Polonium Tea: The Assassination of Russian Defector Litvinenko
43 or 44-year-old Aleksandr Litvinenko had once been a Russian spy — a ranking officer of the country’s Federal Security Service (FSB). When he defected to England in 2000, obtaining British citizenship, he provided his aid to the UK’s secret service, MI6. His background would have been useful in his newest goal of “investigating Russian mafia links with Spain,” according to BBC News. But his public accusation of the FSB’s deadly plot against oligarch Boris Berezovsky, his co-authored book on the FSB’s suspected involvement in the infamous 1999 apartment bombings, and his vehement criticism of President Vladimir Putin led to fatal retaliation.
On November 1st, 2006, BBC News reports Litvinenko met with two Russian citizens in a London hotel: Andrei Lugovi (or Lugovoy), a former KGB bodyguard, and Dmitry Kovtun. A cup of contaminated tea doomed him. With severe, rapid-onset symptoms, he was hospitalized soon after the visit. Litvinenko had been poisoned with the rare radioactive isotope polonium-210. He died on the 23rd of November, accusing Putin himself of ordering his assassination.
The Journal of Environmental Health states that his remains were so environmentally hazardous, his family would not be permitted to cremate him for 28 years, as the radioactivity would take that long to decay. He was still sealed in a protected casket “provided by the United Kingdom Health Protection Agency (HPA)” as of 2009.
How dangerous was the single dose of polonium-210? Able to contaminate others through any form of ingestion, inhalation, or skin absorption, it necessitated the HPA’s testing of many people who could’ve been exposed. The Metropolitan Police were able to backtrack Lugovi and Kovtun’s hotel stays and other locations where they had rehearsed prior to the poisoning by detecting traces of the polonium. The Journal of Environmental Health emphasizes the seriousness of this biological attack — dispersed expansively across public areas all over London, the polonium-210 had essentially acted as a “non-explosive ‘dirty’ bomb.”
Over 700 people were monitored for symptoms, and 600 deemed at risk were foreign nationals. The targeted poisoning of one ex-intelligence agent on London soil had become an international incident, but Russia has never admitted involvement, even claiming Litvinenko “may have poisoned himself.” Even the possibility that Lugovi and Kovtun could have acted as rogue agents would be improbable, according to BBC News, as Russia made no “serious attempt” to prove its innocence other than insisting on general denial.
Both a 2016 British investigation and a 2021 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights align with the determination that Lugovi and Kovtun murdered Litvinenko on Russian orders. RadioFreeEurope adds that Moscow “has refused to extradite them.” On the contrary, Lugovi achieved parliamentary immunity in Russia after being elected to the federal parliament, the ‘Duma,’ and Putin awarded Lugovi a medal for “services to the country” in 2015. Kovtun claimed to be willing to assist the British inquiry in 2015, but allegedly failed to “[obtain] permission from the Russian authorities to give evidence,” and continues to deny his own involvement and the legitimacy of the investigation.
Though justice for Litvinenko will be difficult to find, if not impossible, the FSB defector’s assassination led to a higher awareness of public health necessities in the event of similar attacks. Urged by the Journal of Environmental Health, pre-arranged steps in the US would ideally include radionuclide testing for unidentifiable symptoms, national and international health information alerts for radiation incidents, and additional laboratory capacity for extreme contamination response, among other safeguards.
It’ll be another 13 years before Litvinenko’s remains are safe to be uninterred from London’s Highgate Cemetery. As the Journal of Environmental Health warns, a dose of polonium-210 can be lethal at no larger than a period on a page. The possibility of upscaled dosages could put hundreds or thousands at risk, and the half lives of other isotopes can last far longer than decades. Known radiation sickness cases go all the way back to Marie Curie, the “mother of modern physics,” whose exposure to her discoveries of polonium and radium killed her in 1934. Awash with radium-226, Curie’s laboratory notebooks are able to be handled only with protective gear, and her body rests in a coffin lined with nearly an inch of lead. Their total radioactive decay will take 11,200 years.
In light of weaponized substances like these, we can only hope the responsive precautions will be enough.
