Thinking security through the event: Materiality,politics and publicity in the Litvinenko affair

Thinking security with and beyond Latour

As Walters (2014) and De Goede (2014) explore, Latour’s work offers a number of resources for materially oriented thinking on security (see also Salter 2015, 2016). Actor-network theory, to which Latour has been central (but see also Barry, 2013a; Salter 2015, 2016), is highly suggestive in terms of its insistence that action always takes place through complex constellations of both non-human and human entities, that these are only provisionally stabilized in particular arrangements, and that producing, managing and dealing with actor-networks involves highly specialized technical work. In its injunctions to follow actors (or ‘actants’) and to take seriously the work of expertise, actor-network theory also suggests practical methodological orientations for reconceptualizing and investigating the workings of security knowledges, technologies and practices (Walters, 2014). Latour’s later work on dingpolitik (Latour, 2005a) and the practices through which things are made public (Latour, 2005a, 2005b) is also relevant in pointing up the ways in which ‘objects’ may disrupt and complicate existing arrangements and how they might be more fully understood as resonant ‘things’ that are able to engender controversies and assemble publics in their own right.

In Latour’s argument (which owes an acknowledged debt to Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, via the work of Noortje Marres; see Latour, 2005a; Marres, 2005), theories of politics and democracy organized around the idea of representation – of words representing things, and people representing collectives – are held to be limiting in that they constrain the kinds of objects, actors and knowledges that can be recognized as being involved in any situation and the ways in which they may appear in public deliberations. Rather than being based on assertions of fact, politics needs to be reconceived, Latour argues, around issues, objects and matters of concern in ways that are open to deliberation. There is therefore both a normative and an analytical dimension to dingpolitik. Politics becomes a matter of assembling a ‘parliament of things’ that might constitute a new public around each matter of concern. As Latour (2005a: 5, also cited in Walters, 2014: 104) explains, ‘Each object gathers around itself a different assembly of relevant parties. Each object triggers new occasions to passionately differ and dispute. Each object may also offer new ways of achieving closure without having to agree on much else.’ Latour’s (admittedly experimental) suggestion both points towards the heterogeneity of things that might be, or become, involved in politics and invites us to consider how they, via representatives who speak for them, might reconfigure publics and politics.

Something that interests both Walters (2014) and De Goede (2014) is how existing forms of inquiries-in-public, such as inquests or public inquiries, might be said to embody some features of dingpolitik. Latour’s ideas have been taken up by De Goede (2014) in an analysis of the inquests that took place into the deaths of people killed in the bombings on the London transport network in July 2005. While the remit of these inquests was in principle tightly defined, De Goede argues that, in exploring the difficulty of anticipating and preventing attacks on the basis of often fragmented and ambiguous images, recordings and other information, the proceedings transformed the rationalities and practices of security, in a Latourian manner, from matters of fact into matters of concern. At the same time, however, De Goede shows how the incipiently political questions this might have raised were obviated by an imaginary of pervasive threat that was also deployed throughout the proceedings, which reinstalled the need for constant vigilance and the possibility of forceful action as preconditions of freedom. De Goede’s analysis therefore shows that although material objects can prompt deliberation on matters of concern, the extent to which such objects might be able to reassemble politics continues to be framed by the avowed necessity of illiberal techniques of security. Here, Walters (2014, 2015) reminds us that security entails secrecy, denial, qualification, obfuscation and absence, compromising our knowledge of things and the political roles they might play, or simply preventing such knowledge from having political effect.

Related problems attend the question of the public. In Latour’s thinking, publics ought to be assembled by, and in relation to, matters of concern and the heterogeneous actors and objects involved in them. In this sense, we might say that in De Goede’s (2014) account of the 7/7 inquests, material evidence concerning the event was permitted to assemble certain kinds of representatives, who could speak of its significance to the chair and the audience, which included family members of people killed in the event and members of the press. The bombings and the evidence pertaining to them, it might be said, were allowed, through the technique of the inquest, to assemble a public that would engage in deliberations about the inferences and conclusions that might be drawn. While the chair of the inquests was able to obtain an unusual degree of access to security service material and personnel, and to push the limits of her remit to explore questions not originally envisaged in the terms of the proceedings, making this a particularly interesting case (De Goede, 2014), the scope of inquiry, the evidence considered, the modes in which testimony was given and the kinds of conclusions that could be drawn were constrained by legal frameworks and by exceptions obtained by the security services.

