Who's Who At The Polonium Party

Berezovsky (cigar) and Zakayev, January 23,2006
Boris Berezovsky held his 60th black-tie birthday party at Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill's birthplace. In the center of the room was an ice sculpture representing St. Basil's Cathedral on Red Square, coated with black caviar. At one table was Alexander Litvinenko, Andrei Lugovoi, and Akhmed Zakayev. They all had been born in the former Soviet Union and they had all been in prison. Ten months later, they all had another connection: Polonium-210.

The Polonium Players

In this deadly game, you need a program

Boris Berezovsky (a.k.a Platon Elenin)

Position: Financier and Revolutionary-in-exile
Polonium Link: Detected on his office furniture and fax machine.
Litvinenko Link: Employer
Dossier: Born in 1946, Berezovsky made an immense fortune in the 1990s in Russia. He acquired stakes in the national airline Aeroflot, the major automobile manufacturer, key oil companies and set up his own bank to transfer funds around the world. He also bought control of newspapers and television networks, including the powerful ORT channel. After Boris Yeltsen was re-elected in 1996 with Berezovsky's support, he appointed Berezovsky both deputy secretary of the National Security Council and Secretary of the Organization for Coordinating the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which qualified him for protection by the Kremlin's Ninth Directorate of the FSB, the successor to the KGB. After Putin came to power in 2000, Berezovsky lost his political power base. He came under criminal investigation for diverting hundreds of millions of dollars from Aeroflot and faced indictment. He fled Russia to his villa in the French Riviera, he was arrested in there on a Russian warrant. After his release, he moved to Britain, which granted him political asylum. Among his political activities in London, he funded anti-Putin exiles, including Alexander Litvinenko. Berezovsky's stated goal was to overthrow the Putin regime, explaining in a 2007 interview with The Guardian,"It isn't possible to change this [Putin] regime through democratic means. There can be no change without force, pressure." Asked by the reporter if he was effectively fomenting a revolution, he said: "You are absolutely correct."

Status: Target of a Russian extradition warrant. On trial in absentia for fraud in Moscow

Alexander Litvinenko (a.k.a Alexander Volkov, a.k.a Chris Reid)

Position: KGB Defector, Author
Polonium Link: It killed him.
Berezovsky Link: Protector(Russia), Political advisor (UK)
Dossier: Born in 1962, Litvinenko spent most, if not all ,of his career in the intelligence game. In 1986, he served in KGB military counterintelligence. In the Chechen rebellion in the late 1980s, he recruited KGB sources in Chechnya. In 1991, the KGB was renamed the FSB, and he worked in its newly-created Department for the Analysis of Criminal Organizations . His duties included the surveillance and penetration of Russian organized crime. In 1998, he was put in charge of protecting Berezovsky. In 1999, after Litvinenko charged that the FSB planned to assassinate Berezovsky, Litvinenko was fired from the FSB and accused of stealing munitions. With any trial, he was imprisoned. In 2000, he was released on condition that he remain in Russia (and surrender his passport). He then fled to Turkey on a false passport under the alias "Chris Reid." From Turkey, he went to Chechnya . According to Russian officials, his mission in Chechnya in 2000 was "to eliminate evidence of Boris Berezovsky's involvement in funding illegal armed groups there." Berezovsky, for his part, denied illicit channeling money to separationists. Whatever the purpose of Litvinenko's work in Chechnya, he rejoined Berezovsky in London on November 1, 2000, where he received political asylum. With Berezovsky’s backing, he worked ceaselessly to discredit Putin as a sponsor of state terrorism. His book Blowing Up Russia alleged that Putin’s FSB, not Chechen separationists, had blown up six Russian apartment houses in 1999, and that the Chechens were framed for the death of some 300 residents in those buildings. He said that Putin's motive was to create the pretext for re-invading Chechnya. His book Gang From Lubyanka claimed that Putin was deeply involved in Russian organized crime. In interviews he alleged that the 2002 seizure of a Moscow theater by Chechen women was organized by "FSB agents among the Chechens" and accused Putin of personally ordering the assassination of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. He eveb alleged that Putin’s FSB had trained Bin laden’s partner in 9-11, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for half of a year in Dagestan in 1998. Litvinenko may also been involved with Berezovsky a less-public activities According to Vyacheslav Zharko, a Russian official who alleges that MI6 recruited him in 2003, Litvinenko and Berezovsky acted as access agents for MI-6. Under the pretext of a meeting with British businessmen, they introduced him to three MI6 officers– "John Callaghan," "Kenn Philips," and "Paul" –who then recruited him as a spy. Andrei Lugovoi, a former Russian security officer, tells a similar story, saying that Litvinenko brought him to meetings in October 2006 with British businessmen who openly attempted to recruit him as a spy for MI-6. If so, Litvinenko was acting as an access agent for MI6 about the time he came in contact with the Polonium 210.

