Poison's Use as Political Tool: Ukraine Is Not Exceptional

December 15, 2004

By SCOTT SHANE

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/15/international/europe/15poison.html?ex=1103691600&en=14c2548690293669&ei=5006&partner=ALTAVISTA1

WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 - With speculation running rampant in Ukraine over who was behind the mysterious dioxin poisoning of the presidential candidate Viktor A. Yushchenko, the use of poisons as a sinister tool of statecraft has again entered the public arena in a former Soviet republic. Some former officers of the Russian security services argue that it never left.

On several occasions in the past decade, the successor agencies to the K.G.B. in Russia and other countries once in the Soviet sphere have come under suspicion of giving drugs or poisons to prominent critics. And while the authorities have repeatedly denied ordering such actions, the former intelligence officials say they find many of the allegations credible.

"The view inside our agency was that poison is just a weapon, like a pistol," said Alexander V. Litvinenko, who served in the K.G.B. and its Russian successor, the Federal Security Service, from 1988 to 1999 and now lives in London. "It's not seen that way in the West, but it was just viewed as an ordinary tool."

Mr. Litvinenko said a secret K.G.B. laboratory in Moscow, still operated by the Federal Security Service, which is known by its Russian initials F.S.B., specializes in the study of poisons.

In analyzing Mr. Yushchenko's case, Oleg D. Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general who now lives outside Washington, said it appeared to be "certainly an attempt to remove him from the political scene."

Mr. Kalugin speaks from unusually direct experience. In 1978, he passed along orders directing Soviet agents to supply the Bulgarian secret service with a spring-loaded umbrella that was later used to deliver a dose of the poison ricin, killing the Bulgarian dissident Georgi I. Markov in London.

Mr. Litvinenko and Mr. Kalugin both said they believed that Mr. Yushchenko had been poisoned with the involvement of the Ukrainian security service, which has maintained close relations with the F.S.B., and they suspect that Russian security services may even have been involved. Mr. Yushchenko fell ill after having a meal on Sept. 5 with the head of Ukraine's security service, Gen. Ihor P. Smeshko.

Russian and Ukrainian authorities have vehemently denied being involved. In Washington, a spokesman for the Russian Embassy, Yevgeny Khorishko, said, "There is no evidence to support such claims."

In making their cases, Mr. Litvinenko and Mr. Kalugin describe cases in recent years in which Russian authorities have come under suspicion of drugging or poisoning people.

A Russian banker, Ivan Kivelidi, and his secretary, who died in 1995 after using a telephone apparently dosed with poison. In 2002, a Saudi militant known as Khattab who fought with Chechen rebels against Russian forces died after opening a poisoned letter. And a former speaker of the Russian Parliament, Ivan Rybkin, who disappeared for several days in February during his race against President Vladimir V. Putin, later accused the F.S.B. of drugging him.

On Sept. 1, in an incident that received widespread media attention in Russia and Britain, Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent Russian journalist with the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, lost consciousness after drinking tea aboard a flight to Beslan, in the Caucasus, where militants had seized a school. She later said she thought F.S.B. agents on the plane had poisoned the tea. When she regained consciousness in the hospital, she wrote in The Guardian, a nurse whispered to her, "My dear, they tried to poison you."

There are other theories about who was behind Mr. Yushchenko's illness, of course. Milton Leitenberg, an expert on Russian biological weapons at the University of Maryland, said that although "intelligence agencies are the first possibility," Mr. Yushchenko might have been poisoned by a political enemy or a criminal group.

On Saturday, doctors in Vienna confirmed that Mr. Yushchenko had ingested dioxin, producing a severely disfiguring skin condition. The level of dioxin in his blood was more than 1,000 times normal, the doctors said. In response, Ukraine's prosecutor general, Svyatoslav Piskun, announced that a criminal investigation into the poisoning was being reopened.

Western experts say the dioxin findings all but prove that Mr. Yushchenko was deliberately poisoned. Dioxin is the name for a class of chemicals produced as a byproduct of the burning of refuse, the manufacture of pesticides and other industrial processes.

Alastair Hay, professor of environmental toxicology at the University of Leeds, said dioxin was an unlikely choice for assassination, but if the attacker's motive was to drive Mr. Yushchenko from the race, dioxin might make sense. "It's fat-soluble, so you would want to put it in a fatty medium such as a soup," Dr. Hay said.

Vil S. Mirzayanov, a onetime dissident Russian scientist who lives in New Jersey, said a secret unit inside a Moscow chemical institute studied dioxin for many years while developing defoliants for the military.

He said he had never heard of dioxin being studied as a weapon in the former Soviet Union, but Dr. Paul M. Wax, vice president of the American College of Medical Toxicology, said that at a 2002 conference in Volgograd, Russian scientists told him such research had been conducted.

There have been similar cases around the world in the past few decades. The South African authorities were accused of using clothing impregnated with organophosphates to try to poison antiapartheid activists. In 1997, Israeli agents in Jordan injected a poison into a Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, later delivering an antidote under international pressure to save his life.

In the 1950's and 60's, a secret United States Army program, working with the Central Intelligence Agency, developed weapons designed to use toxins to kill and leave no trace. C.I.A. plots to poison Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of Congo, and Fidel Castro of Cuba failed, but were later exposed by Congressional investigators.