Accordingly, while the 7/7 inquests in some respects exceeded what might have been expected of them, the proceedings fell short of meeting Latour’s criteria for enacting dingpolitik. As Latour (2005a: 31), channelling Lippmann, explains, the ‘parliament of things’ only works if ‘the assembling is done under the provisional and fragile Phantom Public, which no longer claims to be equivalent to a Body, a Leviathan or a State’. Officially constituted inquiries, especially those constituted in relation to security, being framed and loaded in favour of ‘the state’, do not meet this criterion, but they are nevertheless often occasions in which ‘objects’ are considered more in the manner of ‘things’, and some of their properties and stories disclosed and explored. A public inquiry may not be a parliament of things, but may, as an exercise in doing politics with things, make security public in new ways.

As materially oriented work has shown, objects and the actor-networks of which they form part play a variety of roles in forming, unsettling and reconfiguring politics and publics, and attending to such processes enhances our understanding of security. What work on public inquiries into matters of security further reveals are some of the ontological and epistemological limits and problems engendered by the security field in relation to questions of materiality. The assembling of security issues in public inquiries is in part an effect of the materiality of things, and it offers opportunities to examine the material nature and workings of security, but the assembly process remains implicated with the security field itself, which in turn mediates what is made public and how. To explore and address these issues further, it is useful to foreground the question of the event.

Thinking materiality, politics and publicity through the event

If a focus on objects, things and actor-networks can be revealing of what security is and how it works, this is often because of the manner in which those objects and networks are involved in intense transformations, in the course of which they act, interact, enact and are altered in relation to each other and their surroundings (Law, 2004). If ‘object-oriented ontology’ (Latour, 2005a: 4) asserts that anything can be thought of as being an object, this approach can underrate the complex, energetic and processual nature of things like protests, battles, coups, revolutions, assassinations, bombings, epidemics, chemical reactions or the decay of nuclear materials. Indeed, as Gilles Deleuze (2015: 151) suggests, an event is not really a material thing at all, but an ‘incorporeal’ transformation that is only expressed in the naming of intensive, energetic and often violent rearrangements and alterations of bodies and states of affairs. For Deleuze, the event is the transformation, not the agents of transformation or things that are transformed, and something of it always escapes conscious knowledge and appropriation. Events should not be reduced to material processes and transformations, then, but are recognized and inferred via them, and on the basis of the material traces that they enact, as well as the narrative accounts that they engender. Following the actors (or ‘actants’) and the ways in which they transform and are transformed thus becomes a way of getting at events.

The particular qualities of events that are liable to give rise to an officially constituted public inquiry in Britain are expressed in the first article of the Inquiries Act of 2005, under which the Litvinenko Inquiry took place. This states that:

The premise for an inquiry could thus be an actual event about which there is concern, or an event that might cause concern, or a concern that an event might have taken place. The key issue is not necessarily events per se, but their potentially public and concerning qualities.

A consideration of inquiries-in-public (of which inquests are one variety and public inquiries another) via dingpolitik allows us to emphasize something slightly different from work on governmentality, which highlights the ways in which British public inquiries, taking place under the authority of a government minister but proceeding independently of them, function nevertheless as techniques of government rather than enlightenment (Thomas, 2015). What I would like to draw out are the ways in which public inquiries ostensibly pursue an ontology and epistemology of the event. To the extent that they focus on objects, as well as causes and effects and acts of commission and omission, what ostensibly motivates and ties inquiries together is a sense that ‘something happened’ and the kinds of public knowledge and judgements that are possible about this.

