Former spy Alexander Litvinenko has died
November 24, 2006 11:18 AM   Subscribe

 
spy stuff
posted by kliuless at 11:22 AM on November 24, 2006


A nice slow death. Someone has a flair for this kind of stuff.
posted by BentPenguin at 11:27 AM on November 24, 2006


I wonder if, assuming he was murdered by the Russian state, the evidence will be quietly buried? I can't imagine either side being up for the diplomatic shitstorm that would result if Russian security services are shown to have whacked a dissident on British soil.
posted by jack_mo at 11:30 AM on November 24, 2006 [1 favorite]


Somewhat related, the murder of Putin critic and noted journalist Anna Politkovskaya was discussed in the blue previously...
posted by TetrisKid at 11:40 AM on November 24, 2006


.
posted by cillit bang at 11:57 AM on November 24, 2006


Yeah, I considered posting that. Not just because of the news; but because I'm a bit shocked that either the KGB or another agency would go so far as to kill this critic.
If it has been done on behalf of Putin, and we probably won't know for decades, that crushes any hope for a more open democratic Russia...
posted by jouke at 12:12 PM on November 24, 2006


His deathbed statement is eloquent and pointed:

I would like to thank many people: my doctors, nurses and hospital staff who are doing all they can for me; the British Police who are pursuing my case with vigour and professionalism and are watching over me and my family. I would like to thank the British Government for taking me under their care. I am honoured to be a British citizen.

I would like to thank the British public for their messages of support and for the interest they have shown in my plight.
I thank my wife, Marina, who has stood by me. My love for her and our son knows no bounds.

But as I lie here I can distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death. I may be able to give him the slip but I have to say my legs do not run as fast as I would like. I think, therefore, that this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my present condition.

You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed.

You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilised value.

You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilised men and women.

You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.

posted by gdav at 12:17 PM on November 24, 2006


I can't imagine either side being up for the diplomatic shitstorm that would result if Russian security services are shown to have whacked a dissident on British soil.

Not only whacked a dissident on British soil, but whacked a British citizen on British soil.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 12:19 PM on November 24, 2006


ah, how fucking awesome would it be if the UK government had just staged his poisoning and death just to fuck with the Russians
posted by matteo at 12:44 PM on November 24, 2006


This was almost 24 hours ago now, wasn't it?

MetaFilter: first with breaking news.
posted by reklaw at 12:46 PM on November 24, 2006


But as I lie here I can distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death. I may be able to give him the slip but I have to say my legs do not run as fast as I would like. I think, therefore, that this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my present condition.

You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed.

You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilised value.

You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilised men and women.


I sit here and wonder just how many men, women and children around the world today, hastened quickly to their deathbeds through violent means would say very much the same thing.
posted by infini at 12:58 PM on November 24, 2006


I believe he was working on investigating the story that the apartment buildings which were blown up in the Moscow suburbs, ostensibly by Chechen rebels, was actually undertaken by ex-KGB, and helped reignite the Chechen war and help Putin shore up power.
posted by cell divide at 1:11 PM on November 24, 2006


That's right infini. But they do not have a podium like the british papers.
posted by jouke at 1:12 PM on November 24, 2006


Matteo, if this were a Len Deighton novel, I would have assumed as much by now.
posted by jon_kill at 1:26 PM on November 24, 2006


Why would an assassin use a poison that takes 23 days to kill someone?

Aren't there quicker ways, that don't allow your target to launch an impressive media campaign that brings to light everything you're trying to cover up?

This just seems like shoddy workmanship.
posted by afx237vi at 1:34 PM on November 24, 2006


The point of an assassination like this is not just to kill an individual; it's to terrify others who would speak out. Despite what you read in the papers, a vanishingly small segment of the population is actually willing to die for a cause.
posted by phooky at 1:41 PM on November 24, 2006


There are ways of doing both at the same time, though. Why not just shoot him, like they allegedly did with Anna Politkovskaya? Silence your enemy, and intimidate future enemies at the same time. Two for the price of one.

