At one point, the need to trust one's subordinates with a language one does not speak led to outright embarrassment. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph, Richard Sambrook, the then Director of the BBC Global News Division, rebutted the accusations of bias in the coverage of Litvinenko's murder, writing: "Many prominent critics of the Russian government, including Vladimir Bukovsky and Oleg Gordievsky, have been interviewed about Litvinenko's death." Gordievsky immediately responded to this, saying that he and Bukovsky had indeed been interviewed by the BBC Russian Service — "but only for one features programme". 

He mentioned that the feature had been taken off air and removed from the website and added: "Now, to my amazement, Sambrook is using this very programme to support his claim that the Russian Service does not show pro-Kremlin bias." The BBC Press Office, incidentally, was franker than its boss. To a journalist's question, "Is it true that the only time that Messrs Zakayev, Bukovsky and Gordievsky were interviewed by the BBC Russian service in connection with the Litvinenko case was on the programme produced by Ms Karp entitled The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko?" it responded: "Bukovsky and Gordievsky were both interviewed by the BBC Russian Service only on the programme during this period. However, they were widely quoted in press reviews and Mr Bukovsky was interviewed only yesterday on his presidential bid."

As I was arguing my case at the World Service, my BBC colleagues working for domestic radio and television were busy making programmes about Litvinenko. All of the following were broadcast at the end of 2006 and beginning of 2007: 

• Tom Mangold's The Litvinenko Mystery, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, December 16, 2006
• BBC1's Panorama: How to Poison a Spy on January 22, 2007, presented by John Sweeney
• My Friend Sasha: A Very Russian Murder, Storyville, BBC 2, a film by Andrei Nekrasov, January 22, 2007
• File on Four — Moscow's Mystery Deaths, by Julian O'Halloran, February 6, 2007
• BBC2's Newsnight: packages by Tim Whewell on February 10-11, 2007. 

All these programmes dealt with anti-Kremlin allegations. In some, these allegations were made not by interviewees but by presenters and were not always directly challenged. In a case such as Litvinenko's murder it couldn't have been otherwise — any investigation to find the truth starts with allegations. The documentaries discussed Litvinenko's dossier on Igor Sechin, the then deputy head of presidential administration, and another dossier on the president's assistant, Viktor Ivanov. They spoke about death squads allegedly organised within the security forces to kill critics of the government and the law of 2006 which legitimised the murder of terrorists beyond Russia's borders.