Aug 30 2007

Berezovsky Blows The Litvinenko Cover Story

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.

3 responses so far

3 Responses to “Berezovsky Blows The Litvinenko Cover Story”

  1. nomad_990 says:

    Slightly unrelated but still interesting:

    “Russian murder case has fewer suspects”
    MOSCOW — A high-profile case in which Russian police and security officers and others were accused of involvement in the killing of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya appeared to be unraveling Thursday, just days after the arrests were announced.

    Two suspects, identified previously by a Moscow newspaper as former surveillance specialists for the Moscow police, reportedly were released. Authorities said a third figure named in the case, a Federal Security Service officer, had actually been arrested in an unrelated investigation.

  2. nomad_990 says:

    Apologies for the previous post but I was asked to post this instead:

    La Russophobe Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 9:33 AM
    To: me myself
    We’ve written a direct response to Strata-Sphere:

    http://russophobe.blogspot.com/2007/08/editorial-who-killed-anna.html

    We authorize you to post this link on his post and tell him on our behalf that “La Russophobe deeply resents your gross perversion of the statements of Novaya Gazeta’s editors about the murder of their colleague and requests that you correct the record. In our view, the Kremlin has played you for a sap.”