Original subtitles

[ominous music playing]

[narrator] In the shadowy world of espionage,

the act of assassination must be discreet.

[man] The importance of these various methods

is to leave no trace behind when possible.

[narrator] While there are many ways to kill,

poison is one of the most common.

He pushed it into his face.

Fired it, the cyanide gas was inhaled…

[narrator] Intelligence agencies have created innovative delivery systems

for the poisons.

Some of these substances were considered for use

against leaders, such as Fidel Castro in Cuba.

[narrator] For some, death comes quickly,

but others take time to die.

He died a gruesome death

as his organs literally exploded inside.

[narrator] The attacks are audacious.

The Russian government used…

a nuclear weapon

to kill someone in downtown London.

[narrator] The use of poison to assassinate sends a clear message.

Their people should not defect, their people should not cooperate.

Their people should not turn against the leaders.

[theme music playing]

[narrator] Intelligence agencies use espionage

to gain military and political intelligence

on their foreign adversaries,

but sometimes intelligence services also train operatives

to carry out assassinations.

One preferred method is to use poison.

Engineers and chemists within the intel world

have armed assassins with a variety of ingenious and discreet devices

to carry out the operations,

using everything from gas guns

to radioactive pellets,

to make sure their targets pay the ultimate price.

[Joyal] There's a long history of assassination being used as a tool

of espionage to eliminate people.

It's been used in many ways,

not only to kill them but to make them useless.

[narrator] One incident during the Cold War utilized a poison umbrella

against Georgi Markov,

who had defected from England from the People's Republic of Bulgaria.

Now, Markov was a dissident,

but was also a commentator for BBC's Bulgarian Service.

And between 1975 and 1978,

he did a devastating series of reports

that pointed to the ineptitude, the corruption,

of then Bulgarian President Todor Zhivkov.

Zhivkov wanted him dead.

And the idea was to create a pneumatically fired device

that would shoot a tiny pellet,

a little larger than the head of a pin.

That pellet would be cross-drilled

and inside would be filled the poison ricin.

[narrator] Georgi Markov was followed by an assassin

as he walked across the Waterloo Bridge to catch a bus on the other side.

[Joyal] Someone came up from behind him

and hit him on the back of his thigh

with the umbrella tip and injected the ricin pellet into his calf.

He was brought to the hospital.

He was complaining, "Something happened.

I believe I've been poisoned."

[narrator] Four days later, 49-year-old Markov was dead.

Another clever and lethal device was developed by the KGB in the mid-'50s.

They called it the poison gas assassination gun.

This weapon had the capability to kill instantly.

[Melton] It was essentially a small cylinder

hidden inside a newspaper.

And inside was a small vial of prussic acid,

a detonator cap, and a triggering device.

The trigger would impact the detonator.

It would cause the vile of prussic acid to vaporize,

and it would emit cyanide gas.

The trace of that substance would dissipate rapidly.

So by the time you would perform an autopsy, you don't find anything.

The importance of these various methods

is to leave no trace behind when possible.

[narrator] In this case, the target for elimination

was anti-Soviet Ukrainian national and dissident leader Dr. Lev Rebet.

The assassin selected for the mission was KGB officer Bohdan Stashynsky.

Thirty minutes before the attack,

he had to take an antidote that would protect him

from the accidental over-spray or a back-spray

of any of the gas that he may inhale accidentally.

[narrator] After taking the antidote,

Stashynsky lay in wait for Dr. Rebet to return to his Munich apartment.

[Melton] So Stashynsky positioned himself one floor above

and he began to walk down as Dr. Rebet walked up.

And holding the newspaper in his right hand,

he pushed it into his face,

and the startled Dr. Rebet recoiled,

-breathed deeply just as he fired it. -[coughing]

The cyanide gas was inhaled.

Stashynsky simply continued walking down the steps and left.

[narrator] Dr. Rebet died instantly

and Stashynsky continued on his next mission,

to kill Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian radical politician.

This time he used the KGB's improved version of the single-barrel gas gun.

The KGB decided if the single-barrel gas gun was good,

well, then they should have a double-barreled gas gun.

And they simply duplicated this weapon,

mounted it together so that when you squeezed,

you would trigger two barrels of cyanide gas.

[narrator] The Soviets weren't the only ones experimenting

with poison assassination devices.

In the 1960s, an infamous secret project called MK-ULTRA

was formed by the United States Central Intelligence Agency

Office of Technical Services, or the OTS.

MK-ULTRA was the overall program name

for 149 separate projects,

that was originated in 1953

by the director of CIA at the time, Allen Dulles.

Some of them, by standards of the 21st century,

uh, seem to be absolutely out of…

uh, out of responsible research,

in that research was done with unwitting people.