After his death, Polonium 210 was detected in his home and on his clothes.

Status: Died November 23, 2006

Andrei Lugovoi

Position: security expert

Polonium Link: Polonium 210 was detected on him, as well as his wife, children and possessions.
Berezovsky Link: Protector in Moscow

Litvinenko Link: Prospective business partner
Dossier: Born in Azerbaijan in 1966, Lugovoi enrolled in the KGB at the age of 21. During the Yeltsen administration, when the KGB became the FSB, he worked at the Kremlin's personal security unit, where he met Berezovsky. In 1996, he left the FSB to head security at Berezovsky’s television fiefdom, ORT, . After Berezovsky fled Russia in 2000, Nikolai Glushkov, his top associate in Aeroflot war arrested and put under pressure to provide evidence against Berezovsky. Lugovoi had the task of breaking Glushkov out of prison but the escape went awry and Lugovoi served 14 months in prison. After he was released, he set up Pershin, which provided security services to multimillionaires and sold beverages. When he went to London for Berezovsky's gala birthday party on January 23, 2006, he was seated at the same table with Litvinenko, who he had known from the KGB and FSB. Several months later, according to Lugovoi, Litvinenko asked him to come to London to discuss a lucrative joint venture with British businessmen. In the summer he met Litvinenko at his home who gave him documents and "gifts" to bring back to Moscow. The material later tested positive for Polonium 210. indicating that Litvinko (and Lugovoi) were in contact with Polonium 210 four to six months before Litvinenko died. As the deal progressed, Lugovoi and his Moscow associate Dmitry Kovtun met Litvinenko at Erinys, a British security firm. During that meeting, the British participants, according to Lugovoi, tried to recruit him as source for information about the FSB, leading him and Kovtin to assume that they were MI6 officers . The offices of Erinys later tested positive for Polonium-210. Lugovoi last met Litvinenko on November 1st at the Pine Bar.

Status: Subject of a British extradition warrant

Dmitry Kovtun

Position: Consultant

Polonium Link: Detected in his body, in his hotel room, in his Hamburg residence.

Berezovsky Link: Business prospect.
Dossier: Born in 1966, Kovtun graduated from the elite Supreme Soviet Military Command School in 1985. He then served in military intelligence in Eastern Europe, posted in Prague and Berlin, in the final days of the Cold war . From 1991 until 2003, he lived in Hamburg, Germany, eventually marrying a German national, Marina Wall, and working as a "consultant". After 12 years in Germany, he returned to Moscow (without his wife) in 2003 and, continued a consulting career in "oil and gas." Lugovoi, who had known him since they were in school, suggested he come to London to participate in Litvinenko's "joint venture". Kovtun accompanied Lugovoi to the October 16 meeting at Erinys. On October 28, he flew to Hamburg to extend his residence permit The permit, his residence, and ex-wife later tested positive for Polonium 210, indicating that he was contaminated after the October 16th meeting. On November 1, he again saw Litvinenko at the Pine Bar.

Status: Subject of German investigation into Polonium smuggling.

Akhmed Zakayev

Position: Chechen leader. Foreign Affairs Minister of the Chechen Republic (exiled in London)

Polonium Link: Detected on front seat of his car
Berezovsky Link: Ally, attended his 60th Birthday party
Litvinenko Link: Appointed Litvinenko in 2002 to the Commission on " war crimes committed on the territory of Chechnya by the Russian occupying troops."
Dossier: Born April 1956 in Kazakhstan, Zakayev first achieved stardom as an actor at the Grozny theater. In 1990, after Chechnya seceded from Russia, he was appointed its Minister of Culture. After Russia re-invaded Chechnya, Zakayev first fought with the rebels and then went into exile in Denmark, where he was arrested on a Russian warrant. He then went to Britain, where he receive political asylum. He met Litvinenko in London in 2003, and kept, as he stated in his deposition, "in constant contact" with him. At 6 pm on November 1st, Zakayev picked up Litvinenko from Boris Berezovsky's Mayfair office, where Litvinenko had gone after his meeting at the Pine Bar, and drove him home.

