Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [156]
Moscow, February 1, 2007: Speaking at a Kremlin press conference, President Putin indicates that the Russian secret services considered Litvinenko an insignificant target, and would not, therefore, have bothered to murder him. “He didn’t know any secrets,” says Putin. “Before being fired from the FSB Litvinenko served in the convoy troops and had no access to state secrets.” On the same day, Scotland Yard announces that it has completed its investigation and sent the Litvinenko file to the Crown Prosecution Service to determine whether anyone should be charged with a crime. The content of the file has not been disclosed.
“When Watergate was first reported, the White House brushed it aside as a ‘third-rate burglary.’ Then layers of revelations began peeling away, one after another, and the walls around Nixon came tumbling down,” said George Menzies over lunch, some time after Sasha’s death. “Sasha’s case will become Putin’s ‘third-rate poisoning.’ I have a hunch that this murder will be solved.”
George was reacting to my lecture about Polonium-210 as a murder weapon. In the annals of forensic science, I explained, Sasha’s murder will stand out for its ultimate irony: polonium is simultaneously the best and the worst murder weapon ever devised.
Whoever chose polonium to kill Sasha did so because the chances of its ever being discovered were close to zero. It could not be easily identified chemically: the toxicology lab found only low levels of thallium, a minor contaminant of polonium production. Polonium was unlikely to be detected by its radioactivity, since common Geiger counters were not designed to detect alpha rays. Polonium is perhaps the most toxic substance on earth: a tiny speck is a highly lethal dose, and one gram is enough to kill half a million people. But it is absolutely harmless to a handler unless it is inhaled or swallowed. Most important, polonium had never been used to murder anyone before, so practically no one in the expert community—toxicologists, police, or terrorism experts—would have been looking for it or expecting it. It was sheer luck, plus Sasha’s phenomenal endurance, that it was found. He had received a huge dose. Had he died in Barnet Hospital within the first two weeks, his death would have been attributed to thallium, meaning that anyone could have given it to him.
The irony is that once it was detected, polonium became a smoking gun. No amateur killer—even one awash with money—could have used it.
For a freelance killer, polonium in the amounts involved in the attack on Sasha would be impossible to obtain. Polonium is a highly controlled substance made in nuclear labs for use in devices eliminating static electricity, in which it is contained in tiny amounts. According to Dr. John Harrison of the Health Protection Agency, Sasha had received a dose of at least 3 gigabecquerels of radioactivity, which is equal to about a hundred lethal doses. To obtain this amount of polonium from the end product available on the market, one would have to purchase hundreds of recently manufactured static-electricity devices and develop a technology for extracting, concentrating, and handling polonium, which would be virtually impossible for an amateur freelancer.
Any perpetrator who came up with the idea of employing polonium for a sinister purpose would necessarily have to have a high level of sophistication and knowledge of physics, medicine, and radioactive surveillance procedures, not to mention an understanding of polonium’s production and distribution. All in all, it would have required a touch of genius, combined with tremendous resources—and access to polonium in the first place—to develop a murder plan of this sort on an ad hoc basis. Only an established organization with expertise in the area of science-based poisoning could have perpetrated this crime.
Ninety-seven percent of the known production of polonium, about 85 grams annually, takes place in Russia. Some is exported for industrial use, primarily to the United States. The Russian nuclear reactor that produces polonium is