In a meditation on the nature of events following the 9/11 attacks in New York, Jacques Derrida makes a distinction between the ‘event’ and the ‘impressions’ that it makes in individual experience and media reporting, suggesting, following 18th-century empiricism, that it is via its impressions that we try to appropriate the event (Borradori et al., 2003). Here we can add something beyond this, noting how events are also appropriated more specifically via the material transformations in which they participate and the traces they leave. In the terms of actor-network theory and the more Deleuzian vocabulary of ontopolitics (Law, 2004), these transformations and traces do not just ‘happen’, but are ‘enacted’ via specialist, technical investigations, which assemble expert knowledge about events, thus reframing our sense of what the event is. As well as hearing testimony from witnesses and interested parties, inquiries-in-public assemble such evidence and expertise as a basis for producing authoritative judgements about the event. A public inquiry is therefore a meta-level technique of the event in that it assembles, reflects upon and adjudicates between accounts produced by other techniques. In so doing, it does not just take place ‘in public’, but facilitates the assembly ‘of’ a public around objects, issues and disputes of concern, proceeding according to the logic of the event at hand. Inquiries-in-public offer a way to follow the event as it is reassembled and enacted amid ongoing disputes and struggles and in relation to claims of national security. What can also emerge from a careful reading of inquiries into events in which material things have played a significant role is a sense of how, in the course of events, materiality, politics and publics take on new forms and pass across into each other, as well as the absent presences that indicate not just limits to knowledge, but the workings of security.

Actant

Shortly before 4 p.m. on the afternoon of 1 November 2006, a solution of the radioactive element polonium 210 somehow made it into a teapot that was sitting on a table in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair, in London’s West End. Immediately before 4 p.m., Alexander Litvinenko arrived at the hotel, responding to an invitation from another Russian man, Dmitri Kovtun, who was present along with a third, Andrei Lugovoy. ¹ After a short conversation, and as Kovtun and Lugovoy readied to leave, Lugovoy mentioned to Litvinenko that there was still some tea in the pot that he could drink if he so wished. A waiter brought a clean cup, Litvinenko poured, and drank a small amount of the liquid. At that moment, his death from radiation poisoning became inevitable. This, then, is the focal point of the event, in which actor-networks converge, interact, intensify and transform, and from which the event ripples out, altering bodies, time and space.

Litvinenko fell ‘suddenly and unexpectedly’ ill overnight on 1 November 2006 (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 33). He began vomiting continuously, and early on 3 November his wife, Marina Litvinenko, called for an ambulance. He was not hospitalized, however, but began complaining of ‘pain’ and experiencing ‘bloody diarrhoea’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 34). On the afternoon of 4 November, Marina again called for an ambulance, and Litvinenko was admitted to Barnet Hospital in north London. An array of tests were carried out and Litvinenko was prescribed a course of antibiotics, but further tests on his blood determined that the platelet count and red and white cell counts were falling. His hair also began falling out. Over the next three weeks, Litvinenko’s condition deteriorated; by 16 November, his ‘bone marrow had degenerated and contained no discernible normal blood forming elements’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 35). At this point, Litvinenko was transferred to University College Hospital in central London. The deterioration of his condition could not be alleviated, and he died on 23 November.

The Litvinenko Inquiry found the cause of death to be poisoning by polonium 210, and this element can be said to have been the central actant of the event, but one that is neither a stable object nor independent from the myriad practices and networks through which it is created and used, and through which it comes to affect other things. Polonium 210 is a radioactive isotope that has a half-life of 138 days, and in the course of its decay into lead it emits a continuous stream of alpha particles. Given their relatively large atomic size (equivalent to that of a helium atom), alpha particles are readily intercepted by thin screens such as paper, clothing or skin. They may, however, pass through the permeable membranes of the human body, whereupon they transfer their kinetic energy into the cells they encounter, causing severe destruction and inflammation. This makes the ingestion of polonium highly dangerous. While its elemental form is metallic, polonium readily forms a number of compounds, including ‘water-soluble, colourless salts’ (Nathwani et al., 2016: 1079). Having been ingested by Litvinenko in liquid form, polonium was distributed around his body, inflicting alpha particle radiation ‘substantially in excess of doses that could be survived by any person’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2015a: 6). It was ‘cautiously’ estimated that even 1% of the dose ingested could have proved fatal (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2015a: 9). Such massive quantities of polonium were detected in Litvinenko’s body that it was itself treated as a hazardous radioactive object. The pathologist who conducted the post-mortem endorsed its description as ‘one of the most dangerous ever conducted in the Western world’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2015b: 42).