Uh, substances were given,

particularly LSD, to some unwitting folks.

Uh, the results were not always constructive.

[Melton] As part of the program,

they had a target to achieve

a assassination device

that could silently fire a projectile

that could impart a lethal substance.

What they used was a modification

of essentially a tranquilizer gun

that was used to shoot animals.

And they gave it the name

the "non-discernible bio-inoculator pistol."

Does this pistol fire the dart?

[man] Yes, it does, Mr. Chairman,

and a special one was developed which potentially would be able

to enter the target without perception.

[narrator] During the Church Committee hearings,

CIA Director William Colby testified

that toxic agents were being used in CIA assassination devices.

It certainly showed the capability of what could be done

by using a pneumatically powered fléchette

that could carry a very toxic substance, such as shellfish toxin.

[Wallace] There was no prohibition at the time

of assassination programs by the United States government.

And so some of these substances were considered for use against leaders,

such as Fidel Castro in Cuba.

Then subsequently in the 1970s,

by executive order,

the CIA was prohibited

from engaging in any assassination operations,

and that executive order stands today.

[narrator] No such orders were given in Russia,

where assassinations have historically been used

against critics of the regime.

[tense music playing]

[Melton] Yushchenko was not a friend of Russia.

As prime minster of the Ukraine, Yushchenko was a very viable candidate

and appeared to be on his way to be elected president.

He was invited to a dinner at the intelligence service.

He soon became very ill,

was flown out of the country to Western doctors

and discovered levels of the toxic substance

that were thousands of times higher than one would find in the normal environment.

[narrator] The attack was traced back to the dinner Yushchenko had attended

with two leaders of the Security Service of Ukraine,

the SBU.

He was served a soup, and the soup was laden with dioxin.

[narrator] Yushchenko had ingested hazardous amounts of TCDD,

the most potent dioxin, and a contaminant in Agent Orange.

It left him horribly disfigured, but it didn't kill him.

And ultimately he survived and was elected president.

But to this day he still bears marks of the disfigurement.

[narrator] Till then, assassinations had been creative affairs

with an emphasis on masking the actual cause of death

to make it look like an accident.

But 2006 marked a new era

and a new level of aggression by the Russian state.

Russians have always felt justified in reaching out

and touching their own people, their own nationals, wherever they are.

And they wanna send a message.

Their people should not defect.

Their people should not cooperate with foreign intelligence services.

Their people should not turn against the leaders, their own leadership.

[narrator] Alexander Litvinenko,

an outspoken critic of Russian President Putin,

may have known the risks

but could never have imagined the lengths they would take for revenge.

[Melton] Litvinenko was a former officer

in the Russian FSB,

which was the former second directorate, the counterintelligence directorate.

He operated in Moscow.

He was married to a very beautiful ballerina

by the name of Marina.

Alexander Litvinenko was really a remarkable person

in the history of the modern Russia,

because he was a law enforcement officer who focused on corruption.

In fact, he presented to Putin his analysis of corruption rings,

uh, and at that point Putin dismissed him.

Eventually his unit was asked to participate

in the assassination of Boris Berezovsky,

who was a famous, or infamous, oligarch,

who at the time was serving in a national security capacity

for the Yeltsin government in trying to broker peace in Chechnya.

[narrator] Litvinenko and other members of his unit

refused to go through with the hit, instead they went public.

Most of the men all had balaclava masks on,

but Alexander did not.

He gave a press conference and they announced this.

It was an extraordinary event.

And soon after that, he was arrested on some trumped-up charges

and put in prison for a particular period of time.

[narrator] Upon his release, Litvinenko and his family left Russia

and were granted asylum in Great Britain.

[Melton] Litvinenko had maintained

a greater public profile than he should have.

And he wrote a book which asserted

that the key to Putin's election in Russia

had been that he had placed bombs in Russian apartments

which went off and killed people and were blamed on Chechen rebels.

And as a strong nationalist,

he asserted that Putin had then ridden that wave of popularity.

But he went further to claim that Putin was a pedophile.

[audience clapping]

[narrator] On the day he was poisoned, Litvinenko took a series of meetings,

one of them with a man named Scaramella at a sushi restaurant,

the other with Dmitry Kovtun

and former KGB officer Andrei Lugovoi

at the Millennium Hotel's Pinewood Bar in London.

He went home that night,

became violently ill.

[Joyal] And his wife thought that it was some type of food poisoning,

but then he could not stop the vomiting

and all the rest

and realized that, uh…

"I've been poisoned."

Now, Alexander was a very fit individual.

He would run three to five miles a day.