Status: Subject of Russian extradition warrant

Mario Scaramella

Position: Security Consultant

Polonium Link: Contaminated, hospitalized
Litvinenko Link: Source on KGB penetration of Italy
Dossier: Born in 1970 in Naples, Scaramella went to work in 2002 as an advisor to Italy’s Mitrokhin Commission which was investigation allegations of KGB recruitment of Italian politicians. After Scaramella paid Litvinenko to provide information about KGB/FSB operations in 2005, he met again with him around lunchtime on November 1 at the Itsu Sushi. After that meeting (and before Litvinenko proceeded to his meeting with Lugovoi at the Pine Bar), Scaramella was contaminated by Polonium.

Status: In Prison on unrelated charge of calumny

[See Theories Below]

Follow The Polonium

Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-KGB officer, died of radiation poisoning in London on November 23, 2006. The autopsy found that the radiation that killed him came from a rare and short-lived isotope of Polonium, Polonium 210.
The reason for its rarity-- the entire known production is no more than 4 ounces per year-- is that is produced in a nuclear reactor using uranium-235, the fuel of nukes. Only a handful of nuclear reactors, all in Russia, are permitted to produce it. Once produced, it cannot be stockpiled for long since it has a half-life of only 138.3 days, which means it loses over half of its radioactivity every 4 months. The supply of Polonium-210 is also tightly-controlled by an international regime. Virtually all the Russian production is now exported to the US, where it is reduced into harmless trace amounts that are then chemically-bonded into plastic and ceramic for industrial use. The reason the US negotiated this extraordinary arrangement with Russia was to prevent any pure Polonium 210 from getting into the hands of a rogue nation. If such a rogue nation could also acquire a fissile fuel such as U-235, it could use the Polonium 210 to help trigger a chain reaction in a primitive nuclear bomb. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) thus monitors all nuclear reactors under its regime to make sure they are not illegally manufacturing Polonium 210. If any traces of it are found on the equipment, as happened in an inspection of Iran in the early 1990s, it sets off alarm bells.

The international concern about smuggled Polonium 210 is well-founded. Unlike many of the more common radioactive isotopes, which emit gamma particles that can be easily detected with a geiger counter, Polonium 210 emits alpha particles which are much more difficult to detect (unless there is leakage from its container). So it can be smuggled across borders in a plastic capsule. Even if a rogue nation or terrorist group did not possess fissile fuel, it could use Polonium-210 as the radioactive fuel for a so-called "dirty" bomb in conjunction with conventional explosives.


The Polonium Message


Polonium 210 could also be used to send a message. A sample-size capsule of smuggled Polonium 210 demonstrates that a person, or his agents, have access to Russia’s secret nuclear establishment. And showing such bona fide access could be a precondition to arranging a lucrative espionage or black market deal. It could also be to send a different kind of message. Since Russia is the sole source of pure Polonium 210, its use in a crime suggests the involvement of the Russian government, whether true or disinformation. So the issue becomes why was smuggled Polonium in London in 2006.

The Polonium Trail

There can be little doubt that pure Polonium 210 was smuggled into London. Not only did it fatally poison Litvinenko but it hospitalized three of his associates, contaminated a number of their children, and tainted their offices, meeting places, vehicles, and residencies. Part of the spillage occurred on or before October 16, 2006, which was weeks before Litvinenko was admitted to Barnett General Hospital on November 3rd. But the police only began investigating the Polonium trail on November 24th because it was not known until the day that Litvinenko died that Polonium 210 was the poison. (It was initially believed he had swallowed non-radioactive thallium, which is used in rat poison.) In the more than six weeks since Polonium 210 began leaking, all the possible crime scenes were compromised. For example, a tea pot that showed traces of Polonium had been repeatedly washed in a hotel dish washer. The police found many sites, including the Pine Bar at the Millennium Hotel, the Itsu Sushi Restaurant, the offices used by Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky, but they did not find a single witnesses to how the smuggled Polonium 210 tainted these people and places. (Litvinenko himself did not even know he had been poisoned with Polonium 210.) So despite a plethora of polonium traces people and places, there is no evidence as to who contaminated whom, or how anyone, including Litvinenko, came into contact with the smuggled Polonium 210.

The Sixth Victim


History provides some much needed perspective. There have been only six known cases of fatal Polonium poisoning since Polonium was first discovered in 1898 by Marie Curie (who later named it after her native Poland), . The short-list includes Irene Joliot-Curie and Nobus Yamada, who both worked in the lab of Marie Curie, and were contaminated by a leak from a damaged container. Later, in the 1950s, three Israeli scientists, who worked on Israel’s nuclear bomb, which initially used Polonium 210 as part of the trigger mechanism, were fatally exposed. The Israeli investigation found that a large part of the secret facilities where the three victims worked had been contaminated by minute bits of leaked Polonium 210. The leaked Polonium 210 had spread widely by attaching itself to dust that was blown or tracked through the labs. The sixth victim was Litvinenko. Since all the prior Polonium deaths had been work related, Litvinenko's work might also be relevant.


