The First Assassination of the 21st Century

Radiation soon entered the arsenal for high-priority assassinations. In 1957, for instance, Nikolai Khokhlov-like Litvinenko, a former-agent-turned-critic who fled Russia to live in the West-took part in an anti-Soviet conference in Frankfurt, Germany. Shortly after sipping a cup of coffee that somebody handed him, he felt ill and fainted. Food poisoning was initially suspected, until strange lesions began appearing on Khokhlov's face and his hair started coming out in clumps. Doctors at an American military hospital eventually identified radioactive thallium and managed to save his life. Khokhlov felt confident that the Kremlin was behind the hit.

Now some regard last year's legislation authorizing killings outside Russia-and a rash of recent assassinations-as a bit too reminiscent of the bad old days. "This is not a retreat to Soviet times," Kondaurov says, "but to one period of it, around 1937. [These killings show that] we're arriving at some violent authoritarian regime, a new quality of the Russian authorities that's similar to the worst examples of the past."

Kremlin officials have strenuously denied any involvement in Litvinenko's murder. And just because the polonium probably came from a Russian reactor doesn't mean that the assassination was officially sanctioned. "Reactors are making grams and grams of the material," says Middlesex University's Priest. "It would not necessarily be noticed if a few micrograms went missing." Gennady Gudkov, a member of the Russian parliament and a former FSB officer, agrees. "There is no doubt that the people who killed Litvinenko are from Russia," he says. "There are no other leads in the Litvinenko case except Russian leads. But trying to connect the Russian leads with the state-these are very different things."

We may never know who orchestrated the Litvinenko murder, but, like the radiation it left behind, the event has raised a frightening spectre. The prospect of an increasingly authoritarian Russian regime, one that tucks vials of radioactive material into the breast pockets of hit men before dispatching them abroad to silence its critics, is certainly alarming. But even scarier, says Oksana Antonenko, the program director for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, is the prospect that the Kremlin had nothing to do with it.

Murder, Globalized

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world has rightly feared what would happen if terrorists intent on mass murder managed to make a dirty bomb from one of the caches of nuclear material scattered across the region. The Litvinenko murder has created another anxiety entirely. In the pantheon of collective paranoia, weapons of mass destruction are now going to have to make room for the threat of targeted nuclear terrorism.