Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

bringing the past to life in the company of those who have lived through dramatic times.

This week the son of Alger Hiss, the American accused during the Cold War of being a Soviet spy.

Intelectually you grew up overnight, you master the details of accusations and defenses.

The feelings are harder to sort through.

The feeling of helplessness.

How could I save my father?

Also an astonishing assassination in El Salvador's civil war.

It was a devastating blow and it was one of the most brilliant counterinsurgency operations by

the guerrillas of the war.

That was a hammer blow.

Plus a city built on science in Siberia and the worst environmental disaster in Spanish history.

The stench from the oil is truly sickening. You realize just how glutinous, how thick and how heavy it is.

That's all coming up later. But we begin by delving into one of the most notorious bits of Russian skull duggery to have emerged in the post-Cold War years.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, many in the West hope that the bad

old days of KGB underhand tactics would be over, not that the KGB was alone in using

underhand tactics. But instead it appears new

dark forces came into play in the new Russia. For example in November 2006

Alexander Lippienenko a former colonel in the KGB, was fatally poisoned in London.

Rebecca Kessby has been revisiting that story in the company of Alexander's widow, Marina.

Scotland Yard is investigating the suspected poisoning of a Russian dissident living in Britain.

Alexander Litvinenko, once a colonel in the Russian security service.

...