Litvinenko’s Game



Unlike the five dead scientists, Litvinenko’s occupation at the time of his encounter with Polonium-210 was elusive . Before he defected to Britain in November 2000, he had worked in the Department for the Analysis of Criminal Organizations for its successor agency, the FSB, the successor to the KGB. He was also involved in the unit that provided protection for the oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, who had made hundreds of millions of dollars in privatizing Russian industries, and served as Deputy Chairman of the Russian National Security Council. In 1999, Litvinenko was fired from the FSB, charged with corruption and stealing explosives, imprisoned briefly, and released. He proceeded to Turkey using a false passport and the alias "Chris Reid." According to Russian Deputy Interior Minister Arkady Yedelyov, he then went to Chechnya ( via Georgia) in order "to eliminate evidence of Boris Berezovsky's involvement in funding illegal armed groups there," a mission he failed to accomplish. When he arrived in Britain on November 1, 2000, he went to work for Berezovsky, who had also now moved to London. His duties were not specified. But Berezovsky’s projects included an ambitious enterprise to undermine the administration of former FSB-head Vladimir Putin. In April 2007, he further elaborated in an interview with the Guardian, saying that "We need to use force to change this regime, it isn't possible to change this regime through democratic means." Whatever Litvinenko’s role was in Berezovsky’s extraordinary enterprise, he worked to blacken Putin’s name by providing the media with putative evidence that Putin’s FSB had been involved in state-sponsored terrorism activities, including political assassinations, the training in Russia of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Ladin’s partner in al-Qaeda, and the blowing up of six Russian apartment houses in 1999, which killed over 300 people. Litvinenko claimed the FSB had blown up these buildings, and planted evidence that Chechens were responsible for these atrocities, to justify Putin's invasion of Chechnya.
Enter Andrei Lugovoi, a Russian businessman, who owned Pershin, which, among other things, did "private security" work. Like Litvineko, he had previously worked for the FSB providing protection for Berezovsky, and, even after leaving the FSB, headed one of Berezovsky’s security teams in Moscow. He had known Litvineko since 1996, and met with him in London many times. Litvinenko's business with Lugovoi in 2006 involved introducing him to people in London who needed his security services in Moscow. Some of their meetings took place in Berezovsky’s offices (which were tainted with Polonium traces). The real purpose of their liaison, according to Lugovoi, was an intelligence game. Lugovoi stated at a press conference in Moscow in May 2007 that "the British [at the meetings] started to show interest in everything: my connections, financial opportunities, if I had direct access to the Russian president's administration, as well as contacts with officers of the Federal Security Service, the Federal Bodyguard Service and the Foreign Intelligence Service. They were especially interested in an opportunity to get information about the FSB activities in the so-called English direction." Since the money offered to him seemed excessive for security work, he assumed that Litvinenko was working as an access agent for an espionage service. Playing along, Lugovoi brought in a Moscow business associate, Dmitry Kovtun. On October 16, 2006, Lugovoi recounts, "We met with Litvinenko in the afternoon in Bond Street and went to a meeting at Erinys, the security firm which recently developed an interest in Russia." (The Erinys offices were tainted with Polonium). Kovtun was also so contaminated with Polonium 210 after that meeting that he left a trail of Polonium on his trip to Hamburg in late October.


Completing the cast of Polonium-tainted associates, which could have been drawn from Claude Cockburn’s screenplay Beat The Devil, is Mario Scaramella, a Neapolitan "security consultant," who had been working as an investigator for the controversial Mitrokhin Commission set up by Silvio Berlusconi to investigate putative links between Berlusconi's political rivals and the KGB. Scaramella had already paid Litvinenko a small amount for a video interview describing links between the FSB and Italian politicians, when he met him again at the Itsu Sushi restaurant on November 1st 2006. Scaramella said that he met Litvinenko to develop more evidence about Russian crimes. Afterwards, in December, he found that he had also been contaminated with Polonium 210 and was hospitalized in London. When he got out of the hospital, he was jailed promptly jailed by Italian authorities on an unrelated charge of "calumny" against an Ukrainian former KGB agent and gun-running, and is still in prison.
At the heart of these murky associations was Litvinenko's role as an information-supplier. He supplied information– or disinformation– specializing in "intelligence" that was potentially embarrassing to the Putin government. Such sensitive work might have brought him, in one way or another, in contact with Polonium 210 , which, because it traces directly back to Russia, sends a message of Russian involvement.

