One of the two men wanted by the British police for the extraordinarily frightening murder in London by radioactive material of Alexander Litvinenko is Dmitri Kovtun. A former High Court judge is holding an inquiry into this case, and has been hearing evidence about Kovtun. After attending military school, he was posted to East Germany in 1990. There he married a local lady by the name of Inne Hohne, only to desert her when he was posted elsewhere. Inne Hohne gave evidence to the inquiry that for a decade after 1992 he lived off benefits as an asylum seeker in Hamburg. An alcoholic, he frequented the notorious Rieperbahn red-light district. According to her, “Dmitri wanted to be a porno star . . . he had all sorts of dreams and plans, none of which he realized.” Except that by 2003 he was back in Russia, not prosecuted for desertion from the military but the well-paid head of an oil and gas consultancy. Russia now refuses to extradite him to face the charge of murder. Members of the Soviet and then the Russian secret services have usually been described as the brightest and the best. In the age of Putin, Kovtun is evidently in the highest class of operators and it would take the combined talents of Dostoevsky and Graham Greene to do justice to him.