by Luke Harding
In September 1957, a cooling tank storing tens of thousands of tonnes of dissolved nuclear waste overheated and blew up. A cloud of radioactive material was set free. It contaminated over 300 square miles. Radiation was found in the Arctic Sea. It was one of the worst accidents of the nuclear age, on a par with the disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima. In 1967, there was another catastrophe when Lake Karachay, used as a mid-level nuclear waste dump, dried out. Wind threw radioactive dust over a huge area.
The Soviet authorities responded to these accidents predictably, with denial and cover-up. (It took thirty years before Moscow acknowledged the Kyshtym disaster, as the 1957 Mayak explosion was known.) Troops were sent to evacuate some villages; soldiers fenced off the Techa river with barbed wire. But locals weren’t told what had happened: the leak was a state secret. In summer, children still swam in the river; farmers watered their cattle; women drew water from the wells; locals cut hay.
Gradually, the toxic legacy from Mayak became impossible for the Kremlin to conceal. People were dying. The disasters of the fifties and sixties exposed at least half a million to radiation poisoning. Symptoms were ubiquitous: intestinal illnesses, nose bleeds, food allergies. There were respiratory and skin problems. Cancers were rife. In some of the worst-affected areas, it was unusual for villagers to live beyond fifty. Some were dead at twenty. Chronic radiation sickness affected future generations.
Paula Chertok, who grew up in Chelyabinsk, and later emigrated to the US, recalls: ‘Nearly everyone I know from Chelyabinsk had cancer of one sort or another. Many had blood disorders. My mother’s best friend, a doctor, died young from leukaemia. Every woman I know had breast cancer. And we didn’t live in the villages, we lived in Chelyabinsk proper. The environment was utterly contaminated and we never knew a thing.’ She added: ‘We drank the water, played near the rivers and lakes.’
By the 1990s, the local population was still suffering from health problems, although the rules for visiting closed nuclear cities were somewhat relaxed. However, finding once-secret Snezhinsk is something of a challenge: the turn-off point to the town isn’t marked with any signs. A high and rather rickety wooden fence surrounds Snezhinsk, with a checkpoint manned 24/7 at its only exit and entrance. A sign in a field in Russian and English warns non-authorised visitors not to go any further.
Meanwhile, the state that built Mayak disappeared. The demise of the Soviet Union made life difficult for all Russians, but for scientists it was a disaster. State institutions were unable to pay their employees; some moonlighted as taxi drivers; others flogged their possessions on the street. Atomic-weapons laboratories continued to function and academic visitors noted a high level of professionalism still. But with the apparent end of the Cold War their future looked bleak.
It was a moment when Boris Yeltsin’s Russia believed in dialogue with the outside world; after all, Moscow was broke. In the US and Europe there were worries about what might happen to the former Soviet Union’s nuclear technicians. Worst-case scenario: the experts would go off and work in Iran, Iraq or Libya. Russian scientists were given grants. A team from Princeton University advised closed cities like Sarov on how to transform their production lines from nuclear bomb manufacture to non-weapons activity.
Some of these US–Russian initiatives worked. The secret Avangard laboratory in Sarov, for example, mothballed weapons production and began manufacturing civilian radioactive isotopes instead. It exported them to foreign markets, including America. This was, in effect, a job-creation scheme for the town’s shrinking scientific workforce, down from 4,800 employees in the 1980s to 3,300 by 2000.
Avangard became the only place in the world where one particular isotope was made. It had been manufactured there since 1952. Not many people had noticed. The quantities involved were tiny, the export market practically non-existent. But then the isotope was very rare and highly unusual: an intensely radioactive silvercoloured metal.
Polonium.
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On 18 July 1898 Marie and Pierre Curie discovered polonium while experimenting with the mineral pitchblende. Pitchblende contained uranium. They repeatedly heated it, and dissolved the residue in acid. This process allowed them to isolate a new and unknown substance. It had extraordinary properties. It was 400 times more radioactive than uranium. Curie called this new element polonium.
