Murder on the Polonium Express: Deadly Sushi, the World's First Act of
Nuclear Terrorism?

By Matt Taibbi
Created Nov 29 2006 - 8:13am

Five years ago, just before 9/11, I organized and participated in one of the
stupidest and most drunken auto rallies of all time [1], a 500-kilometer
odyssey to Moscow across central Russia in ten ancient and poorly restored
Zaporozhets automobiles -- perhaps the silliest cars ever made, with each
containing thirty horsepower engines and built so light that two grown men
can lift and drop one into a parking spot.

The trip left me with powerful memories -- from driving through historic
Nizhni Novgorod in a Mike Tyson mask with Led Zeppelin IV blaring out of my
midget car windows, to hearing a Georgian theater director explain why he'd
laid seven prostitutes the night before the rally ("They only cost 300
rubles a piece," he said), to watching twenty-five grown men cook a cauldron
of pig and duck entrails at midnight in the wilderness after consuming an
incredible four whole cases of vodka, to going outside to catch a drunken
American woman humping the front right tire of my car outside the nightclub
where we'd held the end-of-the-race celebration. Actually that last night
ended when I got into a fistfight with a professional clown, but it's
probably best not to get into that incident too much...

I'm remembering that trip this week because of where the rally started: a
city called Arzamas, not far from Nizhni. Neighboring Arzamas is a closed
city called Arzamas-16, formerly known as Sarov. Arzamas-16 is the Los
Alamos of Russia, famous nationwide for being home to the Russian bomb. In
Arzamas-16 there's a factory called "Avangard," where the Soviets in the
1950s started industrial production of various radioactive materials. One of
my friends from that rally, in fact, used to work at that factory. Among the
radioactive materials his former co-workers produced at that plant?
Polonium-210, the substance used in the murder of former FSB officer
Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London last week.

Litvinenko has been dead less than a week and already his murder is shaping
up to be one of the all-time Whodunits -- a mind-bogglingly complex story
involving a walking vault of dangerous secrets for a victim and a vast range
of prominent political actors as plausible potential suspects. It's a plot
straight out of a Le Carre novel, featuring a well-known ex-spy with
intimate knowledge of both the Kremlin's inner workings and the Russian
criminal underworld murdered in a London restaurant, using a deadly
radioactive substance whose origin is almost certainly industrial and
military. And not only is this ex-spy murdered, but he's murdered just
before the Russian president, who is presumed by the media to be a suspect,
is due to arrive in Helsinki for a meeting with EU leaders. An intriguing
mix of secrets, political blackmail and retribution.

While most of the world's press is engaged in trying to unravel the murder
mystery, almost no one is bothering to point out the other obvious angle --
that the Litvinenko murder is the world's first act of nuclear terrorism,
and we should all be shitting our pants over its implications.

Authorities aren't saying yet what they know about the source of the
Polonium-210 presumably used to kill Litvinenko, but I'm guessing that
before long it will come out that it came from Arzamas-16, or some place
very much like it in the Russian military-industrial complex. As has been
pointed out repeatedly in the Russian press this week, killing someone with
Western-made Polonium-210 would be very risky, since the chances of the
transaction being traced are so high. Not so in Russia, from whence most of
the key suspects hail in any case. The big question right now is how that
Polonium-210 got from Arzamas-16 or wherever to a sushi restaurant in London
and to "businessman" Boris Berezovsky's office, among other places.

If one assumes that that Polonium-210 was taken and used without the full
knowledge of the Russian government -- and it's not much of a stretch to
make that assumption -- then that definitely makes the Litvinenko killing a
private act of terrorism, one that requires an urgent international
investigation.

The rumor mill among Russia-watchers is buzzing at an all-time high right
now, and from that mountain of gossip several scenarios are beginning to
emerge. Each of them has horrible implications. Running through them in no
particular order:

The Sechin Theory

Igor Sechin, like Putin, is a youngish spook (born in 1960) schooled in
Leningrad. His background is as a translator for Soviet military
intelligence, with a specialty in French and Portuguese, with experience
working in Africa. He worked with Putin in the St. Petersburg government in
the 1990s and is the only advisor whom Putin brought with him at every stage
of his career. He's currently the chairman of the board of directors of the
oil company "Rosneft," but also is said to be the head of a shadow
government of "Leningrad Chekists" who for the past six years have given
marching orders to the likes of the Russian General Prosecutor's office and
the State Accounting Chamber, the investigative body roughly analogous to
our GAO. Numerous news stories came out in the Russian press in recent years
identifying Sechin as the instigator behind Putin's vicious campaign against
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former head of the oil company YUKOS, who was jailed
in another international scandal.

