A Very Expensive Poison (14 page)

Litvinenko returns to the theme of Putin’s culpability in his last two interviews, at 8.06 p.m. and 8.39 p.m. respectively. He is moving and lucid. And perceptive: Litvinenko is aware that his case raises a major dilemma for western governments. How should they deal with the head of a powerful, energy-rich state who, apparently, has his enemies murdered?

Litvinenko says western politicians are to blame for treating Putin as a respectable international leader:

The buzzer sounds, signalling the tape is finishing. Litvinenko tells Hyatt:

Litvinenko’s remarks would turn out to be prescient. The Scotland Yard detectives seem touched by his faith in them. DI Hyatt promises to ‘do absolutely everything within my power to ensure that this case is properly investigated’. He adds: ‘I know that this process has been extremely difficult because of your medical condition, and I just want to thank you for your time, your patience and your help with getting as much information to us as possible in the way that you have done.’

Litvinenko’s condition was rapidly deteriorating. On 20 November, the same day as his last police interview, doctors moved him to intensive care. Here it was easier to monitor the patient and, if necessary, to intervene. His heart rate was becoming abnormal; his major organs failing.

The medics treating him were in unchartered territory. Litvinenko’s case was problematic: he wasn’t behaving like a patient who had ingested thallium. He had severe bone marrow failure and gut damage, which fitted. But he lacked one key symptom of thallium poisoning – peripheral neuropathy, pain or numbness in his fingers and feet. ‘It was still a bit of a mystery,’ one doctor said. Professor John Henry – an expert on poisoning – examined Litvinenko twice. He found that his handshake was still extremely firm. Henry had previously told Sky TV
that Litvinenko was a victim of radioactive thallium. Now he had doubts.

Meanwhile, those close to Litvinenko were reluctantly concluding he was unlikely to survive.

The Kremlin would subsequently accuse Berezovsky and Goldfarb of cynically exploiting Litvinenko as part of their long-running public-relations campaign against Putin. In fact, Litvinenko made it abundantly clear – as the Scotland Yard transcripts show – that he held Putin personally responsible for his poisoning. And he wanted to send this message to the world.

Litvinenko’s lawyer, George Menzies, began drafting a statement on his behalf. Menzies later said that the ideas in it were wholly Litvinenko’s. ‘I was doing my best, in personal terms, to represent what I truly believed to be Sasha’s state of mind and sentiment,’ he said. Its themes – Litvinenko’s pride in being British, his love of his wife, his belief as to the source of his illness – mirrored what his client thought, Menzies said.

Goldfarb and Menzies took the draft to the hospital. They showed it to Marina. Her reaction was negative. She believed her husband would pull through and that writing a last testament was tantamount to giving up on him. Pragmatically, they told her: ‘Better to do it now than later.’

Menzies consulted with Tim Bell, chairman of the London PR firm Bell Pottinger. Bell’s company had worked for Boris Berezovsky since 2002, helping the exiled oligarch through various legal scrapes, and had assisted the Litvinenkos as well. Bell said he thought the text was too gloomy and read like a ‘deathbed statement’.
‘I didn’t think it was the right thing to do because I still hoped and believed Sasha would live,’ Bell said.

Goldfarb read out the A4 sheet to Litvinenko in intensive care, translating it from English to Russian. At one point Goldfarb made a movement with his arms, mimicking the flight of an angel flapping its wings. Litvinenko endorsed the statement in its entirety, confirming: ‘This is exactly what I want to say.’ Litvinenko then signed and dated it – 21 November 2006, his signature trailing off into a raised black swirl.

The statement read:

TV cameras and media had gathered outside the hospital’s main gate, waiting for news. They’d been there since Monday morning, 20 November, in the wake of an interview given by Litvinenko to the journalist David Leppard and published the previous day by the
Sunday Times.

Sixteen floors above them, Litvinenko asked Goldfarb if he was a big story. He was – but not much was known about Litvinenko, other than that he was a prominent critic of Putin’s, and desperately ill. Goldfarb said: ‘Sasha, if you really want the message to be seriously put across, we need a photo.’ Marina was against the idea, and saw it as an invasion of privacy. But Litvinenko agreed, and said: ‘Yes, if you think it’s needed, let’s do it.’

