ASSASSINATION
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Ricin is now used mainly in threat mailings. A ricin scare was sparked by the discovery of castor beans sent in an envelope to the White House last October. Depiction of the soman conjugate of acetylcholinesterase: this and other nerve agents like sarin and Novichok inhibit the normal actions of this enzyme. The perfume bottle containing Novichok which killed Dawn Sturgess and sickened Charlie Rowley in June 2018 had been discarded in a small park in Salisbury. Polonium-210 is a very strong alpha particle emitter which requires detection at very short range.
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orking front to back: the use of the most powerful nerve agent series known to have been developed – Novichok – in Salisbury, Wiltshire, on a front door and discarded in a perfume bottle, resulting in one death and four seriously injured, in March and June 2018; the killing of one individual with VX nerve agent in Kuala Lumpur airport, in February 2017; the lethal poisoning in a cup of tea of one individual with one of the rarest radioisotopes known, polonium-210, in December 2006; the stabbing of one person in London, using ricin in an umbrella tip, in September 1978. The victims also form a pattern: Sergei Skripal was a former Russian spy. Alexander Litvinenko was a known Russian dissident with an espionage history, as did Markov, and the VX victim was the estranged half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un. And as ‘collateral’, Skripal’s daughter, Yulia, and a police officer, Dt Sgt Nick Bailey, were made critically ill but thanks to excellent
medical care, recovered – but probably with lifetime effects. As shown in the 22 November BBC Panorama programme on the Salisbury incidents, Dt Sgt Bailey’s home and contents had to be abandoned. The fatality from the second incident, Dawn Sturgess – and her injured partner, Charlie Rowley – were apparently not intended targets, but all became victims of the UK’s second CW attack nevertheless.
Prime suspects
As has been widely reported, Russia – specifically, its military intelligence agency, the GRU – is implicated in both Salisbury incidents, with a torrent of revelations emerging about the specific miscreants. In all the above cases, not terrorist groups, but a nation state is likely responsible. Identifying the Salisbury attackers and those implicated in the November 2006 death of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko has not led to any being brought to face trial. Many commentators agreed that, in particular in the Salisbury cases the unravelling of the apparent ineptitude of the suspects’ M.O. (in the June attack the variant A-234 of Novichok was traced in a bottle disguised as perfume inside a sealed box, discarded in a small park) and their subsequent movements and behaviour – was for the Russians, specifically, their President, Vladimir Putin, to signal to the world that they can exact revenge, albeit somewhat hamfisted, on their opponents with impunity. And that this can be accomplished with very rare and difficult substances to trace and track, and producing widespread consequences. The likely perpetrators were well on their way long before the causative agent had been identified, in both the Salisbury and Litvinenko incidents. One of the two accused in the latter, former KGB officer Andrei
Lugovoi, conveniently became a deputy in Russia’s state Duma and cannot be extradited.
Attribution
Yet it was easy to establish, once they had been identified, where the substances were made – again, leaving little doubt who was responsible. The materials used in the Skripal and Litvinenko attacks could only have been made in a nationstate with CW and nuclear capabilities, in just one military laboratory in each case. The Novichok nerve agent series was developed as a CW in the 1970s and 1980s by the Soviet Union at the ultra-secret Central Russian Shikhany military facility – chiefly to overpower NATO PPE and evade detection. The facility has since been bulldozed. The polonium-210 used to kill Alexander Litvinenko in the heart of London was made in the world’s only commercial producer, the state-run Avangard plant in Arzamas-16 in the closed Russian city of Sarov. Polonium-210 was used as a trigger in early nuclear weapons and little else. Novichok is purely a CW intended for battlefield use. The potential terror provided by deploying these agents beefs up any regime’s already dread reputation. Kim Jong Nam must have suspected how he could be attacked as his travel bag contained bottles of atropine. His murder by two stooge females, apparently hired by the North Korean regime to smear VX liquid on his face, was committed in broad daylight in an airport terminal, the shot of the incident televised worldwide.
Why choose CBRN?
Using small amounts of exotic, highly lethal substances to kill (and injure) rather than common means of assassination – the bullet, knife, bomb and more common poisons – has become almost a pattern in these events. The CBRN materials chosen so far are difficult to attribute. The Russians are showing off these capabilities – and leaving
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