Actor-network theory understands actants as operating within heterogeneous arrangements of things, and highlights the considerable work and multitude of practices required to make entities cohere so that they can act (Law, 2004). To be sure, the very existence of polonium 210 entails a vast array of other such actors and practices, in highly specific ways: it is a ‘rare and specialised commodity’ that is ‘difficult to produce and dangerous to handle’, and it is ‘only publicly available in minute quantities’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 216). The production of polonium 210 requires a bismuth 209 target to be irradiated with neutrons within a specialized reactor. A chemical process is then used to isolate the polonium. As the inquiry found, only this process could have produced polonium in the quantity and purity that was used in the killing of Litvinenko. The inquiry further found that the quantity and quality of polonium used was ‘at the very least a strong indicator of state involvement’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 225).

The event was assembled, and it converged, around polonium 210, its nuclear properties and its physical affordances. But while we can understand its production as the effect of practices and networks, the event also emerged out of, and came to effect, distinctively political relations of enmity, via practices of deception. Litvinenko and Lugovoy (also a former KGB officer) had known each other in Moscow in the late 1990s as associates of Berezovsky, resuming contact in London in 2004 and coming to explore the possibility of working with each other and with London-based risk and security companies. Litvinenko’s friendly and trusting attitude towards Lugovoy was described by several witnesses to the inquiry, with one stating that Litvinenko had said Lugovoy was trustworthy because they had both worked for the KGB and with Russian security agencies; because Lugovoy had, like Litvinenko, worked for the oligarch Boris Berezovsky; and because he had (apparently – the veracity of this was questioned by the inquiry) served time in jail for this association (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 86). Though Lugovoy subsequently denied responsibility for Litvinenko’s death, he stated in a newspaper interview that he considered him to have been a ‘traitor’ and that, in principle, ‘if someone has caused the Russian state serious damage, they should be exterminated’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 199). Litvinenko’s former superior officer in the FSB stated that he had deserved to be ‘executed’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 67). Poisoning by polonium was thus in effect taken by the inquiry to have served as the material actant of a particular determination of the idea ‘death to traitors’ and the specific form of enactment of the intention ‘death to this traitor’.

In the course of the event, polonium became political, coming to express and effect relations of enmity and enacting fatal consequences for what was taken to have been a betrayal (Horn, 2003), and political relations were also thereby materialized. But there was also a becoming- and making-public of the event. In the early weeks of November 2006, the British media began to unravel the potential import of a former Russian intelligence agent suffering symptoms akin to radiation poisoning in a central London hospital. In the days before his death, Litvinenko expressed to detectives and associates his certainty that he had been killed by the Russian secret services, on the orders of Putin. Two days before his death, Litvinenko’s supporters arranged for a photo to be taken of him in his hospital bed, desperately ill and connected up to tubes and wires, bringing a dramatic representation of his condition into the public and political situation that was assembling and intensifying around it (Barry, 2013b). They also released a statement in Litvinenko’s name, which thanked the British government for its care and the public for their support and interest, naming Vladimir Putin as ‘the person responsible for my present condition’ and accusing him of being ‘barbaric and ruthless’ (BBC, 2006). One of Litvinenko’s associates told the Times that among his last words was the phrase, ‘the bastards got me. But they won’t get everybody’ (Beeston, 2006).

