THE LOW POST: Murder on the Polonium Express

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Five years ago, just before 9/11, I organized and participated in one of the stupidest and most drunken auto rallies of all time, a 500-kilometer odyssey to Moscow across central Russia in ten ancient and poorly restored Zaporozhets automobiles -- perhaps the silliest cars ever made, with each containing thirty horsepower engines and built so light that two grown men can lift and drop one into a parking spot.

The trip left me with powerful memories -- from driving through historic Nizhni Novgorod in a Mike Tyson mask with Led Zeppelin IV blaring out of my midget car windows, to hearing a Georgian theater director explain why he'd laid seven prostitutes the night before the rally ("They only cost 300 rubles a piece," he said), to watching twenty-five grown men cook a cauldron of pig and duck entrails at midnight in the wilderness after consuming an incredible four whole cases of vodka, to going outside to catch a drunken American woman humping the front right tire of my car outside the nightclub where we'd held the end-of-the-race celebration. Actually that last night ended when I got into a fistfight with a professional clown, but it's probably best not to get into that incident too much...

I'm remembering that trip this week because of where the rally started: a city called Arzamas, not far from Nizhni. Neighboring Arzamas is a closed city called Arzamas-16, formerly known as Sarov. Arzamas-16 is the Los Alamos of Russia, famous nationwide for being home to the Russian bomb. In Arzamas-16 there's a factory called "Avangard," where the Soviets in the 1950s started industrial production of various radioactive materials. One of my friends from that rally, in fact, used to work at that factory. Among the radioactive materials his former co-workers produced at that plant? Polonium-210, the substance used in the murder of former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London last week.

Litvinenko has been dead less than a week and already his murder is shaping up to be one of the all-time Whodunits -- a mind-bogglingly complex story involving a walking vault of dangerous secrets for a victim and a vast range of prominent political actors as plausible potential suspects. It's a plot straight out of a Le Carre novel, featuring a well-known ex-spy with intimate knowledge of both the Kremlin's inner workings and the Russian criminal underworld murdered in a London restaurant, using a deadly radioactive substance whose origin is almost certainly industrial and military. And not only is this ex-spy murdered, but he's murdered just before the Russian president, who is presumed by the media to be a suspect, is due to arrive in Helsinki for a meeting with EU leaders. An intriguing mix of secrets, political blackmail and retribution.

While most of the world's press is engaged in trying to unravel the murder mystery, almost no one is bothering to point out the other obvious angle -- that the Litvinenko murder is the world's first act of nuclear terrorism, and we should all be shitting our pants over its implications.

Authorities aren't saying yet what they know about the source of the Polonium-210 presumably used to kill Litvinenko, but I'm guessing that before long it will come out that it came from Arzamas-16, or some place very much like it in the Russian military-industrial complex. As has been pointed out repeatedly in the Russian press this week, killing someone with Western-made Polonium-210 would be very risky, since the chances of the transaction being traced are so high. Not so in Russia, from whence most of the key suspects hail in any case. The big question right now is how that Polonium-210 got from Arzamas-16 or wherever to a sushi restaurant in London and to "businessman" Boris Berezovsky's office, among other places.

If one assumes that that Polonium-210 was taken and used without the full knowledge of the Russian government -- and it's not much of a stretch to make that assumption -- then that definitely makes the Litvinenko killing a private act of terrorism, one that requires an urgent international investigation.