Chechens, in full view of policemen across the street. The official account said that his attackers were there to arrest Baisarov for crimes in the republic. Instead of surrendering, he had threatened them with a rocket-propelled grenade, authorities said. The story was totally lacking in credibility. Baisarov, a willing collaborator with the Russian authorities now in command of Chechnya, had found himself on the losing end of a power struggle between pro-Russian factions there. It seemed most probable that unidentified Russian authorities had decided he was fair game for assassination, even if the killing had to be carried out on Leninsky Prospekt, one of Moscow’s busiest thoroughfares. The episode seemed to underline the peril of being perceived to be on the wrong side in Russia.
As for Litvinenko, he assured friends who came to see him that he was fine. But any improvement in his condition was fleeting. On November 20, the sixteenth day of his hospitalization, he seemed to be losing his fight to survive. Doctors moved him into intensive care.
Alex Goldfarb, the Berezovsky operative who had played a central role in getting the Litvinenko family out of Russia, tried with little success to get reporters on the story. He and Berezovsky’s public relations man—Tim Bell, who famously helped to get Margaret Thatcher elected as British prime minister in 1979—finally hit on the idea of photographing Litvinenko. That would tell the whole story. So it was that a previously little-known South African photographer named Natasja Weitsz was slipped into the intensive care ward. Her picture of the stricken defector was shocking—a wasted, completely bald man clad in hospital greens, staring hollow-eyed at the camera. Bell’s company distributed it.
It was as Goldfarb and Bell had hoped—newspapers and television stations around the world splashed the dramatic image before readers and viewers. Litvinenko became a blockbuster story. Reporters poured in to London and wrote vivid accounts of what he was enduring. “Exspy’s poisoning bears hallmarks of Cold War thriller,” said
As reporters stood outside the hospital awaiting the latest report on Litvinenko’s condition, filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov visited his bedside. Nekrasov would later say that his friend “looked just like a ghost.” A grimly determined Litvinenko said it was necessary that he endure the suffering. “This is what I have to do to prove I’m right,” he said.
On November 22, his condition worsened. He had been able to answer police questions for three or four hours the previous day, but now it was hard for him to speak. His appearance was “like a seventy-year-old man, bald, gaunt, skin over bones,” said Goldfarb. As Marina prepared to leave the hospital for the evening with their son, Anatoly, Litvinenko spoke his first complete sentence of the entire day. “Oh, Marinochka, I love you so much,” he uttered, using the diminutive of her name.
At Litvinenko’s bedside, his father, Valter, crossed himself and said the Lord’s Prayer. “Father, I’ve converted. I’m a Muslim now,” Litvinenko said. During a visit with Akhmed Zakayev—his neighbor and friend, who was a Muslim—Litvinenko had embraced Islam.
That night, Litvinenko twice had to be resuscitated after his heart stopped. Hospital staff summoned Marina, then after a few hours sent her home.
The following evening, the phone rang again in the Litvinenko home. It was the hospital. “Come quickly,” the voice at the other end told Marina.
Though her husband was unconscious, Marina arrived in time to say good-bye.
At 9:21 p.m., Litvinenko was declared dead.
Outside University College Hospital, Alex Goldfarb read a statement that he said Litvinenko had dictated two days earlier. Addressed directly to Vladimir Putin, it said in part, “You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty, or any civilized value. You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilized 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.”
The stunning photograph by Natasja Weitsz and the ghastly manner of his death generated international sympathy for Litvinenko and outrage toward Russia. Many viewed his life story and the way it ended as epic tragedy, and in Hollywood there was a flurry of competition to put it all on the big screen. The contest was won by Johnny Depp, who left open the possibility that he himself would play the slain Russian defector.
What killed Litvinenko? When his doctors saw his hair falling out and his white blood cell count dropping, they had immediately suspected radiation poisoning. So they tested for what they thought to be the most likely culprits —gamma and beta radiation. Finding no evidence of either in his blood, they assumed that they were on the wrong trail. A day before Litvinenko died, however, someone at Britain’s Health Protection Agency had a hunch. Samples of Litvinenko’s urine were sent to the Atomic Weapons Establishment, or AWE, an agency uniquely equipped to solve the mystery.
AWE was just what its name implied—it developed and kept watch over Britain’s nuclear weapons arsenal. At AWE, scientists tested the urine samples for alpha-emitting elements, the rarer, relatively large, and slow- moving particles that, unlike gamma and beta radiation, cannot pass through objects but pack a wallop when they are taken into the body.
The tests came back positive for polonium-210, an alpha emitter.
Around six p.m. on November 23, the news was passed along to Litvinenko’s doctors. But it was too late. He died about three hours later.
The AWE discovery was important in more ways than one. If Litvinenko had not been in such good health when he was first stricken, he probably would have died much sooner. There would have been no urgency to continue testing for radiation poisoning, and the isotope that killed him probably would have gone undetected. Without that clue, investigators might not have found their way to the evidence that Litvinenko had been murdered. Litvinenko himself died without learning the truth.
His doctors could be excused for not knowing that their patient’s body had been ravaged by a few specks of a nuclear isotope so arcane that scientists were startled to hear of its use as a murder weapon. Once upon a time, polonium-210 was something of a household name, at least as far as known elements go. It was discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie, and named for her native Poland. Some called it the deadliest element, gram for gram, on the periodic table. A researcher working for Marie Curie died from exposure to polonium. So did Curie’s own daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie, who, like her mother, was a winner of a Nobel Prize.
During World War II and through the 1960s, polonium-210 was used as a triggering device for nuclear weapons. Mixed with beryllium, it emits a neutron and starts the fission process. But by the early 1970s, the substance had fallen out of favor among atomic bomb makers because its relatively fast deterioration rate meant it had to be replaced every few months. More recently its use had been more benign—to eliminate static in smoke detectors and dust from film and lenses, for example. The commercial market’s demand for polonium-210 was so small that its entire global production was just one hundred grams a year—almost all manufactured in Russia and then exported to the United States.
Few were even aware of its existence. Polonium-210 was on no published list of potential poisons, and as far as I could tell had never been used as one. The silvery isotope was so exotic that, even five years after the imposition of heightened security measures in response to the 9/11 attacks, airports around the world were ill equipped to detect it. It was absent from the usual lists of weapons of mass destruction. Its properties were so peculiar that, unlike more familiar radioactive elements such as plutonium-239, it could be stored safely in, say, an ordinary cigarette pack or an aspirin bottle. Anyone with a mind to—and the right credentials—could slip it through almost any ostensibly secure environment.
It was unclear why the isotope had never been employed in any known assassination before Litvinenko’s. Yes, there were far simpler and cheaper methods of killing. But if an assassin favored the use of radioactive poison, polonium-210 was an ideal candidate. First was its novelty, meaning it was less likely to attract suspicion than its brother thallium, which assassins, including the Soviets, had used in its nonradioactive form numerous times over the decades. Second was its nature to wander: Once it invaded an organism, polonium-210 went in many different directions. This set it apart from isotopes that gravitated toward, say, kidneys or bone marrow, thus inflicting largely localized and treatable damage. And polonium-210 threw off its mass with astonishing speed—it dispensed half its atomic particles in just 138 days, a barrage superior to almost any other relatively stable isotope. By
