Viva Brighton Issue #48 February 2017

TALK
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Luke Harding
Perfect poison, incompetent assassins
“This operation, I’ve
sort of concluded, was
never meant to be
discovered,” says the
Guardian journalist
Luke Harding. He’s
written a book on the
killing of the Russian
dissident Alexander
Litvinenko, who was
poisoned with an extremely
rare and hardto-generate
radioactive isotope: polonium-210.
If detected, it could be traced back to the Russian
state, probably the only organisation capable of
making it in the quantities used. But it can’t be detected
by the standard equipment - Geiger counters
- as it gives off alpha radiation, not gamma. “So it
was seen in FSB circles as a kind of perfect poison,”
Harding says.
“I think where the FSB went wrong was… first of all
the assassins they picked for this mission were pretty
incompetent. And certainly the chapters of the book
I had most fun writing were all about the assassins
careening round London, you know, on rickshaws,
trying to pick up women, pouring polonium down
the hotel U-bend… I mean, all that stuff was just
extraordinary, like from a spy thriller. So that was
one mistake, the assassins were not very good.
“But the other mistake, I think, was that the FSB
didn’t understand how Britain works and how its institutions
work. In other words, if you are murdered,
there will be a proper police investigation, regardless
of whether you’re the son of the prime minister, or
just some Russian. And I think they thought that
actually the police wouldn’t really bother, they’d just
kind of write this down as a mysterious death and
move on. And of course, they did bother.”
Wasn’t it an amazingly
audacious
plot? “The amazing
audacity is one of
the hallmarks of the
Putin regime. There’s
a kind of, I would say
a kind of criminal
ambition to it. And
it thinks big. I mean,
look at what’s happened
recently with
the hacking of the US election…
“The big dilemma for western democracies is: how
do they contain, or deal with, a powerful, aggressive,
revisionist state, that doesn’t play by the rules and
ignores international law, is prepared to use military
force or cyber-attacks or all sorts of other kind of
nasty methods to advance its foreign-policy agenda
and strategic goals?
“The whole Litvinenko case sort of speaks to that
massively, because the woman who didn’t want
to have a public inquiry, initially turned it down,
was Theresa May, as home secretary. Sort of
realpolitik of good relations with Russia was more
important than finding the truth of who murdered
Litvinenko… I think it sort of speaks to all the
dilemmas and geopolitical problems that we have at
the moment.”
Isn’t it reassuring, though, that the Litvinenko case
shows the power of a sinister ‘mafia state’ being constrained
by the human propensity to mess things up?
“Well, I mean… life doesn’t always work in a kind of
linear way. The Russian state is deeply sinister. But at
the same time, it’s quite incompetent as well.”
Steve Ramsey
Harding will discuss A Very Expensive Poison at the
Ropetackle, Shoreham, Thurs 16th, 7pm, £8
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