Britain146;s spy mystery: A slow death by poison

Litvinenko was allegedly given a highly toxic radioactive isotope in his tea. Who gave it to him and when?

In the new James Bond movie, Casino Royale, Agent 007 gives a master class in what to do if you are unexpectedly poisoned by your enemies in a public place for one thing, when you stagger dramatically from the room, make sure to do it in a suave manner.

But while the fictional Bond has an array of useful resources at his disposal8212;a car filled with potential antidotes that serves as a mobile emergency room; a hotline to trained poison-control experts at MI6 headquarters; and a personal defibrillator that comes in handy during heart attacks8212;the ordinary real-life poison victim has no such advantages.

Nor is the sequence of events surrounding nonfictional poisoning generally as clear-cut as when Bond, played by Daniel Craig, falls deathly ill within moments of taking the first sip of his spiked martini.

In the case of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who died in a London hospital on Thursday night, the most confounding questions were also the most basic. Who gave it to him and when? And how did they get this particular poison?

Litvinenko, it emerged, had been given a substance even Bond would not have been prepared for: a highly toxic radioactive isotope, a cup of tea gone nuclear, so to speak. The substance, polonium 210, 8220;is not the kind of weapon that any kind of amateur could construct,8221; said Dr Andrea Sella, a lecturer in inorganic chemistry at London8217;s University College.

By his and his friends8217; initial accounts, Litvinenko8217;s illness seemed to have had all the hallmarks of the sort of attack favoured, according to exiled critics of the Russian government, by the Russian security services in recent years. His friends insisted that he had been poisoned on November 1, perhaps during or after two meetings in London8212; one in a hotel, the other at a restaurant8212;and that he had been a target because of his vocal opposition to the government of President Vladimir V. Putin.

Before he became sick, Litvinenko said, he was investigating the death of Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who was highly critical of Russian policy in Chechnya and who was shot at her apartment building in Moscow on October 7.

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Poison, an effective murder weapon for centuries, in recent years has been used as a weapon of choice in the former Soviet bloc. Yuri Shchekochikin, a journalist who wrote about corruption in Russia, fell ill and died in July 2003, for example. The Russian authorities said he had suffered an allergic reaction; his colleagues said it was poison.

A Russian banker, Ivan Kivelidi, and his secretary died in 1995 after using a telephone apparently dosed with poison. The current president of Ukraine, Viktor A. Yushchenko, was poisoned with dioxin in 2004 but survived and took office despite Putin8217;s opposition. Politkovskaya herself became violently sick8212;poisoned, she insisted8212;after drinking a cup of tea on a plane while covering the hostage crisis in Beslan in 2004.

Shortly before he died, Litvinenko issued a statement saying he was certain he had been poisoned, and blaming Putin8212;who promptly dismissed the claim. The Russians continued to deny responsibility, even as one British Foreign Office official said that Moscow8217;s ambassador had been called in and told 8220;the situation was now more serious.8221;

8211;SARAH LYALL