The media in Britain suggests that Alexander Litvinenko has been a very vocal critic of Putin for many years, so using an extremely slow form of poisoning seems strange in this case. They must've known he'd shout very loudly before he died.
posted by afx237vi at 1:58 PM on November 24, 2006


Matt Taibbi wrote an interesting column on the Litvinenko poisoning this week.
posted by Phlogiston at 2:04 PM on November 24, 2006 [1 favorite]


hastened quickly to their deathbeds through violent means would say very much the same thing

A lot of people, but they don't have podiums indeed.
posted by elpapacito at 2:04 PM on November 24, 2006


This poisoning reminds me of Viktor Yushchenko's weird, slow, disfiguring poisoning that ended up "backfiring" in the end.
posted by jessmode at 2:07 PM on November 24, 2006


a vanishingly small segment of the population is actually willing to die for a cause.

But many in that segment would disagree, both that the cause is not worth dying for and that the number who are committed enough to die for it is vanishingly small.

That's the point of fanaticism.
posted by blucevalo at 2:09 PM on November 24, 2006


a vanishingly small segment of the population is actually willing to die for a cause.

ROFL over "vanishingly."

Do we have a Pun of the Day award?
posted by rokusan at 2:20 PM on November 24, 2006


Metafilter: as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed.


(sorry)
posted by papakwanz at 2:33 PM on November 24, 2006


Where is his deathbed statement? I'd like to link people to it at a location slightly more authoritative than "that's what this guy on mefi said".
posted by blacklite at 2:38 PM on November 24, 2006


Here, blacklite.
posted by matthewr at 2:41 PM on November 24, 2006




Thallium is nasty, nasty stuff. Twenty-three days is a heck of a long time to hang on, eventually to go after all your white blood cells are killed off. Interestingly, Litvinenko was a colonel in the old 1st Main Directorate of the KGB, just like Putin.

If this was the SVR, we'll probably never know.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 3:13 PM on November 24, 2006


This whole business about Polonium 210 seems suspect to me. Polonium is one of the rarest elements on earth. Polonium 210 does not occur naturally and is usually synthesized by bombarding bismuth 210 in a nuclear reactor. It has a half-life of only 138 days so you can't just have it lying around. It is extremely difficult and dangerous to handle. I await more information.
posted by JackFlash at 3:13 PM on November 24, 2006


It's all Bond publicity.
posted by popcassady at 3:15 PM on November 24, 2006


JackFlash: It sounds like the sort of thing you need a bunch of nuclear physicists and a state apparatus to prepare. Hmm...
posted by athenian at 3:36 PM on November 24, 2006


Thallium is nasty, nasty stuff.

Dude, thallium is so last week. Polonium-210 was the poison, according to the police and HPA.

Polonium 210 does not occur naturally

It occurs naturally in uranium ores, but you're right that to get hold of enough to poison someone requires synthesis.
posted by matthewr at 3:37 PM on November 24, 2006


Yeah he 'died' of 'natural causes', I'm 'sure'.
posted by Effigy2000 at 3:52 PM on November 24, 2006


Uranium and its daughter elements are trace contaminates of phosphate rock used to make phosphate fertilizers. One of the daughter elements is polonium 210. Small amounts are found in tobacco because of phosphate fertilizers. Polonium 210 is commonly found in the blood and urine of smokers. It would be interesting to know if Litvinenko was a heavy smoker.
posted by JackFlash at 3:57 PM on November 24, 2006


(Please forgive me if you didn't want to be spoiled, there's no avoiding it)

This is startlingly similar to the plot of Martin Cruz Smith's 2004 Arkady Renko novel, Wolves Eat Dogs, in which Renko investigates the death of a Russian tycoon. Turns out he was poisoned with cesium-137 in the form of the salt, cesium nitrate, which was merely hidden among table salt he ingested.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 3:57 PM on November 24, 2006


Was just reading about this. Russia's just so corrupt nowadays, and the act of killing people who oppose the system is becoming almost commonplace.
posted by kisch mokusch at 4:00 PM on November 24, 2006


Though I haven't seen anything in Russian, the denials from Putin all seem to take the form of "You can't prove it" rather than "I didn't do it." Curious.
posted by RavinDave at 6:07 PM on November 24, 2006


Not so much curious as "expected". What with this and an attempted bombing at Stormont, it's been an old-school week.
posted by bonaldi at 6:22 PM on November 24, 2006


This just in: John Mark Karr admits to poisoning Litvinenko! Karr states, "I've always enjoyed England in the wintertime."
posted by Sir BoBoMonkey Pooflinger Esquire III at 6:29 PM on November 24, 2006


Although this bears similarity with the Yushchenko poisoning, the strongest resonance for older readers is the murder of Georgi Markov.