Goldfarb rang Bell Pottinger and spoke to Jennifer Morgan, Bell’s liaison. Morgan in turn called a photographer she knew, Natasja Weitsz. Weitsz arrived at the hospital and was escorted upstairs past a police guard. She was with Litvinenko for mere minutes. He pushed his green hospital gown to one side so as to reveal the electro-cardiagram sensors attached to his heart. Weitsz shot a couple of frames of Litvinenko: bald, gaunt and defiant, staring with cornflower-blue eyes directly at the camera lens. The image was cropped around its haunting subject. It went round the world.

Litvinenko was aware his time was running out. His friend Zakayev had been visiting him in hospital every day; they had talked of Chechnya, religion and Zakayev’s Muslim faith.

Litvinenko told Zakayev: ‘One day when I die, will you promise to put my body in Chechen ground?’ Zakayev agreed – given the circumstances, it would have been impossible to refuse. A precondition of burial was that Litvinenko convert to Islam. Zakayev asked Marina if he could bring an imam. She assented; the imam visited intensive care and performed the ceremony at speed.

Litvinenko’s father Walter flew in from Moscow and arrived at his son’s bedside. Litvinenko informed him: ‘Dad, what do you think? I’ve converted. I’m now a Muslim.’

Walter was an Orthodox Christian. In his later years he’d become more of a believer. He took this development in his stride. And replied: ‘It doesn’t matter, at least you’re not a communist.’

By the next day, Wednesday, 22 November, doctors treating Litvinenko had scrapped their diagnosis. Their notes read: ‘We DO NOT feel this gentleman has or had inorganic thallium poisoning.’

At midday, a top-level meeting was convened at the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism command. It involved SO15 detectives, led by Detective Superintendent Timmons, medical staff, a scientist from the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment, the Forensic Science Service and Dr Nick Gent from Porton Down, the UK’s military science facility. The latest urine test had revealed the presence of a new radioactive isotope – polonium-210. But this was marked down as an anomaly, caused by the plastic container used to carry Litvinenko’s urine.

According to Timmons, the specialists discussed five theories which might explain Litvinenko’s baffling poisoning. Most were esoteric. They included Stevens– Johnson syndrome, an idiosyncratic reaction to drugs; an intake of cytotoxins, cancer-fighting medicines; and exposure to an external radiation source, such as cobalt-30. Another possibility was natural causes. Or an internal radiation source, such as polonium. This last theory was seen as unlikely. The experts decided to investigate further and to send a litre of urine to Aldermaston.

Back in the intensive care ward, Litvinenko was drifting in and out of consciousness. The Russian-German filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov visited him. Nekrasov had previously conducted several interviews with Litvinenko; he shot the video on condition that it would be released only with Marina’s approval. It’s the last photograph.
Litvinenko lies on his bed, a vanquished soul, around whom the world is closing and darkening. A drip is attached to his nose; his cheeks are hollow; his eyes are open – just. There is pale afternoon light.

‘He was conscious, but was very, very weak,’ Marina said. ‘I spent almost all day sitting close to him, [to] make him just be calm and more relaxed.’ At 8 p.m. Marina got up to leave, and told her husband: ‘Sasha, unfortunately I have to go.’

She said: ‘He smiled so sadly, and I started to feel I’m guilty because I’m leaving him, and I just said, “Don’t worry, tomorrow morning I will come and everything will be fine.”’

Litvinenko whispered back to her: ‘I love you so much.’ Marina wanted to exit on an optimistic note; she joked that she hadn’t heard those words for a long time.

At midnight the hospital called to say that Litvinenko had gone into cardiac arrest, not once but twice. They managed to resuscitate him. She returned to University College Hospital, getting a lift with Zakayev, and found her husband unconscious and on a life-support machine. She spent the following day, 23 November, at his side; Litvinenko was in an induced coma. That evening she went back to Muswell Hill. An hour after arriving home the phone rang. It was the hospital telling her urgently to return.

Litvinenko suffered a third cardiac arrest at 8.51 p.m. The consultant on duty, Dr James Down, tried to revive him but at 9.21 p.m. pronounced life extinct. When Marina and Anatoly arrived at the hospital they were 
taken not to the ward but to a side-room. Ten or fifteen minutes later, the doctor told them that Litvinenko was dead. He added: ‘Would you like to see Sasha?’, to which Marina replied: ‘Of course.’