The polonium continued to act, in some ways that were kept secret and others that necessarily became public. The discovery by scientists at Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) on the day of Litvinenko’s death that polonium 210 was the cause of his deterioration sparked a major emergency response that sought to identify contaminated sites and track down every person who might have come into contact with the substance in the period in which the attack on Litvinenko had taken place (Health Protection Agency, 2010). The public assembled by the event thereby proliferated, and it was transformed as a matter of concern. Sites across London were cordoned off for investigation, and hundreds of people in Britain and abroad were contacted, invited to give samples for testing and offered follow-up advice. This response in turn elicited massive media and public interest and, among some, affective disquiet, in turn causing health providers to offer further reassurance and support (Morgan et al., 2008). By this stage, however, polonium was already coming to figure in a different register, to which we now turn in more detail.

Trace

In Reassembling the Social, Latour writes:

without transformation in some state of affairs, there is no meaningful argument to be made about a given agency, no detectable frame of reference. An invisible agency that makes no difference, produces no transformation, leaves no trace, and enters no account, is not an agency. (Latour, 2005a: 53, emphasis in original)

The solution of polonium employed by Litvinenko’s killers made a difference and left myriad traces; indeed, the report of the Litvinenko Inquiry devotes a whole chapter to what became known as ‘the polonium trail’. Traces of polonium, when detected, measured, recorded and assembled via expert practices into meaningful form, offered detailed insight into some of the crucial spatialities and temporalities of the event. The account of polonium 210 offered in the preceding section is thus dependent on public access afforded by the inquiry to the accounts and products of the investigations that are described and drawn upon here, as summarized in the report and in documents contained in its public archive.

Significant quantities of polonium were detected not just in urine samples and in Litvinenko’s body itself, but in hair he had shaved off his head after it started to fall out, which, the Inquiry found, happened to have remained in a bag in his hospital room (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 35–36). Traces were also detected by means of a ‘series of tests’ conducted ‘at a series of locations’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 110). These tests found traces on a multitude of objects, in particular the teapot, located after exhaustive searching at the Millennium Hotel, wherein radioactive material had become embedded in residues from tea-making that persisted, despite repeated washing, on regions inside the bowl and, especially, in the spout, indicative of polonium solution having been poured through it (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 177). There were correspondences between polonium traces and two previous visits to London, by Lugovoy and Kovtun on 16–18 October, and by Lugovoy only on 25–27 October, during which, the Inquiry concluded, attempts were also made on Litvinenko’s life. Polonium traces also corresponded with visits on 28 October–3 November (by Lugovoy) and 1–3 November (by Kovtun), during which the fatal poisoning took place. Kovtun had travelled to London on 1 November via Hamburg, where traces were also discovered at more than one location and on several objects by German police. In London, traces were found, inter alia, on door handles, on towels, on a shisha pipe, on restaurant and bar seats, in a nightclub and in a car, and on seats at the Emirates Stadium, home to Arsenal Football Club in north London, visited by Lugovoy on the evening of 1 November 2006, when Arsenal had played CSKA of Moscow. Contamination was also found on seats and on an overhead locker in aeroplanes working between Moscow and London during the period of interest, on which the persons of interest had travelled. As well as on, and in, one particular teapot and on the table upon which it had apparently sat, especially high concentrations were found amid the detritus in the u-bend of a sink in the bathroom of a hotel room in which Lugovoy stayed on the first visit, and on a meeting table around which the three men had met in the offices of a risk and security consultancy in Mayfair; in the bin in the bathroom of a hotel room in which Lugovoy stayed on the second visit; and in the sediment trap of the sink in the bathroom of the hotel room in which Kovtun stayed on the third visit. Notably high readings of alpha radiation were also taken from the cuff of the denim jacket worn by Litvinenko on 1 November.

