Boris Berezovsky Born-1946, Moscow Russia, A mathematician and computer programmer by training, in 1989, Berezovsky left the world of academia to start a business, becoming one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the period, his interests including auto industry, oil, aluminium, and mass media. During the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, Berezovsky was one of the so-called oligarchs who gained access to the president, becoming a close member of Yeltsin’s inner-circle, unofficially known as the “Family”. He used this influence to acquire stakes in state companies including the car giant AutoVAZ, state airline Aeroflot, and several oil properties that he organized into Sibneft.
After, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced in 2000 that Russia would no longer tolerate ’’shady groups’’ that divert money abroad, establish their own ’’dubious’’ security services, and block the development of a liberal market economy, Berezovsky voiced his plans to create an opposition party led by regional governors and other influential figures threatened by Putin’s drive for power. Berezovsky left Russia at the end of 2000 and he received political asylum in the United Kingdom.
Vladimir Bukovsky Born-1942 is a former Soviet dissident, author and human rights activist. He was one of the first to expose the use of psychiatric imprisonment against political prisoners in the USSR. He spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and in psikhushkas, forced-treatment psychiatric hospitals used by the regime as special prisons. The fate of Bukovsky and other political prisoners in the USSR, repeatedly brought to attention by Western human rights groups and diplomats, was a cause of embarrassment and irritation for the Soviet authorities. In December of 1976, while imprisoned, Bukovsky was exchanged for former Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalan. Since then, Bukovsky has lived in the UK, focusing on neurophysiology and writing.
Paolo Guzzanti Born-1940, Rome. Member of the Italian Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee. The president of the Mitrokhin commission (a parliamentary comission which was entrusted of investigations about the role of KGB in Italy), Guzzanti, is a Forza Italia senator and as a journalist, has long held a senior position at Il Giornale, a newspaper owned by the Berlusconi family, which has been running the KGB-Italian left story for months. In April 2006, Italian papers published what were reported to be transcripts of conversations between Guzzanti and Mario Scaramella. The transcripts allegedly show the two men discussing how Scaramella is to acquire strong enough evidence from Moscow to label Romano Prodi, then the leader of Italy's centre-left opposition, now Prime Minister, a tool of the Russians. Other members of the Prodi government were also said to have been targeted, including the head of the Green Party, Alfonso Scanio, who is now environment minister. 
Alexander Litvinenko Born 1962, Voronezh Russia, was a lieutenant-colonel in the FSB (Russia’s Security Service) and later a Russian dissident and writer, who was murdered in London by becoming a victim of lethal polonium-210 radiation poisoning. After working for the KGB and its successor, the FSB, Litvinenko publicly accused his superiors of ordering the assassination of Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky. He alleged that al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri was trained by the FSB in Dagestan in the years before the 9/11 attacks. He wrote Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within, in which he said that it was FSB agents and not Chechen rebels who carried out the apartment block bombings. He was arrested, released then fled to the UK, where he was granted political asylum and citizenship. Litvinenko is thought to have been close to journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot dead last month in Moscow, and said recently that he was investigating her murder. Litvinenko died November 21, 2006. 
Mario Scaramella Born-1970, Naples Italy, is an Italian lawyer, academic, and security consultant. He served as an investigator and adviser to the controversial Mitrokhin Cimmission set up by Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party in order to investigate supposed links between Berlusconi's political rivals, including his rival for the premiership (now Prime Minister) Romano Prodi and the KGB. Scaramella is alleged to have collaborated with the president of the commission Paolo Guzzanti in garnering false evidence to link Prodi with the KGB.
The Italian self-styled security consultant says he flew to London last month to warn Alexander Litvinenko that both their lives were at risk. At a meeting at a West End sushi restaurant he claimed he gave the Russian a document which named five people on a hit list allegedly drawn up by Russian intelligence officers. Curiously, Scaramella reportedly was meeting with Litvinenko at a London sushi restaurant to tell the former KGB agent that his name was on an assassination list that he'd uncovered. Revelations that Scaramella, a shadowy nuclear security expert and well-known information peddler, tested positive Friday for the same radioactive toxin that killed Litvinenko, gives the evolving spy mystery yet another weird twist: The Italian Connection.
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