Uh, he was an extremely tough man

and determined to help the authorities

find who was behind this,

because all of us knew that the Kremlin was definitely behind this.

This is not something that is done by anyone else.

And it was only within the last 24 hours that they detected,

through an analysis of his body fluids, that it was, in fact, polonium.

If he had died 24 hours before,

he would have been buried with "cause unknown."

[siren wailing]

[narrator] The Counterterrorism Unit at the Metropolitan Police

determined that Litvinenko had been given a lethal dose of polonium

at his meeting with Lugovoi and Kovtun at the Millennium Hotel.

[Joyal] At that hotel, he was presented with the opportunity

to have some tea, green tea.

He had it, didn't taste right.

Apparently in the tea,

was a grain of polonium

and the grain of polonium would be the size,

if you took a packet of artificial sweetener,

one tiny grain of the sweetener…

with that as polonium,

once it was in the tea,

from the moment he ingested it, he was dead.

He became radioactive.

Everything he touched,

the seat that he sat.

When he went to the men's room, he placed his hand on the door.

The area above the urinal.

[narrator] The British authorities were also able to track the movement

of Litvinenko's assassins, Lugovoi and Kovtun.

[Melton] The British authorities went back

and tracked the flights they had…

that the individuals carrying the compound had flown

from Moscow on British Air.

And they could tell which seat they were sitting in because it was radioactive.

They track… they flew to an apartment in Germany.

They could track that apartment, it was still radioactive.

-[monitor clicking rapidly] -[Joyal] These men had no idea…

…that this was polonium.

I guarantee you…

because they were absolutely careless with it.

And that explains why it's messy, to me.

And clearly to get access to polonium,

anyone would know it had to be state-sanctioned.

There had to be approval at the very top of the Kremlin

to authorize this particular operation.

[Melton] There is a famous picture of him laying in the hospital,

uh, giving kind of a last will and testament.

So it was a pointed message and the first

nuclear assassination that we know of.

[narrator] Along with being a security analyst,

Paul Joyal was also a close personal friend of Litvinenko's.

He appeared on Dateline

to publicly accuse the Kremlin for being responsible for his friend's death.

Four days after the show aired,

Joyal was attacked.

One shot was fired.

It entered about right here and exited over here,

uh, blew right through me.

And then, uh…

he came in close and I heard him-- the gun click.

And he chambered…

tried to re-chamber the round and it jammed.

[narrator] Joyal survived the attack, but in the months that followed,

many other prominent critics of Putin were not so lucky.

[Joyal] You have Boris Berezovksy who died under very mysterious circumstances.

He was found hanged in his bathroom.

His partner, Badri Patarkatsishvili,

with a heart attack in London…

-[camera shutters clicking] -…at his home.

Countries tend to eliminate people

for many more reasons than national strategic policy.

The most recent visible example

would be the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal.

[tense music playing]

[narrator] Skripal was one of four alleged double agents

released from Russia in a spy swap with the US in 2010.

[plane engine running]

And Skripal had been a member of GRU,

Russian military intelligence,

and is believed to have been actively cooperating

with British intelligence to identify other GRU agents around the world.

According to the British authorities,

Sergei Skripal was living somewhat openly.

His daughter Yulia had just come to visit him from Moscow.

[narrator] Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia

had spent a day together in Salisbury, England,

stopping at Bishops' Mill Pub, then to Zizzi, an Italian restaurant.

They're last spotted on CCTV footage outside the restaurant at 3:47 p.m.

before being found unconscious 25 minutes later on a bench.

They were foaming from the mouth so they thought there was an overdose.

[narrator] With CCTV cameras installed all over London,

it didn't take long for authorities to identify two suspicious men

in and around the vicinity of Skripal's home.

[Joyal] They were able to get some images and then later

use those images to go back and identify the two individuals,

who were identified as members of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence.

With this, again, a forensic trail of video,

they got a timeline, so now they see that these people

were in close proximity to the site

in which Skripal and his daughter were discovered

and were able to conduct the forensic analysis

on the house,

in which they identified the Novichok.

It was used against them

by spraying it on his door handle.

[spraying]

[narrator] Assassins used a modified perfume bottle

to carry the Novichok,

which they sprayed on the handle of Skripal's front door,

then discarded seven miles away in the trash can.

[monitor beeping]

[narrator] Although Skripal and his daughter both survived,

a woman who came in contact with the poison almost three months later

became an unwitting victim.

It was later found by a man and a woman searching through rubbish bins.

When she saw the perfume, he found it, gave it to her.

The first thing she did was spread it on her wrist.

She died.

He ultimately survived.