The SMERSH Narrative

A mystery story needs to a narrative line to capture an audience. Even before Litvinenko died on November 23, 2006, Berezovsky, together with Russian exiles he funded, provided the British press with a powerful one: Litvinenko was poisoned by Russian agents to stop him from revealing Russian state-sponsored crimes. Litvinenko himself helped with a death bed statement saying that he was poisoned on Putin’s orders. When this narrative began, the poison was said to be commonly-available thallium. Then, when polonium traceable to Russia was discovered in Litvinenko's body, the silencing narrative neatly fit in with the endless string of assassinations attributed to the Russian counterintelligence service SMERSH ("Death To Spies and Traitors" loosely translated from Russian). The SMERSH specialty was killing defectors abroad, such as Trotsky in Mexico and General Walter Krivitsky in Washington D.C. The SMERSH legend became so ingrained in the popular imagination by the 1950s that, crossing over to the realn of fiction, Ian Fleming made SMERSH the main nemesis of his fictional character James Bond. (In later James Bond movie adaptations, SMERSH was changed SPECTRE, a non-Russian criminal syndicate.)

In the Litvinenko case, the SMERSH narrative gained such great traction that not only did the newspapers and editorialists report it as established fact but Hollywood producers commissioned competing screenplays based on it. For their part, British prosecutors quixotically sought to extradite Litvinenko’s Russian associate, Lugovoi, in May 2007 after Russian officials had made it clear that such a request would be denied. It was foreseeably unsuccessful. (Meanwhile, Russian prosecutors, pushing a very different Corrupt Oligarch narrative, moved to try Berezovsky in absentia in Moscow since British authorities predictably had refused to extradite him to Russia.)

While the SMERSH narrative may provide an exciting and easy -to-follow plot for movies and tabloid newspapers, it also can fuel a flight from reality for the public. Conspicuously missing-in-action in the SMERSH narrative is the smuggled Polonium 210.

The Missing Link

The media's relentless focus on the exciting SMERSH narrative has led to the neglect of the more prosaic chronology of Polonium contacts. The key might be in the timing. When was this valuable isotope smuggled into London and when did in did it come in contact with Litvinenko and his associates?
Here is what we know: The smuggled Polonium 210 was in London weeks, if not months, before Litvinenko showed any signs of being poisoned. According to Lugovoi. Litvinenko gave him "gifts" and documents to take back to Moscow in the summer of 2006 that tested positive for Polonium-210. (The dating can be forensically verified by comparing the ratio of Polonium 210, which decays rapidly, with its daughter isotope Polonium 208, which is more stable.) If so, smuggled Polonium 210 was leaking in trace amounts from its container in London in the summer of 2006. By mid-October, the leak contaminated a great many more places -- and people. On October 16th, Litvinenko, Lugovoi, and Kovtun met with British businessmen (or intelligence officers, according to Lugovoi's assessment) in the offices of Erinys UK, which specialized in providing mercenaries to countries with a security problem. Afterwards, the offices were tainted with Polonium 210. So was the Parks Hotel in Knightsbridge, where Lugovoi and Kovtun spent the night of October 16th and 17th. And so were Litvinenko, Lugovoi, and Kovtun (all of whom were subsequently hospitalized.) When Kovtun visited Hamburg the next week, he left traces of Polonium 210 on German travel documents, vehicles and a couch in the place he stayed. The October trail could have all resulted from leaked Polonium 210 at the meeting on October 16th.

The more vexing mystery is how a speck of the smuggled Polonium 210-- one millionth of a gram is fatal-- got into Litvinenko's body. Although the coroner’s report has still not been released (after six months), the London Daily Telegraph reported that the autopsy examination conducted in late November revealed that Litvinenko had ingested Polonium 210 on at least two different occasions. The first amount was non-fatal. The second fatal amount caused him to seek admission to the hospital on November 3rd. Unless Litvinenko was the victim of a serial poisoner who administered Polonium 210 to him on two different occasions, Litvinenko himself must had been in possession of an object that contained Polonium 210. If Litvinenko was exposed to spilled Polonium 210 on October 16th, either accidentally or intentionally, specks of it could attach themselves to dust or lint, as had happened in the fatal Israeli leak, and the dust could have spread to anything in his possession, including articles of clothing, pieces of candy, or papers. (Litvinenko’s house was so widely contaminated by Polonium 210 that it still cannot be sold by his family.) A speck could then have fallen into his food or on an open cut.

The object that delivered the Polonium 210 has never been found. Possibly, it was destroyed or discarded during the three weeks that Litvinenko was in the hospital. But without it, or any witnesses as to how the radioactive isotope got to London and the place where it spilled, the Polonium trail hits a dead end and leaving little more to titillate the media thab a profusion of theories.