by Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Dany Shoham
The quest for untraceable, incurable poisons and undetectable modes of employing them has long preoccupied intelligence services oriented towards political assassination.
The Maltings, Salisbury. White cover
conceals the bench where Sergei Skripal was found unconscious following
poisoning attack. Image via Flickr CC
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 792, April 10, 2018
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The
recent poisoning on British soil of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian
military intelligence officer who acted as a double agent for the UK’s
intelligence services, and his daughter Yulia with a very rare nerve
agent of the Novichok type appears almost certainly to have been
conducted by the Russians. While the attack is part of a long chain of
similar incidents, it was an overwhelming event diplomatically,
politically, practically, and in terms of intelligence. Two similar
incidents in London exhibited common elements linking them to the
Skripal attack. Together, they shed light on the apparatus that might be
responsible.
The quest for untraceable, incurable poisons and
undetectable modes of employing them has long preoccupied intelligence
services oriented towards political assassination. In addition to being a
major medico-technical challenge for both perpetrators and
investigators, that quest has serious diplomatic and political
dimensions.
In 1978 and 2006, two notorious assassinations
(among many others in the UK and elsewhere in the world) occurred in
London. Those two assassinations bear a strong resemblance to the recent
attack on former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal
and his daughter on British soil and thus warrant reexamination.
The Russian toxic legacy in the UK goes back to
the late 1970s, when the Cold War was at its fiercest. Georgi Ivanov
Markov was born in Sofia, Bulgaria and died in London in 1978 due to
poisoning by ricin, a deadly plant protein biotoxin (weaponized for
wide-scale warfare as well). He was executed by DS (Durzhavna Sigornost,
or Bulgarian State Security) with vital assistance from the then Soviet
KGB.
An independent journalist, Markov was Bulgaria’s
most revered dissident and Bulgarian Communism’s arch enemy. Bulgarian
Communist dictator Todor Zhivkov asked the KGB to help him silence
Markov, and his request was granted.
The KGB elected to use a camouflaged weapon. A
folding umbrella was adapted with a firing mechanism and silencer with
which to shoot a small pellet at close range (one and a half to two
meters). The “Chamber” – namely, Department 12, Directorate S (the KGB
Operational Technical Support Directorate) – adapted the umbrella tip to
enable it to shoot the victim with a tiny metal pellet containing
ricin. The pellet was designed to penetrate clothing and lodge in the
skin.
On the day of his assassination, Markov worked a
double shift at the BBC. After finishing the early morning shift, he
went home for a rest and some lunch. Returning to work by car, he drove
to a parking lot on the south side of Waterloo Bridge. It was his habit
to take a bus across the half-mile bridge to BBC headquarters in Bush
House. After parking his car, Markov climbed the stairs to the bus stop.
As he neared the queue of people waiting for the bus, he experienced a
sudden stinging pain in the back of his right thigh. He turned and saw a
man bending to pick up a dropped umbrella. The man, who was facing away
from Markov, apologized. The assassin then hailed a taxi and departed.
Though in pain, Markov boarded the bus to work.
The pain continued. Markov noticed a small blood spot on his trousers,
told colleagues at the BBC what had happened, and showed a friend a
pimple-like red swelling on his thigh. By evening, he had developed a
high fever. He was hospitalized and treated for an undetermined form of
blood poisoning. His condition quickly worsened, and he did not respond
to medical treatment. The next day he went into shock, and after three
days of agony and delirium, he died.
During an autopsy performed at Wandsworth Public
Mortuary, a tiny metal sphere the size of a pinhead was found in the
wound in Markov’s leg. When the doctors attempted to extract the “pin,” a
tiny pellet fell onto the table. The police took the pellet to the
Chemical and Microbiological Warfare Establishment at Porton Down,
commonly called the “Germ Warfare Center.” There, it was examined by a
team of Britain’s foremost specialists in forensic medicine as well as,
reportedly, Dr. Christopher Green of the CIA.
The 1.52mm-diameter pellet embedded in Markov’s
leg was composed of 90% platinum and 10% iridium. Two 0.34-mm holes had
been drilled into the pellet, possibly with a high-technology laser, at
right angles to one other, producing an X-shaped cavity. The holes were
empty.
Investigators were unable to establish what type
of substance had been used, but the pellet was sufficient to determine
that Markov had “not died of natural causes.” BATS (British
Anti-Terrorist Squad) detectives then joined the Scotland Yard
investigating team. After weeks of research and experimentation, in
January 1979, a Coroner’s Inquest ruled that Markov had been murdered
with the ricin toxin.