If it had not been discovered in the trash bin

by the two people searching and the woman died,

it is unlikely the authorities would have ever learned

how the nerve agent was applied.

But, because of that quirk of the rubbish divers

that were going through the rubbish bin, that's what exposed the device itself.

Novichok is produced only in probably three places in the world.

So, it had to be produced at a nation-state-level facility.

Whether or not this was ordered

at the highest level of the Russian government

is known only to the authorities in the Russian government.

But certainly it appears that someone within the GRU

consciously made a decision to go forward with this action.

[narrator] In response to the attack, the British government

publicly accused Russia of attempted murder

and, in a coordinated response with its Western allies,

announced a series of punitive measures,

including the expulsion

of an unprecedented 153 Russian diplomats.

[Melton] The cleanup that's taken place in Salisbury, England, at the restaurant

and the area has cost the British government enormously.

One police officer was hospitalized for a long period of time.

His home and personal effects had to be basically destroyed

because of the potential contamination.

No one knows the shelf life of Novichok.

It is one of the most virulent, dangerous substances in the world.

[Joyal] The idea that Novichok, this, um…

banned, by the way.

Banned by treaty, by the chemical weapons convention.

Banned… was used again

in a foreign country to kill somebody.

It's just brutal, it's barbaric.

[Melton] And it was a very pointed warning.

I would believe every defector in any country in the world

that had betrayed Russia

would sleep with one eye open.

So Russians don't have a problem reaching out, touching their own people,

and neither apparently do the North Koreans.

[narrator] Kim Jong-nam, the eldest son of former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il,

was considered the heir apparent, until he was caught

trying to go to Tokyo Disneyland and embarrassed the regime.

Kim Jong-nam went into exile,

allowing half-brother Kim Jong-un to become North Korea's leader.

[crowd applauding]

Now, the brother who was living in exile

had very poor tradecraft.

He was using the same passport

and had not changed his name

and had been living very openly,

knowing that his brother wanted him dead.

[narrator] The North Koreans devised an elaborate plan

of the likes of a James Bond movie

to carry out the assassination in broad daylight

at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia.

The North Koreans apparently were able to send in a team

in advance of his arrival.

They were waiting in the airport.

[narrator] In this disturbing footage

captured on Kuala Lumpur's International Airport CCTV cameras,

Kim Jong-nam is seen walking through the departure terminal

when two women approach.

One lunged at him from behind, covering his face,

then quickly walking away.

The attack takes less than three seconds to carry out.

He immediately complained to the authorities

that he believed… this was trying to kill him.

He fell ill within minutes and died

before there was no way they could resuscitate him.

Two women, a Cambodian and a Vietnamese, were both arrested.

And what they explained was that they thought they had been paid

to take part in a prank

and the prank was to be televised and put on YouTube

and the idea, they would identify a traveler

and they would take a rag and then rub it on his face.

All the time this would be a hilarious joke.

[narrator] The women had been paid by North Korean agents

posing as television producers to take part in a prank.

What the women didn't know was who the victim of the prank was

or that the substance they used was a deadly nerve agent called VX.

[tense music playing].

Kim Jong-nam died within 20 minutes of the attack.

Experts suggest the women may have been unaffected

because they washed their hands immediately after the attack.

Another theory is that the assassins used a binary concoction,

smearing two non-fatal elements of VX

that mixed on the victim's face to make it lethal.

Murder charges were dropped against the women in 2019

and it's widely believed that Kim Jong-nam was murdered

on the orders of his half-brother Kim Jong-un.

Interestingly, North Korea issued an apology to Vietnam

for causing one of their citizens to be involved in this event,

though they never admitted any involvement with the event.

[narrator] Although assassinations are no longer sanctioned by the CIA

in the United States,

targeted assassinations have been the norm

in the fight against terrorism for the past 20 years.

[Melton] So, targeted assassinations

against terrorists are considered

viable elements of US policy regardless of administration.

Poisons do not play any role in conventional espionage.

However, it's certainly reasonable to believe

that future adversaries will continue,

for reasons of vanity or revenge against defectors,

to want to eliminate them.

And you have very clever services

with access to some of the most toxic substances in the world,

such as nerve agents,

that will continually be looking at new ways

to deliver the poisons and kill people.

So it's a viable threat.

The deaths are so horrible that a public death

serves as an ample warning,

and there are careful reasons,

that when people commit to become spies,

should they be so fortunate enough to escape and live,

probably there's good reason for them to live quiet lives ever after,

because if they take a public presence, they are at great risk.

[Joyal] Through human history, we see poisons being used,

but today, the variety of means

is certainly greater.

And, unfortunately, the will to use these weapons to kill people,

I believe, has never been higher.

[atmospheric music playing]