And I don't see how the Politkovskaya case is "somewhat" related -- that's what the meeting at the sushi bar was about. Litvinenko thought he was going to get information on that murder.
posted by dhartung at 6:57 PM on November 24, 2006


Conspiracy is suddenly all the rage on the front pages of UK newspapers.
... I raise it, in part, because no one questions it. There isn't the slightest eyebrow raised, not even a hint of real scepticism except for some slightly eccentric pro-Russians (the anti-conspiracy theorists are the eccentrics now). I also raise it because it strikes me that conspiracy theory has been a part of official ideology for the last century at least. From Reds under every bed to semites in every closet, all the the way to the Yellow Peril and the ocotopoid threat of various Arabs or Muslims (Saddam's gonna invade Saudi Arabia - the Muslim Brothers are gonna conquer Europe), conspiracy theory in the sense of potent, occult operations affecting global politics, has been the official story. ...

posted by amberglow at 7:26 PM on November 24, 2006


Polonium seems like such an odd choice as a poison. I mean, it's a radioactive element, so it's easy to detect, and it's sure to show up atomic spectroscopy. Also, the difficult availability just screams 'government action' (although it's not a sure thing; there are a few consumer uses for polonium, so a sufficiently rich and motivated civilian could scrape a dose together.)

If Russia did do this, they want everyone to know it was them. If it was someone else, they really went out of their way to make everyone think it was Russia. If it was someone else, the possibilities were limited; the Russian mafia seems like a logical possibility. Another country's intelligence agency? It sure doesn't feel like the way the chechnyan terrorists operate.
posted by Mitrovarr at 7:43 PM on November 24, 2006


If it IS actually polonium-210 specifically, wouldn't that rule out pretty much anyone but a small handful of governments due to the rarity of it and the difficulty of coming by even the smallest amount of it?

I've read a few things stating that they've now determined that to be it, but with as fast as information changes in this kind of thing I never but too much weight behind the news reports.

But yeah, that is a hell of a strange poison. Only thing I could think of is that whoever was responsiblel would want to make certain it would kill him, and was hoping that the damage and symptoms would be too hard to specifically nail down, thus preventing a useful or definitive lead. Although, if that WAS identified....yeah...that's a hell of a lot more damning than cyanide. Hard to blame a polonium-210 death on an estranged lover or someone that he owed money.
posted by Stunt at 9:21 PM on November 24, 2006


If it IS actually polonium-210 specifically, wouldn't that rule out pretty much anyone but a small handful of governments due to the rarity of it and the difficulty of coming by even the smallest amount of it?

I would imagine that the IAEA knows exactly how many facilities are set up to produce it, and how many have actively done so recently.

Polonium-210 has a half-life measured in days.

If Russia did do this, they want everyone to know it was them.

Funny, the WaPo said it was selected for its difficulty in being detected -- either as a toxin, or during smuggling. I think I'm with you, though -- in the long run they must have known it would be identified. A message, then, surely.
posted by dhartung at 9:55 PM on November 24, 2006


dhartung: I would imagine that the IAEA knows exactly how many facilities are set up to produce it, and how many have actively done so recently.

Polonium-210 has a half-life measured in days.


Yeah, 138 days. It's not so short lived it's a laboratory curiosity.

Polonium has a couple of commercial uses, such as in anti-static brushes. Theoretically, someone could just buy a whole lot of them and dismantle them for the polonium (rather like the 'Radioactive Boy Scout' did with the Americium in smoke detectors and the Thorium in lantern mantles.) It's also used in the radiothermal generators in satellites. Polonium-210 is actually the common isotope and the one used in these commercial applications.

It's actually not totally inconceivable that a civilian could scrape together a lethal dose, although it would be dangerous (but like I said, its something the mafia could have accomplished.) It's also well within the abilities of near any intelligence agency, even ones without access to nuclear facilities.
posted by Mitrovarr at 10:24 PM on November 24, 2006


Why would an assassin use a poison that takes 23 days to kill someone?

Maybe it was hard to predict the dose that the target would get. If it was in his lunch, for example, one more serving of Igor's mom's super-spicy goulash could have made it a lot faster.

But a not quite instant death is useful. It helps to hide the location of the poisoning and the identities of the killers (where you were and who you saw three days ago is much harder to determine than where you were and who you saw yesterday), it gives the killers time to get away and carry on working in the field (good killers are expensive these days), and it lets the target suffer physically and mentally, which is much more satisfying (to the killer's bosses) than instant, painless, peaceful death.
posted by pracowity at 11:37 PM on November 24, 2006


The Times speaks of the start of a new cold war.
posted by jouke at 11:50 PM on November 24, 2006


Russia no longer needs our money. Nor does it care much for our approval. The past few years have taught Mr Putin that when he needs something from the West, he gets it.

