Inside The Mind Of The Poisoner Assassin

We don’t yet know what has led to Ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, to collapse on a bench on Sunday in the UK, but, a nerve agent has been implicated.

180 military personnel, experts in chemical warfare and decontamination, have now been deployed to the scene of the incident in Salisbury, in what is described as an investigation into attempted murder.

Source: Cory Doctorow flickr Alexander Litvinenko's grave, Highgate Cemetery West, Camden, London, UK

There appear similarities with the case of Alexander Litvinenko, also a former spy for Russia, who died in London in November 2006 following being poisoned.

Can psychology explain the motivation behind such unconventional attempts at disposing of adversaries?

According to a study entitled, ‘Death by polonium-210: Lessons learned from the murder of former Soviet spy Alexander Litvinenko’, the radioactive substance that killed Alexander Litvinenko, is several orders of magnitude more toxic, on a milligram per milligram basis, than hydrogen cyanide.

Death is certain, but it takes time, so the victim suffers greatly, knowing what is happening to them. This may be part of the intent.

Dr Robin McFee, a toxicologist at the Long Island Regional Poison Information Center, New York and Dr Jerrold Leikin, director of medical toxicology, at Glenbrook Hospital, Illinois, explain in their study published in the journal, Seminars in Diagnostic Pathology, that one gram of polonium-210, could kill 50 million people, and render another 50 million seriously sick.

Polonium-210 becomes extremely toxic when absorbed by inhalation or ingestion but while on the outside of the body is relatively harmless, as its particular radioactivity doesn’t penetrate intact skin.

An assassin’s poison of choice would be relatively harmless to whoever was transporting it, but reliably deadly if imbibed by an unsuspecting victim.

Alexander Litvinenko was met in a London bar by two men suspected of poisoning him. Given how unusual a poison polonium-210 is, an extended period elapsed before the correct diagnosis was made, possibly helpful to escaping perpetrators.

Once identified, polonium-210’s journey to the victim is traceable.

The radioactivity trail could be followed around London and even back on to British Airways flights from Russia. Given the possible contamination risk posed by its trip, the UK Health Protection Agency ended up tracing 673 people at risk across 52 countries.

According to Christian Duffin, reporting in the journal, Nursing Standard, nurses working for NHS Direct were bombarded with more than 1,000 calls in one day on top of their usual workload during the Alexander Litvinenko incident. This was partly because many international callers contacted NHS Direct, even though the service is for callers in the UK, and filtering out calls from overseas proved difficult.

NHS Direct received almost 4,000 calls during the two weeks following the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko; public panic creates disinformation for the authorities, introducing multiple false leads.

Part of the strategy behind the use of such an alarming substance?

NHS Direct associate medical director at the time, Simone Lester, is quoted by Christian Duffin, as declaring that the experience of NHS Direct in dealing with the incident was a 'nightmare'.

Owen Dyer writing in the British Medical Journal in 2007 reported that after the news that small traces had been found on British Airways aircraft, 1700 passengers contacted the NHS, but none showed signs of exposure.

In an article entitled, ‘More cases of polonium-210 contamination are uncovered in London’, Owen Dyer points out that two of the men who met Mr Litvinenko in London, where the poisoning occurred, the former KGB officer Andrei Lugovoi and former army officer Dmitri Kovtun, later tested positive for polonium-210 contamination in Moscow, and both received medical treatment.

A study entitled, ‘Epidemiology of internal contamination with polonium-210 in the London incident, 2006’, identified 11 locations in London as sufficiently environmentally contaminated with polonium-210 to represent a possible health risk to people associated with them.

Published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, the investigation by the Health Protection Agency found 139 individuals showed evidence of probable internal contamination with polonium-210, but none had been exposed to radiation doses considered dangerous.

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John Dunlop, an emeritus senior fellow at the Hoover Institution based at Stanford University, points out poisoning assassinations by the Soviet secret service has a long history.

In his book chapter, ‘Post-Communist Political Violence: The Poisoning of Aleksandr Litvinenko’, in the book ‘Political Violence’, the example of Nikolai Khokhlov is cited. Three years after defecting to the West, this Soviet ex-spy was poisoned in 1957 by radioactive thallium placed in a coffee he drank at an anti-soviet conference.

He developed Lyell Syndrome, an acute skin disease, and his hair began to fall out. Khokhlov observed that the Soviet secret services had wanted to kill him “in such a way that the assassin could get away… they wanted to kill me in such a way so that those familiar with Soviet intelligence would understand where the revenge had come from… ”

What poisoned Alexander Litvinenko years later was polonium-210, leading to ‘acute radiation syndrome’ with nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea in the immediate phase, later signs including loss of hair and bleeding. Death is from multiple organ failure while longer term effects, from lower doses, including radiation-induced cancer.

Khokhlov may have been saved by the fact he drank only a small amount of the coffee, and the assassins may have learnt their lesson from that, possibly hence the use of polonium-210 now.

The thallium that was used in 1957, according to John Dunlop, was the product of already more than thirty-five years of research by scientists working for the Soviet secret services. John Dunlop points out that in 1921 Lenin had created a secret laboratory for toxic substances to combat Soviet enemies.

Later referred to Laboratory X, its director was Professor Grigorii Maironovskii, whose research had focused on using toxic gases and poisons against cancer. Maironovskii subsequently became known as “Doctor Death” and “the Soviet Dr. Mengele.”

We don’t yet know the specifics of what has led to Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, to be critically ill, but if it turns out they are the victims of a poisoning assassination plot, while the victims need urgent help from skilled physicians and toxicologists, maybe it won’t take expert psychologists to figure out what message was being sent?