The name was in tribute to Curie’s lost homeland, Poland, which hadn’t existed as an independent state since the late eighteenth century. Three imperial powers – Russia, Prussia and Habsburg Hungary – had partitioned it into non-existence. Curie’s family actively supported Polish nationalist movements; her father, a mathematics and physics teacher, was sacked from his job for pro-Polish sentiments. It would take two decades, strikes and street battles in Warsaw and Lodz in 1905, plus a world war, before Poland was reconstituted in 1918 as a sovereign territory.
Polonium was so rare it was impossible to make in any quantity. There were 100 microgrammes of polonium per ton of uranium ore. In the 1930s scientists found that under the right conditions they could manufacture polonium in a nuclear reactor. The technique involved irradiating another element, bismuth or Bi, by bombarding it with neutrons. (Specifically, Bi-209 absorbs a neutron and becomes Bi-210. It then beta-decays to Polonium-210, or Po-210.)
An isotope is a particular version of an element, depending on the number of neutrons. This resulting isotope was strange. Po-210 emits extraordinarily high levels of alpha particles, one of three types of radiation. A single gram produces 140 watts of energy, an enormous amount. Polonium is a source of much weaker gamma radiation. The element has a half-life of 138 days, which means that over this period half of the material will decay.
The right equipment can detect tiny quantities of polonium, so intense is its emission of alpha particles. It’s possible to detect amounts as small as a few picograms, one millionth of a millionth of a gram.
In the century since the Curies’ discovery, polonium never found much of a foothold in the real world. Nuclear states including the US, USSR, UK and France used polonium as a trigger for the first generation of nuclear bombs; it had a niche role in the Soviet space programme. In 1970, Moscow sent Lunokhod 1 – an ingenious space rover that looked like a giant bathtub on wheels – to the moon. (It’s still there.) During the lunar nights, Po-210 kept its components warm.
By the 1970s, polonium was more or less obsolete. Weapons scientists replaced it as a trigger with a more efficient tritium ‘gun’. State-run nuclear laboratories in the US, UK and Canada stopped making polonium. (In the 1950s and 1960s Britain produced it at civilian nuclear sites. According to the defence ministry in London, any surviving stocks would have completely decayed to Pb-206 – lead – by the early 1980s.) China abandoned polonium in the 1990s.
The only country that continued to produce it was the Russian Federation. The Avangard facility exported Po-210 on a commercial basis, for use in anti-static devices. The amounts involved were extremely small.
By the time Lugovoi and Kovtun came to kill Litvinenko in London in 2006, polonium was something of a forgotten chemical oddity. It was present on the periodic table, hanging in dusty chemistry classrooms, atomic number 84, found between bismuth and astatine, marked with a hazard sign.
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Faced with what looked like a mini-nuclear bomb, a case with obvious political and diplomatic implications, and an international media frenzy, the British government sought expert advice on polonium. Where had it come from? Was it possible to buy polonium on the open market? How much would it cost? Did the UK have its own stockpiles? Could criminal gangs be involved? And just how dangerous was it?
One knowledgeable source was Norman Dombey, an emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the University of Sussex, set on a pleasant campus above the seaside town of Brighton. Dombey had published about a hundred scientific papers and was an authority on the nuclear weapons programmes of the UK, US and former Soviet Union. He also knew Russian. In 1962–3 he spent a year at M
oscow state university on one of the first academic exchanges with the USSR, when he visited Soviet scientific institutions. He went back to Moscow in 1988 during Glasnost. He invited the nuclear scientist turned dissident Sakharov – by this point recalled by Mikhail Gorbachev from internal exile in Gorky – to the UK to collect an honorary degree. In 1992, Dombey visited the St Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute. Subsequently he toured other physics institutions in Russia, as well as Armenia and Georgia, where professional scientific life had collapsed.
White-haired, approachable, lucid, modest, Dombey displayed a credibility that was enhanced by the fact that he was one of very few who predicted that Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. In September 2002, in the run-up to the Iraq war, he wrote an article entitled ‘Saddam’s Nuclear Incapability’. His thesis – there was no nuclear threat from Baghdad – contradicted the apocalyptic assessments coming from the Bush–Cheney administration in Washington, as well as from its ally in London, Tony Blair. Dombey, as history shows, was right.
