Yep, time again to reopen the Litvinenko file and once more prove that the UK’s theory Alexander Litvinenko died of an assassination attempt is scientifically implausible at best (if not impossible). All my posts on the Litvinenko case can be found here and are quite extensive. Anyone truly interested in the matter would best review these to see how shaky the entire assassination theory has been from day one, and how the story shifts to cover up initially implausible claims with new ones.

Very recently the UK news got another quote from a government source close to the investigation, and that quote attempts to answer one of my key points against the government’s case, and fails miserably. The quote goes directly to the implausible story of the Polonium-210 laced (Po-210) Tea Pot and Cup:

Mr Litvinenko died after drinking from a cup of green tea while with Mr Lugovoi and two other Russians at the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in central London. The teapot was so irradiated that the bar and several employees suffered from contamination, including a pianist who drank from the teacup after it had gone through a dishwasher.

…

The source continued: “If he [Litvinenko] had drunk the whole cup of tea he would have died instantly. It is only because he sipped it that he lingered and polonium was detected.”

Scientifically this is impossible given the fact no one else outside Andre Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, the two UK suspects also in the Pine Bar, were seriously exposed to Po-210. All other exposures in the Pine Bar, whether kitchen staff or customers, resulted in very low doses. The reason this is impossible is Po-210 is highly energetic and tends to travel around rooms easily, severely poisoning anyone in a matter of a breathe or two. Litvinenko died of an incredibly small, but deadly dose. Some reports have his dosage at a maximum of tens of millionths of a gram. The tea pot and cup apparently are orders of magnitude higher than that.  And I think I know why.

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Important Update Below

I have posted extensively on the Litvinenko case of Polonium-210 poisoning ever since the case broke. I and a few other folks have resisted the flimsy stories laid in the UK and US media surrounding the news that a highly valuable and dangerous radioactive elements surfaced all over London. To me the evidence looked to be less the trail of assassination against a two-bit thug and more a case of a smuggling effort in nuclear arms technology gone awry.

And let’s be clear here – Polonium-210 is best applied to mass assassinations, as in Weapons Of Mass Destruction (WMDs). You would no more assassinate Litvinenko with the large amounts of Po-210 discovered running through London two Octobers ago than you would use a battleship to kill a shark. Po-210, as Litvinenko sadly demonstrated, is very useful as the core of a nuclear dirty bomb attack. 10 millionths of a gram (less than a few grains of sweetener in 1 gram paper packet) can kill a person within a month. Can people smell and taste their sweeteners when they rip open a paper packet? If that packet was powdered Po-210 then you would be facing a death just like Litvinenko’s – that’s all it takes.

But even more concerning is the role Po-210 plays in full up nuclear bombs. It is a key element in the trigger device which detonates the bomb (see here for example). What if Litvinenko and Berezovsky were actually aiding Islamic extremists in obtaining the grand-daddy of all WMDs? This scenario is highly plausible, but was ignored in the media in favor of the Berezovsky produced theories of assassination from Putin’s Russia. This is why this story has concerned me – the worst case scenario is frightening and has never been addressed, let alone proven to be unfounded.

In London in October 2006 there were three incidents of Po-210 transiting London hotels, where multiples rooms showed the mark of the material. Was it one source bringing in a shipment coming in and then being broken up into smaller segments and going out multiple paths? Or was it the other way around – multiple smaller shipments coming in and being combined? One thing is clear, only a few grains of dust-sized particles killed Litvinenko. You do not need three shipments to move this microscopic amount, and you cannot divide it or transport these amounts as the trail shows.

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Yes, still harping on the Litvinenko story. I found portions of the Berezovsky interview with Russian and UK authorities in London and noticed he screwed up the cover story. Remember this is supposedly NOT a smuggling ring exposed by an accidental exposure to one of its members. It was a stealth assassination hit meant to go undetected. Underpinning this conventional wisdom of the UK view of things only enough Po-210 was brought into the UK to take out Litvinenko. The best information we have is Litvinenko died from a lethal dosage of ten millionths of a gram (10 times higher than what is considered the lethal dose). But ten millionths of a gram is smaller than a grain of sugar from a one gram sugar pack you find at any convenience store for your coffee. With this in mind read Berezovsky’s testimony and how it is at extreme odds with this scenario:

Asked by Otvodov who might have wanted to kill Litvinenko and urged to provide proofs should any definite names be given, Berezovsky said there was no way to obtain polonium 210 in such quantity without involvement of state structures, the more so to arrange technology of not only receiving it but also of delivering it to another country. “Once it emerged that it was the polonium and that polonium was so hard to discover, those arguments have covered my previous thought of Putin’s non-involvement. Using exactly polonium leaves no doubts it was the state machine.”

Emphasis mine. Berezovksy again runs into the layman’s inability to comprehend the amounts be discussed here. Getting hold of ten millionths of a gram of Po-210 is NOT hard. For assassination this material would be pre-disolved or suspended in a liquid used to deliver the poison. Access to any of the commercial sources of minute amounts of Po-210 available in commercial sensors used for detecting static charge (if memory serves where Po-210 is used) then you can collect enough that way to kill Litvinenko.

But now if you want to collect the necessary amount needed for nuclear trigger, which I assume to be on the order of grams, that would be an amount that would support Berezovsky’s comments. Supposedly he is as much in the dark about the lethal dose as everyone else. But he seems to be of the mind the amount surrounding this event was quite large, not the microscopic amounts that killed Litvinenko (and the apparently larger amounts the make up the sum of the Po-210 trail). I think Berezovsky was trying to fib up a story and forgot that smuggling amounts are 10’s of thousands (if not millions) of times larger than that which supposedly killed Litvinenko. He may have been thinking in the back of his mind of the amounts he knew about, verses the amount that contaminated Litvinenko. Clearly his testimony is at odds with the cover story – there were no “such amounts” inside Litvinenko.

Sorry for obsessing on Litvinenko, but I wanted to resurrect one important point from the bowels of the massive post I wrote late last night. In that post Lugovoi reiterates a point I made – much of the Po-210 evidence was found a month after Lugovoi and Kovtun left London and cannot be deterministically tied to them. And I noted the prime example of this was the extremely ‘hot’ teapot and cup found at the Millenium Hotel.

I also noted that the reporting of discolored porcelain and the one barman witness who claims to have seen melted tea leaves creating a some kind of gooey mass tells me the tea pot was way too contaminated to be the vessel that delivered ten millionths of a gram (or whatever the autopsy supposedly says) as his deadly dose of Polonium. Now I don’t think I have to be even that close (was in 100 thousandths of a gram that killed Litvinenko) because the amounts required to discolor porcelain and melt plant tissues is so much higher we can use estimates.

I worked for a while, a long time ago, with nuclear tagging medical tests, where we subject samples to solutions of nuclear material to see how much nuclear material binds to the biological sample. Low doses to be sure – but repeated constantly over and over again. The fact is animal cells can be killed off easily by radiation – Po-21o shows this to be true. But plants are designed to absorb radiation, it takes a little more melt them away into a pool of muck. But even ignoring this, porcelain is a tough material and the precursor of a lot of heat and energy resisting products we have today.

But forget my suspicions, this can be tested now by the UK and even the media. One only needs to gather up some representative tea pots and run two experiments. The first is to brew some Po-210 traced tea that will in the proper dosage to impart 10 millionths of a gram of Po-210 in six ounces (the teas Litvinenko supposedly gulped down and died from). The second is to brew tea with ever increasing amounts of Po-210 until the porcelain discolors. That will give the amount of Po-210 to discolor the tea pot – and I would bet the two doses will be miles apart. Orders of magnitude different.

If so then this would be the plausible scenarion: When Berezovsky, Zakayev and Litvinenko realize his poisoning could expose the smuggling effort they concoct a way to blame Lugovoi – whom Litvinenko met the day he fell ill. The story involves the tea at the Pine Bar (which was a very early theory it seems). They also plan the PR story about a Putin-directed assassination to buy time and misdirect the media. They wait to see if Litvinenko survives and the news can be contained.

But Litvinenko succumbs and they put their plans in place. But their concocted story has timeline problems – especially in Berezovsky’s office. They begin to realize how much of a trail Po-210 can leave. So they need to bolster their story. But being smugglers, and not scientists, they botch the effort to plant evidence. In a naive misunderstanding of how much Po-210 is required to kill and how solutions contain the same dosage/volume whether in a tea pot or tea cup and they soak the tea pot in Po-210 tea to make sure it is detected when they plant it. But that ruins the planted evidence – which is now way too hot to be the vessel that killed Litvinenko.

A simple test can confirm or dismiss this possibility. I know it. And now the others know who can act. And maybe even those responsible will hear about this – and realize it is only a matter of time before they are discovered.

Note, this turned into a really long post full of details once I found the transcript of the interview Kovtun and Lugovoi gave to the British media. All I can say is there are lots and lots of holes now appearing in the UK theories.

I suspected we might get more information on some of the details and some are showing up. But it also appears the news media is doing a bang up job of ignoring critical discrepencies in favor of publicizing irrelevent BS – which is a sad commentary on their objectivity. I have two previous posts below which point to critical assumptions in the Po-210 trail and timeline. One of these details is the fact that original reports had Berezovsky claiming it was Litvinenko who contaminated his office after he met Scaramella (and their were reports of Po-210 on the copier he supposedly used). The problem is that would put Litvinenko’s contamination PRIOR to meeting Lugovoi and Kovtun in the Pine Bar, busting the UK’s pet theory.

When it turned out this was a problem Berezovsky claimed (and I thought no one disputed) that it was Lugovoi who contaminated the office when he visited Berezovsky the day before Litvinenko fell ill. Now Lugovoi has come out and contradicted this timeline, saying he met Berezovsky on the 28th of October during his previous trip to meet Litvinenko. This is the trip without Dimitri Kovtun present, who flew to Hamburg from Russia on the 28th and left the Po-210 trail there prior to returning to London on November 1 to meet Lugovoi and Litvinenko again (he met them on during the even early set of meetings around Oct 16th).

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I ran across a transcript of Ahmed Zakayev’s testimony to UK authorities during the time earlier this year when Russian investigators went to London to interview people, under UK authority supervision, regarding the death of Litvinenko. Zakayev is a Chechen rebel in exile and lives across the street from the Litvinenko house at the time of the poisoning. It is important to remember that the assassination theory has Litvinenko poisoned in the Millenium Pine Bar between 4:30 and 5:00 PM, well into the evening. Any traces of Po-210 prior to that time linked directly to Litvinenko destroy the conventional wisdom surrounding the current claims by UK authorities. I have found such a discrepency.
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The truth about what happened to Alexander Litvinenko has become clear as mud. The joint, timed media shows that Berezovsky and the UK authorities were performing (i.e., the mysterious Russian assassin the UK detected, detained, and then released back to Russia and never told Russia about) have now moved to Russia. Recently the Russian authorities announced arrests in the Politkovskaya murder, only to be followed by a ridiculous media show by the UK’s prime suspect Andre Lugovoi. The storyline gets more ridiculous as do the claims (e.g., Putin is a pedophile leader who assassinates people with Polonium), so what is going on with this reality TV B-Movie? First, some of the more ridiculous claims by Lugovoi – who is as poor an actor as Berezovsky:
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I do not buy the idea the Litvinenko incident was an assassination. I have felt all along it was a smuggling operation which basically went awry, and Litvinenko, Lugovoi and Kovtun all suffered the consequences of a leak. If people wonder why I stay on this story it is not to be proved right. It is to make sure I am proved wrong. Because if I am right then something very dangerous was happening in London last October. The NY Times ran an Op-Ed explaining the ramifications of last fall if I am right:
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The UK is on some kind of strange PR stunt over the Litvinenko case – either that or their intelligence assets just aren’t as good as one would think. The UK tried to bolster the Litvinenko assassination angle by having Litivinenko’s boss, Boris Berezovsky, come out recently in the media and claim another assassin was sent to kill him. It was a B-movie level script because the story has it this perported assassin was arrested, detained and then deported to Russia. Nothing else. It would seem, if the UK had a Russian assassin in their hands, they would exploit the situation more in the media. But they did not say a word to bolster their case. They followed up after Berezovsky shopped the story around.

But no way would the UK simply deport this assassin and NOT make a big case of this incident to Russia. You would think even in private someone would say something like “Russia, we detected your assassin, we deported him, and we can prove it because this is his name”. Apparently someone forgot to add that scene to this Soap Opera\’s storyline:

n the latest measure of the rapidly deteriorating relations between the two countries, the British ambassador to Moscow, Tony Brenton, was ordered to provide an “official explanation”, according to the Russian foreign ministry.

“He was told that the Russian side expects an official explanation about the recent reports in the British media about a person of Russian origin who was supposedly arrested in London on suspicion of planning to kill B. Berezovsky,” a statement said.

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The man was arrested on June 21 on suspicion of conspiring to murder Mr Berezovsky, the billionaire oligarch who has been a ferocious critic of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
The suspect was handed over to immigration officials two days later and it is understood that his visa was revoked before he was deported and he was banned from returning to the UK for 10 years.

But no word of this to Russia? No pulling the Russian ambassador downtown to read him the riot act for this infraction of UK’s soveriegnty? Gimme a break!

This smells of an elaborate game. There are of course other explanations, and this could all be the results of two totally inept governments trying to shift blame to the other. But I cannot fathom to world-class powers like Russia and the UK being this clumsy. This game is as lame as the assassination theory. How just hope it bears its fruit soon enough. Of course we may never know the truth – and maybe that is the goal of all this in the end?

The details of the UK’s ‘case’ against Andre Lugovoi in the death of Alexander Litvinenko last October, when there appears to have been up to three incidents of nuclear smuggling of the highly dangerous Po-210 through London, have never been exposed to public scrutiny. But Russia does have insights, due to there interviews and supporting UK interviews, that have become public today which blow holes in the assassination theory:

Polonium signs were found not only in places Lugovoi and Kovtun visited in London, but in different places where the two Russian businessmen had not been, Majorov said. This tendency was obvious during two visits by Lugovoi and Kovtun to London. There were no signs of Polonium in the office of businessman Shadrin. whom the two entrepreneurs met in London, and no Polonium signs were found in several restaurants and a night club that both Russian businessmen visited, Majorov said.

We do KNOW that the Po-210 trails over the month of October always include Litvinenko. And Litvinenko was the one who apparently contaminated Boris Berezovsky’s offices (at least that was the early story from Berezovsky’s PR team). And Kovtun’s radiation trail begins with a meeting with Litvinenko, then follows him as he travels to Moscow and then Hamburg and then back to London. This trail puts Po-210 with Litvinenko a week before the Pine Bar meeting on November 1. And there are trails that go back even a week prior to that. All the Po-210 trails follow Litvinenko and NO ONE ELSE.

The news that Kovtun and Lugovoi visited places where the trail doesn’t exist, and yet places like Erinys, where Litvinenko supposedly worked as a consultant, show a consistent trail, means that the Po-210 was NOT on Lugovoi or Kovtun until they met a radiated Litvinenko. But there is more evidence the UK’s case is more facade than real:

The British version presumes that Polonium -210 was administered to Litvinenko in tea Lugovoi offered to Litvinenko on November 1, but both Lugovoi and Kovtun ordered the same tea for themselves, which shows that a version that Lugovoi was the source who administered poison is vulnerable, Majorov said.

And in this article by the NY Times we learn there was no Po-210 detected on the planes that took Litvinenko and Kovtun TO London. Apparently all the planes showing contamination were flights out of London AFTER meetings with Litvinenko. And in this story we learn the Po-210 was detected on Litvinenko’s SIM card, making him the source of the contamination:

Russia’s Prosecutor General Office that conducts its own probe into polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko is checking the lead whereby Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun caught radioactive polonium from the SIM card of Alexander Litvinenko, RIA Novosti reported.

”The checked lead is that polonium poisoning of Kovtun and Lugovoy happened from initially poisoned Litvinenko,” Andrey Maiorov from Prosecutor General Office said at the news conference Monday. “Lugovoy got from Litvinenko a SIM card and the card to pay for communication, and the trace of polonium was discovered on those objects,” ITAR-TASS reported.

A SIM Card is used as the brains of cellular phones. It holds your account information and address books, stored data, etc. One interesting thing to note is a cell phone case would be a good place to hide grams of Polonium 210. A flat plastic baggy [AJStrata: sorry, posted without my brain in gear] heat absorbing ceramic case could house the material, especially if the SIM card is removed and the space it sits is used to hold the material and case. Recall we are talking amounts found in sugar packets you get at Star Bucks able to kill tens of thousands of people in a dirty bomb. Maybe this is how the smugglers moved the material through airports. Or maybe Litvinenko had some Po-210 on his hands. Maybe this is how the material hit the floor of the hotel room in the Millnium Hotel – someone dropped the SIM card on the carpet. There are lots of valid scenarios to consider.

I think the UK’s fiction is about to be exposed, because as I have been posting for months now the assasination story has way too many scientific and simple common sense holes in it. For some reason the UK is presenting this charade to cover something up – probably a massive screw up with one of their ‘intelligence assets’ who stood up a nuclear contraband smuggling ring and died because he did not know how to handle the material properly. This seems as plausible as the other theories.

The contamination trail is the key, yet the UK refuses to release a full timeline of contamination sites and dates. Why? What is so secret about the Po-210 trail?