That night, Litvinenko twice had to be resuscitated after his heart stopped. Hospital staff summoned Marina, then after a few hours sent her home.
The following evening, the phone rang again in the Litvinenko home. It was the hospital. “Come quickly,” the voice at the other end told Marina.
Though her husband was unconscious, Marina arrived in time to say good-bye.
At 9:21 p.m., Litvinenko was declared dead.
Outside University College Hospital, Alex Goldfarb read a statement that he said Litvinenko had dictated two days earlier. Addressed directly to Vladimir Putin, it said in part, “You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty, or any civilized value. You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilized men and women. 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. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.”
The stunning photograph by Natasja Weitsz and the ghastly manner of his death generated international sympathy for Litvinenko and outrage toward Russia. Many viewed his life story and the way it ended as epic tragedy, and in Hollywood there was a flurry of competition to put it all on the big screen. The contest was won by Johnny Depp, who left open the possibility that he himself would play the slain Russian defector.
What killed Litvinenko? When his doctors saw his hair falling out and his white blood cell count dropping, they had immediately suspected radiation poisoning. So they tested for what they thought to be the most likely culprits—gamma and beta radiation. Finding no evidence of either in his blood, they assumed that they were on the wrong trail. A day before Litvinenko died, however, someone at Britain’s Health Protection Agency had a hunch. Samples of Litvinenko’s urine were sent to the Atomic Weapons Establishment, or AWE, an agency uniquely equipped to solve the mystery.
AWE was just what its name implied—it developed and kept watch over Britain’s nuclear weapons arsenal. At AWE, scientists tested the urine samples for alpha-emitting elements, the rarer, relatively large, and slow-moving particles that, unlike gamma and beta radiation, cannot pass through objects but pack a wallop when they are taken into the body.
The tests came back positive for polonium-210, an alpha emitter.
Around six p.m. on November 23, the news was passed along to Litvinenko’s doctors. But it was too late. He died about three hours later.
The AWE discovery was important in more ways than one. If Litvinenko had not been in such good health when he was first stricken, he probably would have died much sooner. There would have been no urgency to continue testing for radiation poisoning, and the isotope that killed him probably would have gone undetected. Without that clue, investigators might not have found their way to the evidence that Litvinenko had been murdered. Litvinenko himself died without learning the truth.
His doctors could be excused for not knowing that their patient’s body had been ravaged by a few specks of a nuclear isotope so arcane that scientists were startled to hear of its use as a murder weapon. Once upon a time, polonium-210 was something of a household name, at least as far as known elements go. It was discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie, and named for her native Poland. Some called it the deadliest element, gram for gram, on the periodic table. A researcher working for Marie Curie died from exposure to polonium. So did Curie’s own daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, who, like her mother, was a winner of a Nobel Prize.
During World War II and through the 1960s, polonium-210 was used as a triggering device for nuclear weapons. Mixed with beryllium, it emits a neutron and starts the fission process. But by the early 1970s, the substance had fallen out of favor among atomic bomb makers because its relatively fast deterioration rate meant it had to be replaced every few months. More recently its use had been more benign—to eliminate static in smoke detectors and dust from film and lenses, for example. The commercial market’s demand for polonium-210 was so small that its entire global production was just one hundred grams a year—almost all manufactured in Russia and then exported to the United States.
Few were even aware of its existence. Polonium-210 was on no published list of potential poisons, and as far as I could tell had never been used as one. The silvery isotope was so exotic that, even five years after the imposition of heightened security measures in response to the 9/11 attacks, airports around the world were ill equipped to detect it. It was absent from the usual lists of weapons of mass destruction. Its properties were so peculiar that, unlike more familiar radioactive elements such as plutonium-239, it could be stored safely in, say, an ordinary cigarette pack or an aspirin bottle. Anyone with a mind to—and the right credentials—could slip it through almost any ostensibly secure environment.
It was unclear why the isotope had never been employed in any known assassination before Litvinenko’s. Yes, there were far simpler and cheaper methods of killing. But if an assassin favored the use of radioactive poison, polonium-210 was an ideal candidate. First was its novelty, meaning it was less likely to attract suspicion than its brother thallium, which assassins, including the Soviets, had used in its nonradioactive form numerous times over the decades. Second was its nature to wander: Once it invaded an organism, polonium-210 went in many different directions. This set it apart from isotopes that gravitated toward, say, kidneys or bone marrow, thus inflicting largely localized and treatable damage. And polonium-210 threw off its mass with astonishing speed—it dispensed half its atomic particles in just 138 days, a barrage superior to almost any other relatively stable isotope. By comparison, an alternative element such as americium took 432 years to accomplish the same task. A terrorist could release polonium-210 into a crowd in an enclosed space, through food or air, and cause many fatalities in a compressed period of time, with no one learning the cause—and with reduced odds of being caught.
The few scientists familiar with polonium-210 struggled for metaphors to describe its agonizing effects. Perhaps the most chilling likened the relatively large atomic particles it released to bullets, firing away mercilessly at Litvinenko’s soft tissue. Another evoked a football image, the particles knocking over cells like a rampaging fullback flattening every defender in his path. All said, polonium-210 was many times more hazardous than poisons usually associated with excruciating death, such as hydrogen cyanide.
In Litvinenko’s case, once the isotope had reached his stomach, it began to shoot off particles in a ferocious attack on his intestinal lining. Internal bleeding resulted, causing him to feel pain and nausea. By the end of the first day, up to half the poison was lodging in his spleen, kidneys, liver, lymph nodes, and bone marrow. It was delivering a massive punch to his red blood cells, whose natural response was to stop multiplying, and his bone marrow stopped replenishing his body with new blood cells. Ultimately, his organs were ripped apart and his immune system rendered inoperable.
In the early hours of the day after Litvinenko’s death, British police and AWE scientists appeared at the family home. They told Marina to pack her things—she had to get out, and probably wouldn’t be coming back. She wondered what the fuss was about, until they told her for the first time that a nuclear poison had been used to kill her husband.
“You have to understand that we’ve never encountered this before, that we don’t even know what it is, and we don’t know what the consequences will be,” said one of the emergency workers.