LONDON - Since the moment of her husband's death, Marina Litvinenko has seemed to blend discomfort at her presence in the glare of media coverage with a fierce determination to use her prominence there to push for justice and closure.
Finally, though, more than six years after the former KGB agent Alexander V. Litvinenko died in a still mysterious poisoning in November, 2006, an inquest is to be held next May that could throw light into the whole episode.
In London last week, as I discuss in my latest Page Two column in The International Herald Tribune, new assertions emerged reinforcing Ms. Litvinenko's belief that her husband was the target of a state killing by the Kremlin. Coincidentally it emerged that, according to her lawyers, he was also a paid and registered agent of the British MI6 and the Spanish security services.
British news coverage of those disclosur es, according to her associate Alex Goldfarb, pained her with the suggestion that had been a double, or triple agent.
‘‘The reality is that he was never a double agent'' in the years before he fled Russia for Britain in 2000, with the help of Mr. Goldfarb and the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who acted for many years as the sponsor and mentor of the Litvinenko family in Britain.
‘‘He was a cop, an FBI-type guy,'' Mr. Goldfarb said. ‘‘He was selling his expertise to the market and the market happened to be MI6.''
But there has been another concern for Ms. Litvinenko â€" her legal bill, according to Mr. Goldfarb, with whom she co-authored a book about her husband, ‘‘Death of a Dissident,'' in 2007.
Just as her long campaign to secure a hearing for her husband seems to be nearing a climax, thus, her funding has dried up and ‘‘she is in dire need of money to pay her lawyers,'' Mr. Goldfarb said.
She is looking for £300,000, or about $486,000, he said, and has set up a Web page to seek donations. So far, she has received just over £4,000.
As journalist Luke Harding, the author of critical book about the Kremlin, wrote in The Guardian, the decline of Ms. Litvinenko's previous funding followed Mr. Berezovsky's defeat in a court case with another Russian tycoon, Roman Abramovich.
The huge expense of the case has forced Mr. Berezovky, a self-exiled foe of the Kremlin who has lived in Britain since 2000, to scale back his long-standing campaign against the Russian President, Vladimir V. Putin.
‘‘Ironically,'' Mr. Harding wrote, quoting an unidentified friend of Mr. Berezovsky, ‘‘what the Kremlin could not do in a decade - shutting down Boris's anti-Putin London operation - was done by a decision of an English court.''