This brief overview illustrates the manner in which remnants of polonium distributed around London and beyond enabled a tracing of the event. This process involved police forensics experts but also scientists from the AWE and other agencies, who conducted tests with alpha particle detectors, which could detect both the presence and the approximate strength of radiation, with swabs being taken for further testing in cases of significant contamination. The results of this investigation were compiled in a 260-page report produced to the Inquiry that had remained secret but was made public by it. An expert from AWE gave crucial evidence, distinguishing contamination levels into ‘primary’, indicative of direct contact with polonium 210, and ‘secondary’, resulting from the subsequent transfer of material. As she stated,

The transfer of polonium from primary contamination areas to other areas is dependent upon the physical and chemical properties of polonium and the surface of the materials on which it is deposited. The amount of contamination transferred is dependent upon the amount of original activity present on each successive surface to which it is transferred. (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 111)

Here, we are well within the realm of actor-network theory: of experts, devices, materials, properties, recordings; of ‘inscription’ and related epistemic practices. As described in the report, beyond the ‘primary finding’ that contamination was attributable to polonium 210, ‘the principal questions that arose were, first, the level of each of the findings, and, second, the inferences that could be drawn from the results’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 111). The traces do not just ‘exist’, but are ‘enacted’ (Law, 2004) via devices and techniques, and are assembled to support an account of the event in which they participated and whose passing they are taken to record.

The technical infrastructure and expertise making it possible to detect these traces in Litvinenko’s body and beyond made a decisive difference to the case (Dombey, 2007), illustrating ways in which materiality comes to matter. At the same time, the radioactive remnants of polonium should be regarded as more than traces of direct and secondary contact between a radioactive substance and a series of bodies, objects, sites and surfaces that were amenable to scientific investigation. They would not have been enacted as such without technical capabilities related to Britain’s status as a nuclear state, a perceived radiation threat to public security, and the suspicion of the commission of a crime affecting someone immersed in the relations of intelligence and espionage between adversary states. In other words, there are, from the beginning, political dimensions to the ways in which remnants of polonium became traces of an event in virtue of the national security implications of nuclear technology, which are further signalled by the anonymous identification of the AWE expert as ‘A1’ in the inquiry. In becoming traces, these remnants acquire an epistemic quality that bears the impression of a political situation (Barry 2013b) and which, in the course of investigation, serves to confirm the political nature of the event. In terms of the inquiry’s concern with the nature of the event, the presence of traces of a highly rare and toxic substance in immediate proximity to certain people, in certain settings, at certain times, in certain dispersions and concentrations, becomes explicable and comprehensible in terms of a conjunction of enmity, deception and lethal intent, which are in turn explicable in relation to other actors and events – that is, in terms of a broader political situation in which Litvinenko was also an actant.

The material traces of polonium 210 neither fully describe the material, political or public dimensions of the event, nor fully illuminate the actor-networks involved in it, however. There are many other actants (e.g. phones) and traces (e.g. phone records) that were explored in the Inquiry, but also absent presences (Walters, 2014). No evidence was presented, in public at least, regarding how Lugovoy and Kovtun came by the polonium used in each of the attempts on Litvinenko’s life. On this point, the barrister representing Marina Litvinenko as a core participant in the Inquiry suggested that as Lugovoy and Kovtun had not had opportunity to acquire polonium between their arrival at Gatwick Airport from Moscow on the morning of 16 October and their meeting with Litvinenko that afternoon, they must have brought it with them. However, Sir Robert Owen, chairing the inquiry, rejected this proposition owing to the lack of evidence concerning their movements that day, concluding that he could not ‘exclude … the possibility that they obtained polonium 210 from some source in London’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 125). Aspects of the event, and understanding of the role played in it by polonium 210, including the latter’s presumed origins within the Russian nuclear complex, therefore remain obscure, at least in terms of the official public record.

Evidence

Traces of the event came to function in a distinct, but related, way as evidence when they were assembled via legal reasoning in the context of the inquiry. To be sure, polonium 210 had already acquired an evidential quality before this point. The work of dozens of police officers, detectives and forensic specialists on the case was oriented in terms of the potential for the traces they detected and gathered coming to function as evidence, in the first instance in a possible a criminal trial. However, while Lugovoy and Kovtun were charged with murder, the Metropolitan Police eventually concluded that there was no realistic prospect of them leaving Russia to face trial. At this point, the coroner’s inquest that had initially been opened into Litvinenko’s death resumed its work, but was then adjourned pending resolution of the dispute over whether, as Marina Litvinenko and Sir Robert Owen himself argued, a public inquiry into the event should take place. Following protracted legal argument, and in the days following the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, Home Secretary Theresa May (2014) announced that a public inquiry would take place after all.

