secrets within secrets

this brings back memories of the cold war days -- part of the article follows:

LONDON - A former Russian spy and fierce critic of the Kremlin who is fighting for his life in a London hospital may have been given a radioactive poison, a doctor said Tuesday.

Litvinenko was under armed guard at the London hospital, the victim of what his friends and fellow dissidents called an assassination attempt by the Russian government.

Litvinenko joined the KGB counterintelligence forces in 1988, and rose to the rank of colonel in the FSB. He began specializing in terrorism and organized crime in 1991, and was transferred to the FSB’s most secretive department on criminal organizations in 1997.

Litvinenko quit Russia for Britain six years ago and has been an outspoken critic of the Kremlin ever since.

just the stuff of a movie, right? i still remember a man who had worked in the intelligence community who was standing with a crowd of people waiting for the light at a busy intersection, felt a slight prick on his leg, became sick later in the day, and died three days later (memory may have altered details slightly). autopsy authorities speculated he'd been injected with poison which had been placed on the tip of an umbrella.

pshaw, you say? ha, say i! there's always stuff that takes place which, if you put it in a movie, everyone would say was ridiculous and couldn't really happen. sometimes paranoia is justified.