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LONDON-Britain's domestic intelligence service has been warned by Oleg Gordievsky, the former KGB agent who spied for Britain during the Cold War, that Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered a death squad to assassinate wealthy Russian billionaire exiles and their associates now living in the United Kingdom. From their heavily guarded mansions, the oligarchs have mounted a relentless campaign to undermine Putin's power and disrupt the Russian elections next month.Now Gordievsky, the London chief of the KGB which Putin once headed, is raising the stakes.The squat, bespectacled Gordievsky provided his controller, John Scarlett, the chief of MI6, with many of the KGB's top secrets – including the former Soviet Union's plans to launch a nuclear war.Scarlett arranged for Gordievsky to be smuggled out of Moscow on the eve of his arrest in a James Bond-style operation which involved picking up travel documents from a dead letter box in a Moscow street and jumping on board the night train to Leningrad, now St Petersburg. From there he was smuggled across the border into Finland in the trunk of the car of the British ambassador. Since his arrival in Britain Gordievsky, 69, has lived under heavy protection in a house outside London. From there he advises MI5 on the activities of his former colleagues in the renamed FSB, the Russian security service.Last week Gordievsky took the dramatic step of announcing he could be murdered by a Putin death squad."I am on his death list. I need more protection and I need it now," he said.The demand came after the mysterious recent death of Russian billionaire Badri Patarkatsishvili, which came less than a week after he also claimed he was "on Putin's death list."He suddenly collapsed in his $20 million mansion not far from where Gordievsky lives behind electric fences and floodlights.There have been other sudden deaths. In 2006, another Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, who had fled to Britain died of polonium poisoning, and in 2004, Stephen Curtis, a London lawyer who represented a number of powerful Russian exiles including oil billionaire Boris Berezovsky died when his helicopter crashed on a clear afternoon. One day earlier, Curtis had told his staff: "If you hear I have died mysteriously, it will not have been an accident."As in the days of Noah....
