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Polonium 210 has some prosaic applications; it is used, for example, in antistatic devices found in photo shops and fabric mills. It would be very difficult, but for less than $1,000, just a few such gizmos could theoretically be disassembled and the contents reworked in a laboratory to produce a lethal dose. To be usable as a poison, Michael Clark, a spokesman for Britain's Health Protection Agency, said last week, the polonium would then have to be mixed in solution, probably with a gelling agent. "If it was some sort of liquid, it could have been--as in James Bond--a little magic capsule," Clark said. All this implies considerable sophistication and resources. A rich, ambitious criminal syndicate might have been able to pull it off; nevertheless, normally it is governments that work on this scale. And obscure poisons have long been a specialty of Russia's secret police, going back to a "toxicological office" that reported to Lenin personally. In the past, the Russians were known to have developed a gun delivering a burst of cyanide gas causing death easy to misidentify as a heart attack, and tiny pellets smeared with the poison ricin, which has no antidote.
In retrospect, it would have been a lot less trouble for someone to push Litvinenko under a bus than to feed him polonium. But it's likely his poisoners did not anticipate the brouhaha his death would cause. "I believe this was a botched operation," says Litvinenko's friend Alexander Goldfarb, who helped him escape from Russia and runs the Berezovsky-funded International Foundation for Civil Liberties in New York City. Without the intervention of Britain's nuclear-bomb lab, the cause of death would have remained shrouded. Boris Zhuykov, chief of the radioisotope laboratory at the Nuclear Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says the discovery that polonium was the cause was "an act of scientific heroism. The murderers obviously did not expect that the polonium would be found. They failed because of the excellence of the English gamma spectrometer and the persistence of the research." (Zhuykov says that when he was making these points to Moscow's pro-government NTV network last week, the interview was terminated.)
Who had the opportunity?
SCOTLAND YARD HAS HAD ONE BIG BREAK IN the case: polonium, once released, is like a persistent, invisible dye that marks whatever it touches. Someone who ingests even small amounts will leave an unmistakable trail through sweat and even fingerprints. London's gumshoes have spent the past two weeks following such spores all over town--and beyond.
Litvinenko got sick the evening of Nov. 1, when alpha particles were destroying the lining of his gut. As he began to suspect poison, he focused on two meetings he had earlier that day. One was at a sushi bar in central London with Mario Scaramella, 36, an Italian lawyer and, like Litvinenko, a man drawn to the world of secret information and conspiracy theories. The second meeting was in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel, near the U.S. embassy, with a group of Russian businessmen with whom Litvinenko was apparently hatching business ventures in Britain. "Alexander said both [meetings] were suspicious, and one was probably innocent," says Goldfarb.