Russian Venom

By BORIS VOLODARSKY
November 22, 2006

On the evening of Feb. 18, 1954, in Frankfurt, a man called on Georgy Okolovich, a leader of an anti-Soviet émigré union. The business at hand was murder. But things took a different turn when Okolovich opened the door. "I'm a captain in the Ministry of State Security and I have been sent from Moscow to organize your assassination," the visitor told him straight out. "I don't want to carry the order out and I need your help." His name was Nikolai Khokhlov. He defected to the U.S. and revealed that the Soviets used assassination as a political instrument.

Three years later, Mr. Khokhlov was at a conference in Germany when, while with friends, he drank a cup of coffee and collapsed hours later. The doctors called it simple food poisoning, but his condition deteriorated until, 10 days into his illness, his hair began to fall out; his bone marrow was found to be severely damaged and his body showed an almost total loss of the white cells that are vital to the proper functioning of the immune system. Later tests uncovered the culprit: deliberate poisoning by a new and previously unknown form of thallium. He lived to tell the tale.

Fast forward to November 1998, in Moscow, when Col. Alexander Litvinenko of the Russian Ministry of State Security -- the old KGB that today goes by FSB -- publicly accused his superiors of ordering him to assassinate Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky. He was soon arrested and put in the infamous Lefortovo prison. The head of the FSB at the time was Vladimir Putin. A court cleared Mr. Litvinenko the following year of all accusations, including service misconduct and assorted others, but he was rearrested and retried the following year, and cleared again. In 2000, he and his family went to live in exile in Britain. There, Mr. Litvinenko published a book that tied the 1999 bombings of Moscow apartment buildings -- which justified Russia's reinvasion of Chechnya -- to the Putin presidential election campaign, which was successfully propelled by that war.

Early this November, Mr. Litvinenko was invited to tea at a London hotel with a Russian man who was familiar to him from his Moscow days. Some hours later, he had a sushi lunch at Piccadilly Circus with an Italian acquaintance, Mario Scaramella, who wanted to give him documents purportedly throwing light on the recent assassination in Moscow of the opposition journalist Anna Politkovskaya, shot dead last month in her apartment building.

That night, he became violently ill. At first, doctors suspected food poisoning. It was only on the 10th day in hospital, when his hair began to fall out, that toxicology tests were performed. His body contained, these tests showed, three times the fatal dose of thallium. John Henry, a clinical toxicologist who was the first to pinpoint the dioxin poisoning of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, examined Mr. Litvinenko this Saturday and told the BBC, "There's no doubt that he's been poisoned by thallium." According to my sources close to Alexander, whom I've known for a couple years, investigators now suspect that he was poisoned at the tea, not the lunch. The name of the Russian suspect hasn't been made public by the police.

When I heard the other day that Alexander's condition was worsening, I thought that the doctors perhaps made the same mistake as in the Khokhlov case. Thallium has never been known to attack the blood stream, but that's what's happening to Alexander Litvinenko. Specialists at the U.S. military hospital in Frankfurt only later discovered that Mr. Khokhlov was exposed to radioactivated thallium, which initially only results in non-specific gastrointestinal symptoms; and only later did they observe a moderate elevation of blood lipids, leukocytosis and anemia that occurs in most high-level intoxications. By the time the symptoms known to be after-effects of radiation began to appear, the radioactivated thallium had already disintegrated, making it very hard for doctors to find, and for investigators to confirm, the poisoning. The same scenario may be playing out with Mr. Litvinenko. Yesterday the London hospital treating him said it could not confirm that the poison was thallium -- a diagnosis that in the Khokhlov case was only made by a special U.S. military hospital.

I last met Alexander at London's Connaught Hotel to discuss the Khokhlov case, about which I'd published a monograph. He was investigating the death of Yury Shchekochikhin, an opposition Russian parliamentarian and journalist, who died in suspicious circumstances in 2003 after a two-week illness. His symptoms were similar to President Yushchenko's, pointing clearly to exposure to a toxic agent. After his death, no autopsy was performed and access to medical records wasn't allowed.

Mr. Litvinenko is a small thorn in the side of the current Russian regime. He lives abroad and holds a British passport. That didn't protect him, but nor did it Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident who in 1978 was killed by a KGB ricin-tipped umbrella near Waterloo station.

It is perhaps too early to discuss how and why Mr. Litvinenko was poisoned. Some things are clear. This was likely the work of the Russian secret service that had been after him for years. Whether the Russian president, who was often the object of Mr. Litvinenko's fierce and fearless mockery, is involved is open to doubt. I wonder if Mr. Putin is in control of his squabbling entourage. Whatever the truth, this poisoning also looks to be directed against Boris Berezovsky, now in exile in London and campaigning for regime change in Russia. Mr. Litvinenko is one of his advisers.

Russian foreign intelligence denies any involvement in his poisoning. It cannot deny, however, its long history of using poison as a weapon. The "Kamera," or as KGB veterans might remember it, "Laboratory No. 12," was founded in 1921 in a corner of Lenin's Cheka. This office innovated biological and chemical agents as advancing science and the Kremlin dictated. But one thing in their design has stayed constant: To make the victim's death or illness appear natural, or at least produce symptoms that will baffle doctors long enough to delay proper treatment. The Chechen rebel Khattab was poisoned in 2004, as was Trotsky's secretary Wolfgang Salus in 1957. Countless other victims were never identified as such.

Before the Litvinenko case, the most prominent poisoning involved Mr. Yushchenko, whose digestive tract and once-chiseled face were destroyed by a complex, dioxin-based compound during a meal with the top officials of his country's security service. Mr. Yushchenko was an unwelcome candidate for Moscow in Ukraine's 2004 elections. Like Khokhlov, he survived; all leads in that case point to the Kamera. The investigation has been hindered by overt pressure on Mr. Yushchenko's doctors at home and in Austria, where he was treated, and Ukrainian politicians.

At this hour, Alexander Litvinenko is fighting for his life in a London hospital.

Mr. Volodarsky, a former Soviet military intelligence officer who lives in London, is the author, with Oleg Gordievsky, of the forthcoming "KGB: The West Side Story."

link: http://online.wsj.com/