Dec 01 2006
Now If it Was An Assassination Attempt On Litvinenko…
I have been exchanging emails with a very interesting person who agrees with Clarice Feldman and disagrees with me on whether this entire event was an assassination attempt or not. The reason this person is interesting is she is a well known liberal writer and, while disagree on the motivations, she and I agree on all the questionable reporting. Well this person just emailed me one of the best theories I have ever seen that explains HOW the Polonium-210 might have been delivered so as to kill and leave little trace, and to get Scaramella and Litvinenko and Berezovsky all at once.
The creator of this excellent theory is none other than Raw Story’s Larisa Alexandrovna, and she presents her theory here at her blog:
Now many people have argued that because this is so obvious, it could not have been Putin or FSB without Putin. But people fail over and over to grasp what I have already reported and believe given the people with whom I had talked: this was not meant to be traced, they thought they could get away with it. So, if you had something that you thought no one would be able to trace and you wanted to take out three very visible targets, would you not do it? Ah, exactly, FSB would do it, but they must have miscalculated on the dosages.
…
If Mario is not involved, but contaminated, what did he share with Alex and when? The same question applies to Alex’s wife. What was it, a cup? No, because Mario did not go home to visit Alex’s family.
How about this:
A cigarette. In fact, a cigarette would be an extremely powerful way to distribute the polonium via air, causing another to inhale it. But since the only people that would inhale for any real duration would be people in close proximity to the victim, it is certain to do the trick as smoking at most places is not allowed and also because in small vapor qualities it would not be necessarily lethal, so not too much of a danger to the British public, although somewhat of a danger if things went badly.
This a bit of brilliant thinking. I mentioned myself that if Litvinenko and Scaramella were exposed at the same time, an airborne agent would make sense with the lesser (more dispersed) dose for Scaramella. In the true sense of serendipity, I was sent an email a few days ago by blogger AJacksonian regarding an 1987 study regarding Polonium-210 found in Syrian cigarettes. At the time I dismissed this since Polonium-210 is a natural element and it can be found in lots of places – but the point is it can be hidden in cigarettes (I of course emailed this to Larrisa).
Now if we combine Larrisa’s theory on the delivery mechanism with reader Crosspatch’s notes that Polonium-210 would best be brought in disoved in an acid-salt (probably in crystal form since liquids can be dodgy these days on plays) we have enough pieces to put together a good scenario. The Polonium suspension is possible what spilled in the Millenium hotel. Once in a liquid form of sufficient density of Polonium it one would simply need a syringe to deposit some of the suspension down the center of a cigarette and there you go.
Now do I believe this is what happened? Nope. But it is the first good theory that shows a sophisticated assassination plan, not some half baked one. I do not think the air plane contamination can be explained this way. And cigarettes would not explain the contamination in the planes or the Hotel where the Russians where staying. But you have to admire the beauty of the concept!
There are only a few sources of polonium in the world. Iran is one of them. Iran is probably the only one where you could obtain the material without providing the required documentation according to UN nuclear regulations.
Iran has been producing polonium since at least 2003 and earlier this year was to begin production at an “industrial scale” whatever that means.
A reminder–In January of this year, Berezovsky threatened to topple Putin with a coup, indicating he was working with multiple sources inside Russia. He also was a major financial backer of Yuvshenko. http://www.bhhrg.org/mediaDetails.asp?ArticleID=849
They have siad that Scaramella got somthing like 20% of a fatal dose.
If Litvinenko regularly carried polonium at different times in black market transactions could he have been infected several times with improperly sealed polonium? The polonium involved seems to be not very safely sealed. Witness contamination on planes Oct. 17 and Oct. 25. That could indicate AJ’s theory about air pressure in flight breaking the seal on the polonium. Maybe every shipment had broken seals and they didn’t know it. Of course, this theory is more scary than a single shipment would be. Where would this material be going and what was planned for its use? Since the life of this material is so short supples would have to be replenished on a regular basis but the life is longer than a week which is the difference between contamination times. Oct l7, 24 and Nov l. Sounds like a regular weekly black market shipment. And where in world could this stuff be coming from?
Of course, if true that he was blackmailing people, he would no longer be considered small fry. And if he was involved in this black market
theory then he deserved what he got. He evidently lived in a dark and dangerous world and probably always had.
In reading Mariposa’s link the thing that bothered me most was we allowed an ex-KGB agent to immigrate to the US after spying on us for ten years.. What a wonderful immigration department we have.
Don’t they check anyone’s credentials? But then again maybe he asked for sanctuary.
Link
Barbara, once again–according to the Times, Litvinenko was not contaminated before the afternoon of Nov 1.
The Mirror may be right, but, like the Sun, it is basically a tabloid.
While it might be true that Litvinenko didn’t receive his massive dose until November 1, it doesn’t mean he hadn’t come in contact with it before only not ingested it. The point is that it seems that Lugovoi was contaminated on the 25th and possibly the 17th of October and had met with Litvinenko during those trips. It just means nobody got sick those times. With Lugovoi being contaminated for such a long time or so many different times, that would go a long way to explaining why so many planes and places were contaminated. All we are saying is that nobody had ingested enough in the past to get sick and Litvenenko wasn’t contaminated on November 1 until sometime near the time he went to the itsu sushi bar.
It certainly appears that Lugovoi had been contaminated at least once and possibly twice in the past.
But in this case they are quoting a government official, not providing analysis. A quote would be a quote no matter who printed it, unless you are saying they would be making the whole thing up which is certainly possible, AP does it all the time, apparently.
ON the morning of November 1 Litvinenko was given a lift into the centre of London by car. No trace of polonium has been found in that vehicle — an indicator that Litvinenko had not yet been poisoned.
—-
What is known is that in the late afternoon Litvinenko called Akhmed Zakayev, his Chechen dissident friend and neighbour, on his mobile phone.
“He said he was in the city centre and since I was in town I agreed to give him a lift back home,†said Zakayev. About 5.15pm Zakayev and his aide picked up Litvinenko, who read the documents aloud as they drove home.
Police have checked this vehicle and found contamination. Litvinenko, it seems, had been poisoned sometime between leaving home that morning and driving back.
(Times)
“CP, that sounds awfully roundabout and complicated to me.”
When people are doing dangerous and illegal things, it rarely is done in a simple and straightforward manner. It really isn’t all that complicated in any case. The real problem is that if it was going to Chechens and the Chechens used it against Russia, Iran would stand to lose a significant amount of support for their nuclear program. But all you would need to mitigate against that is to make sure the Iranians don’t know it is going to Russia. Then the Iranians could honestly say they had no idea. The most the Iranians would need to know is that they were selling it to a buyer in London.
I still want to know where the polonium came from and if there is any more of it around.
The National Interest
Karl K. Turekian, professor of geology and geophysics at Yale University
Q&A on Polonium, the Poison Picked
NIo: How could one use it as a poison without hurting themselves?
KKT: Remember the rays aren’t like X-rays or gamma rays that penetrate a great distance. This stuff, the radiation isn’t going to go beyond the cardboard box. It’s easy to handle as long as there’s a container.
NIo: What about removing it, how would you poison another person? Would you put it into food?
KKT: Well, you could put it into food. It would act like a small explosion in the cells, and that’s where the damage is done. It could also be inhaled, but I don’t think that’s what you would do to someone else. You’re not going to use an aerosol spray in the air you’re breathing.
NIo: How would you go about exposing the food to the polonium?
KKT: I’m not really a chef. You don’t need a whole lot of it, though; adding it to food in some way or another need not be obvious or ostentatious.
NIo: It still seems like such an exotic property to choose, though.
KKT: Well, there’s plenty of polonium-210 available—any place there’s a bomb maintenance facility—and it’s always manufactured. It is a sophisticated thing to know that polonium-210 is dangerous, but that’s been known because it did a lot of harm to people throughout the Manhattan Project.
Beyond that, I have no idea. I was surprised that somebody was clever enough to look for polonium-210 during the investigation. If you were looking for alpha emitters, there is a diagnostic energy for polonium-210 no one would mistake. But the act of looking into that shows some insight into what might have been used, and I have no idea how they got that insight. Maybe they knew something about this person or the people he hung around with.
Sushi would seem to be a perfect food to use since it would not be heated. Mario would have been exposed from the plate sitting on the table. The trail could probably be due to the container. Other traces at Litvinenko’s home. etc could be a ruse to throw everyone off the trail. Someone would have to be very close to Litvinenko to have access to all of these places and that someone is Berezovsky.
This is from To The Point News
[Note by JW: A friend of mine in the US intelligence community provides this comment:
I worked with people from more than one security service in Russia, including a former commander of Alpha. I witnessed first hand what Berezovsky was capable of and the thugs he employed and security people he enticed into his service. He now lives in England where Litvinenko was murdered.
Litvinenko trusted Berezovsky, so that Berezovsky’s people could get close to him. Litvinenko’s life was dispensable, a useful means of besmirching Putin.
This is gang warfare and Berezovsky’s number one goal is to set the international community against Putin, that is the only way he will ever get back in power in Russia. Berezovsky suckered the West in the 90s and he can do it again.]
SBD
Clarice
I wonder how the Times is so sure that Litvinenko had not ingested polonium before Nov. l. Everyone who is found to be contaminated now felt nothing and even Scaramella thought he was fine. Maybe Litvinenko only realized he was poisoned when he got sick. After all, he seemed pretty clueless about it while walking all over London on Nov. l. However, all this is just theory and whatever we speculate on amongst ourselves will have no bearing on the results of the investigation.
“Police have checked this vehicle and found contamination. Litvinenko, it seems, had been poisoned sometime between leaving home that morning and driving back.”
Nobody is doubting that for a second.
What I am saying is that he could have ALSO been slightly contaminated at an earlier meeting the previous month and washing his clothes and taking a shower had removed all traces of the contamination.
In other words, if Lugovoi had been a walking polonium duster for the past two weeks and Litvinenko had met with him in that time, there is a good chance Litvinenko and probably a lot of other people had been exposed to small amounts of it in the past.
There is evidence to suggest that Lugovoi was contaminated in the 17th and the 25th. He had met with Litvinenko on at least one and possibly both of those trips. We have no information on Litvinenko’s contamination state on those days. The only thing we know was that he wasn’t contaminated enough on November 1 in the morning to contaminate his surroundings. This is reasonable if one figures that he probably put on clean clothes fresh from the cleaners after a shower.
Anything, I suppose is possible, but one would expect that if hehad zero traces on him the morning of Nov 1 and the contamination of his wife and child (and house) was minimal, this was a one time event, cp.
If the other Russian was contaminated in the 17th and the 25th, what do you make of that in and of itself?
Just because a vehicle, airplane, or a building is contaminated, does not mean Litvinenko was the one leaving the trail. If you were going to kill someone with polonium-210, you would have plenty of time to spread it around to muddy the waters. The fact that it was on the plane is a further indication of this, especially if you want to pin it on Putin.
Whoever told the officials to look for polonium-210 as the cause of the poisoning is more than likely involved in the murder. As the Yale Professor said in that interview:
“I was surprised that somebody was clever enough to look for polonium-210 during the investigation. If you were looking for alpha emitters, there is a diagnostic energy for polonium-210 no one would mistake. But the act of looking into that shows some insight into what might have been used, and I have no idea how they got that insight. Maybe they knew something about this person or the people he hung around with.”
SBD
“The Russian intelligence services, the prime suspects behind the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, have a network of more than 30 spies operating in Britain, it can be revealed.
Mario Scaramella’s name was one of five on a supposed “hit-list” of people allegedly targeted for assassination by a shadowy group called Dignity and Honour, run by a Colonel Velentin Velichko
The sophisticated ring represents the greatest espionage threat facing Britain, Whitehall sources told The Sunday Telegraph.
The agents, equivalent to one in five of the Moscow government officials based in Britain, are known to be monitoring the movements and activities of Russian emigres and opponents of the Putin regime.
But they are also involved in a widespread operation targeting businessmen, MPs and scientists in an attempt to steal commercial and state secrets. Only the United States, it is understood, has more Russian agents operating on its soil.
Whitehall sources claim that the agents are as active today as they were at the height of the Cold War, despite the fact that the Kremlin is now one of Britain’s major allies in the war on terrorism.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=CB0GKJBXHOS5DQFIQMGSFFOAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2006/12/03/nspy03.xml
This is true in the US as well–read Bill Gertz’ new book, “Enemies”
Apparently the seat used on the plane to fly to Moscow on the 25th by Lugovoi was contaminated as were locations visited on the 17th but not on the later trip. Also locations visited by Lugovoi but not visited by Litvinenko in the later trip were contaminated (such as the spot on the couch where Lugovoi sat and drank a glass of wine). These were spots not known to have been visited by Litvinenko or the Italian.
So Lugovoi was either in frequent contact with polonium or the inside of his luggage or his home or both were contaminated with it. I would certainly be interested in the results of a search of his home and luggage for polonium contamination.
Oops, FROM Moscow on the 25th