Death of a spy and a burst of conspiracy theories

Litvinenko’s slow end, the intrigue of his final healthy days, his deathbed statement accusing President Vladimir V. Putin of culpability (in English, some Russians noted suspiciously) — have nurtured a widely held view here that it was all indeed a conspiracy, only not the one embraced by Putin’s critics.

It was, from this point of view, not a plot by the Kremlin to silence a critic, but one by its enemies to discredit the Kremlin, the obvious suspects being Putin’s critics in exile or, of course, President Bush, the Central Intelligence Agency or the West (generally).

Or it could have been a plot by a faction inside the Kremlin to make it look as if a competing faction inside the Kremlin had done it. “There is too much evidence” to think otherwise, said Stanislav A. Belkovsky, a political scientist here with ties to Putin’s Kremlin.

Actually, there is not much evidence at all, only questions and suspicions—which is, by the way, equally true of the accusations against Putin, no matter how fervently his critics believe them.

Every country has its conspiracy theories, of course, and the Spy vs. Spy dramas of the cold war and Hollywood have given life to a fair number of them. But they thrive here in the fertile ground of the Russian imagination as they do in few other places.

The Soviet Union’s leaders obsessed over conspiracies, real and imagined. They also rewrote history so regularly, fabricated so many economic reports extolling progress, covered up so many embarrassments like the Chernobyl disaster that few here ever believed they knew the whole truth about anything. And the absence of truth is where conspiracy theories take root.

This remains so, and Mr. Putin is at least partly to blame. He has stifled the news media, and the day-to-day operation of the Kremlin is again as opaque as it was in Soviet times. And there is the inconvenient fact that the Kremlin’s critics—including a number of journalists—keep dying in circumstances that investigators have yet to solve.

Putin’s entire presidency has been wrapped up in conspiracy theories, starting with his abrupt rise to power as Boris Yeltsin’s successor in 1999. That fall, a series of apartment bombings killed 243 people, fanning popular support for the second war in Chechnya, Russia’s separatist region. From the start, the bombings were viewed with suspicion, especially after the discovery of federal agents planting what turned out to be explosives in the

basement of another building. (A training exercise, officials finally said.) In Russian politics, the violence clearly played to the advantage of hard-liners like Putin.

A vocal adherent of the theory that Russian secret services conspired to bomb their own citizens to bolster the Chechen war effort was Litvinenko, a former agent of the secret service he accused in a book he jointly wrote,

“Blowing Up Russia: Terror From Within”. The book was published with the help of Boris A. Berezovsky, the self-exiled tycoon who lives in London and has become Putin’s fiercest critic (the feeling is, evidently, mutual).

Aleksei A. Venediktov, a radio host and executive editor of Ekho Moskvy, said the failure of the government to investigate the bombings thoroughly has nurtured distrust. In the same way, there are those who believe the authorities know more than they have told about the terrorist school siege in Beslan, in which 332 hostages and rescuers were killed in 2004.

“As long as the public is not informed, conspiracy theories will multiply and grow,” Venediktov said. “This does not mean there is no conspiracy.”

His theory? It was neither Putin nor the secret services. In fact, few here believe Russia’s leaders would have been so obvious as to use a radioactive isotope; it was used, instead, so people would think so!

Venediktov said a death squad working outside of government control killed Litvinenko to frighten the political elite into insisting that Putin stay on for a third term whether he wants to or not. By law he must step down in 2008. “The people who are behind this murder want to lay the responsibility in the future on Putin,” he said, in order to make him afraid to leave office lest he be prosecuted.

In the Russian press, where objectivity is as elusive as ever, even darker theories abound, almost always pointing the blame away from Putin’s Kremlin and back toward his accusers. Izvestia offered four on Thursday. According to one, Litvinenko was selling radioactive materials on the black market. Another: he and Berezovsky were making a nuclear bomb to help Chechnya’s separatists.

These theories about Litvinenko are not just ideas on the fringe. The chairman of the upper house of Parliament, Sergei M. Mironov, noted that the deaths of Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was murdered in October, took place on the eve of trips by Putin to Europe. “I do not think the coincidence was accidental,” he said.

When news emerged last week that Yegor T. Gaidar, a former prime minister and critic of Putin’s, had fallen ill a day after Litvinenko died, an ally of Gaidar’s, Anatoly B. Chubais, linked it to the deaths of Litvinenko and Politkovskaya, but not to Putin. Chubais, the head of Russia’s electric company, offered a grand conspiracy theory involving an attempted coup against Putin.

