Dead Russian Spy Mystery

About three weeks ago, a fisherman found the decomposing remains of Russian Major General Yuri Ivanov, 52, washed up on the beach along the Turkish Mediterranean coast.

Ivanov was the deputy director of the GRU, the Russian spy agency which is largely comparable to the American CIA. Consequently, Ivanov had his finger on the pulse of Russia's worldwide espionage operations.

The circumstances seem to indicate that Ivanov's death was quite possibly a homicide but official sources claim Ivanov merely drowned while swimming. Unexplained is the fact that his security detail was nowhere to be found when he went "swimming" and no one seemed to miss him before he was found.

Interestingly, Ivanov is the second top GRU leader to die under suspicious circumstances. Senior agent Yuri Gusev was reportedly killed in a "car accident" in 1992. Later, GRU investigators called it a murder.

Ivanov was also reported to have traveled to Syria as a diplomat on holiday but reports presume he was on official business to a Russian naval base under construction in the Syrian port of Tartus.

Also, Ivanov was part of the high-level investigation team that studied the 2004 Beslan massacre and virtually alone in claiming that the Russian government was whitewashing the whole violent and deadly episode as something other than obvious terrorism. Ivanov and Yuri Savelyev contended that the Kremlin's official version of the events at Beslan was a fabrication.

Ivanov implicated Putin by name as the person who ordered that RPGs be fired at the school, contrary to the official blame being put on the Chechen terrorists. The exploding grenades started the bloody end to the massacre.

By promoting the idea that the Beslan investigation was a cover-up along with pointing the finger at Premier Putin as the man who should shoulder some blame for the deaths, one could surmise that Ivanov had made nasty enemies in Moscow who have no problem with whacking their own. Readers may recall that Moscow is believed to have ordered the poisoning death of ex-KGB agent and Kremlin critic Col. Alexander Litvinenko.

If the Kremlin ordered the hit, it would explain why Ivanov's body was quietly whisked off to Moscow for a quick and unheralded burial. Typically, a military general holding high government office would be honored at an elaborate ceremony except, apparently, Major-General Yuri Ivanov.

Source1, Source2, Source3, Source4

Companion post at The Jawa Report.