Plutonium Files: How the U.S. Secretly Fed Radioactivity to Thounited snakesnds of AmericansSTORYMAY 05, 2004
(https://assets.democracynow.org/assets/icons/watch-icon-52b3526e27a20ade1b75a8055ed8fd5d47bca5d4b7c9be4dabc14c522f21d91a.png)WATCH FULL SHOW (https://www.democracynow.org/shows/2004/5/5?autostart=true)
'"
n".self::process_list_items("'.str_replace('
', '', '
[*=left]
[*=left]
[*=left]
').'")."n[/list]"'
[h=5]TOPICS[/size]
'"
n".self::process_list_items("'.str_replace('
', '', '
- Medical Experimentation (https://www.democracynow.org/topics/medical_experimentation)
').'")."n
"'
Denver-based journalist Eileen Welsome reveals how as a reporter for the tiny Albuquerque Tribune (circulation 35,000) she uncovered one of the country's great Cold War secrets: the U.S. government had knowingly exposed thounited snakesnds of human Guinea pigs with radiation poisoning including 18 Americans who had plutonium injected directly into their bloodstream.
In a Massachusetts school, seventy-three disabled children were spoon-fed oatmeal laced with radioactive isotopes.
In an upstate New York hospital, an eighteen-year-old woman believing she was being treated for a pituitary disorder, was injected with plutonium.
At a Tennessee clinic, 829 pregnant women were served "vitamin cocktails" containing radioactive iron, as part of their regular treatment.
No these are not acts of terrorism by common criminals.
These are just some of the secret human radiation experiments that the U.S. government conducted on unsuspecting Americans for decades as part of its atom bomb program.
In a gruesome plot that spanned 30 years, doctors and scientists working with the US atomic weapons program, exposed thounited snakesnds of unwilling and unknowing Americans to radiation poisoning to study its effects.
For years, the experiments by the U.S. government and the identities of their human guinea pigs were covered up.
Then after a six-year investigation, investigative reporter Eileen Welsome uncovered the names of 18 people who were injected with plutonium in the 1940s without their knowledge by federal government scientists. In 1993, she published her finding in The Albuquerque Tribune and later received the Pulitzer Prize for her work.
Another six years later, Welsome published "The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War." The book gives a detailed account of the unspeakable scientific trials conducted by the U.S. government that reduced thounited snakesnds of American men, women, and even children to nameless specimens.
'"n".self::process_list_items("'.str_replace('
', '', '
- Eileen Welsome, Pulitzer prize-winning reporter and author of "The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War."
').'")."n
"'
[h=5]TRANSCRIPT[/size]
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: After a six-year investigation, reporter Eileen Welsome uncovered the identities of eighteen people injected with plutonium in the 1940's without their knowledge by federal government scientists. Eileen Welsome published her findings in a series in the "Albuquerque Tribune" and received the Pulitzer Prize for her work. It took another six years for her to complete her book called "The Plutonium Files, America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War." She joins us now in Boulder, Colorado. Eileen Welsome, thanks for joining us.
EILEEN WELSOME: Happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: Over the years we have spoken with you, but now that we're on this tour and you live in Denver, this is a rare opportunity to sit down and go through this story. First, how did you even get a clue that this was going on?
EILEEN WELSOME: Amy, it started, as you mentioned earlier, I was a reporter at the "Albuquerque Tribune" and I was doing some research on an air force base there, and they were doing some cleanup work. I noticed that in the document there were several radioactive animal dumps on this air force base. So I was curious about what kind of animals were in the dump and why were they radioactive? So I went over to the air force base, Kirkland Air Force Base, to what was then called the Air Force Special Weapons Laboratory. And they got out a big stack of these dusty reports for me to read on these animal studies. And so as I was thumbing through these reports, and it was horrible because they were incubating beagles and watching them develop cancers and how long they lived and charting the radiation sickness. But as a reporter, there wasn't a story there for me. These were old experiments and as gruesome as they were, it wasn't something that a daily newspaper would be interested in. So it was about 5:00 on Friday, I was eager to go home, but I felt like I had gone to this trouble to get these documents and I had to make my time look good. So I kept flipping through the reports. And my eye fell on a footnote and the footnote mentioned something about 18 humans who had been injected with plutonium. So I kind of reared back in my seat. I was just shocked. Shocked to think that our government had injected 18 people with plutonium. So I jotted down what I could from the citation and the next day, which was a Saturday, I went to the university library there and started hunting up reports about these scientists. So that was the beginning of it and the reason I looked at the footnote, I need to say this, is I had done a lot of financial reporting prior to that time and I know that whenever a company wants to put in the bad news, it's always in a footnote. So that taught me to look at footnotes.
AMY GOODMAN: And so how did you begin to unravel this story?
EILEEN WELSOME: Well, here was my problem: I learned there were some scientific reports in the literature, so I got those reports. I started to cull everything I could. And I learned that there were 18 people that had been injected with plutonium, but they were known by code numbers only. So the problem for me became how to find 18 Americans that had been injected with plutonium 30 or 40 years ago in a country of millions. So I thought that — I mean, it was an impossible task, and so I started very crudely. I put these 18 code numbers on yellow sheets of paper and then as I gathered documents, I would write down what I knew about each of these 18 people. So I eventually learned their ages, the date they were injected, what kind of disease they had, if there was an autopsy or a biopsy conducted, and when they died. And then it was just a matter of continuing to do that and pick up clues.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about one of the 18 people.
EILEEN WELSOME: Well, I had gone off on a journalism fellowship and I had been filing Freedom of Information Act requests with the federal government. So I had a tiny folder on this experiment and when I came back and looked — I pulled out my folder and I had fresh eyes. And I looked at this document again and these documents were redacted. In other words, the names of the patients were whited out and so were the names of the doctors. And my eye fell on this line, which said Doctor so and so contacted the physician of Cal-3 in Italy, Texas. And what leapt out at me were the words, Italy, Texas. By then, I knew a lot about Cal-3. I knew he was an Kmtyw American man who would have been 80 years old, who would have been — who had his left leg amputated three days after he was injected with plutonium. So given those few clues and that this person might have lived in Italy, Texas, I was determined to go there and knock on every door until I found this man.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Eileen Welsome. So tell us about your discovery, how you made contact.
EILEEN WELSOME: So I got out a map. I looked up Italy, Texas. It was south of Dallas, about 60 miles. I called directory assistance, got the number of Italy's City Hall, called them up, introduced myself, described the person I was looking for and they said, "You're looking for Elmer Allen, but he died a year ago. Would you like his wife's number?" So I said, "Of course." And I wrote the number down and within minutes I was talking to Mrs. Allen.
AMY GOODMAN: And what did you say?
EILEEN WELSOME: I was very circumspect because I didn't want to frighten her and I didn't want to seem like a kook and I didn't want to put words in her mouth. I wanted to know what she remembered. So I simply said, you know, I had some documents that suggested that her husband may have been involved in a government-funded study and I would like to talk with her about it. And she asked me to talk to her daughter, Elmerine Allen Whitfield. And I called her and she was very quiet on the phone. As I reeled out my story, she said, "Ok, you can come on." And so I flew to Italy, Texas, and we sat down at her kitchen table and by the end of the interview, I knew and they knew that I had found the first of these 18 people.
AMY GOODMAN: Elmer's story?
EILEEN WELSOME: Elmer's story.
AMY GOODMAN: What was Elmer's story, how did he end up in a hospital being injected with plutonium?
EILEEN WELSOME: Elmer was a railroad porter. He and his wife were living in the Bay Area in the mid 1940's. They had left Texas and gone out there to start a better life. They had two young babies. Elmer fell from the train in Chicago and damaged his leg, and that sort of put him into the medical system. That was the beginning of his participation in this experiment. And his leg did not heal and he kept going back to the doctor. Somehow he found himself in this clinic at U.C. San Francisco University of California Hospital in San Francisco, and they selected him for this radiation experiment.
AMY GOODMAN: But he didn't know that?
EILEEN WELSOME: Oh, no, no, he absolutely did not know. He was told that he had an osteosargenic sarcoma in his knee and they would have to amputate in order to save him. There's some question about whether he did or didn't have that cancer and I do not know the answer to that. But three days before they amputated that leg, they injected him in the calf, intramuscularly, with plutonium.
