The Annals of Unsolved Crime

The idea for
The Annals of Unsolved Crime
grew out a trip to Moscow in 2007 to investigate the case of a radioactive corpse. The victim was Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-KGB officer, who had become deeply involved in the political intrigues of the billionaire Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch in exile in London, and those of Yukos, the immensely powerful oil company that Vladimir Putin was then in the process of expropriating from its owners. What made the case interesting to the intelligence services of at least four countries was the way the corpse in London had become radioactive: Litvinenko had been poisoned by an extremely rare radioactive isotope, polonium-210, which had immense value to parties seeking to go nuclear because it could be used to trigger an early-stage nuclear weapon. For this reason, it was one of the most tightly controlled and most carefully monitored substances on earth. So how, and why, were Litvinenko and some of his associates exposed to it? When I read through the relevant files in Moscow, I realized that this question might never be answered. The files had come to me by a circuitous route. The Crown Prosecutor in London had supplied their counterparts in Moscow with some evidence that they had in the case to support an extradition request for a suspect, Anatoli Lugovoi, who had also been exposed to polonium-210. What the files made clear was that, even though this was supposed to be a joint British-Russian investigation, the autopsy report, the hospital records, the toxic analysis, the
radiation readings in London, and other evidence concerning the polonium-210 were being retained by the British government as state secrets. For their part, the Russians would not allow Lugovoi (whom I interviewed for many hours in Moscow) or any other Russian citizen to be extradited, and they would not furnish any information about the leakage or smuggling of polonium-210. Nor, as of December 2012, would the British allow the coroner to complete his report on Litvinenko’s death or release the autopsy files.

Even if officially the case of the radioactive corpse remains an unsolvable crime, we can still learn a great deal from the barriers that block us from solving it. I have found in my journalistic career that even with the unstinting financial and editorial support of magazines such as
The New Yorker
,
Vanity Fair
,
The Atlantic
,
New York
, and
Reader’s Digest
, the cases from which I learned the most—and that most intrigued me—were cases that I could not solve. Some of the most high-profile crimes in history also lack a satisfactory solution because the basic facts of the case remain suspect. Napoleon defined history “as the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon,” which raises the question of whether such agreements proceed from facts or from political expediency. The problem of establishing truth has concerned me since I began my thesis at Cornell on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1965 by posing it to seven of the most powerful men in America, the members of the Warren Commission. Some of these men, including a former director of the CIA, a former U.S. high commissioner for Germany, and the minority leader of the House of Representatives, pointed to inherent difficulties faced by a Presidential Commission, such as pressure of time, the lack of truly independent investigators, and the need to reach a consensus even if they disagreed. Other commissions from the military tribune that investigated the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln have confronted similar
problems. So do prosecutors whose careers turn on their ability to appear to resolve cases of great interest to the public. For the past four decades, in seeking to cast light on this limitation, I have tended to focus on crimes that may contain elements beneath the surface that have never been fully reported. In this regard,
New York Times
columnist Joe Nocera was correct when he suggested that I believe “that conspiracies are more common than most journalists credit.” But conspiracies do exist—indeed, over 90 percent of federal indictments for terrorism since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 have contained a conspiracy charge, according to the Center on Law and Security at New York University, which tracks all federal terrorism cases. It is also true that many cases that initially appear to be conspiracies, such as the putative plot against the Black Panthers in the late 1960s, turned out, as I discovered when I reported about it for
The New Yorker
, to be the unconnected acts of lone individuals.

Some obvious problems with the puzzles presented by unsolved crimes are that they may be missing critical pieces, contain pieces that have been falsified, or contain pieces of evidence that belong in other puzzles. Even so, unsolved crimes have commonalities that can help us understand why they defy resolution. Although the taxonomy of such an elusive subject may be imperfect, I have classified these cases in four categories: loners, disguised crimes, cold cases, and crimes of the state.

The category of “loners” has long intrigued me. A lone gunman shoots someone and then is himself killed. There is no doubt that he fired the shots and was the only perpetrator at the crime scene, but was he alone? Conspiracies can hire a lone assassin, such as the killer in the book and movie
The Day of the Jackal
, to minimize the chances of being detected. Consider, for example, the assassination that had probably the most momentous consequences in history, the shooting of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand, the Hapsburg heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The bullet that killed him, and that ignited World War I, was fired by Gavrilo Princip. The immediate circumstances suggested a happenstance shooting. The archduke was on his way to an unscheduled visit to Sarajevo Hospital in his open Gräf and Stift Double Phaeton limousine. The driver made a wrong turn, got lost, and then while he backed up toward a bridge, the giant car stalled. The archduke, in his easily recognizable gold-braided uniform and plumed hat, was in the back seat, waiting for the driver to crank the car. At that very moment, Princip, a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist, was finishing his coffee at a café on the corner. He spied the archduke, rushed over to the stalled car, and fatally shot him in the neck. Since no one could have known in advance that the archduke would be at that place at that time, it initially appeared to be a random shooting by a lone Serb. Austrian authorities, however, intercepted Serbian communications that revealed that this was a conspiracy planned and orchestrated by Serbian intelligence and that Princip was one of a dozen assassins positioned along the archduke’s route. At least three, including Princip, had received their weapons, training, and a suicide cyanide capsule from their Serbian case officers. It was the discovery of this plot that led to a war in which nine million soldiers were killed, and to the demise of the Hapsburg empire.

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