The professor’s report on polonium – originally commissioned by Marina Litvinenko – was disturbing. The only comfort for investigators was that polonium was so intensively radioactive it was easy to track. The trail of those who brought it to London could be ‘easily established’, he believed.
The bad news was that what investigators were dealing with was an extremely hazardous substance – dangerous to handle in even milligram or microgram amounts, and requiring special equipment and strict control. Weight for weight, polonium was 2.5 x 10 to the 11 times as toxic as hydrocyanic acid.
Dombey’s suspicion was that the polonium had come from Russia. He also realised Litvinenko’s murder was not meant to be discovered. One version was that the use of polonium was showy: it sent a chilling message to Berezovsky and other émigré critics of the Russian regime. The other: that the isotope was the perfect undetectable weapon. Dombey inclined strongly to this second view. ‘It was meant to be a mysterious poisoning. That was because polonium was an alpha emitter which Geiger counters didn’t pick up,’ he said.
To be certain of the polonium’s origin, the professor had to make further inquiries. He wrote to senior nuclear officials in Moscow, the US, Canada and France. As he suspected, all countries other than Russia had ceased the manufacture of polonium. The only surviving polonium line was at Avangard in Sarov. Its director, Radii Ilykaev, confirmed the plant was exporting 0.8 grammes of polonium to the US a month, on a contractual basis.
Logically, there were only three ways of making polonium, Dombey reported. The first was to extract it from uranium ore, as the Curies did. The second was to irradiate a small sample of Bi-09 in a research reactor suitable for preparing isotopes. The third was to irradiate a large quantity of Bi-209 in a powerful high-flux reactor.
In his meeting with Lugovoi and Kovtun, Litvinenko drank 26.5 micrograms of polonium, it was established – or 4.4 gigabecquerels (GBq). This was an infinitesimally small amount, less than a grain of sand. A report by three radiation experts – John Harrison, Dr Nick Gent and Stuart Black – estimated that Litvinenko absorbed about 10 per cent of this dose – 0.44 gigabecquerels – into his bloodstream. It was more than enough to kill him
The actual amount put in the teapot, though, was larger – at least 50 micrograms, and probably 100 micrograms, including the undrunk tea left in Litvinenko’s cup and the remaining tea in the teapot.
It would be impossible to extract this amount of polonium from natural uranium ore, Dombey calculated. Nor could it be prised out of commercial supplies sent to America. You would need to buy or steal 450 anti-static devices containing polonium without anyone noticing. Moreover, the tiny amount of polonium inside was impossible to extract unless, as Dombey put it drily, those performing the extraction ‘wished to commit suicide’.
In the wake of Litvinenko’s murder, Russian officials said that any nuclear research reactor was capable of making the isotope. There are about thirty research reactors worldwide. But again the amount that could be generated was far smaller than the amount of polonium put in Litvinenko’s tea – mere picograms, at least 20,000 times smaller than the dose that killed him, via cell death in his body tissue and organs.
Dombey’s conclusions – made public in 2015 – were succinct. He wrote:
a) The Po-210 used to poison Mr Litvinenko was made at the Avangard facility in Sarov, Russia. One of the isotope-producing reactors at the Mayak facility in Ozersk, Russia, was used for the initial irradiation of bismuth.
b) In my opinion the Russian state or its agents were responsible for the poisoning.
Dombey believed it was ‘highly unlikely’ that the reactor used to irradiate the bismuth was in Sarov. None of the reactors there had a sufficiently high neutron flux. Instead it began its journey to London from the Mayak facility near Chelyabinsk.
Litvinenko was undoubtedly Mayak’s most spectacular victim. But there were thousands of anonymous others in Chelyabinsk province and beyond who were consigned to agonising leukemias and premature deaths. Their suffering played out at home and in hospitals, largely unnoticed, beyond a small circle of family and friends, before an indifferent world.
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The operation to kill Litvinenko was complex, covert and extra-territorial. It involved an esoteric nuclear poison, two hand-picked – if incompetent – assassins and a logistics chain that stretched from the Ural mountains via several intermediary points to the streets of London’s Mayfair.
