On Saturday, craving a little miso myself, and figuring I could be as daring as the clerks and shoppers in the usual lunch crowd, I went to Itsu. But by then the door was locked and a scrawled sign was posted where the menu used to be: “As a result of the Russia/KGB business, we are temporarily closed while Scotland Yard investigate. Sorry!!” Litvinenko had died. The poison used on him was determined, at last, to be the radioactive isotope polonium 210. Traces of it were turning up in just about every place he’d visited on Nov. 1, the day he got sick.
Since then, the story of Litvinenko’s poisoning , or more properly, speculation about it, has dominated the British press. In the absence of hard facts and with fast-approaching deadlines, most of the articles study the old question of cui bono : Who benefits from the crime? And the mystery only grows deeper.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has no love for rivals, defectors, dissidents and those he considers traitors—a long list, some of whom have died nasty deaths of late. So maybe by sowing terror among them, he benefits. Another theory suggests that exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who supported Litvinenko, might have poisoned his own man to discredit Putin. Or perhaps elements of the FSB (formerly the KGB)—whether current, retired or rogue—were behind the plot against their old comrade. Maybe Litvinenko had something on the Russian mob? Or … maybe he decided to poison himself and make his excruciating suicide a statement against Putin?
In every case, if you have a mind to, you can make an argument that the perpetrator you want to condemn actually benefited from the crime—even the victim. Such arguments quickly turn almost any killing with political consequences into a whodunit that seems to defy solution, from political assassinations in Lebanon to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. (A French magistrate has issued warrants against several top officials in the current Rwandan government, most of them Tutsis. He charges them with shooting down the plane of the Hutu president 12 years ago, thus triggering the slaughter that killed 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis, but rallied international support for the new regime. The irate government in Kigali, in addition to issuing denials, has broken diplomatic relations with Paris.)
If such cases are ever going to be sorted out, then we’re going to need a much more effective International Criminal Court than exists at the moment. (It would help if the United States supported it instead of trying to undermine it.) And we’re going to have to rely on something more than assumptions about the killers’ motives. What’s required is evidence. In the Lebanese murders, there is some . And there is some, too, in the Litvinenko killing.
The poison itself narrows the field of potential suspects. According to one nuclear expert I talked to this afternoon, polonium 210 “is pretty wicked stuff.” And while it’s found outside labs—especially in cigarette smoke—it’s very hard to make or collect in a form that could be used for murder. “The challenges in its production are such that it would require the capacities of a nuclear weapons state,” said my friend Dr. Atomic, who, like the other experts I talked to, asked not to be cited by his real name or organization because of the enormous political sensitivities involved.
But why would an assassin want to use such an exotic substance in the first place? “It’s a pretty good weapon of choice,” says Dr. Atomic. “It causes maximum pain, works fairly rapidly and is relatively easy to conceal and administer.” The alpha radiation that polonium 210 emits is deadly if you swallow, inhale or inject the stuff, but the rays cannot penetrate the skin from the outside. You could hold it in your hand with no ill effect. You could carry it in an envelope. It won’t set off Geiger counters or other security devices. And very, very little—much less than a pinpoint—is needed for a murderer’s purposes. According to a fact sheet at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, “a simple gram of this substance represents 10,000 times the lethal dose.” Worldwide production is thought to be about 100 grams a year: potentially enough to poison 1 million people.
Wicked stuff indeed. But Marie Curie isolated the radioactive element polonium (and named it for her native Poland) in 1898. There are more than 30 countries that now have nuclear power reactors, and still others doing atomic research. So why finger the nine “weapons states”? One reason is that polonium 210 used to be used as part of the trigger in atomic bombs, so the facilities exist for making it in weapons states. And if you want to have it on hand, you have to keep making it. The half-life of polonium 210 is only 138 days. After that, it’s lead. (In the early bombs, the polonium 210 had to be replaced every three months.) The poison used on Litvinenko would have to have been made quite recently.
Then there’s the question of purity. The standard way to produce polonium 210 is to bombard bismuth metal with neutrons. But Dr. Atomic cautions that “you have to have extremely pure bismuth. If not, the polonium will be contaminated with gamma radiation, which will literally burn a hole in your butt,” if, that is, you were foolish enough to carry it in your hip pocket.
So, now, back to the whodunit. If the poison came from a known or assumed nuclear weapons state, that narrows the field to the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. Iran also has produced tiny quantities of polonium 210 in the past. Apart from the Russians, would assassins from any one of those countries have a reason to poison Alexander Litvinenko?
The investigation continues.