AMY GOODMAN: Didn't they — he describe to his wife how they put a target on his leg and they injected it in that?
EILEEN WELSOME: They eventually, with the consent of Mrs. Allen, I was able to get Elmer's medical records from U.C. San Francisco and in those medical records, the doctors talked about putting that target on his calf prior to the injection.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, he never knew he was a subject in a U.S. government experiment, but he suspected something, is that right?
EILEEN WELSOME: Yes. He told a good friend of his in Italy, Texas, that the doctors kept flying in and out of his room practicing to be doctors. And he told his friend, "They guinea-pigged me."
AMY GOODMAN: We interviewed Elmerine Allen a number of times and she talked about how growing up her father would say that, and then when she left for college, he said, watch out, "Don't let the U.S. government guinea-pig you." And they always thought that Elmer had some kind of, well, Elmer was kind of quirky, and he had this delusion that the government experimented on him.
EILEEN WELSOME: The sad part about and the tragic part about Elmer's story is that nobody believed him. He went to his doctor and told him, you know, "I think I've been injected with something." His doctor diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic at the same time that he was conversing with the atomic energy scientists in Argonne National Lab to provide them with tissue samples and —
AMY GOODMAN: Wait, wait, wait. His doctor said he was a paranoid schizophrenic at the same time his doctor was providing Elmer's tissues to the government scientists doing the experiment?
EILEEN WELSOME: That's correct. That's what the medical records show. So, Elmer was not only used in 1947 when he was injected with this radioactive isotope, but he continued to be used as a guinea pig for the rest of his life.
AMY GOODMAN: Being sent for example to where, Rochester, New York?
EILEEN WELSOME: In the — the experiment had two parts. In the 1970's, the — in the 1970's, a second generation of atomic scientists rediscovered this experiment. So they wanted to dig up all the people who were dead, who had been injected with plutonium, and they also wanted to bring whoever survived them back into the lab for further studies. And Elmer was one of those people.
AMY GOODMAN: Under what pretext since he didn't know, supposedly, that he was a U.S. government guinea pig?
EILEEN WELSOME: They told Elmer, and this is all documented in the medical records, that they knew he had a very serious cancer and they wanted to know where he had lived so long.
AMY GOODMAN: Eileen Welsome is our guest. Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, unearthed the names of 18 people injected with plutonium by the U.S. government. When we come back, we're going to talk about who these scientists were. We'll hear more of the stories. And then also the group studies, the studies of hundreds of people who were given — well, a couple dozen disabled children in Massachusetts fed radioactive isotopes in their oatmeal, hundreds of pregnant women, also, served so-called vitamin cocktails containing radioactive iron — how this all happened without anyone knowing about it until recently. Stay with us.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I'm Amy Goodman. As we continue looking at "The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War." We're broadcasting from Boulder, Colorado and our guest is Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Eileen Welsome now lives in Denver. The lessons — let the lessons of history remind us that the best safeguard for the future is an informed and active citizenry. Let's continue on this journey of the people who were injected, and the people who injected them. This certainly sounds a little like the Tuskegee experiments, but tell us, who ran this program?
EILEEN WELSOME: The program sounded in the Manhattan Project, the project to build the atomic bomb in the early 1940's. Side by side with the physicists worked a group of doctors who were interested in finding out how to protect their own workers in the Weapons Complex. And also trying to figure out what these new radio isotopes did in the human body. So basically, the beginning was the fathers of the bomb project, the medical doctors and scientists that were the tier below the Nobel Laureates, below the Oppenheimers and so on.
AMY GOODMAN: Did they know this was happening?
EILEEN WELSOME: Certainly the records indicate that Oppenheimer approved the injections of these patients with Plutonium, because Los Alamos was fighting a severe contamination problem and the scientists working in those laboratories were concerned about their own health.
AMY GOODMAN: Didn't Oppenheimer come from Berkeley, and you had Elmer who was injected in California?
EILEEN WELSOME: That's correct. There was a large component of the atomic bomb project in the Bay area.
AMY GOODMAN: Conducted where?
EILEEN WELSOME: At the University of California at Berkeley and also at the university of California San Francisco.
AMY GOODMAN: So we're talking about a nexus of university, military, working together?
EILEEN WELSOME: That's exactly right. During the Manhattan Project, it was a very strange hybrid animal where you had people that were in the military working for the military, and you had people that were getting paid by universities.
AMY GOODMAN: The robbing of graves?
EILEEN WELSOME: That occurred — well, I don't know if I would quite put it so strongly as that, but they did exhume bodies.
AMY GOODMAN: With the family's consent?
EILEEN WELSOME: They sought the consent of the families, but they did not tell the families the true purpose for the exhumations.
AMY GOODMAN: What did they tell them?
EILEEN WELSOME: That they had been given some radio isotope or some chemical and wanted to see what it had done in the bodies of their loved ones.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, that's true, isn't it?
EILEEN WELSOME: Yes, but they didn't use the word Plutonium.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you name a scientist and can you tell us what the response has been?
EILEEN WELSOME: When I did my research, most of the scientists, with the exception of Himer Fridel, who was the assistant medical director of the Manhattan Project, were dead.
AMY GOODMAN: The Manhattan Project being —
EILEEN WELSOME: The atomic bomb program. But the scientist who had conducted the more recent studies defended them. That they were important to protecting the workers in the nuclear weapons complex or that they were harmless.
AMY GOODMAN: So let's go through the experiments. The 18 people injected with Plutonium, none of them knew that that had happened to them. But moving on, in a Massachusetts school, 73 disabled children spoon fed oatmeal that had radio isotopes in them, radioactive isotopes. What happened?
EILEEN WELSOME: In that case, this was a nutrition study and they were given radioactive calcium and other radio isotopes.
AMY GOODMAN: Every morning?
EILEEN WELSOME: In their oatmeal, it was either mixed into the oatmeal or in the milk. And these boys did not know what was being given to them, nor did their parents. And in fact, they were told that this was really something nutritious and good for them. They were asked to give blood samples, urine samples, feces samples.
AMY GOODMAN: How long did this go on for?
EILEEN WELSOME: It went on for a number of years. And these boys grew into men and did not find out what had been done to them until the 1990's.
AMY GOODMAN: Upstate New York hospital, 18-year-old girl thinks she's being treated for a pituitary disorder and gets injected with Plutonium?
EILEEN WELSOME: This was a young woman who like Elmer Allen wound up in a hospital at the wrong place and was injected.
AMY GOODMAN: Tennessee clinic, 829 pregnant women served radioactive iron as part of their regular treatment. What did they think they were getting?
EILEEN WELSOME: This was a study done immediately after World War II and these young women came to the clinic thinking that they were getting vitamins to drink, that this would help their babies. And in fact, what was being studied was how fast the radio iodine crossed into the placenta.
AMY GOODMAN: Where was this?
EILEEN WELSOME: At Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
AMY GOODMAN: And what happened to these women?
EILEEN WELSOME: They had all kinds of ailments, skin diseases, cancer, blood disorders, some of their offspring, their children that they were carrying at the time of this experiment died of cancer. And very strange cancers at young ages.
AMY GOODMAN: Were there any whistle blowers among the doctors and nurses?
EILEEN WELSOME: There was none whatsoever. The doctors closed ranks and considered this worthwhile science, and something they were doing to protect the country.
AMY GOODMAN: What about patients brought into the basement of the hospital and experimented on in the middle of the night, where was this?
EILEEN WELSOME: This was an experiment that was done in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was another one of these hybrid experiments that was half medical, half military. And in many cases, that's the problem with hybrid experiments. Often times, what's medically good for the patient is not militarily the best experiment. So these studies were done with cancer patients. They were told it would help their cancer. What the doctors were looking at was trying to figure out in the event of an atomic bomb detonation, how long could soldiers fight?
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Eileen Welsome. Her series came out in the Albuquerque Tribune and she turned it into a book, the Plutonium Files. Your expose came out under the Clinton years. President Clinton set up an advisory committee on human radiation experiments, which did its own digging into radiation programs. Remarkably enough, the report, the final report, came out on October 3, 1995, the same day as the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case. I don't remember seeing the results being reported.