Here, it is relevant to draw out some of the ways in which the Inquiry was itself enacted as an event. The inquiry took place within the framework of the Inquiries Act 2005, which sets out the parameters within which such investigations are to be configured and conducted, but its chair went to great lengths to emphasize the importance of due process. One expression of this was the care taken by the chair concerning the kind of inferences that might be drawn from the polonium trail with regard to bodies, space and time. On the one hand, the report of the Inquiry records the judgement that a positive finding of contamination ‘calls for explanation’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 112) in terms of the conjunction between polonium and a particular person at a particular location at a particular time. However, a negative finding might mean that the relevant person was not contaminated at a particular location and time, but it might also mean that a contaminated person did not transfer polonium onto any surface at that point, or that contamination had decayed or been cleaned away. Therefore no particular significance was to be attached to the absence of contamination. This approach was also reflected in the extent to which Owen sought to interrogate and reject conspiracy theories and other fanciful or speculative ideas concerning the event. Polonium did not speak for itself, nor was it only enacted through technical practices, knowledge and representatives (Latour, 2005a), but nor was it taken, in and of itself, to indicate directly a political character to the event; rather, its role in and significance for the event was made to emerge through a performative enactment of analytical process, logic and judgement.

As the Oxford English Dictionary states, the word ‘evidence’ has come to carry the meaning of ‘information (in the form of personal or documented testimony or the production of material objects), tending or used to establish facts in a legal investigation’. The word additionally carries the meaning of ‘grounds for belief; facts or observations adduced in support of a conclusion or statement; the available body of information indicating whether an opinion or proposition is true or valid’. ² Objects and narratives become ‘evidence’, or ‘testimony’, by virtue of their transformation in specific intentional and institutional contexts and practices, in which they are taken to point towards something, in this case an event. Objects are therefore assembled by, as well as assembling of, inquiries-in-public.

The distinctiveness and importance of the polonium evidence was recognized by the Inquiry. Having outlined the conventional forms of evidence, the chair stated that ‘in addition to’ these, ‘it became apparent that there was a highly unusual, in fact unprecedented, line of inquiry to be followed’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 109). As the chair further stated, ‘I shall refer not only to the extensive witness and documentary evidence that has been adduced, but also to the body of evidence arising from the testing for radioactive contamination’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 109, emphasis added). Polonium in some ways assembled the Inquiry, but it was enacted there as evidence via representations and representatives. There was a 265-page collection of radiation schedules, listing the results of testing at 56 ‘scenes’ of relevance to the investigation and a further eight that were also tested, some of which encompassed dozens of individual surfaces and objects. Polonium further became evidence via the testimony of A1, the doctors who treated Litvinenko and experts on nuclear matters, as well as via a number of sketches, diagrams and 3D model images of some of the scenes. Polonium also appears as evidence via letters, reports and certificates concerning plane seats, and in documents emerging from medical examinations. It is further possible that polonium was mentioned in the ‘closed evidence’ that the chair had determined necessary to the investigation and was able to access but that could not be disclosed, having been assessed by the home secretary ‘as being too sensitive to put into the public domain’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 181). Some kinds of evidence were therefore material to the public findings of the Inquiry, but did not themselves become public.

Polonium was adduced (that is, cited as evidence) in the chair’s narrative of the event, which set out a chain of reasoning as to what was either supported or excluded by the available material. The report of the inquiry thus moves from enacting the event as a matter of concern (Latour, 2005a; De Goede, 2014) to ‘findings of fact’, expressed according to a series of legal standards, explained by the chair:

In making findings of fact I have adopted the ‘flexible and variable’ approach to the standard of proof…. I add that where in this Report I state that ‘I am sure’ I will have found a fact to the criminal standard. When I use such expressions as ‘I find’ or ‘I am satisfied’ the standard of proof will have been the ordinary civil standard of proof, namely the balance of probabilities. Where it is obvious that I have found a fact but I have not used one of these terms, the standard will have been the civil standard. All other expressions, such as a reference to a state of affairs being ‘possible’ will not be a finding of fact, but will indicate my state of mind in respect of the issue being considered. (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 10)

