Smoking out the Litvinenko killer

They say the Litvinenko poisoning case fascinates writers rather more than it grabs readers -- American readers, at least. Americans seem confused by all those long, hard-to-pronounce foreign names.

C'mon, folks -- this is a murder mystery. A spy story. Lots of suspects. Lots of colorful, off-the-wall characters. Not far beneath the surface, we have the tale of a billionaire crook who wants to take over what used to be (and may be again) the second superpower. Behind the scenes we have a band of manipulators who want to engineer a new cold war.

And if that's not enough to capture your attention, we have waitress Ela Malek, who may have received an accidental dosing. She's really pretty.

One of the oddities of the case is that the natural suspects have either become sick themselves or have shown evidence of exposure to polonium-210, the presumed murder substance. In fact, traces of the stuff have been found in the damnedest places -- cars, airplanes, apartments, restaurants. No-one has come up with a linear storyline which would explain how these contaminations might have occurred.

Larisa Alexandrovna made the interesting suggestion that the substance was hidden in a cigarette, or in a pack of cigs. This theory would explain why anyone near Alexander "Sasha" Litvinenko might show trace amounts of polonium-210. However, published reports (see here) inform us that the substance spread out from Litvinenko's gastrointestinal tract, suggesting ingestion.

Nevertheless, the haze of tobacco smoke envelopes this case. It turns out that polonium-210, erroneously considered a rare substance, pervades the tobacco supply. See here and here:

Tobacco crops grown in the United States are fertilized by law with phosphates rich in radium 226. In addition, many soils have a natural radium 226 content. Radium 226 breaks down into two long lived 'daughter' elements -- lead 210 and polonium 210. These radioactive particles become airborne, and attach themselves to the fine hairs on tobacco leaves.

Studies have shown that lead 210 and polonium 210 deposits accumulate in the bodies of people exposed to cigarette smoke. Data collected in the late 1970's shows that smokers have three times as much of these elements in their lower lungs as non smokers. Smokers also show a greater accumulation of lead 210 and polonium 210 in their skeletons,though no studies have been conducted to link these deposits with bone cancer. Polonium 210 is the only component of cigarette smoke which has produced tumors by itself in inhalation experiments with animals.

Might this contamination play a part in all the polonium traces mentioned in various news accounts? Just how would investigators "weed out" (so to speak) tobacco as a source of the polonium they've found?

More intriguingly, might the plotters have used their knowledge of polonium-210's near-ubiquity (among smokers, at least) as a way of covering their tracks?

Consider the recent case of Litvinenko business associate Dmitry Kovtun, who had met with the victim in October. (The fact that Litvinenko's business was invariably quite shady may or may not tell us something about Kovtun.) Russian and British investigators met Kovtun in Moscow a few days ago. At some point toward the end of the interview, Kovtun suddenly became very ill, fell into a coma, and was rushed off to the hospital.

What happened next is still being sorted out. A flurry of reports informed the world that Kovtun was and is in "critical condition." His lawyer, however, said that his client remains in fine health. A lawyer for another Kovtun business partner, Andrei Lugovoi (another spooked-up pal to Litvinenko, another suspect in the murder, and yet another potential poisoning victim) has labelled all news accounts of Kovtun's poisoning a "provocation."

Provocation. That is an awfully suggestive word.

I don't mean to sound overly cynical, especially concerning the health of a man who is, as far as I know, completely innocent. But the timing of this latest illness, if illness it be, seems awful damned suspicious. Are we really to believe that Kovtun went into a coma during an interview with the FSB and MI6...? He was perfectly fine for weeks, and he is reportedly fine now -- yet he suddenly keeled over while "the Man" grilled him. Does that seem likely to you?

Listen closely. Somewhere in the distance, you can hear the voice of Redd Foxx as Fred Sanford: "This is the big one! I'm coming to join you, 'Lizabeth!"

Seems to me that we should consider the possibility that polonium-210 traces will be found on any person who acts sick -- if that person is a smoker or lives with a smoker.

Worth noting: Kovtun also kept an apartment in Hamburg, Germany. Naturally, the German cops started investigating.

No radiation has been detected in Russian spy-turned-businessman Dmitry Kovtun's Hamburg apartment, but his ex-wife's flat in the suburb of Pinneberg has proved contaminated.

This little-noted, but highly suggestive, paragraph suggests two notions:

1. The ex- is a smoker.

2. Kovtun is the killer. He decided to deal with the ex- after dispatching Sasha.

I don't take the last notion seriously. The first, however...

Well, let's just say that right now, I'm thinking of shopping this story around Hollywood as "THE ELA MALEK STORY!" With a special guest apperance by Alexander Litvinenko.