For the first time in several days, she said, she was allowed to touch and kiss him; Anatoly ran from the room after half a minute.

Six hours before Litvinenko’s death, at about 3 p.m., Timmons received a phone call from the Atomic Weapons Establishment. It had the results from the latest tests. They confirmed that Litvinenko was ‘terribly contaminated’, as Timmons put it, with radioactive polonium.

Every good Russian student knows the beginning of Alexander Pushkin’s much-loved mock-epic poem
Ruslan and Lyudmila.
It concerns a young prince, Ruslan, whose bride Lyudmila is seized from him on his wedding night by an evil dwarf, Chernomor. To get her back, Ruslan has to go on a knightly quest. Along the way he defeats a rival suitor. He meets a giant talking head and finds a golden sword.

The dwarf, meanwhile, tries in vain to woo Lyudmila, his prisoner. She manages to disappear using an enchanted hat. There is fighting. Ruslan grapples with Chernomor as they fly through the air. He later rescues Kiev from enemy attack. And there is a happy ending, with a little help from healing water and a magic ring.

The poem begins in a translation by Peter France:

Published in 1820, the mock-heroic fairy tale made the young Pushkin famous. He started writing it at the age of seventeen, a student at the lyceum near St Petersburg. He finished it three years later, a junior official at the ministry of foreign affairs. The poem is playful, luminous, sparse and strange. Pushkin admired Lord Byron;
Ruslan and Lyudmila
has witty and colloquial touches reminiscent of the British poet.

It is also a very Russian work. It blends elements from Russian folklore and ordinary life; as well as a fantasy garden there is a scene in a bathhouse. It’s subtle, too. Pushkin both enters into this fairytale universe and simultaneously stands outside and coolly assesses it. The low-tonality vowels of the opening have a haunting quality. What emerges is a new and vibrant literary language.

In the Soviet Union every educated citizen read Pushkin’s epic verse at school. So, it was unsurprising that scientists working at a Soviet nuclear facility deep in the Urals decided to call two of their nuclear reactors there ‘Ruslan’ and ‘Lyudmila’. The names were playful, half-nodding towards the strange and magical world of nuclear science. ‘Ruslan’ and ‘Lyudmila’ was also a lively, if ghoulish, shorthand – a way of referring to the clandestine work that went on inside the guarded perimeter fence. The Mayak complex was top secret, like other state institutions engaged in the assembly of nuclear
weapons. What better way of defusing Mayak’s threat than jolly familiarity? In Russian,
mayak
means ‘lighthouse’, humorous given its invisibility.

The two reactors were built at the tail end of the Soviet Union. Ruslan is a pool-type light water reactor that has operated since 1979, undergoing a major overhaul in 1998–9. Lyudmila is a heavy water reactor that has been in operation since 1988. Lyudmila is bigger, with a power of 1,000 megawatts.

The Mayak complex sprang from the Cold War, and the post-1945 nuclear arms race between the world’s two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union. After the American atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Stalin accelerated the Soviet nuclear programme. The nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov directed research, while Lavrenty Beria, head of the NKVD secret police, was put in charge of efforts to steal nuclear secrets from the US, Britain and Canada.

These efforts worked. The Soviets were able to recruit a network of agents from among the scientists designing the US atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico – Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard. In Britain, Donald Maclean, part of the Cambridge spy ring, told Moscow that the British were developing a uranium bomb too. It was an exhaustive international espionage operation that allowed Moscow to catch up.

Money and privileges flowed towards physicists and engineers who worked in this new and covert field. They included Andrei Sakharov, a gifted nuclear scientist and future dissident, and the physicists Yakov Zeldovich and
Lev Landau. With many others, they successfully designed a Soviet H-bomb. A network of secret Atomgrads – closed cities – was built. These cities were dedicated to nuclear weapons research and development.

Mayak was located 43 miles (70 km) north-west of the city of Chelyabinsk and south of Yekaterinburg. The spot was chosen for its remoteness: it was in the geographic centre of Russia, far away from any front line, and protected by the Ural mountains to the west and Siberia to the east. In a mere eighteen months, Kurchatov built the USSR’s first plutonium production reactor, Anachka. Some 70,000 gulag labourers were used. More reactors followed. The site was based around the closed towns of Ozersk and Snezhinsk.

Many of the people who worked in Russia’s fledgeling nuclear industry had fled from war zones further west; they came from Belarus, Ukraine, Poland. Some were Jews who escaped the Nazis. Within a few years, Chelyabinsk was a booming industrial city, home to engineers, metallurgists and mathematicians. Another principal atomic facility was constructed at Sarov, 450 miles (725 km) south-east of Moscow near the Volga river. Sarov specialised in atomic weapons design and research. Sakharov worked there from 1950.

Officially, neither Mayak nor the Sarov complex existed: they didn’t appear on maps. Residents of closed cities weren’t permitted to leave for holidays until the 1950s. Sarov was codenamed Arzamas-16; Mayak Chelyabinsk-40, and later Chelyabinsk-65. They were closed to Soviet citizens, unless they had a good reason to be there.
And, of course, off-limits to foreigners. This made them objects of allure for western powers. (In 1960, American pilot Gary Powers was photographing the Mayak atomic plant when his CIA spy plane was shot down.)

Soviet physics was a beneficiary of Stalin’s determination to match the US bomb. But there was a price. Little attention was paid to the environmental consequences of handling large quantities of fissile material. For example, radioactive waste water from Mayak was pumped out into small lakes nearby and the Techa river. The complex itself was the scene of mishaps and dangerous small leaks.

In September 1957, a cooling tank storing tens of thousands of tonnes of dissolved nuclear waste overheated and blew up. A cloud of radioactive material was set free. It contaminated over 300 square miles. Radiation was found in the Arctic Sea. It was one of the worst accidents of the nuclear age, on a par with the disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima. In 1967, there was another catastrophe when Lake Karachay, used as a mid-level nuclear waste dump, dried out. Wind threw radioactive dust over a huge area.

The Soviet authorities responded to these accidents predictably, with denial and cover-up. (It took thirty years before Moscow acknowledged the Kyshtym disaster, as the 1957 Mayak explosion was known.) Troops were sent to evacuate some villages; soldiers fenced off the Techa river with barbed wire. But locals weren’t told what had happened: the leak was a state secret. In summer, children still swam in the river; farmers watered their cattle; women drew water from the wells; locals cut hay.

Gradually, the toxic legacy from Mayak became impossible for the Kremlin to conceal. People were dying. The disasters of the fifties and sixties exposed at least half a million to radiation poisoning. Symptoms were ubiquitous: intestinal illnesses, nose bleeds, food allergies. There were respiratory and skin problems. Cancers were rife. In some of the worst-affected areas, it was unusual for villagers to live beyond fifty. Some were dead at twenty. Chronic radiation sickness affected future generations.

Paula Chertok, who grew up in Chelyabinsk, and later emigrated to the US, recalls: ‘Nearly everyone I know from Chelyabinsk had cancer of one sort or another. Many had blood disorders. My mother’s best friend, a doctor, died young from leukaemia. Every woman I know had breast cancer. And we didn’t live in the villages, we lived in Chelyabinsk proper. The environment was utterly contaminated and we never knew a thing.’ She added: ‘We drank the water, played near the rivers and lakes.’

By the 1990s, the local population was still suffering from health problems, although the rules for visiting closed nuclear cities were somewhat relaxed. However, finding once-secret Snezhinsk is something of a challenge: the turn-off point to the town isn’t marked with any signs. A high and rather rickety wooden fence surrounds Snezhinsk, with a checkpoint manned 24/7 at its only exit and entrance. A sign in a field in Russian and English warns non-authorised visitors not to go any further.

Meanwhile, the state that built Mayak disappeared. The demise of the Soviet Union made life difficult for
all Russians, but for scientists it was a disaster. State institutions were unable to pay their employees; some moonlighted as taxi drivers; others flogged their possessions on the street. Atomic-weapons laboratories continued to function and academic visitors noted a high level of professionalism still. But with the apparent end of the Cold War their future looked bleak.

