[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Op-Ed Contributor: Murder He Ate

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Op-Ed Contributor: Murder He Ate

December 19, 2004
 By GAIL BELL 



 

Forresters Beach, Australia 

WHEN Viktor Yushchenko sat down on Sept. 5 to his bowl of
soup at the summer house of the deputy chief of the
Ukrainian government's intelligence unit (the successor to
the old Soviet K.G.B.), he may well have been supping with
the devil. 

For weeks afterward he suffered a bizarre cascade of
symptoms - prostration, crippling abdominal pains, a
swollen liver and disfiguring lesions on his upper body and
face-all indicative of a violent internal process that was
variously described as an infection (possibly viral, and
probably herpes) and gluttony (overindulgence in exotic
foods). Mr. Yushchenko gradually recovered enough health to
return to his campaign for the presidency of Ukraine, but
the man who donned the orange scarf and stepped back up to
the microphone had taken on the appearance of a scarred and
bloated roué. 

And there the matter stayed, until Mr. Yushchenko's
protestations that he'd been poisoned were finally
investigated outside his own country, by a team in a Vienna
clinic headed by Dr. Michael Zimpfer. When Dr. Zimpfer's
findings were made public on Dec. 11, the world sat up and
took notice. 

The headlines gave us two vital pieces of information:
poison, which we all understood, and dioxin. Dioxin? It
sounded like some sort of chemical; it even sounded vaguely
familiar, like something you'd buy at the plant nursery. As
the days passed we read everything we would ever need to
know about the properties of dioxin, without discovering
the answers to the deeper, more troubling questions of who
administered it, and why. Not, why try to hurt Mr.
Yushchenko, but why use dioxin to do it? 

It is curious and unsettling in 2004 to be reading about
the attempted assassination by poison of a prominent
political figure. Murder by poison has largely been
relegated to the history pages, principally because science
has overtaken the great advantage that the poisoner of old
had over his pursuers: the ability to hide his work beneath
the normal calamities that afflict human life. 

Death by degrees of pain and wasting could (particularly in
the 19th century) be laid at the door of organic disease,
and there were few if any tests for the suspicion of
poison. In the 21st century the game is desperately hard to
play, unless, as in Mr. Yushchenko's case, you apply the
first rule of the old poisoners' handbook. Choose a
substance that nobody can identify. Find an obscure
environmental pollutant that infects the air around
smelting and recycling plants and concentrate it into a
small vial. 

Poisoning is not an amateur's game. There is art and a good
deal of cunning to perfect before one can claim admission
to the guild. Graduates of the old poisoning schools
grappled with the same compounding problems as modern
chemists and apprentice chefs in five-star hotels. Will the
powder mix with the liquid? Will the oil separate into a
greasy film? Have I cloaked the telltale smell under enough
aromatic spices? And what about the taste? 

Our senses are not trained to discriminate what is hidden
under camouflage. Studying the contents of your plate
looking for odd colors has never been a reliable gauge of
what is normal. Arsenic, for instance, is red, yellow,
green or white depending on its chemical bedfellow. And
what of poison's smell? Prussic acid smells like almonds,
hemlock smells like a family of mice, oleander like
chocolate, and arsenic in cocoa like supper on a cold
night: there are no reliable pocket guides to assist the
novice. To his wife, dioxin smelled like "some kind of
medicine" on Mr. Yushchenko's lips. 

Poisoning is an up close and personal crime. The victim is
deceived into swallowing a toxic dose concealed in a benign
carrier like food or drink, thereby betraying one of the
foundations of all social dealings between fellow humans,
the assumption of benign intent. In Ukraine, the rules of
hospitality demand that the guest eat and drink heartily at
the host's table, even when he suspects the host of ill
intent. 

As a matter of course in an earlier century, Mr. Yushchenko
might have taken his own poison-taster to the dinner party
at the dacha. Poison-tasters trained their wizard eyes on
every stage of meal preparation, following each dish from
kitchen to table to mouth - sometimes adding a little
theater to their performance by the application of crystals
and feathers, but, in essence, using the highest acuity of
their native senses. 

I have in my own collection a poisoner's ring, which is
hinged on one side and has a hollow compartment concealed
under a large amethyst. With practice I have perfected a
party trick of dropping a small piece of fizzing vitamin
tablet into my dining partner's wine glass. It is
surprisingly easy to distract someone long enough to flip
the hinge, let the sliver fall and watch until the bubbles
subside. How simple was it, one wonders, to slip dioxin,
which is easily absorbed in fat, into the jug of cream
destined for Mr. Yushchenko's soup, or, stealing from a
later chapter of the poisoner's handbook, to coat his
spoon, or plate, with an invisible layer of chemical? 

A chemist at University College, London, wondered why a
peculiar substance like dioxin was chosen in the first
place. "If you really want to kill someone you use cyanide
or ricin or strychnine," wrote Dr. Andrea Sella in The New
Scientist.com, "If you use something weird I guess it's
just that much harder to find." 

Why indeed? Cyanide, strychnine, arsenic, and the extensive
pharmacopeia of the plant and serpent kingdoms have
provided the staples for poisonous intent for centuries.
Cleopatra was an adept at empirical studies into the
effects of snakebite on slaves. She is said to have found
the mineral poisons too slow and too liable to cause
grimacing and color changes in the corpse. 

Other prominent poisoners, like Madeleine d'Aubray (the
Marquise de Brinvilliers), and the unknown visitor to
Napoleon's exile on Elba, have found arsenic perfectly
suited to their plans. The marquise took quite a shine to
the poisoning art and, after practicing on charity patients
at the poor hospital, endowed arsenic with its cynical
alias "inheritance powder" (poudre de succession) when she
fed her father and brothers her special soup. 

And here we circle back to the question, why use dioxin?
There are many ways to classify poison. Arsenic and
hemlock, for instance, are slow killers; they take their
own terrible time. Cyanide and strychnine are quick though
not merciful. Dioxin, we discover, is a slow accumulative
poison, expressing its mauling effect on human physiology
over months, years, perhaps a lifetime. 

What if the intention was not to kill Mr. Yushchenko but to
injure him in ways that mimic a fall from grace, like
superimposing the ruined face of an alcoholic onto a once
handsome man? This is a glimpse, I suspect, into the secret
world of chemical warfare, the successor to the old
poisoners' guild, and even, perhaps, a peep behind the
shreds of the Iron Curtain. Steady doses of dioxin cause
cancer and premature aging. 

Dioxin, then, seems tailor-made to topple an Adonis from
his plinth, which, for someone in the public eye is a kind
of death. The sweet twist of this unhappy business is that
the plot has been exposed. Mr. Yushchenko's face will heal
with time. The same cannot be said for the disfigured mind
that brought poison to the table. 

Gail Bell, a pharmacist, is the author of "Poison: A
History and a Family Memoir." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/opinion/19gailbell.html?ex=1104467659&ei=1&en=71c968607a796d0b


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