Not much is known about Sechin, but the few details that have come out are
interesting. Legend has it that he likes to turn documents upside down on
his desk so that visitors to his office will be distracted trying to read
them. He is also said to be unusually ruthless even by Russian political
standards and a personage that many people in government would be more than
glad to be rid of -- once the protective presence of Vladimir Putin is
removed, ostensibly, when he reaches the end of his term limit in 2008.

Which brings us to the "Sechin theory" -- that Sechin and his hard-liner
cronies, a group of generally anti-democratic, generally anti-Western and
generally low-foreheaded brutes known collectively as the "Siloviki," are
trying to force Putin to remain by their side, in government, by binding him
to them in blood. The idea here is that whatever thoughts Putin might have
had about retiring to a leisurely life of giving speeches in Munich and
sipping cappuccinos in Venice with Silvio Berlusconi will very shortly be
off the table once he is tied, internationally, to a series of Stalin-like
assassinations.

You remove Putin's options for a Western-focused dismount to his political
career and you make it very attractive for him to consider a way around his
term limit problem -- particularly when the alternative is remaining in
Russia while one of his political enemies, perhaps a more "liberal" type
like Dmitri Medvedev, comes to power. If a disgraced Putin stays in Russia
in that case, he risks becoming the target of future prosecutions and
intrigues. Each killing along the lines of the Litvinenko business backs
Putin further and further into that corner.

So the theory is that Sechin, who until now has always been known as a
creature of Putin, acted independently in this case and ordered the
Litvinenko hit as a pre-emptive strike against such possible 2008
presidential candidates as Medvedev and defense minister Sergei Ivanov,
blocking their rise with Putin's presumed refusal to step down. He made it
as messy as possible, causing maximum embarrassment to Putin, in order to
apply pressure on his own political benefactor.

This is the most popular theory right now, and it has a few variations,
including:

The Kompromat File

The other factor to consider in the Litvinenko killing is the legendary
existence of a supposed treasure trove of kompromat, or compromising
information, that exiled businessman and underworld figure Boris Berezovsky
is said to have on Putin.

The legend goes something like this: Berezovsky allegedly helped Putin rise
to power and also allegedly helped engineer a series of apartment bombings
in Russian cities in 1999 that Putin used a) to propel him into the
presidency and b) to launch a war with Chechen separatists. Subsequently,
Berezovsky fell out of favor with Putin and was booted out of the Russian
criminal Eden and forced to set up shop in England, where, in defiance of
several laws of nature and physics, he continues to walk the earth and speak
freely. He would seem to be a prime candidate for assassination, but for
some reason he remains alive -- leading to speculation that Berezovsky has a
"doomsday device" ready to go off, a vault of compromising materials
(videos? documents?) tying the Russian president to a variety of horrible
deeds, some of those most probably involving the apartment bombings.

Under this theory, the Litvinenko assassination was again a shot across
Putin's bow, probably by Sechin but perhaps by some other faction within the
Russian government. Whoever ordered the hit would appear to be sending a
message: by killing Litvinenko, a figure who is close to Berezovsky (Boris
Abramovich is said to have owed Litvinenko his life, as the latter refused
to carry out an assassination order against him while still in the FSB),
they are showing that they could also kill Berezovsky, perhaps next. And if
Berezovsky dies, "it" all comes out, and Putin's career is finished.

There's an interesting and somewhat disturbing twist to the kompromat angle.
Four months ago, Litvinenko published an article [2] accusing Putin of being
a pedophile, claiming that Putin tried to cover up evidence of his allegedly
sordid past while he was head of the FSB. Litvinenko's article came on the
heels of an extraordinarily strange incident in which Putin lifted up the
shirt of a small boy and kissed his belly. The incident sparked a minor
scandal in Russia and Putin explained himself somewhat maladroitly, saying,
creepily, that "I saw this little boy and I wanted to cuddle with him like a
kitten."

In his article Litvinenko referred to a passage in a book by former Russian
General Prosecutor Yuri Skuratov, who himself left office after a sex
scandal in which he was videotaped cavorting with whores in a Moscow
apartment. According to Litvinenko, Putin had romps with boys in that same
apartment; and in the Skuratov book, the former prosecutor claims that when
Putin asked him to quit, he told him that he himself had had sex in that
same room before.

I bring this up apropos of nothing, but...Jesus, how weird this story is
getting. Mark Foley is one thing, but Vladimir Putin?

