razor

The mystery surrounding the poisoning death of Alexander Litvinenko continues to spread and darken like a cloud of squid ink, and tensions are mounting between the Russian and British Governments.  The Russians apparently feel that it was irresponsible for the British government to allow Litvinenko to publish his deathbed letter implicating the Kremlin in his murder.  The Brits have responded like the British, thank you very much.

From the Telegraph UK: 

Dr Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, told The Daily Telegraph: "In Britain, people are still free to speak, which is a lesson that seemingly needs to be learnt in Mr Putin's Russia.

"At first glance, it [the Russian protest] is an outrage. But on a deeper aspect, it is symptomatic of a state that does not understand any longer the concept of free speech."

Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, the former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, joined the criticism, calling the Kremlin letter "absolute bloody cheek, frankly".

Thank you, Dr. Fox, Dame Neville-Jones.  You have the souls of poets.

At this juncture, four people are testing positive for polonium contamination, Litvinko's wife Marina and father, Walter have both received low dosages, well beneath the threshhold of lethality, but his contact at Itsu, Mario Scaramella has received five times what is accepted as a lethal dose of alpha radiation, but he has yet to show symptoms of poisoning.  Another former KGB agent in London, Andrei Lugovoi is testing positive for exposure and he also met with Litvinenko the day he fell ill.   According to CNN, 27 people have been referred for testing for possible exposure.

We still don't have conclusive word on how the polonium-210 was introduced into Litvinenko's body since the autopsy process has been complicated by the fact that the cadaver is still highly radioactive.  (From The New Scientist via Chip Scanlon at Poynter Online.)  

Meanwhile, possibly the most delicate autopsy ever performed in London is due to take place on Friday, at the Royal London Hospital, when radiation-suited pathologists gingerly prise apart the highly toxic body of Litvinenko. What they find might suggests where the radioactive element polonium-210 suspected of poisoning him came from.

(snip)

“It looks like a typical 30-day radiation death,” says Dudley Goodhead, former director of the British Medical Research Council’s Radiation and Genome Stability Unit at Harwell in Oxfordshire.

Relative doses

A person dies of the highest doses of radiation immediately. If the dose was high enough to destroy the intestinal wall, death takes five days, Goodhead explains. At lower doses, enough to destroy the bone marrow, a particular syndrome sets in with death typically at around 30 days, with some variation. Both Litvinenko’s symptoms and time to death are consistent with that, he says.

That means he probably received only microgram amounts of polonium, Goodhead suggests. But only half would have been cleared from his body before he died. “There will be plenty left for the autopsy team to worry about,” as the polonium would be distributed widely throughout the body.

Since the radioactive element decays fast, with a half-life of only 138 days, the alpha particles it emits possess very high energy, making even tiny amounts toxic. As an unexplained death, by law Litvinenko must receive an autopsy. But just the small droplets released, for example, as the autopsy team opens his chest, could be dangerous.

The other lingering question is, obviously, who did it and why.  Occam's razor says to always go for the simplest explanation, and that would be that the Kremlin silenced Litvinenko as well as Moscow journalist Anna Politkovskaya.  That just doesn't sit right with me, though.  Why go to so much trouble when all they had to do was shoot him and leave his body in an alley?  Why invoke such a public, excruciating death, one that would enable Litvinenko to point the finger of blame at the Putin government?

Dr. Hillhouse has a roundup piece at The Spy Who Billed Me addressing many of the current theories out there: 

  • The murder was designed to frame Putin as to frighten other regime critics into silence.

It’s a very Western perspective to believe that framing the FSB/Putin for the murder of a dissident in London would have any affect upon Putin's power, except to increase his popularity with the old-timers still longing for Uncle Joe.  Despite what many wanted to believe about his democratic tendencies several years ago, Putin was then and remains an authoritarian ruler.  Public opinion has no impact on his power unless there are massive uprisings in the streets and even then it only really matters if the military refuses to quell it. 

(snip)

  • It was designed to frame Putin to cause international uproar as part of a larger campaign to oust him from power.
Newsflash: International political opinion carries little to no real weight in domestic politics (with a few possible exceptions.)  The US is a prime example.  The world has not exactly been pleased with how the US has conducted itself in the War on Terror and in Iraq.  Now think about how negative world opinion has impacted US domestic politics both in terms of the actions of the Bush Administration and voter behavior.  It hasn't. 
(snip again)
  • It was done to scare Putin, demonstrating that one of the Russian mafias could not only access state-controlled radiation sources but also frame Putin for the murder.
He would not be shaking in his fur-lined boots over this.  Unprofessionalism aside, demonstrating that the Russian mafia could kill someone in London is not impressive.  Russian control on nuclear isotopes is so loosey-goosey (to use a technical term) that Putin is more likely to be shocked if it were all accounted for.  Scientists are highly underpaid and and easy bribery targets. 

Clearly, these are valid points, but I'm going to go way, way out on a limb here and posit that this murder was carried out by operatives of Yukos, the oil company owned by jailed petro-oligarch Mikhail Kordorkovsky.  I have precious little to back this up except a gut feeling, a denial, and this piece from The Australian:

A DOSSIER drawn up by Alexander Litvinenko on the Kremlin's takeover of the world's richest energy giant will be given to Scotland Yard overnight as police investigate the former KGB spy's secret dealings with some of Russia's richest men.

It emerged yesterday that Mr Litvinenko travelled to Israel just weeks before he died to hand over evidence to a Russian billionaire of how agents working for President Vladimir Putin dealt with his enemies running the Yukos oil company.

He passed this information to Leonid Nevzlin, the former second-in-command of Yukos, who fled to Tel Aviv in fear for his life after the Kremlin seized and then sold off the $US40 billion ($51 billion) company.

And then there's this piece at CNN, in which former KGB operative Yuri Shvets says he knows who killed his friend Litvinenko and that he has handed over a dossier to Scotland Yard.  He refuses to verbally implicate anyone because, "I want this inquiry to get to the bottom of it, otherwise they will be killing people all over the world -- in London, in Washington and in other places.  I want to give the police the time and space to crack this case, to allow them to find those behind this assassination, the last thing I want to do is give a warning to those who are responsible."

(Yeah, not like us.) 

And then he denies that Yukos had anything to do with the murder:

In a separate statement issued through Tom Mangold, a London-based former British Broadcasting Corp. reporter and friend for 15 years, Shvets denied claims published Sunday in Britain's Observer newspaper that he had been involved in the drafting of a dossier on Russian oil company Yukos.

If Shvets was Tony Snow, I would say that now we've solved everything.  It's like I told my brother last spring, "I've gotten to where I don't believe anything anymore until the White House denies it.  Then I know it's the truth."

UPDATE: It has been pointed out to me in the comments that the documents that Litvinenko and Shvets are making available to the British government are probably favorable to Yukos and incriminating to the Putin government.  For some reason I had it in my head that these documents would be equally damning to both parties.  Still!  It's my theory and I'm sticking to it.  Nyah.  Nyah.  Nyah.