At the age of 43, a few weeks after he secured British citizenship, former  KGB and FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was murdered: the world's first victim  of polonium 210 poisoning.  The Litvinenko killing revealed that London has  quietly become not only the single greatest centre of Russian capital outside  Moscow, but also a turbulent seat of Russian opposition.

Our special guest tonight is Alan Cowell, senior correspondent for the  New York Times, based in London and Paris.  Few people know more about this  extraordinary subject than Alan; his book  “The  Terminal Spy” is the definitive work on the topic, and he continues  to report on the story as it unfolds for NYTimes.com.

Alan typifies old-school journalism at its best.  He was the last Reuters  correspondent to file dispatches by carrier pigeon, and has covered stories in  over 90 countries.  He won a George Polk Award for his coverage of the  broadening turmoil in South Africa that led to the end of apartheid.  He was  expelled from the country by the government of P.W. Botha in early 1987.

Since then, he has headed The New York Times’s bureaus in Greece, Egypt,  Italy, Germany and London, where he the Nathaniel Nash Award.

Alan has written three other books: an African memoir, “Killing  the Wizards”; and two novels, “A  Walking Guide” and its sequel, “The  Paris Correspondent”, which deals in part with the challenges of the new  digital era in news gathering and reporting.