The logic behind the conspiracies — let alone the facts — can sometimes be hard to fathom, but a Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry S. Peskov, said that many people in London, exiles and their supporters, were all too ready to believe anything that reflected poorly on Russia. “It is a negative heritage of the old times,” he said.

Pressed, he suggested that “commercial interests” lay behind Litvinenko’s charges.

Even Putin himself struck a conspiratorial tone, questioning the origins of Litvinenko’s last statement. “If such a note really appeared before Litvinenko’s death, then a question arises: why this note was not made public when he was still alive?”

Watch What You Inhale

ROBERT N. PROCTOR

When the former KGB agent Aleksandr V. Litvinenko was found to have been poisoned by radioactive polonium 210 last week, there was one group that must have been particularly horrified: the tobacco industry.

The industry has been aware at least since the 1960s that cigarettes contain significant levels of polonium. Exactly how it gets into tobacco is not entirely understood, but uranium “daughter products” naturally present in soils seem to be selectively absorbed by the tobacco plant, where they decay into radioactive polonium. High-phosphate fertilisers may worsen the problem, since uranium tends to associate with phosphates. In 1975, Philip Morris scientists wondered whether the secret to tobacco growers’ longevity in the Caucasus might be that farmers there avoided phosphate fertilisers.

How much polonium is in tobacco? In 1968, the American Tobacco Company began a secret research effort to find out. Using precision analytic techniques, the researchers found that smokers inhale an average of about .04 picocuries of polonium 210 per cigarette. The company also found, no doubt to its dismay, that the filters being considered to help trap the isotope were not terribly effective. (Disclosure: I’ve served as a witness in litigation against the tobacco industry.)

A fraction of a trillionth of a curie (a unit of radiation named for polonium’s discoverers, Marie and Pierre Curie) may not sound like much, but remember that we’re talking about a powerful radionuclide disgorging alpha particles — the most dangerous kind when it comes to lung cancer—at a much higher rate even than the plutonium used in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Polonium 210 has a half life of about 138 days, making it thousands of times more radioactive than the nuclear fuels used in early atomic bombs.

We should also recall that people smoke a lot of cigarette—about 5.7 trillion worldwide every year, enough to make a continuous chain from the earth to the sun and back, with enough left over for a few side-trips to Mars. If .04 picocuries of polonium are inhaled with every cigarette, about a quarter of a curie of one of the world’s most radioactive poisons is inhaled along with the tar, nicotine and cyanide of all the world’s cigarettes smoked each year. Pack-and-a-half smokers are dosed to the tune of about 300 chest X-rays.

Is it therefore really correct to say, as Britain’s Health Protection Agency did this week, that the risk of having been exposed to this substance remains low? That statement might be true for whatever particular supplies were used to poison Litvinenko, but consider also this: London’s smokers (and those Londoners exposed to secondhand smoke), taken as a group, probably inhale more polonium 210 on any given day than the former spy ingested with his sushi. No one knows how many people may be dying from the polonium part of tobacco. There are hundreds of toxic chemicals in cigarette smoke, and it’s hard to sort out how much one contributes compared to another—and interactive effects can be diabolical.

In a sense, it doesn’t really matter. Taking one toxin out usually means increasing another—one reason “lights” don’t appear to be much safer. What few experts will dispute is the magnitude of the hazard: the World Health Organisation estimates that 10 million people will be dying annually from cigarettes by the year 2020—a third of these in China. Cigarettes, which claimed about 100 million lives in the 20th century, could claim close to a billion in the present century.

The tobacco industry of course doesn’t like to have attention drawn to the more exotic poisons in tobacco smoke. Arsenic, cyanide and nicotine, bad enough. But radiation? As more people learn more about the secrets hidden in the golden leaf, it may become harder for the industry to align itself with candy and coffee – and harder to maintain, as we often hear in litigation, that the dangers of tobacco have long been “common knowledge”. I suspect that even some of our more enlightened smokers will be surprised to learn that cigarette smoke is radioactive, and that these odd fears spilling from a poisoned KGB man may be molehills compared with our really big cancer mountains.

Robert N. Proctor is a professor of the history of science at Stanford University