This last statement is important in terms of how the report stated only that the polonium ‘could’ have come from Russia. However, the chair felt able to state that he was ‘sure’ that the cause of the cardiac arrest as a result of which Litvinenko died ‘was acute radiation syndrome’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 184) and that this ‘was caused by Mr Litvinenko ingesting approximately 4.4GBq of polonium 210 on 1 November 2006’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 185). As rephrased ‘in everyday language’, the chair stated that ‘I conclude that Mr Litvinenko was fatally poisoned with polonium 210 on 1 November 2006’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 185). He was further ‘sure’ that this happened while drinking tea in the Pine Bar on that date, given the primary contamination found there and other corroborating evidence. The pattern of contamination further allowed the idea that Litvinenko had accidentally poisoned himself or committed suicide to be ruled out. Based on the hair sample and other evidence, the chair also expressed himself ‘sure’ that Litvinenko had earlier ingested a smaller dose of polonium, and that this was ‘likely to have been received’ at the meeting on 16 October. Crucially, the chair stated that he was ‘sure that Lugovoy and Kovtun placed the polonium in the teapot at the Pine Bar on 1 November’, that ‘they did this with the intention of poisoning Mr Litvinenko’ and ‘that they knew they were using a deadly poison’, while he believed that they did not know precisely what the substance was or ‘the nature of all its properties’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 192). Through this evidentiary reasoning, the materiality of polonium was publicly established to have been deployed, and to have acted, in accordance with the intention of targeting and killing Litvinenko, as it in fact came to do.

The use of polonium was also taken to point beyond Lugovoy and Kovtun, not only towards a nuclear complex from which it must have emerged, but also to political actors and intentions. As the chair found, the two had neither the means to obtain the quantities of polonium used nor a plausible personal motive to kill Litvinenko. As he stated, ‘all the evidence points in one direction, namely that, when they killed Mr Litvinenko, Mr Lugovoy and Mr Kovtun were acting on behalf of someone else’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 209, emphasis added). Here the inquiry found that ‘the use of polonium 210 is at the very least a strong indicator of state involvement’. In exploring this, the chair made reference to a ‘pattern of events’ that was taken to suggest that ‘the Russian state may have been involved in the assassination of Mr Putin’s critics’ and that it ‘may have sponsored attacks against its opponents, including radioactive poisons’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 231); he also noted that ‘leading opponents of President Putin, including those living outside Russia, were at risk of assassination’, and that ‘one of the risks they faced was that of being poisoned’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 233). Overall, the open evidence was taken to establish ‘a strong circumstantial case that the Russian State was responsible for Mr Litvinenko’s death’. A further difference that ‘security’ makes to our understanding of materiality and events here is indicated by the fact that it was after having considered the ‘closed’ evidence that the inquiry found Lugovoy to have been, with ‘strong probability’, acting under the direction of the FSB, as had Kovtun, ‘possibly indirectly through Mr Lugovoy but probably to his knowledge’ (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 240). Taking account of ‘all of the evidence and analysis available’, the inquiry concluded that the operation was ‘probably’ approved by the director of the FSB and by President Putin (Litvinenko Inquiry, 2016: 240, emphasis added).

Polonium 210 was the central material actant in the event, which it enacted in ways that were amenable to tracing. While this tracing was already ‘evidential’ in a number of ways, the inquiry enacted a particular kind of evidential reassembly of the event, not just in terms of matters of fact, but in terms of likelihood, probability and possibility. In evidential terms, the strength of associations between polonium and other aspects of the event, and the corresponding level of ‘facticity’ asserted by the inquiry, intensify as one moves closer in space and time towards the fatal convergence of the event in Litvinenko’s body. In this convergence, there is no distinguishing between politics and materiality. Polonium becomes politics, and politics becomes polonium; nuclearity and enmity are enacted in new ways, and the event begins to assemble new publics.