Then there's the Berezovsky theory. The bootlicking Russian press, anxious
to find a fall guy for these murders that doesn't involve either Putin or an
influential Russian politician, has been bandying this one about, and it
appears that Boris Berezovsky will eventually be fingered as the chief
"suspect" in the killings by the Russian media.

The funny thing is, the theory makes some sense. Not much sense, but some.
Although Berezovsky and Litvinenko were supposedly close, the fact remains
that Litvinenko was dining with another Berezovsky associate, Andrei
Lugovoi, when he was killed. Another Berezovsky ally, Alexander Goldfarb, is
the only figure vouching for the authenticity of Litvinenko's "deathbed"
letter accusing Putin of the crime, which to me reads like total horseshit.
Here's a sample of Litvinenko's supposed anti-Putin last words:

You have managed to make me silent, but you have paid dearly for my
silence. You have exposed yourself to be barbarian and ruthless. These are
the names by which your most irreconcilable opponents most often call you.
You have managed to make one person silent, but cries of protest that will
whoop all over the world will sound in your, Mr. Putin, ears till the end of
your days...

As one Russian writer I read this weekend pointed out, this letter is so
wildly overdone -- even for a notoriously full-of-shit publicity hound like
Litvinenko -- that it seems highly unlikely that he wrote it. It recalls two
things simultaneously: the hyper-repetitive, blathering style of Boris
Berezovsky, and the hyper-repetitive, blathering style of old Russian WWII
propaganda movies ("Fascist dog, you've killed me, but you'll never hang us
all!"). The fact that a Berezovsky crony shepherded this letter into the
press is enough to make anyone suspicious about its origins.

Moreover, let's point this out. Boris Berezovsky does have connections with
Chechen separatists, including, notoriously, the legendary Zelig of the
Chechen terrorist world, Shamil Basayev. And just two years ago, in February
2005, Berezovsky gave an interview to Komsomolskaya Pravda in which he
claimed somehow to have knowledge that "the Chechens have their own kind of
atom bomb" and hinted that what he meant was a kind of dirty bomb.
Berezovsky claimed in the interview that when he heard about the existence
of this bomb through his own circle of acquaintances, he informed the FSB
director of what he knew.

But subsequently, a mysterious Chechen figure named "Zakhar" wrote to
Komsomolskaya Pravda and claimed that Berezovsky had lied in the interview,
that it was Berezovsky himself who had this dirty bomb, and that, far from
informing the FSB of its existence, he had tried to sell it to the Chechens.

--

All of which could be bullshit, or it could be absolutely true. Almost
everyone involved in this story is capable of anything. One thing that is
interesting to note is that one Maksim Shingarkin, a former officer in the
Defense Ministry and an expert on nuclear weaponry, wrote in Komsomolskaya
Pravda over the weekend that Polonium-210 was industrially produced by the
Soviets in the '50s -- at that very factory in Arzamas-16 -- for use in a
kind of primitive "dirty bomb" that the USSR was developing before it had
large stockpiles of more sophisticated atomic weapons. The unique properties
of the element made it somewhat ideal for this kind of weapon: although it
has a short half-life, it is both highly destructive and easy to transport,
as the Soviets apparently discovered fifty years ago. Thus the idea that a
Polonium-210-based "dirty bomb" is floating around somewhere in this
labyrinth of political deviants is not entirely implausible. These bombs
existed once already, and it just might be that they have come back into
vogue.

That's what's truly scary about the Litvinenko story. Although something
very twisted is clearly going on in Russian politics -- most likely a
struggle over the 2008 succession that may yet become bloodier, but perhaps
something as mundane as a gangland disagreement between political exiles --
the more serious issue is the use of a deadly radioactive material in a
Western capital. In virtually every scenario you can imagine the Litvinenko
story describes the misuse and misplacing of nuclear material.

If it arrived in London by way of a faction within the Russian government,
then the Russian government is an absurd shambles and presents an urgently
serious security risk. (Remember, this same Russian government once gave
sarin gas to the Japanese death-cult Aum Shinriko -- you think al-Qaeda
couldn't outbid those clowns?) If it arrived by way of someone like Shamil
Basayev, that's even worse.

Think about it: While the U.S. was busy burning the national treasure
digging for nonexistent nukes in the Iraqi desert, gobs of green glowing
shit were making their way from Arzamas-16 to Piccadilly Square. The fact
that we don't know who did it doesn't make it a more interesting mystery. It
makes us that much more fucked. More suspects means more holes in the
system -- and that's not exactly the kind of thing we need to hear in the
post 9/11 world.
_______

--
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson