I’ve been a little slow in posting this update to l’affaire Litvinenko. Back in May the Independent ran a follow-up, tallying up 18 months later what we know and still don’t know about how Alexander Litvinenko died.
That article pointed to a piece by Edward Jay Epstein in the New York Sun from March of this year. Epstein, you will recall, almost immediately expressed doubts about the official version of the matter, bruited in the British press—doubts that I shared, along with his suspicions about who was probably behind it. He was barely audible amid the braying of the American commentariat, which echoed the UK press in pointing the finger of blame at none other than the president of Russia at the time, Vladimir Putin.
Epstein traveled to Russia to talk with prosecutors there. In the process, he was able to view the materials the British government supplied in support of its request that the Russians extradite Scotland Yard’s prime suspect, Andrei Lugovoi. Here’s the thumbnail version of the Epstein article:
- The polonium-210 could have come from almost anywhere (not just Russia but “America, Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Taiwan, North Korea, or any other country whose nuclear reactors have not been inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency”).
- The “Putin hit job” line came from Berezovsky-funded sources; Litvinenko himself was heavily subsidized by Berezovsky.
- The British authorities did not provide an autopsy report to the Russians. “Like Sherlock Holmes’s clue of the dog that didn’t bark,* this omission was illuminating in itself,” Epstein writes.
- The “radiation trail” is unclear, and “in London the trail was inexplicably erratic.” Yes, it really does matter.
- Litvinenko “initially said he believed that he had been poisoned at his lunch with [the Italian ne’er-do-well Mario] Scaramella at the Itsu restaurant. Even one week after he had been in the hospital, he gave a bedside BBC radio interview in which he still pointed to that meeting, saying Mr. Scaramella ‘gave me some papers … after several hours I felt sick with symptoms of poisoning.’ At no time did he even mention his later meeting at the Pine Bar with Mr. Lugovoi.” Let alone Putin—that accusation came later.
- Epstein’s hypothesis: “Litvinenko came in contact with a Polonium-210 smuggling operation and was, either wittingly or unwittingly, exposed to it. … His murky operations, whatever their purpose, involved his seeking contacts in one of the most lawless areas in the former Soviet Union, the Pankisi Gorge, which had become a center for arms smuggling. He had also dealt with people accused of everything from money laundering to trafficking in nuclear components. These activities may have brought him, or his associates, in contact with a sample of Polonium-210, which then, either by accident or by design, contaminated and killed him.”
And there we leave it, for now.
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*See Conan Doyle’s “Silver Blaze.” I happen to be in the midst of a romp through all the Sherlock Holmes stories. At the end of the very first tale, we find a quote from a newspaper account of the case called “A Study in Scarlet”:
Needless to say, they were, in fact, clueless. [back]