It was also full of hazards. As part of his investigation, Dombey examined previous cases of polonium poisoning. In 1925, Nobus Yamada, a Japanese scientist who had been working at the Curies’ laboratory in Paris, fainted suddenly on his return to Japan. He had been handling polonium. Yamada died eighteen months later. In the summer of 1927, a Polish researcher, Sonia Cotelle, who had also been preparing polonium, suffered severe side effects. The Curies’ daughter Irene wrote that Cotelle was in ‘very bad health’, had stomach problems and had experienced ‘a very rapid loss of hair’. She carried on working for several years until a vial of polonium shattered in her face. She died two weeks later.
These were accidents, but Litvinenko’s death was deliberate. Given polonium’s rapid decay, the dose used to kill him must have been made in a relatively brief period before his killers travelled to London.
Dombey said: ‘Whoever poisoned Mr Litvinenko and brought polonium to Britain would only have done it if it had been tested in advance, because polonium is so radioactive that if they got their numbers wrong it wouldn’t work.’ He went on: ‘On the higher side it could have produced a major public health problem.’
With little data to go on, Dombey asked a colleague to check if there were any suspicious deaths in Russia with the same symptoms as Litvinenko’s? The colleague said there were. He mentioned two similar cases. The Russian press had featured both of them.
The first involved a Chechen guerrilla commander called Lecha Ismailov. Ismailov was captured, put in Lefortovo Prison, and tried. He got nine years. According to Akhmed Zakayev, Russia’s spy agencies put pressure on Ismailov to switch sides. He refused their offer to work for the FSB.
On the morning of his transfer from Lefortovo to a regular jail, the two people who had failed to recruit Ismailov summoned him for a friendly chat. They suggested he drink a farewell cup of tea. They also offered him a snack. Ismailov drank the tea. He began to feel ill after five minutes, as warders took him to his cell. He was moved to a hospital in Volgograd, where his Litvinenko-like symptoms – hair loss and massive blisters – bewildered doctors there. Twelve days later he was dead. His relatives told journalists they suspected Russia’s security agencies may have poisoned him.
The other possible precedent involved a figure from Vladimir Putin’s early years in St Petersburg, Roman Tsepov. In the 1990s, Tsepov worked as a bodyguard for Putin and for the city’s mayor Anatoly Sobchak. Allegedly, he was the liaison between politicians and the Tambov crime gang. Tsepov co-found
ed a private security company, Baltic-Escort. His partner was Viktor Zolotov, the future head of Putin’s personal bodyguard. According to some accounts, Zolotov was the president’s brutal enforcer and an individual of enormous physical strength.
Tsepov had friends in high places. And, unfortunately perhaps, he knew their secrets too well. In September 2004, he stopped by at the local FSB office for a cup of tea. He fell violently ill. He was admitted to Hospital No. 31 in St Petersburg, an institution that formerly treated the communist elite. Tsepov’s symptoms were unusual: vomiting and diarrhoea but also a catastrophic fall in white blood cells. He died shortly afterwards.
The investigative paper Novaya Gazeta quoted sources in the St Petersburg prosecutor’s office who said a post-mortem examination revealed ‘high quantities’ of radioactive contamination in Tsepov’s body. This wasn’t told to law-enforcement bodies. No cause of death was established.
Dombey’s report traced the source of the polonium to Mayak, in the form of irradiated bismuth. From Mayak it went to Sarov. But one link in the chain was missing. The polonium made on Sarov’s production line was in metallic form. Sealed in a special container, it was difficult to extract. The polonium used to kill Litvinenko, by contrast, was soluble.
According to Dombey, a ‘state organisation’ would need to convert the metallic polonium to soluble polonium. Only then could it be deployed.
That the KGB had its own specialist poisons laboratory was a well-established fact. Numerous former officers – some retired, some defectors – had confirmed its existence.
Pavel Sudoplatov, the former chief of Stalin’s foreign-intelligence service, who coordinated the atomic espionage operation against the US and Britain, mentions the lab in his 1994 memoir, Special Tasks. The poisons factory was set up in 1921. It went through several changes. Its core function – experimenting with poisons and other lethal substances on behalf of the state – remained the same.