Capitalism at its finest, when it sponsors fascist regimes. Look for this investigation to peter out and become a cold case after a couple days of blustering.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:48 AM on November 25, 2006


So, the FSB were definately not to blame for the bombing of the apartment block in Moscow that directly led to Putin's election and the Chechen onslaught. Oh, no.
posted by asok at 4:07 AM on November 25, 2006


This poisoning reminds me of Viktor Yushchenko's weird, slow, disfiguring poisoning

Yup, it's gratifying to see political poisonings finally making a comeback; they're so neoBorgia.
posted by FelliniBlank at 5:33 AM on November 25, 2006


It's all Bond publicity.

Or maybe for another remake of D.O.A..
posted by raygirvan at 6:49 AM on November 25, 2006


Hmm, polonium 210 is an alpha-emmitter, which means that its alpha radiation, though dangerous enough if coming from within the body itself, can be stopped by a sheet of paper.
So, it seems that it is both safe and concealable enough to be quite a handy poison. And the death is both slow and painful...

Putin always made me think of a Bond villain, but this is really up there with piranha ponds and steel-jawed henchmen...
posted by Skeptic at 10:24 AM on November 25, 2006


Man, I can't imagine why putin would use such an exotic poison other then to say to the world "Yeah I fucking did it." If he wanted to some plausible denyability he would have used something else.
posted by delmoi at 12:21 PM on November 25, 2006


Using Polonium-210 to kill someone is so very rococo-- really the quadruple lutz of assassination methods-- it may justify a little extraordinary speculation about motives and messages being sent.

First, Po-210 is an alpha emitter and a gamma emitter, just like Pu-239, only Po-210 is ~64,000 times more radioactive than Pu-239, which was the fissionable material in the bomb the US dropped on Nagasaki, as well as an often mentioned candidate for the essential ingredient of a radioactive 'dirty bomb' to be smuggled into any country by terrorists.

This means that anyone who can smuggle as much as 0.2 grams of Po-210 into a country undetected, could equally easily have brought in 6.4 kilograms of Pu-239, the amount used in the Nagasaki device, and which formed a sphere only 3.2" in diameter, no bigger than many Christmas-tree ornaments, the instant before it exploded with a force of 21 kilotons of TNT, causing total destruction to a radius of one mile.

If Russia was behind this assassination, it could have been sending a message to the West, particularly Britain and the US, to encourage them to think very, very carefully about what Russia can so readily do to them, before they decide to push her too hard.

It's interesting to observe, in this light, that Marie Curie, who by her discovery was awarded the traditional right to name the new element, called it 'Polonium' in hopes of drawing attention to the plight of her native Poland, then suffering "under Russian, Prussian and Austrian domination, and not recognized as an independent country."

Right now, Russia is extremely angry over Western plans to make Poland and other former Eastern bloc countries part of NATO.

Putin strikes me as a man who might enjoy an irony such as that.
posted by jamjam at 12:26 PM on November 25, 2006 [1 favorite]


I haven't seen anyone suggest this might be a false flag operation, designed to make Putin and his gang look like heartless psychos.
posted by cillit bang at 1:10 PM on November 25, 2006


Western plans to make Poland and other former Eastern bloc countries part of NATO

It doesn't really detract from your point but Poland is already a member, as are most of the former Soviet-bloc countries. It's the wooing of Ukraine that recently caused some turbulence. Still: Poland and Russia have been doing their own squabbling as well.
posted by Ljubljana at 1:55 PM on November 25, 2006


Thank you, Ljubljana. I 'knew' that too, but it clearly has not sunk in; I am obviously living in the past, and I have to tell you, it seems a lot safer to me there.
posted by jamjam at 3:29 PM on November 25, 2006


I haven't seen anyone suggest this might be a false flag operation, designed to make Putin and his gang look like heartless psychos.

Putin's administration has made that suggestion, actually.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:02 PM on November 25, 2006


This means that anyone who can smuggle as much as 0.2 grams of Po-210 into a country undetected, could equally easily have brought in 6.4 kilograms of Pu-239

Given the nature of the poison, we have several possibilities:

• Russia smuggled it into the UK undetected, which means London has no or poor means to detect radiation weapons and would be rife for a dirty bomb attack

• Russia worked with the UK to poison Litvinenko, with the UK disabling its radiation sensors in London

• The UK poisoned Litvinenko in a 'false flag' operation to discredit Putin

The first possibility seems most credible, given Putin's strong-arm tactics in the region, and the incapability and incompetence of the West in matters of national security.