EILEEN WELSOME: It was really unfortunate, because everybody in the country was focused on O.J. Simpson and —
AMY GOODMAN: Or was it timed right? Because let's remember every day people were waiting to the Simpson verdict, so it clearly was not beyond the government commission to understand the attention of the nation was focused elsewhere.
EILEEN WELSOME: I hadn't thought about that, Amy. It's simply a possibility.
AMY GOODMAN: So the results came out anyway?
EILEEN WELSOME: The results came out anyway, and nobody paid attention to it.
AMY GOODMAN: And what were the results?
EILEEN WELSOME: Basically, they confirmed that thounited snakesnds and thounited snakesnds of experiments had been done on U.S. Citizens. That the victims were the most vulnerable people in our society: the young, the disenfranchised, the poor, people of color, people who did not know enough to ask questions. In other words, the subjects were not doctor's children or friends of their doctors; they were people who were vulnerable.
AMY GOODMAN: And how many places did this happen in the United States? The school in Massachusetts, the Cincinnati test, Elmer Allen was at the University of California Berkeley, how many sites were these government scientists working in?
EILEEN WELSOME: There were hundreds of sites. There were private hospitals, public hospitals, military installations, orphanages. About any place that doctor was working where they might be able to get a grant.
AMY GOODMAN: Prison?
EILEEN WELSOME: Yes, that was a really, really ugly experiment. A group of prisoners had their testicles eradiated.
AMY GOODMAN: Where?
EILEEN WELSOME: In Oregon mostly. And the purpose was for NASA. They were interested in knowing the effects of space radiation on astronauts.
AMY GOODMAN: And what happened to these prisoners?
EILEEN WELSOME: Many of them that I interviewed were still in prison. They had all kinds of medical problems and cancers and health issues.
AMY GOODMAN: Lawsuits?
EILEEN WELSOME: Many, many lawsuits filed. Some of the families were compensated. The Plutonium patients got an average per family of $400,000. I think that was the largest. And patients at other sites around the country got lesser amounts.
AMY GOODMAN: What about today? Do you think which have learned anything? And as people listen to this, I'm sure there are many who will start to wonder.
EILEEN WELSOME: I think that the way to safeguard yourself, you as a patient or your loved ones as patients, is by asking questions. And the other way to safeguard — the other way to prevent these things from happening again is to make sure that what we do is open an available to the public. Because openness is a disinfectant and it keeps these kinds of malignant, unethical experiments from happening.
AMY GOODMAN: Yet we have entered an age of perhaps greater secrecy than ever before.
EILEEN WELSOME: That's correct. In fact, I realized as I was doing my book, my intuition told me this was a small window that was closing and I don't think that today I could get some of the documents that I was able to get for this book.
AMY GOODMAN: Soldiers?
EILEEN WELSOME: Thounited snakesnds of soldiers were used in bomb tests in Nevada.
AMY GOODMAN: How?
EILEEN WELSOME: Well, they were ordered into the blast area within minutes after a detonation. They flew in — Air Force pilots flew into radioactive clouds. They detonated atomic bombs in the Pacific. The soldiers and sailors were then ordered in to retrieve various instruments that were contaminated.
AMY GOODMAN: And then there were not the people who were personally fed the radio isotopes, the kids at the school or the women who were given these vitamin cocktails that were radioactive. But there was the disbursing of radio activity in the air over cities, at schools?
EILEEN WELSOME: That's correct. One of the most famous is the Green Run at the Hanford Reservation.
AMY GOODMAN: In Washington state?
EILEEN WELSOME: In Washington State in which they released radio iodine and the prairie was very hot, but that was one of the controversial findings in this committee report. They did not say or recommend that the government be forbidden from doing this. They basically said you need to have a committee and at some point the documents should be made public. I thought that was one of the worst recommendations that they came out with.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us. What was the biggest revelation for you in this research and looking at the Plutonium Files?
EILEEN WELSOME: The biggest revelation for me was to see how cruel and inhuman these very educated doctors were toward their patients.
AMY GOODMAN: And not telling them?
EILEEN WELSOME: And not telling them.
AMY GOODMAN: And the medical establishment today, is it backing them up?
EILEEN WELSOME: They were when I was doing my research on this book. They still defended these experiments as being important.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Eileen Welsome, thank you for being with us. The book is called "The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War." Tomorrow on Democracy Now!, we'll be joined by Joyce Mescus, the owner of The Tattered Cover, an independent bookstore in Denver who has been talked about by many booksellers as the one who took on the US Government when police came in to get records of someone who had bought a book in her store. She spent tens of thounited snakesnds of dollars fighting this case. We're going to talk about what this means this day and age. We're also going to speak with a doctor who has treated soldiers coming back from Iraq.The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/). Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UObIhUKjCiY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UObIhUKjCiY)
Alexander Litvinenko: the man who solved his own murderThis week, the inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko will deliver its findings. The former Russian spy was poisoned with a cup of tea in a ukkk hotel. Working with Scotland Yard detectives, as he lay dying, he traced the lethal substance to a former comrade in the Russian secret service
(https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/45f44dfb141c9e0bc0ee846c8f933455dfdd8f2f/1150_973_1489_893/master/1489.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&)
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/19/alexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder#img-1)
Alexander Litvinenko in the intensive care unit of University College Hospital, ukkk, on November 20, 2006. He died three days later. Photograph: Natasja Weitsz/Getty Images Contributor
Luke Harding (https://www.theguardian.com/profile/lukeharding)Tuesday 19 January 2016 06.00 GMT
'"
n".self::process_list_items("'.str_replace('
', '', '
- (https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Alexander%20Litvinenko%3A%20the%20man%20who%20solved%20his%20own%20murder%20%7C%20Luke%20Harding&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Fjan%2F19%2Falexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder%3FCMP%3Dshare_btn_tw)
[/url]
- View more sharing options
').'")."n[/list]"'
Shares18,192
Comments626 (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/19/alexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder#comments)
The Millennium hotel is an unusual spot for a murder. It overlooks Grosvenor Square, and is practically next door to the heavily guarded US embassy, where, it is rumoured, the CIA has its station on the fourth floor. A statue of Franklin D Roosevelt – wearing a large cape and holding a stick – dominates the north side of the square. In 2011 another statue would appear: that of the late US president Ronald Reagan. An inscription hails Reagan's contribution to world history and his "determined intervention to end the cold war". A friendly tribute from Mikhail Gorbachev reads: "With President Reagan, we travelled the world from confrontation to cooperation."
The quotes would seem mordantly ironic in the light of events that took place just around the corner, and amid Vladimir Putin's apparent attempt to turn the clock back to 1982, when the former KGB boss Yuri Andropov – the secret policeman's secret policeman – was in charge of a doomed empire known as the Soviet Union. Next to the inscriptions is a sandy-coloured chunk of masonry. It is a piece of the Berlin Wall, retrieved from the east side. Reagan, the monument says, defeated communism. This was an enduring triumph for the west, democratic values, and for free societies everywhere.
(https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2d2d2d98b8b51adca8c38e58f66a4fcaa077b656/0_218_4000_2400/master/4000.jpg?w=460&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&)
The Guardian's Audio Long Reads Alexander Litvinenko: the man who solved his own murderThis week, the inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko will deliver its findings. The former Russian spy was poisoned with a cup of tea in a ukkk hotel. Working with Scotland Yard detectives, as he lay dying, he traced the lethal substance to a former comrade in the Russian secret service
Listen
Five hundred metres away is Grosvenor Street. It was here, in mid-October 2006, that two Russian assassins had tried to murder someone, unsuccessfully. The hitmen were Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun. Their target was Alexander Litvinenko (https://www.theguardian.com/world/alexander-litvinenko), a former officer in Russia's FSB spy agency. Litvinenko had fled Moscow in 2000. In exile in Britain he had become Putin's most ebullient and needling critic. He was a writer and journalist. And – from 2003 onwards – a British agent, employed by MI6 as an expert on Russian organised crime.
Latterly, Litvinenko had been supplying Her Majesty's spooks and their Spanish counterparts with hair-raising information about the Russian mafia in Spain. The mafia had extensive contacts with senior Russian politicians. The trail apparently led to the president's office, and dated back to the 1990s when Putin, then aide to St Petersburg's mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, worked closely with gangsters. In a week or so, Litvinenko was to testify before a Spanish prosecutor. Hence, it appeared, the Kremlin's frantic efforts to kill him.
The men from Moscow were carrying what Kovtun confessed to a friend was "a very expensive poison". About its properties he knew little. The poison was polonium-210, a rare radioactive isotope, tiny, invisible, undetectable. Ingested, it was fatal. The polonium had originated at a nuclear reactor in the Urals and a production line in the Russian town of Sarov. A secret FSB laboratory, the agency's "research institute", then converted it into a dinkily portable weapon.
Lugovoi and Kovtun, however, were rubbish assassins. The quality of Moscow's hired killers had slipped since the glory days of the KGB. Their first attempt, in a Grosvenor Street boardroom, had not worked. They had lured Litvinenko to a business meeting, where – the radiation stain later showed – they had tipped polonium into his cup or glass. But Litvinenko did not touch his drink. As of 1 November 2006, he was stubbornly alive.
Lugovoi and Kovtun were rubbish assassins. The quality of Moscow's hired killers had slipped since the KGB's glory days
Like most upmarket ukkk hotels, the Millennium has CCTV. Its multiplex system can run up to 48 cameras; that day, 41 of them were operational. The cameras work on a time-lapse system. They take an image every two seconds; the video is retained for 31 days. This footage has a jerky quality, a little like the early days of cinema – images jump; people appear and vanish; life ebbs and flows. And yet it is an honest record. A time stamp – days, hours, minutes – fixes everything. The stills offer a miraculous time machine, a journey into verisimilitude.
Even modern CCTV has its limitations. Some parts of the Millennium were not covered by it – as Lugovoi, an expert in surveillance, and a former Kremlin bodyguard, would have noticed. One camera was fixed above the reception desk. Its footage shows the check-in counter; a bank of three computer screens; uniformed hotel staff. In the left of the picture is a part view of the foyer. There are two white leather sofas and a chair. Another camera – you wouldn't notice it, unless you were looking – records the steps leading up to the lavatories.
The hotel has two ground-floor bars accessed from the foyer. There is a large restaurant and cafe. And the smaller Pine Bar immediately on the left as you enter through a revolving door from the street. The bar is a cosy wood-panelled affair. Three bay windows look out onto the square. In CCTV terms, the Pine Bar is a security black hole. It has no cameras; its guests are invisible.
Play Video
PlayCurrent Time0:00
/
Duration Time1:10
Loaded: 0%
Progress: 0%
FullscreenMute
Embed
Facebook
Twitter (https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=CCTV%3A%20Andrei%20Lugovoi%20at%20Millennium%20Hotel%20before%20Alexander%20Litvinenko%20meeting%20-%20video&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2Fvideo%2F2015%2Ffeb%2F26%2Fcctv-andrei-lugovoi-video)
Pinterest (http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?description=CCTV%3A%20Andrei%20Lugovoi%20at%20Millennium%20Hotel%20before%20Alexander%20Litvinenko%20meeting%20-%20video&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2Fvideo%2F2015%2Ffeb%2F26%2Fcctv-andrei-lugovoi-video&media=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.guim.co.uk%2Fsys-images%2FGuardian%2FPix%2Faudio%2Fvideo%2F2015%2F2%2F26%2F1424980819499%2Fcrop_KP_106074_640x480.jpeg)
Andrei Lugovoi with his two daughters at the reception desk of the Millennium hotel.On the evening of 31 October, camera 14 recorded this: at 20:04 a man dressed in a black leather jacket and mustard yellow jumper approaches the front desk. On either side of him are two young women. They have long, groomed blonde hair: his daughters. Another figure wanders up from the sofas. He is a strikingly tall, chunky-looking bloke wearing a padded black jacket and what resembles a hand-knitted Harry Potter scarf. The scarf is red and blue – the colours of Moscow's CSKA football club.
(https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/7/3/1435921112363/aa86f9cc-d17e-4efe-b572-06a8dc1512d4-1020x612.jpeg?w=460&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&)
Sign up to the long read emailRead more
The video captures the moment the Lugovois checked in – on this, his third frantic trip to ukkk in three weeks, Lugovoi arrived with his entire family. He came from Moscow with his wife Svetlana, daughter Galina, eight-year-old son Igor, and friend Vyacheslav Sokolenko – the guy with the scarf. At the hotel, Lugovoi met his other daughter Tatiana. She had arrived from Moscow a day earlier with her boyfriend Maxim Bejak. The family party was due to watch CSKA Moscow play Arsenal in the Champions League the following evening. Like Lugovoi, Sokolenko was ex-KGB. But Sokolenko was not, British detectives would conclude, a murderer.
CCTV shows Kovtun arriving at the Millennium at 08.32 the next day – a diminutive figure carrying a black bag over one shoulder. The events of the next few hours were to become infamous – with Litvinenko the fated victim, the Russian state an avenging god, the media a sort of overexcited Greek chorus. What actually took place was a piece of improvisation that might easily have misfired. Lugovoi and Kovtun had decided to lure Litvinenko to a further meeting. But the evidence suggests that they had still not figured out how exactly they were going to kill him.
Litvinenko had first met Lugovoi in Russia in the 1990s. Both were members of the oligarch Boris Berezovsky's entourage. Later, while living in exile in ukkk, Berezovsky became Litvinenko's mercurial patron. In 2005, Lugovoi recontacted Litvinenko and suggested they work together, advising western firms wanting to invest in Russia (https://www.theguardian.com/world/russia). At 11.41am, Lugovoi called Litvinenko on his mobile. He suggested a meeting. Why didn't Litvinenko join him later that day at the Millennium? Litvinenko said yes; the plot was on.
Scotland Yard would later precisely fix Litvinenko's movements on the afternoon of 1 November: a bus from his home in Muswell Hill in north ukkk; the tube to Piccadilly Circus; a 3pm lunch with his Italian associate Mario Scaramella in the Itsu sushi restaurant in Piccadilly. In between, he fielded several calls from Lugovoi, who was becoming increasingly importunate. Lugovoi called Litvinenko again at 3.40pm. He told Litvinenko to "hurry up". He had, he said, to leave imminently to watch the football.
Lugovoi would tell British detectives that he arrived at the Millennium at 4pm. The CCTV shows that he was lying: half an hour earlier, at 3.32pm, Lugovoi appears at the front desk and asks for directions to the gents. Another camera, number four, records him walking up the stairs from the foyer. The image is striking. Lugovoi seems preoccupied. He is unusually pale, grim, grey-visaged. His left hand is concealed in a jacket pocket. Two minutes later, he emerges. The camera offers an unflattering close-up of his bald spot.
Play Video
PlayCurrent Time0:00
/
Duration Time0:31
Loaded: 0%
Progress: 0%
FullscreenMute
Embed
Facebook
Twitter (https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=CCTV%3A%20Andrei%20Lugovoi%20and%20Dmitry%20Kovtun%20at%20Millennium%20Hotel&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2Fvideo%2F2015%2Ffeb%2F26%2Fcctv-andrei-lugovoi-dmitry-kovtun-millennium-hotel)
Pinterest (http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?description=CCTV%3A%20Andrei%20Lugovoi%20and%20Dmitry%20Kovtun%20at%20Millennium%20Hotel&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2Fvideo%2F2015%2Ffeb%2F26%2Fcctv-andrei-lugovoi-dmitry-kovtun-millennium-hotel&media=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.guim.co.uk%2Fsys-images%2FGuardian%2FPix%2Faudio%2Fvideo%2F2015%2F2%2F26%2F1424979878150%2Fcrop_KP_106023_640x480.jpeg)
Lugovoi walking up the stairs from the Millennium hotel foyer. The image is striking. 'Lugovoi seems preoccupied. He's unusually pale, grim, grey visaged. His left hand is concealed in a jacket pocket.'Then, at 3.45pm, Kovtun repeats the same procedure, asking for directions, vanishing into the men's toilets, reappearing three minutes later. He is a slight figure. What were the pair doing there? Washing their hands, having set the polonium trap? Or preparing the crime, a heinous one, in the sanctuary of one of the cubicles?
Tests were to show massive alpha radiation contamination in the second cubicle on the left – 2,600 counts per second on the door, 200 on the flush handle. Further sources of polonium were found on and below the gents' hand-dryer, at over 5,000 counts per second. There was what scientists called "full-scale deflection" – readings so high they were off the scale.
(https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c61b6a2ea02f86f1503cf53a1e7ba56f42db7c64/69_0_1901_1140/master/1901.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&)
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/19/alexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder#img-2)
Facebook
Twitter (https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Alexander%20Litvinenko%3A%20the%20man%20who%20solved%20his%20own%20murder%20%7C%20Luke%20Harding&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Fjan%2F19%2Falexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder%3FCMP%3Dshare_btn_tw%26page%3Dwith%3Aimg-2%23img-2)
Pinterest (http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?description=Alexander%20Litvinenko%3A%20the%20man%20who%20solved%20his%20own%20murder%20%7C%20Luke%20Harding&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Fjan%2F19%2Falexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder%3Fpage%3Dwith%3Aimg-2%23img-2&media=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.guim.co.uk%2Fc61b6a2ea02f86f1503cf53a1e7ba56f42db7c64%2F69_0_1901_1140%2F1901.jpg)
Dmitry Kovtun arrives at the Millennium. Photograph: Litvinenko Inquiry/PA WireThe multiplex system shows someone else arriving at 15.59 and 41 seconds – a fit-looking individual, wearing a blue denim jacket with a fawn collar. He is on his mobile phone. This is Litvinenko at the blurred edge of the picture; he calls Lugovoi from the hotel lobby to tell him that he has arrived. The CCTV tells us little beyond this. Apart from one important detail. Litvinenko never visits the hotel bathroom. He is not the source of the polonium; it is his Russian companions-turned-executioners who bring it with them to ukkk, in this, their second poisoning attempt.
* * *The Soviet Union had a long tradition of bumping off its enemies. They included Leon Trotsky (ice-pick in the head), Ukrainian nationalists (poisons, exploding cakes) and the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov (ricin pellet fired from an umbrella, on ukkk's Waterloo Bridge). There was a spectrum. It went from killings that were demonstrative, to those where the KGB's fingerprints were nowhere to be found, however hard you looked. Such murders were justified by what you might call Leninist ethics: they were necessary to defend the Bolshevik revolution, a noble experiment.
Play Video
PlayCurrent Time0:00
/
Duration Time0:57
Loaded: 0%
Progress: 0%
FullscreenMute
Embed
Facebook
Twitter (https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=CCTV%3A%20Dmitry%20Kovtun%20at%20Millennium%20Hotel%20before%20Alexander%20Litvinenko%20meeting%20-%20video&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2Fvideo%2F2015%2Ffeb%2F26%2Fcctv-dmitry-kovtun-video-alexander-litvinenko)
Pinterest (http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?description=CCTV%3A%20Dmitry%20Kovtun%20at%20Millennium%20Hotel%20before%20Alexander%20Litvinenko%20meeting%20-%20video&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2Fvideo%2F2015%2Ffeb%2F26%2Fcctv-dmitry-kovtun-video-alexander-litvinenko&media=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.guim.co.uk%2Fsys-images%2FGuardian%2FPix%2Faudio%2Fvideo%2F2015%2F2%2F26%2F1424981593185%2Fcrop_KP_106105_640x360.jpeg)
Litvinenko arrives at the Millennium hotel.Under Boris Yeltsin these exotic killings mostly stopped. Moscow's secret poisons lab, set up by Lenin in 1917, was mothballed. After 2000 though, with Putin in the Kremlin, such Soviet-style operations quietly resumed. Critics of Russia's new president had an uncanny habit of ending up ... well, dead. In power, Putin steered the country in an increasingly authoritarian direction, snuffing out most sources of opposition and dissent. The president's fellow KGB comrades, once subordinate to the Communist party, were now in sole charge.
The murders of journalists and human rights activists could not be explained in terms of protecting socialism. Rather, the state was now synonymous with something else: the personal financial interests of Putin and his friends.
As an FSB officer in the 1990s, Litvinenko had been shocked to discover how thoroughly organised crime had penetrated Russia's security organs. In his view, criminal ideology had replaced communist ideology. He was the first to describe Putin's Russia as a mafia state, in which the roles of government, organised crime and the spy agencies had grown indistinguishable.
While serving with the FSB, where his role was akin to that of a detective, Litvinenko had also perfected his observation skills. It was part of his basic training. How to describe the bad guys: their height, build, hair colour and distinguishing features. What they were wearing. Any jewellery. How old. Smoker or non-smoker. And of course their conversation – from the major stuff, such as admissions of guilt, down to trivial details. For example, who offered whom a cup of tea?
When DI Brent Hyatt of Scotland Yard later interviewed Litvinenko, the Russian gave him a full and – in the circumstances, remarkable – account of his meeting with Lugovoi and Kovtun in the Pine Bar. Litvinenko said that Lugovoi approached him in the foyer from the left side and said: "Let's go, we are sitting there." He followed Lugovoi into the bar; Lugovoi had already ordered drinks. Lugovoi sat with his back to the wall; Litvinenko was diagonally across from him on a chair. There were glasses on the table – but no bottles. And "mugs and a teapot".
As Lugovoi knew, Litvinenko did not drink alcohol. Moreover he was hard-up and reluctant to spend any money of his own in a fancy establishment. The barman, Norberto Andrade, approached Litvinenko from behind, and asked him: "Are you going to have anything?" Lugovoi repeated the question and said: "Would you like anything?". Litvinenko said he did not want anything.
Litvinenko told Hyatt: "He [Lugovoi] said, 'OK, well we're going to leave now anyway, so there is still some tea left here, if you want to you can have some.' And then the waiter went away, or I think Andrei asked for a clean cup and he brought it. He left and when there was a cup, I poured some tea out of the teapot, although there was only a little left in the bottom and it made just half a cup. Maybe about 50 grammes.
"I swallowed several times but it was a green tea with no sugar and it was already cold, by the way. I didn't like it for some reason, well, almost cold tea with no sugar, and I didn't drink it any more. Maybe in total I swallowed three or four times." Litvinenko said he didn't finish the cup.
Hyatt: The pot with the tea in it was already there?
Litvinenko: Yes.
Hyatt: How many mugs were on the table when you came in?
Litvinenko: I think three or four cups.
Hyatt: And did Andrei drink any more from the pot in your presence?
Litvinenko: No.
Hyatt: OK, and what happened next?
Litvinenko: Then he said Vadim [Kovtun] is coming here now ... either Vadim or Volodia, I can't remember. I saw him for the second time in my life.
Hyatt: What happened next?
Litvinenko: Next Volodia [Kovtun] took a place at the table on my side, across from Andrei.
The three men discussed their meeting scheduled for the following day at the private security firm Global Risk. In previous months, Litvinenko had tried to supplement his £2,000-a-month MI6 (https://www.theguardian.com/uk/mi6) salary by doing due diligence reports for British firms keen to invest in Russia. The bar was crowded, Litvinenko said. He felt a strong antipathy towards Kovtun. It was only their second encounter. There was something strange about him, Litvinenko thought – as if he were in the midst of some personal torment.
Litvinenko: Volodia [Kovtun] was – seemed to be – very depressed, as if he was very much hungover. He apologised. He said that he hadn't slept for the whole night, that he had just flown in from Hamburg and he wanted to sleep very much and he couldn't stand it any more. But I think he is either an alcoholic or a drug addict. He is a very unpleasant type.
Hyatt: Volodia, how did he know to come to the table? Did Andrei contact him and ask him to come and join you, or was there already an arrangement for him to join you?"
Litvinenko: No ... he [Kovtun], I think he knew in advance. Even possibly they had been sitting before this and maybe he went up to his room.
Hyatt: Just going back to when you had some tea, you didn't ask the waiter for a drink. It was mentioned that there was some tea left. How insistent was Andrei that you have a drink, or was he indifferent? Was he saying, "Go on, go on, have some?" Or didn't he care?
Litvinenko: He said it like that, you know, "If you would like something, order something for yourself, but we're going to be leaving soon. If, if you want some tea, then there is some left here, you can have some of this..."
I could have ordered a drink myself, but he kind of presented in such a way that it's not really need to order. I don't like when people pay for me but in such an expensive hotel, forgive me, I don't have enough money to pay for that."
Hyatt: Did you drink any of the tea in the presence of Volodia?
Litvinenko: No, I drank the tea only when Andrei was sitting opposite me. In Volodia's presence, I wasn't drinking it .... I didn't like that tea.
Hyatt: And after you drank from that pot, did Andrei or Volodia drink anything from that pot?
Litvinenko: No, definitely. Later on, when I left the hotel, I was thinking there was something strange. I had been feeling all the time, I knew that they wanted to kill me.
There is no evidence to say whether it was Kovtun – an ex‑waiter, who once worked in a Hamburg restaurant – or Lugovoi who put polonium in the teapot. From Litvinenko's testimony, it is clear that this was a joint criminal enterprise. Lugovoi would subsequently explain that he could not recall what drinks he had ordered in the Pine Bar. And that Litvinenko had insisted upon their meeting, to which he had reluctantly assented.
Subsequently, police tracked down Lugovoi's bar bill. The order was: three teas, three Gordon's gin, three tonics, one champagne cocktail, one Romeo y Julieta cigar No 1, one Gordon's gin. The tea came to £11.25; the total bill £70.60. Lugovoi was a man who murdered with a certain breezy style.
By this point, Lugovoi and Kovtun must have concluded that their poisoning operation had worked. Litvinenko had drunk the green tea. Not much, admittedly. But, he had drunk. Surely, enough? The meeting lasted 20 minutes. Lugovoi gazed at his watch. He said he was expecting his wife. She appeared in the foyer and, as if on cue, waved her hand, and mouthed: "Let's go, let's go." Lugovoi got up to greet her, and left Litvinenko and Kovtun sitting together at the table.
There was one final, scarcely believable scene. According to Litvinenko, Lugovoi came back to the bar accompanied by his eight-year-old son Igor. Lugovoi introduced him to Litvinenko. He said to Igor: "This is Uncle Sasha, shake his hand."
Igor was a good boy. He obediently shook Litvinenko's hand, the same hand that by now was pulsing with radiation. When police examined Litvinenko's jacket they found massive contamination on the sleeve – Litvinenko had picked up and drunk the tea with his right hand. The party, plus Litvinenko, left the bar. The Lugovoi family and Sokolenko went off to the match. Kovtun declined to go, declaring: "I'm very tired, I want to sleep."
Igor was a good boy. He obediently shook Litvinenko's hand, the same hand that by now was pulsing with radiation
Forensic experts would test the entire bar area, the tables, and crockery. They examined 100 teapots, as well as cups, spoons, saucers, milk jugs. Litvinenko's white ceramic teapot was not difficult to discover – it gave off readings of 100,000 becquerels per centimetre squared. The biggest reading came from the spout. (The teapot was put in the dishwasher afterwards and unknowingly reused for subsequent customers.) The table where they sat registered 20,000 becquerels. Half that, ingested, was enough to kill a person.
(https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ca1e7772c0a87d1f214cd9b6fb6522fe78c8a0fc/53_0_3451_2072/master/3451.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&)
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/19/alexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder#img-3)
Facebook
Twitter (https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Alexander%20Litvinenko%3A%20the%20man%20who%20solved%20his%20own%20murder%20%7C%20Luke%20Harding&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Fjan%2F19%2Falexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder%3FCMP%3Dshare_btn_tw%26page%3Dwith%3Aimg-3%23img-3)
Pinterest (http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?description=Alexander%20Litvinenko%3A%20the%20man%20who%20solved%20his%20own%20murder%20%7C%20Luke%20Harding&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Fjan%2F19%2Falexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder%3Fpage%3Dwith%3Aimg-3%23img-3&media=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.guim.co.uk%2Fca1e7772c0a87d1f214cd9b6fb6522fe78c8a0fc%2F53_0_3451_2072%2F3451.jpg)
Lugovoi and Kovtun at a press conference in Moscow, in 2006. Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/APPolonium was a miasma, a creeping fog. It was found inside the dishwasher, on the floor, till, a coffee strainer handle. There were traces on bottles of Martini and Tia Maria behind the bar, the ice-cream scoop, a chopping board. It turned up on chairs – with large alpha radiation readings from where the three Russians sat – and the piano stool. Whoever sent Lugovoi and Kovtun to ukkk must have known of the risks to others. Apparently they didn't care.
The most crucial piece of evidence was discovered several floors above the Pine Bar, in Kovtun's room, 382. When police forensic teams took apart the bathroom sink they found a mangled clump of debris. The debris was stuck in the sediment trap of the sink's waste pipe. Tests on the clump showed it contained 390,000 becquerels of polonium. The levels were so high that they could only have come from polonium itself.
After laying the poison in Litvinenko's teapot, Kovtun had gone back upstairs to his room. There, in the privacy of the bathroom, he had tipped the rest of the liquid solution down the sink. No one else – other than Lugovoi and Sokolenko – had access to the room. Police concluded that Kovtun had knowingly handled the murder weapon, and afterwards got rid of it. It was an intentional act of disposal.
The science was objective, conclusive and utterly damning. It had the simplicity of undeniable fact. Back in Moscow, in numerous subsequent interviews, Kovtun would claim innocence. He was never able to explain away this piece of evidence: why was the polonium in his bathroom?
Polonium was a miasma, a creeping fog. It was found inside the dishwasher, on the floor, till, a coffee strainer handle
The Russian operation to murder Litvinenko would have had a codename -– thus far unknown. It could finally be marked down as a success. It was the sixth anniversary of Litvinenko's arrival in Britain: 1 November 2000. He did not know it yet, but he was dying. The substance used to kill him had been chosen because the killers believed it could not be detected. The plan was working. From this point on nothing – not even the most gifted medical team from the heavens – could save him.
* * *Seventeen days later, Litvinenko was lying in hospital, mortally ill. His case had baffled medical staff. Eventually, they had alighted on a diagnosis of thallium poisoning. This late stage saw the arrival of Scotland Yard.
To begin with, the British police had a confusing picture – a poisoned Russian who spoke poor English; a baffling plot involving visitors from Moscow; and a swirl of potential crime scenes. Two detectives, DI Brent Hyatt and DS Chris Hoar, from the Met's specialist crime unit, interviewed Litvinenko in the critical care unit on the 16th floor of University College Hospital.He had been admitted as Edwin Redwald Carter, his British pseudonym.He is a "significant witness" in the investigation. There are 18 interviews, lasting eight hours and 57 minutes in total. These conversations stretch out over three days, from the early hours of 18 November until shortly before 9pm on 20 November.
The interview transcripts were kept secret for eight-and-a-half years, hidden in Scotland Yard's case file, and stamped with the word "Restricted". Revealed in 2015, they are remarkable documents. They are, in effect, unique witness statements taken from a ghost. But Litvinenko is no ordinary ghost: he is a ghost who uses his final reserves of energy to solve a chilling murder mystery – his own.
Litvinenko was a highly experienced detective. He knew how investigations worked. He was fastidious too: neatly collating case materials in a file, always employing a hole‑punch. In the interviews, he sets out before the police in dispassionate terms the evidence of who might have poisoned him. He acknowledges: "I cannot blame these people directly because I have no proof."
He is an ideal witness – good with descriptions, heights, details. He draws up a list of suspects. There are three of them: the Italian Mario Scaramella; his business partner Andrei Lugovoi, and Lugovoi's unpleasant Russian companion, whose name Litvinenko struggles to remember, and to whom he refers wrongly as "Volodia" or "Vadim".
Hyatt begins recording at eight minutes after midnight on 18 November. He introduces himself and his colleague DS Hoar. Litvinenko gives his own name and address.
Hoar then says: "Thank you very much for that, Edwin. Edwin, we're here investigating an allegation that somebody has poisoned you in an attempt to kill you." Hoar says that doctors have told him Edwin is suffering from "extremely high levels of thallium" and "that is the cause of this illness".
He continues: "Can I ask you to tell us what you think has happened to you and why?"
Medical staff had pre-briefed Hoar that Litvinenko spoke good English. Hoar discovered that was not true. After this first conversation, an interpreter was brought in.
Litvinenko is still able to give a full account of his career in the FSB, his deepening conflict with the agency. He also talks of his "good relationship" with the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jun/09/anna-politkovskaya-murder-two-men-guilty-russia), another Putin enemy, and her fear that she was in danger. In spring 2006, they met in a branch of Cafe Nero in ukkk. Litvinenko asked her what was wrong. She told him: "Alexander, I'm very afraid," and said that every time she said goodbye to her daughter and son she had the feeling she was looking at them "for the last time". He urged her to leave Russia. She said she could not – her parents were old, she had kids. In October 2006, Politkovskaya was shot dead in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment.
Politkovskaya's murder left Litvinenko "very, very shocked", he says, adding: "I lost of a lot of my friends", and that human life in Russia is cheap He tells detectives about his speech in the Frontline Club, a press club in ukkk, the previous month, in which he accused Putin publicly of having Politkovskaya killed.
From time to time, the interviews stop: the tape runs out; nurses come in to administer drugs; Litvinenko, suffering from diarrhoea, has to go to the bathroom. Mostly, though, he battles on. He tells Hyatt: "Meeting you is very important for my case."
(https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3c53dca617ad2cf41c6685bbc9db06a0dafc5bf3/244_22_2134_3201/master/2134.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&)
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/19/alexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder#img-4)
Facebook
Twitter (https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Alexander%20Litvinenko%3A%20the%20man%20who%20solved%20his%20own%20murder%20%7C%20Luke%20Harding&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Fjan%2F19%2Falexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder%3FCMP%3Dshare_btn_tw%26page%3Dwith%3Aimg-4%23img-4)
Pinterest (http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?description=Alexander%20Litvinenko%3A%20the%20man%20who%20solved%20his%20own%20murder%20%7C%20Luke%20Harding&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Fjan%2F19%2Falexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder%3Fpage%3Dwith%3Aimg-4%23img-4&media=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.guim.co.uk%2F3c53dca617ad2cf41c6685bbc9db06a0dafc5bf3%2F244_22_2134_3201%2F2134.jpg)
The journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a friend of Litvinenko, was shot dead in 2006.
Photograph: Fyodor Savintsev/APIt is the two Russians who are at the centre of his suspicions. Litvinenko recounts his meeting with them at the Millennium. He says that he had not been to the hotel before and that he had to find it on a map. He insists this "special" information remain secret – not to be made public or shared with his wife Marina. "These people, it's interesting. Most interesting," he muses.
With time running out, Litvinenko is working furiously to solve the conundrum. The transcript reads:
Carter - :[/b] Only these three people can poison me.
Hyatt: These three.
Carter: Mario, Vadim [Kovtun] and Andrei.
There are moments when it appears that there are three officers hard at work: Hyatt, Hoar and Litvinenko, the punctilious ex-cop. After four or five hours of interviews, the case begins to cohere. The investigation gains new momentum. Information is passed back to SO15, the counter-terrorist command at Scotland Yard, headed by Det Supt Clive Timmons.
Litvinenko explains that his most important papers are kept at home, in the lower shelf of a large cupboard. The papers include critical information on Putin, and the people around him, from newspapers and other sources, as well as background on Russian criminal gangs. He gives the police his email password and bank account. He tells them where they can find receipts for two Orange sim cards, bought for £20 from a store in Bond Street – in a black leather wallet on his bedside table. Litvinenko explains that he gave one of the sims to Lugovoi; they used these secret numbers to communicate. He hands over his diary.
Ever helpful, Litvinenko phones his wife and asks her to locate a photo of Lugovoi at their home. Hyatt suspends the interview to secure the photograph. Lugovoi is now a prime suspect. Litvinenko describes him like this: "Andrei is a pure eureurasiaan, and even he looks a little bit like me, sort of. The same type as like me ... I am 1m 77cm – 1m 78cm, so he is probably 1m 76cm. He is two years younger than me, light hair." He has a small, "almost invisible" bald patch.
The transcript reads:
Hyatt: Edwin, do you consider Andrei to be a friend of yours, or a business associate? What, how do you describe your relationship with Andrei?
Carter: ... He is not a friend. He is a business partner.
At the end of his second day of interviews, on 19 November, Litvinenko describes getting a lift home with a Chechen friend named Akhmed Zakayev: "Now the paradoxical thing is that I was still feeling very well but then somehow I had some kind of feeling that something might happen to me in the nearest future. Maybe subconsciously." The detectives turn off the tape. It is a full and frank account of events leading up to Litvinenko's poisoning – with one exception. During these two days he does not mention his secret life and his job working for British intelligence. It is only the next day that he speaks of his meeting on 31 October with his MI6 handler "Martin", in the basement cafe of the Waterstone's bookshop on Piccadilly. Litvinenko is chary – evidently reluctant to discuss his undercover role.
Carter: On 31 October at about 4pm, I had a meeting arranged with a person about whom I wouldn't really like to talk here because I have some commitments. You can contact that person on that long telephone number which I gave you.
Hyatt: Did you meet with that person, Edwin?
Carter: Yes.
Hyatt: Edwin, it could be absolutely vital that you tell us who that person is.
Carter: You can call him and he will tell you.
The interview abruptly stops. It's 5.16pm. Hyatt dials the long telephone number, reaches "Martin", and tells him that Litvinenko is gravely ill in hospital, the victim of an apparent poisoning by two mysterious Russians.
(https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/28e896acfa2f2a794fe3caea35dea69586f5f082/0_86_3000_1800/master/3000.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&)
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/19/alexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder#img-5)
Facebook
Twitter (https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Alexander%20Litvinenko%3A%20the%20man%20who%20solved%20his%20own%20murder%20%7C%20Luke%20Harding&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Fjan%2F19%2Falexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder%3FCMP%3Dshare_btn_tw%26page%3Dwith%3Aimg-5%23img-5)
Pinterest (http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?description=Alexander%20Litvinenko%3A%20the%20man%20who%20solved%20his%20own%20murder%20%7C%20Luke%20Harding&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Fjan%2F19%2Falexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder%3Fpage%3Dwith%3Aimg-5%23img-5&media=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.guim.co.uk%2F28e896acfa2f2a794fe3caea35dea69586f5f082%2F0_86_3000_1800%2F3000.jpg)
Police investigate Litvinenko's poisoning at the Millennium hotel in central ukkk. Photograph: Alessia Pierdomenico/ReutersIt appears to be the first time that MI6 – an organisation famed for its professionalism – learns of Litvinenko's plight. Litvinenko, of course, was not a full-time employee. But he was a salaried informant, with his own encrypted mobile phone and MI6-provided passport. The agency appears not to have classified Litvinenko as being at risk, despite numerous threatening phone calls from Moscow and a firebomb attack on his north ukkk home in 2004.
MI6's reaction is unclear. The British government has still refused to release the relevant files. One can imagine panic and embarrassment. And the agency shifting into full-blown crisis mode. The transcripts show that after speaking to DI Hyatt, "Martin" scrambled to Litvinenko's hospital bedside. He talked to his poisoned agent, and left around 7.15pm. The police interview then resumes; the final exchanges deal with earlier threats against Litvinenko from the Kremlin and its emissaries. The detectives ask if there is anything Litvinenko would like to add:
Hoar: Can you think of anybody else who may wish to do this sort of harm to you?
Carter: I have no doubt who wanted it, and I often receive threats from these people. This was done ... I have no doubt whatsoever that this was done by the Russian Secret Services. Having knowledge of the system I know that the order about such a killing of a citizen of another country on its territory, especially if it is something to do with Great Britain, could have been given by only one person.
Hyatt: Would you like to tell us who that person is, sir? Edwin?
Carter: That person is the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin. And if ... you of course know, while he's still president, you won't be able to prosecute him as the main person who gave that order, because he is the president of a huge country crammed with nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons. But I have no doubt whatsoever that as soon as the power changes in Russia or when the first officer of Russian Special Services defects to the west he will say the same. He will say that I have been poisoned by the Russian Special Services on Putin's order.
* * *Litvinenko's condition was rapidly deteriorating. On 20 November, the same day as his last police interview, doctors moved him to intensive care. There it was easier to monitor him and, if necessary, to intervene. Litvinenko's heart rate was becoming abnormal; his major organs failing.
The medics treating him were in uncharted territory. Litvinenko's case was problematic: his symptoms were not consistent with thallium poisoning. He had severe bone marrow failure and gut damage, which fitted. But he lacked one key symptom of thallium poisoning – peripheral neuropathy, pain or numbness in his fingers and feet. "It was still a bit of a mystery," one doctor said.
Meanwhile, those close to Litvinenko were reluctantly concluding that he was unlikely to survive.
The Kremlin would subsequently accuse Litvinenko's friend Alex Goldfarb, and Boris Berezovsky of cynically exploiting him, as part of their long-running public relations campaign against Putin. In fact, Litvinenko made it abundantly clear – as the Scotland Yard transcripts show – that he held Putin personally responsible for his poisoning. And he wanted to send this message to the world.
Litvinenko's lawyer, George Menzies, began drafting a statement on his behalf. Menzies later said that the ideas in it were wholly Litvinenko's. "I was doing my best, in personal terms, to represent what I truly believed to be Sasha's state of mind and sentiment," he said. Its themes – Litvinenko's pride in being British, his love of his wife, his belief as to the source of his illness – mirrored what his client thought, Menzies said.
Goldfarb and Menzies took the draft to the hospital. They showed it to Marina. Her reaction was negative. She believed her husband would pull through and that writing a last testament was tantamount to giving up on him. Pragmatically, they told her: "Better to do it now than later."
Menzies consulted with Tim Bell, chairman of the ukkk PR firm Bell Pottinger. Bell's company had worked for Berezovsky since 2002, helping the exiled oligarch through various legal scrapes, and had assisted the Litvinenkos as well. Bell said he thought the text was too gloomy and read like a "deathbed statement." "I didn't think it was the right thing to do because I still hoped and believed Sasha would live," Bell said.
Goldfarb read out the A4 sheet to Litvinenko in intensive care, translating it from English to Russian. At one point Goldfarb made a movement with his arms, mimicking the flight of an angel flapping its wings. Litvinenko endorsed the statement in its entirety, confirming: "This is exactly what I want to say." Litvinenko then signed and dated it – 21 November 2006, his signature trailing off into a black swirl.
The statement accused Litvinenko's one-time FSB boss of murder, and ended: "You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life."
TV cameras and media had gathered outside the hospital's main gate, waiting for news.
Sixteen floors above them, Litvinenko asked Goldfarb if he was a big story. He was – but not much was known about Litvinenko, other than that he was a prominent critic of Putin's, and desperately ill. Goldfarb said: "Sasha, if you really want the message to be seriously put across, we need a photo." Marina was against the idea, and saw it as an invasion of privacy. But Litvinenko agreed, and said: "Yes, if you think it's needed, let's do it."
Goldfarb rang Bell Pottinger and spoke to Jennifer Morgan, Bell's liaison. Morgan in turn called a photographer she knew, Natasja Weitsz. Weitsz arrived at the hospital and was escorted upstairs past a police guard. She was with Litvinenko for mere minutes. He pushed his green hospital gown to one side so as to reveal the electro-cardiagram sensors attached to his heart. Weitsz shot a couple of frames of Litvinenko: bald, gaunt and defiant, staring with cornflower-blue eyes directly at the camera lens. The image was cropped around its haunting subject. It went round the world.
(https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/6d16601197e3655d05b1a75671ed746a4850b1e5/1275_464_1237_1855/master/1237.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&)
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/19/alexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder#img-6)
Facebook
Twitter (https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Alexander%20Litvinenko%3A%20the%20man%20who%20solved%20his%20own%20murder%20%7C%20Luke%20Harding&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Fjan%2F19%2Falexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder%3FCMP%3Dshare_btn_tw%26page%3Dwith%3Aimg-6%23img-6)
Pinterest (http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?description=Alexander%20Litvinenko%3A%20the%20man%20who%20solved%20his%20own%20murder%20%7C%20Luke%20Harding&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2016%2Fjan%2F19%2Falexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder%3Fpage%3Dwith%3Aimg-6%23img-6&media=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.guim.co.uk%2F6d16601197e3655d05b1a75671ed746a4850b1e5%2F1275_464_1237_1855%2F1237.jpg)
Marina Litvinenko in 2012. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty ImagesBy the next day, Wednesday 22 November, doctors treating Litvinenko had scrapped their diagnosis. Their notes read: "We DO NOT feel this gentleman has or had inorganic thallium poisoning."
At midday, a top-level meeting was convened at the Met's counter-terrorism command. It involved SO15 detectives,ledby Det Supt Timmons, medical staff, a scientist from the UK's atomic weapons establishment, the forensic science service and Dr Nick Gent from Porton Down, the UK's military science facility. The latest urine test had revealed the presence of a new radioactive isotope – polonium-210. But this was marked down as an anomaly, caused by the plastic container used to carry the sample.
According to Timmons, the specialists discussed five theories that might explain Litvinenko's baffling poisoning. Most were esoteric. The experts decided to investigate further and to send a litre of urine to Aldermaston.
Back in the intensive care ward, Litvinenko was drifting in and out of consciousness. The Russian-German film-maker Andrei Nekrasov visited him. Nekrasov had previously conducted several interviews with Litvinenko; he shot the video on condition that it would be released only with Marina's approval. Litvinenko lies on his bed, a vanquished soul, around whom the world is darkening. A drip is attached to his nose; his cheeks are hollow; his eyes are open – just. There is pale afternoon light.
"He was conscious, but was very, very weak," Marina said. "I spent almost all day sitting close to him, [to] make him just be calm and more relaxed." At 8pm Marina got up to leave, and told her husband: "Sasha, unfortunately I have to go."
She said: "He smiled so sadly, and I started to feel I'm guilty because I'm leaving him, and I just said: 'Don't worry, tomorrow morning I will come and everything will be fine.'"
Litvinenko whispered back to her: "I love you so much."
At midnight the hospital called to say that Litvinenko had gone into cardiac arrest, not once but twice. The medics managed to resuscitate him. Marina returned to University College Hospital, getting a lift with Zakayev, and found her husband unconscious and on a life-support machine. She spent the following day, 23 November, at his side; Litvinenko was in an induced coma. That evening she went back to Muswell Hill. An hour after arriving home the phone rang. It was the hospital telling her urgently to return.
Litvinenko suffered a third cardiac arrest at 8.51pm. The consultant on duty, Dr James Down, tried to revive him but at 9.21pm pronounced him dead. When Marina and Anatoly arrived at the hospital they were taken not to the ward but to a side room. Ten or 15 minutes later, the doctor told them that Litvinenko had died. He added: "Would you like to see Sasha?" to which Marina replied: "Of course."
For the first time in several days, Marina was allowed to touch and kiss her husband; Anatoly ran from the room after half a minute.
Six hours before Litvinenko's death, at about 3pm, Timmons received a phone call from the atomic weapons establishment. It had the results from the latest tests. They confirmed that Litvinenko was "terribly contaminated", as Timmons put it, with radioactive polonium.
• A Very Expensive Poison by Luke Harding will be published in March by Guardian Faber (£12.99). To order a copy for £7.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com (https://bookshop.theguardian.com/catalog/product/view/id/381398/s/very-expensive-poison/?utm_source=editoriallink&utm_medium=merch&utm_campaign=article) or call 0330 333 6846. Luke Harding will be in conversation with Marina Litvinenko (https://membership.theguardian.com/event/guardian-live-the-litvinenko-inquiry-20857915587) at a Guardian Live event on Thursday 17 March. Tickets £10. His previous non-fiction books include Mafia State and The Snowden Files.
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread (https://twitter.com/@gdnlongread), or sign up to the long read weekly email here (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/jul/20/sign-up-to-the-long-read-email).