Spymania: Traces of polonium found on cup in hotel bar

posted at 9:08 pm on December 9, 2006 by Allahpundit
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Ace had a sharp post yesterday questioning the dirty-bomb theory. If Litvinenko et al. were building a bomb, he wondered, how come so much polonium was found in the hotel bar? Were they assembling it in a corner booth over beers?

The location suggests poisoning. And lo and behold:

The Millennium Hotel in London emerged as the most likely site for the poisoning of the Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko last night after it was revealed that a cup had been found containing traces of the radioactive substance which killed him.

It was reported that polonium 210 had also been found in a dishwasher at the hotel, in Grosvenor Square, raising concerns that small amounts of the substance could have been released into the water system. Unlike his drinking partners at the hotel’s Pine Bar, Litvienenko was tee-total and drank only tea…

The most significant finds of polonium have been at the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel and at rooms on the fourth floor, where Mr Lugovoi and Mr Kovtun stayed from October 31 to November 3, meeting Mr Litvinenko in the bar on November 1, the day he was poisoned.

The same article says Lugovoy is hospitalized with multiple organ failure. Kovtun allegedly has radiation damage to his kidneys and intestines, and radiation has been detected in apartments in Germany belonging to his ex-wife and her mother. If he and Lugovoy are the assassins, and it sure looks like they are, how’d they bungle the hit so badly that they ended up poisoning themselves too? Did they underestimate how lethal even an infinitesimal dose could be and got careless in preparing the stuff?

Here’s a possible timeline. They bring the stuff into the UK from Moscow and plan the hit. It’s in two cases: a smaller one for surreptitious transport and a larger carrying case. On November 1, they remove the polonium from the larger case in their hotel rooms; contamination occurs here, possibly because whoever had prepared the containers inadvertently left stray particles of the stuff inside the larger case. The men then head to the bar to meet Litvinenko. At some point before or during the meeting, one of them excuses himself and heads to the bathroom (another hot spot where polonium was later detected), where he removes the polonium from the smaller case and embeds it in a cigarette or dissolves it in some sort of solution. He returns to the meeting and slips the poison to Litvinenko somehow. But he’s sloppy — particles of the substance are all over him from the preparation and, perhaps, from the hotel room. Unwittingly, through physical contact or even just air currents in the room, the substance is transferred to his cup, to the other men present, and even to the hotel bar staff. Litvinenko is contaminated with so much of it that he transfers a minute amount to Scaramella at their meeting later that day.

How resilient is this stuff, though? We’re more than five weeks removed from the poisoning and traces of polonium are still present on a cup in the hotel? How many times has that cup been washed in five weeks? If it is that resilient, that would explain why traces of it are being found all over town and how it got to Kovtun’s ex’s apartment in Hamburg; he probably visited her at some point after he returned to Moscow.

As for Scaramella, by all accounts he’s just a loser wannabe.

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