Post by Watchman on Mar 6, 2007 11:37:47 GMT -5
By JASON DEPARLE
New York Times
WASHINGTON — A few hours after meeting a former KGB general outside a spy museum here, an outspoken critic of the Kremlin may have became engulfed in the kind of intrigue he studies when he was shot Thursday outside his Maryland home.
The shooting occurred four days after the critic, Paul M. Joyal, warned on Dateline NBC that a "message has been communicated to anyone who wants to speak out against the Kremlin: 'If you do, no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you and we will silence you in the most horrible way possible."
Joyal was speaking about the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, a KGB defector, who was poisoned last fall in London.
A spokesman for the Prince George's County Police Department declined to say whether the police viewed the shooting as a reprisal or a coincidence. The spokesman, Corp. Clinton Copeland, said the police had "a vague description of two black males" fleeing the scene.
Federal authorities were leaning toward the view that Joyal was the victim of a street crime unrelated to his opinions of Russia, said a federal law enforcement official. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is incomplete, said the crime scene did not point toward professional assassins.
Joyal, 53, who was shot in the groin outside his home in Adelphi, Md., was in stable condition on Saturday, police said.
Joyal was an aide on the Senate Intelligence Committee from 1980 to 1989 and edited a business newsletter about Russia throughout the 1990s. He has criticized President Vladimir Putin of Russia for reversing democratic reforms.
In the mid-1990s, Joyal went into business with Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB general who became a leading KGB critic and moved to Washington. The venture failed.
They met Thursday afternoon at a restaurant next to the International Spy Museum in downtown Washington. Soon after Joyal arrived home at 7:30, Kalugin got a panicked call from Joyal's wife, Elizabeth, who had found her husband shot in the driveway.
"She called me and said, 'Oleg, Paul is shot, I want to warn you,'" Kalugin said. "I couldn't believe my ears."
Despite Elizabeth Joyal's warning and his dim view of the KGB, Kalugin said "my suspicion is that it's not linked to anything international." As described, he said, the crime did not bear the fingerprints of Russian agents. He also said their enemies' list had more prominent names on it than that of Joyal.
Joyal was featured prominently in the Dateline NBC segment about Litvinenko, who died in November after ingesting a rare radioactive substance called Polonium 210, the bulk of which comes from Russia. Litvinenko fled the country after accusing superiors of ordering him to kill businessman Boris Berezovsky.