Several years later, two former top KGB officers,
Oleg Gordievsky and Oleg Kalugin, publicly admitted Soviet complicity in
Markov’s murder by means of ricin.
In 1994, the British Parliament asked Russia to
help locate 15 former KGB agents who might have been involved in or had
knowledge of the Markov murder. The request remains unanswered. The
Markov case remains officially unsolved. No one has been brought to
justice, though the evidence points fairly clearly to the involvement of
Bulgarian and Soviet elements, chiefly the KGB.
The KGB officially ceased to exist in November
1991, but its successor organization, the FSB (Federal Security Service
of the Russian Federation), is functionally extremely similar. While
many alterations were undertaken, the underlying system did not
substantially change. The KGB’s policy of political assassination on
foreign soil was continued by the FSB, as was demonstrated by the murder
of Alexander Litvinenko.
A former FSB officer who specialized in tackling
organized crime, Litvinenko and several other FSB officers publicly
accused their superiors, in November 1998, of ordering the assassination
of Russian tycoon and oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Litvinenko was
arrested the following March on charges of exceeding the authority of
his position. He was acquitted in November 1999 but re-arrested. The
charges were dismissed in 2000, at which time he fled to London and was
granted asylum in the UK. There, he worked as a journalist, writer, and
consultant for British intelligence.
Naively, perhaps, Litvinenko wrote two books
during his time in London wherein he accused the Russian secret services
of staging several acts of terrorism in an effort to bring Vladimir
Putin to power. He also accused Putin of ordering the murder in October
2006 of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
On November 1, 2006, Litvinenko suddenly fell ill
and was hospitalized in what was determined to be a case of poisoning by
radioactive polonium-210. He died on November 23. He thus became the
first known victim of lethal polonium 210-induced acute radiation
syndrome.
On the day he fell ill, Levtinenko met with two
former KGB agents. Though both denied any wrongdoing, a leaked US
diplomatic cable revealed that one of them had left polonium traces in
the house and car he had used in Hamburg.
In January 2007, British officials said police had
solved Litvinenko’s murder. They had discovered “a ‘hot’ teapot at
London’s Millennium Hotel with an off-the-charts reading for
polonium-210, the radioactive material used in the killing.”
Significantly, a senior British official said
investigators had concluded the murder of Litvinenko was “a
‘state-sponsored’ assassination orchestrated by Russian security
services.” Eventually, at a London court hearing in 2015, a Scotland
Yard lawyer concluded that “the evidence suggests that the only credible
explanation is in one way or another the Russian state is involved in
Litvinenko’s murder”.
Polonium-210 is often regarded as the “perfect
poison” because the alpha particles emitted by this radioisotope cannot
travel through skin or paper. It would therefore be easy to smuggle a
tiny amount of it into a foreign country in a glass vial. Also, the
substance is very difficult to detect through either hospital tests or
with airport scanners because it emits hardly any gamma radiation, which
is what Geiger counters look for. Polonium also has no color or taste,
so it can be added to food or drink without detection by the person
ingesting it. When it decays inside the body, it continues to cause
damage for weeks on end.
The recent attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury involved another mode of poisoning, however.
Recruited in Spain to British intelligence in
1995, Skripal passed on state secrets and blew the cover of numerous
Russian agents. A colonel in Russian military intelligence, he headed
the personnel department, which provided him access to valuable
information. He was arrested in Russia in 2004, and in 2006 was
sentenced to 13 years in a high security detention facility.
In 2010, Skripal, along with three other Russian
nationals imprisoned for espionage, was freed as part of a spy swap for
ten Russian agents arrested in the US. The UK government insisted on
Skripal’s being included in the swap. Skripal then made the critical
miscalculation of resuming his provision of information to the UK and
other Western intelligence agencies for a period of time.
The extent of Skripal’s treason was apparently
perceived by the Russians as entirely unforgivable as a matter of
principle. Moscow may have been conveying the following tacit message by
agreeing to his swap: “We will include Skripal on the list of
anti-Russian spies to be freed, but that does not mean we will never
harm him in the future, no matter where he is located.”
The toll on Skripal’s family grew remarkably high.
His wife died in 2012 of disseminated endometrial cancer, his brother
died in 2016, and his son died at age 43 in March 2017 in unknown
circumstances while on a visit to Saint Petersburg. All these deaths
displayed suspect pathologies and chronologies.