The second and third options require a conspiracy on such a grand scale that its culprits would be discovered quickly. Someone would talk.

If I was the UK, I would worry more about what the first possibility suggests to motivated Muslim terrorists, than what Russia might hypothetically do to attack UK on her soil.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:22 PM on November 25, 2006


Jamjam, there are about 8 million leaps in your logic of craziness.
posted by dame at 5:59 PM on November 25, 2006


which means London has no or poor means to detect radiation weapons

Has anyone ever claimed otherwise? Is there anywhere in the world that claims to?

If I was the UK, I would worry more about what the first possibility suggests to motivated Muslim terrorists

Because previously they only weren't attacking us because they thought they'd get caught by London's ring of Geiger counters, and not because it's not something any of them actually want to do?
posted by cillit bang at 7:07 PM on November 25, 2006


Has anyone ever claimed otherwise? Is there anywhere in the world that claims to?

New York, maybe?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:20 PM on November 25, 2006


The media in Britain suggests that Alexander Litvinenko has been a very vocal critic of Putin for many years, so using an extremely slow form of poisoning seems strange in this case. They must've known he'd shout very loudly before he died.

And, in doing so, reveal information they need to remove other 'parties of interest'?
posted by five fresh fish at 8:37 PM on November 25, 2006


New York has 3 interstates and god knows how many other roads and railway lines going into it, none of which have routine searches. How on earth would they prevent someone bringing in a dirty bomb?
posted by cillit bang at 8:57 PM on November 25, 2006


" which means London has no or poor means to detect radiation weapons"

People remain befuddled by magic radiation. It's trivially easy to hide a small amount of radioactive material. You couldn't possible seal borders and otherwise protect against highly radioactive isotopes per se. What you can do is look for them in some contexts. Poisoning people, or a number of people, or terrifying them, isn't one them.

If you are really diligent, you can probably (though far from definitely) detect a true nuclear bomb realistically produced by terrorists. It's not going to be a suitcase bomb. As far as anyone knows, no one ever produced a suitcase bomb. The only bomb design that could be that small is an implosion device and building a sufficient high-explosive casing and compression casing that small is deep engineering. Maybe not the deep science it once was, but it's still deep engineering. If a terrorist has an implosion bomb, then they probably got it from a warhead somehow.

I'll get to Russia giving a warhead to terrorist group in a moment.

So we're going to look at bigger stuff that might be bombs. That's a lot more realistic. Well, personally, I don't think that's realistic at all ultimately because I think you just get one on a container ship and blow the thing up while it's still in some harbor and before customs even has the chance to look at it. Maybe not quite enough damage, but more than enough. The only thing that (realistically) could protect against this is intelligence.

The other possibility is a dirty bomb. Those come in two flavors. One is something that's very near a working nuclear bomb that's goes pre-critical and creates a substantial amount of by-products that contaminate a few square block area, killing some people and terrifying far more. Alternatively, you rely less upon the fission reaction and just include a bunch more radioactive material. But that, of course, has the problem again of being much more material and much more likely to be discovered.

Finally, yes, a nuclear nation like Russia could easily smuggle a working bomb into any country it wishes. The problem with this is that this just isn't that different from lobbing an ICBM over. They'd need to have a very, very strong amount of deniability. They'd never need to be a suspect in the first place. That's just not likely. Especially a foreign nation mounting such an operation would be subject to intelligence leaks. If not before the fact, then after. And when the nuclear victim gets word, then it's nuclear retaliation. MAD still reigns.

In my opinion, this is all why the only near-term threat of an actual nuclear bombing we have to worry about is a terrorist organization getting ahold of a warhead from somewhere in the former USSR illicitly, which is not unrealistic.

Eventually I think someone's going to use a dirty bomb for terror purposes. It's pretty much the perfect weapon for that purpose. The majority of its effect would be nothing but terror—you're just not going to kill that many people with one. And there's not that much we can do to stop this from happening, short of good intel. If you're catching people smuggling in radioactive fuel, you've pretty much already screwed up.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 12:14 AM on November 26, 2006


« Older Human Development Report 2006   |   It's not fair - life was good before Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments