This is a follow up to my previous post on the news that police are now publically admitting what I predicted a while ago: the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko took place in a 4th floor room of the Millenium Hotel, and not in the Hotel’s Pin Bar has had been assumed for many weeks now. And this was all after the sushi restaurant meeting with Scaramella had been eliminated as the prime spot for the event. Now that we have three key people and three key pieces of evidence all in the same room, we can put the assassination theory to rest. This post is long - be patient. This is a complicated crime which requires some knowledge of chemistry, biology and physics to sort through.
The first thing to keep in mind is the size of Litvinenko’s deadly dosage. Po-210 is so deadly that, when ingested or inhaled, an amount the size of a dust grain is sufficient to kill someone 30 times over. That is roughly the amount detected in Litvinenko. What has been the Achilles Heel of the assassination theory is the dosage - specifically the impossibility of controlled handling of a dust grain. In contrast, the Po-210 trail represents a lot more than a dust grain, since it consists of P0-210 being spread over three countries and numerous hotel rooms, offices and restaurants. Po-210 in a disolved form is manageable with simple hygiene, as the UK HPA has pointed out many times. Simple soap and water can remove a dust grain of Po-210 from your skin or clothes, which is why the people contaminated in this incident have been contaminated by direct contact with the material and not so much by bodily fluids. These people are no threat to the ones they live and work with. In comparison, any assassin’s potion at the levels seen in Litvinenko would be as manageable as Po-210 in bodily fluids. That is because disolved Po-210 salts act and interact differently with the environment and people than a solid form.
And this is another important factor in assessing the evidence: the form of the Po-210 material being seen. We have discussed many times on this blog that an assassin would brew an acid solution of Po-210 disolved in a liquid prior to coming to London to administer the deadly dose. Why? Because a liquid is easy to handle. A dust grain in a small vile is manageable. And fact it is the only way to handle such small amounts.
Disolved in a liquid the Po-210 atoms are basically floating freely associated with their binding salt counterpart. This is just like table salt disolving in a liquid (except Po-210 salts need more acid in the liguid to actually ‘disolve’). When salt is in its granular form (a single grain of which would produce 100 to 1000 times the dosage Litvinenko took, which in turn is 20-30 times the amount required to kill) are packed one on top of the other in a crystal lattice. When disolved, the Sodium and Chloride atoms - still bound together - are freed from their crystal structure and float freely in the water, distributing evenly throughout the liquid. So when Litvinenko takes a drink of the tea, he is getting a fixed amount of sugar, salt or Po-210 salt per swallow. The density is fixed by how much is added to the volume of liquid, but it is fixed.
And here is where the evidence is pretty clear. In the amounts seen in Litvinenko, the tea cup would contain 1 - 20 dust grain’s worth of Po-210 - depending on whether he took a sip or drank the entire cup (and the size of the cup of course). There would not be Po-210 in amounts that would come close to a single grain of salt. But the tea cup clearly showed signs of a much more concentrated presence of P0-210. Why? Because the cup was easily identified from all the other cups, glasses and dishes in the hotel which had been washed and contaminated in the Pine Bar dishwasher. To be so clearly identifiable, to stand out like this after weeks of use, the tea cup had to have come into contact with a much larger and more dense amount of Po-210 than would be seen from the Litvinenko dosage. The signature on the cup and the Litvinenko dosage do not appear to match up, and we are talking orders of magnitude differences, not slight amounts.
Going back to the assassination method, it is clear that the most controlled method of transport and delivery is in a pre-made liquid. This was not and could not be done in London hotels. It is complex and requires a lab, but it produces what an assassin needs: a small vile of liquid with dropper to administer the few drops needed to kill. As I said, in a liquid the atoms or compounds disperse evenly. That is why every sip of your drink is sweetened or salted to the same level. That is why liquid would be the preferred form of assassination - all the liquid would have the same dosage per sip. Solids would drop to the bottom or adhere to the sides, making it possible that the material is never ingested. And, given the fact Litvinenko was delivered a fraction of a grain of salt to kill him, a liquid form is THE ONLY form that could have been deliberately used to assassinate him. the solid forms could not be handled in these microscopic amounts. So does the room support this form? No.
First, the tea cup showed a clear indication of Po-210, which means the ceramic coating of the cup must have been altered and some Po-210 was embedded in the ceramic - which caused the tea cup to go on and contaminate the Pine Bar kitchen and staff. This is important as well. Under the Litvinenko dosages a simple rinse at the sink and the Po-210 should have been flushed down the drain (BTW, when this is over we will find a drain in that room contaminated with Po-210 levels well beyond Litvinenko’s dosage). But this cup was so contaminated it contaminated a kitchen, the kitchen staff and it held its signature over weeks of use.
In addition, we have the spill in the room:
The assassins were so bungling that they dropped the polonium on the floor of a London hotel room, a senior government source told The Daily Telegraph yesterday.
…
The senior government source, who is aware of the discussions of the Cabinet’s emergency committee, Cobra, said the picture of the killers that was emerging was closer to bungling assassins than cool James Bond-type killers.
Clear traces of the radiation were found on the floor of a room, thought to be in the Millennium hotel in central London, the source said, as well as on a light switch in the same room. The traces were so strong that they indicated the actual source of the radiation was present, not a secondary source such as excretions from Mr Litvinenko’s contaminated body.
It was one of these statements that hinted at Litvinenko’s presence in the room that made me stand by my prediction of where the poisoning took place. But I digress. If the form was a liquid, then there is now way to really recover it from a hotel rug. No one would try. So it would not likely end up on the light switch. We are talking about a few drops for assassination. Why? The assassin only needs a few drops with maybe 20 dust grains worth of material to deliver what is still a massively excessive dose.
The signature in the hotel room looks to much larger than a few dust grains. So we must assume the form of the spill was actually one of two solid forms: a block of material or granules of material. Was it a small metal rock or a bunch of tiny pebbles? Was it pure Po-210 or one of the salts in solid form>? Either way, it has to be in a form and amount that can be handled by humans. It really doesn’t matter at this point which form of the metal, but we know to be handled by humans, even in the granule form, implies amounts thousands or millions of times larger than the Litvinenko dose.
My theory has been that the container used to transport the material failed in the room, dropping the Po-210 rock or pebbles onto the rug. Litvinenko, and possibly Kovtun (now both placed at in the room), tried to collect the material. They used the tea cup to hold the material (it is hot) while a new transport container was made ready. When they removed the material from the tea cup they noticed it had been burned by the material, the ceramic had been discolored. They attempted to remove the cup from their room by dropping it outside the Pine Bar area where other cups would be collected for lunch. In the process of leaving, one of them turned off the room light and left a clear mark on the light switch. This too is important. Someone had Po-210 on their hands when they left that room.
The final piece of the puzzle is the timeline. The three did meet in the Pine Bar around 4:30 PM before the Arsenal-CSKA Moscow game. My guess is Litvinenko dropped by to pass on the news he heard from Scaramella. Scaramella’s presence at the same time the 3rd consignment of Po-210 was traversing London would have raised alarm bells to a smuggling ring . I doubt if Scaramella was part of the ring, the Litvinenko “friends” would not have pointed the finger at him originally if he was. They have tried to divert attention from the smuggling ring angle since Berezovsky brought in Lord Bell’s PR firm (which has disappeared from this story) and mouthpiece Alex Goldfarb read the supposed deathbed claim of Litvinenko the day AFTER he died. But the Pine Bar is at the end of the trail, not the beginning.
We know Litvinenko was contaminated, and possibly poisoned already, when he met Scaramella at 3:00 PM. If Litvinenko only had one contact with the Po-210 itself, and it was not at the Pine Bar at 4:30 PM, then he was in the hotel room before he met Scaramella. In fact, there was Po-210 found very recently at another Picadilly restaurant, one which reports say Lugovoi and Litvinenko visited that fateful day. This visit too must be before the Pine Bar, before Scaramella, and seems to be a lunch visit.
Scaramella testified Litvinenko said he had a prior meeting, which was why he could not meet Scaramella until 3:00 PM. this meeting is clearly with Litvinenko and Lugovoi, and was probably a strategy meeting for dealing with up coming meetings with RISC Management and Erinys, two UK security firms that show signs of Po-210, and which where associated with Litvinenko (and defunct Russian oil giant Yukos). It is clear from early timelines Litvinenko bought a paper around Picadilly circus at noon and showed no signs of contamination at that time. I postulate Litvinenko went to the Millenium Hotel to meet up with Lugovoi and Kovtun (and possibly others who had contaminated rooms at the Millenium), the spill occured while someone, possibly Litvinenko, investigated the latest consignment. They went onto lunch after they thought they took care of their ‘accident’ to discuss their logistics for this round of the smuggling. Someone still had the Po-210 on their hands, showing up in the restaurant. It could have fell into food or an absent-minded touch of fingers to mouth, would be enough to deposit that deadly dust grain of P0-210 so that Litvinenko ingested it. Clearly Kovtun got a massive dose as well. And tKovtun’s poisoning is why this is probably NOT an assassination with liquid, and therefore not likely an assasination at all.
It seems clear Kovtun and Litvinenko got nailed during the same event. A liquid delivery would not leave the trail behind Litvinenko as he went around town on November 1, it would be inside him and not yet excreting through bodily fluids, It might have been arguable for Kovtun to be around a liquid spill, and then the poison was later administered in Litvinenko’s tea cup. But the trail follows Litvinenko’s movements, not Kovtun’s. Therefore Kovtun was nearby when Litvinenko got contaminated. But a liquid in Litvinenko’s tea would not poison Kovtun like it seems he was - unless he shared the tea. Most unlikely.
If there was another person in the room, they must have fell ill by now - possibly died. On the other hand, if this is a fictional scenario involving one of the people who took the Po-210 material onto their next destination (which is clearly what seems to be what is happening in the three hotels Lugovoi visits in October with the multiple contaminated rooms) then the person will not fall ill. Why? He is a scapegoat who was not in the vicinity of the spill that killed Litvinenko and nearly killed Kovtun. Either he was there and is ill or was not there and is fine.
And what about these previous shipments, where Lugovoi is always present, Litvinenko always shows up, Po-210 is found in multiple hotel rooms, and at which Litvinenko got his first dose of P0-210? How does the assassination theory address what is clearly other shipments? What I want to know is when did Litvinenko trail the Po-210 to Berezovsky’s office? The reporting on this claimed there was Po-210 on the copier and the couch. The copier was used by Litvinenko supposedly. Was it Litvinenko’s hand that contaminated the light switch, the copier and the couch? Did they go to Berezovsky’s office before the restaraunts? Is this why Berezovsky’s office shows more contamination than any site visited afterwards? At some points that contaminated hand stopped depositing a lot of material, because the trail never shows a harmful amount of Po-210. Did Litvinenko finally get around to washing his hands there?
With the tea cup in the room with the spill and the light switch, and Litvinenko now there with Lugovoi and Kovtun (at least), we see that (a) the meeting events in the room happened before the meeting with Scaramella, and probably after the visit to Berezovsky’s office, and (b) the early reporting and evidence did NOT lead to the Millenium hotel room first. It did not lead to this meeting in the hotel. Early reports seemed to try and establish a diversionary set of events to distract from this earlier meeting, which would point to smuggling. And how is it the Picadilly Circus restaurant meeting with Lugovoi and Litvinenko only surfaced after Scotland Yard returned from Moscow and the questioning of Lugovoi and Litvinenko. Some people are still doing all they can to keep shaping these events to an assassination theory. But that shape is just not fitting. It still looks like Litvinenko and ‘his friends’ were, and still are, trying to distract everyone from a possible Po-210 smuggling activity. One which Litvinenko was a key part of, and probably died in from an accident in transporting and handling the deadly contraband.
As I recall the idea that Sasha visited room 411 was originally denied by authorities, thought they found the room quickly, and the sushi bar and Pine Bar seemed likely alternatives.
So it is new that the authorities now are saying Sasha went up to the room and that there’s this mysterious assassin with multiple passports, also Gordievsky’s telling Sasha’s story about “Vladislav” making him tea.
For me what makes sense is that the Po was in a liquid that was put in the tea, that maybe the tea spilled (Vlad got nervous), that the cup remained very hot because the amount of radiation was very large (after several 100s of customers stirring their tea there’d probably be plently of surface scoring on the cup), that the other contaminated rooms and surfaces came from the spill on the floor and the cup - and Sasha, that neither Lugovoi nor Kovtun were actually poisoned, and that Vlad is probably responsible for all the contamination in Hamburg and the prior Po contamination found on the planes.
I wonder how Lugovoi and Kovtun came to know Vlad, did he travel with them in October also (or did someone else)? It’s a bit like Clarice’s idea that someone (and definitely something - the Po) was shadowing these guys prior to the assassination. I remember reading an account of Sasha saying that he, and the KGB, used people with a grudge against the target as assassins, perhaps that’s true here also.
The Times article also mentions mercury poisoning of Yukos people, this Russians had previously mentioned a mercury trail - I’d thought this had to do with the manner of producing the Po from Bi, put it in a mercury bath and “zap” it.
Lastly, I was struck by this bit of the Times article:
” He reportedly travelled on the same flight as Dimitri Kovtun, a Russian businessman who is being investigated for trafficking the radioactive material used in the poison plot.”
Now, I wouldn’t have said”trafficking” was what was being investigated, so I’m surprised that these picky UK journos would. Maybe this is a gift for AJ.
Left by jerry on January 20th, 2007