The Novichok (“newcomer” in Russian), a highly
advanced category of nerve agents, typifies the top chemical warfare
weapons created by the Soviets/Russians. Novichok agents were designed
to meet the following criteria:
- to be appreciably more deadly than the most toxic chemical warfare agent known in the West, namely VX;
- to be undetectable by NATO-standard chemical detection equipment;
- to defeat NATO’s chemical protective gear, and, ideally, antidotes;
- to be safer to handle, chiefly in terms of binary-patterned producible compounds; and
- to circumvent the Chemical Weapons Convention list of controlled substances and related inspection regimes.
The mission was accomplished, largely
clandestinely, in the form of a spectrum of organophosphorus substances,
usually fluorinated. The most potent compounds from this family,
Novichok-5 and Novichok-7, are supposedly around five to eight times
more toxic than VX. The “Novichok” designation refers to the binary
format of the agent, with the final compound referred to by its code
number (A-232 and A-234, respectively).
Novichok agents are probably deliverable as liquid
aerosols, powdered aerosols, or gases via a variety of systems, namely
artillery shells, aerial bombs, rockets, missiles, and spraying devices,
including those adapted for guerrilla warfare and self-destruction
mechanisms or spontaneously decomposing toxicants.
The pathological impact of Novichok agents could
be intentionally delayed by the weapon designer or attacker so as to
blur the time, place, and physical source from which the poison is
released. This might have been the case in the Skripal attack. Skripal
and his daughter were found unconscious on a public bench one day after
Yulia had flown from Russia into London’s Heathrow Airport, whereas a
policeman seriously injured by the toxin was poisoned following a visit
to Skripal’s house.
The British investigators looking into the
Salisbury incident are likely to draw conclusions from the two
precedents of 1978 and 2006, as well as others, despite the years that
have passed. There are certainly parallels to be examined. A significant
difference between the Salisbury case and those two main precedents
could be the mode of delivery of the toxicant into the victims’ bodies.
In the earlier attacks, delivery was direct (injection into the leg or
insertion into a cup of tea), while in Salisbury, it was apparently
environmental (as indicated by the serious effect on the policeman and
the mild poisoning of another 20 people). The methods of infiltrating
the poisons into the UK constitute their own separate issue as well.
Ironically, in September 2017, Russia announced
that it had destroyed its own entire CW arsenal (which had been the
world’s largest), though this declaration cannot be verified. It might
be assumed, nonetheless, that the Russians retain a stock of Novichok
agents for purposes of both large-scale and guerrilla warfare.
Although unconnected, the political assassination
in February 2017 of North Korean ruler Kim Jong-un’s estranged
half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, in Malaysia by North Korean agents warrants
attention. (Moscow was indirectly involved insofar as the North Korean
agents, who were affiliated with Pyongyang’s Ministries of State
Security and Foreign Affairs, flew back to Pyongyang from Kuala Lumpur
on the day of the assassination via Vladivostok, Russia). South Korea’s
request to detain four of the suspects was rejected by Russian officials
on the grounds of lack of evidence. While the assassination of Jong-nam
was accomplished by means of the well-known nerve agent VX, the nerve
agent employed in Salisbury was probably much more advanced and elusive.
This is unsurprising as the Russian CW program is far ahead of the
North Korean.
Tensions between London and Moscow are on the
rise, and a genuine crisis is developing with the West. But foremost,
perhaps, is the fierce confrontation between the British and Russian
intelligence communities, which are among the most elite and
sophisticated in the world. British and Russian intelligence have a long
and hostile rivalry that overshadows the political and diplomatic
spheres.
Collectively, the Salisbury incident and the two
earlier poisoning incidents represent a toxic Russian legacy in three
different modes: a biological protein toxin derived from castor beans
(ricin); an extremely rare, naturally occurring radioactive chemical
element (radionuclide polonium-210); and a synthetic nerve agent
(Novichok). Administered in various ways, all three are highly lethal,
cause incurable illness, and are largely untraceable, suggesting malign
forces behind incidents that were written off as “cause of death
unknown.”
An extraordinarily thorough investigation is being
conducted by a variety of British national agencies to unravel the
Salisbury incident to the last detail. The conclusion will in all
likelihood be that it was a Russian operation.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Dany Shoham,a
microbiologist and an expert on chemical and biological warfare in the
Middle East, is a sen ior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center
for Strategic Studies. He is a former senior intelligence analyst in the
IDF and the Israeli Defense Ministry.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/russia-poison-assassinations/
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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