It was a moment when Boris Yeltsin’s Russia believed in dialogue with the outside world; after all, Moscow was broke. In the US and Europe there were worries about what might happen to the former Soviet Union’s nuclear technicians. Worst-case scenario: the experts would go off and work in Iran, Iraq or Libya. Russian scientists were given grants. A team from Princeton University advised closed cities like Sarov on how to transform their production lines from nuclear bomb manufacture to non-weapons activity.

Some of these US–Russian initiatives worked. The secret Avangard laboratory in Sarov, for example, mothballed weapons production and began manufacturing civilian radioactive isotopes instead. It exported them to foreign markets, including America. This was, in effect, a job-creation scheme for the town’s shrinking scientific workforce, down from 4,800 employees in the 1980s to 3,300 by 2000.

Avangard became the only place in the world where one particular isotope was made. It had been manufactured there since 1952. Not many people had noticed. The quantities involved were tiny, the export market practically non-existent. But then the isotope was very
rare and highly unusual: an intensely radioactive silvercoloured metal.

Polonium.

On 18 July 1898 Marie and Pierre Curie discovered polonium while experimenting with the mineral pitchblende. Pitchblende contained uranium. They repeatedly heated it, and dissolved the residue in acid. This process allowed them to isolate a new and unknown substance. It had extraordinary properties. It was 400 times more radioactive than uranium. Curie called this new element polonium.

The name was in tribute to Curie’s lost homeland, Poland, which hadn’t existed as an independent state since the late eighteenth century. Three imperial powers – Russia, Prussia and Habsburg Hungary – had partitioned it into non-existence. Curie’s family actively supported Polish nationalist movements; her father, a mathematics and physics teacher, was sacked from his job for pro-Polish sentiments. It would take two decades, strikes and street battles in Warsaw and Lodz in 1905, plus a world war, before Poland was reconstituted in 1918 as a sovereign territory.

Polonium was so rare it was impossible to make in any quantity. There were 100 microgrammes of polonium per ton of uranium ore. In the 1930s scientists found that under the right conditions they could manufacture polonium in a nuclear reactor. The technique involved irradiating another element, bismuth or Bi, by bombarding it with neutrons. (Specifically, Bi-209
absorbs a neutron and becomes Bi-210. It then beta-decays to Polonium-210, or Po-210.)

An isotope is a particular version of an element, depending on the number of neutrons. This resulting isotope was strange. Po-210 emits extraordinarily high levels of alpha particles, one of three types of radiation. A single gram produces 140 watts of energy, an enormous amount. Polonium is a source of much weaker gamma radiation. The element has a half-life of 138 days, which means that over this period half of the material will decay.

The right equipment can detect tiny quantities of polonium, so intense is its emission of alpha particles. It’s possible to detect amounts as small as a few picograms, one millionth of a millionth of a gram.

In the century since the Curies’ discovery, polonium never found much of a foothold in the real world. Nuclear states including the US, USSR, UK and France used polonium as a trigger for the first generation of nuclear bombs; it had a niche role in the Soviet space programme. In 1970, Moscow sent
Lunokhod 1
– an ingenious space rover that looked like a giant bathtub on wheels – to the moon. (It’s still there.) During the lunar nights, Po-210 kept its components warm.

By the 1970s, polonium was more or less obsolete. Weapons scientists replaced it as a trigger with a more efficient tritium ‘gun’. State-run nuclear laboratories in the US, UK and Canada stopped making polonium. (In the 1950s and 1960s Britain produced it at civilian nuclear sites. According to the defence ministry in London, any surviving stocks would have completely decayed to
Pb-206 – lead – by the early 1980s.) China abandoned polonium in the 1990s.

The only country that continued to produce it was the Russian Federation. The Avangard facility exported Po-210 on a commercial basis, for use in anti-static devices. The amounts involved were extremely small.

By the time Lugovoi and Kovtun came to kill Litvinenko in London in 2006, polonium was something of a forgotten chemical oddity. It was present on the periodic table, hanging in dusty chemistry classrooms, atomic number 84, found between bismuth and astatine, marked with a hazard sign.

Faced with what looked like a mini-nuclear bomb, a case with obvious political and diplomatic implications, and an international media frenzy, the British government sought expert advice on polonium. Where had it come from? Was it possible to buy polonium on the open market? How much would it cost? Did the UK have its own stockpiles? Could criminal gangs be involved? And just how dangerous was it?