Some time ago, I read somewhere about how the KGB would use X-ray machines in the course of, uh, “personal diplomacy.” According to the story, the unsuspecting victim would be puttering around his living room while Soviet agents, in an adjoining apartment, proceeded to use an X-ray machine to irradiate the victim’s apartment. The victim was clueless, until his hair began to fall out a few weeks later…
For sheer creepiness and paranoia potential, that’s pretty hard to beat…
Does this have any basis in truth?
Anyone else have any other creepy and/or particularly exotic murder techniques they’d like to share?
While creative, it’s probably a little impractical.
For one, X-ray machines are big. It’d be hard to “sneak” one in and out of an apartment. Even the portable units, like the AMX, is impossible to get up stairs. The smallest X-ray machines I know of are small ones used in dental applications (like this: http://img.diytrade.com/cdimg/712172/5661576/0/1208243123/dental_x-ray_unit.jpg) but they are so low power, that God knows how long it might actually take to give someone cancer or radiation poisoning. (Although it does have the benefit of looking like some kind of futuristic ray gun, :D)
And even if you could get one up there, how you going to power it? Portable and dental ones use regulat 110V power, but they still draw more amps than the average apartment circuit will likely handle.
And finally, the X-rays won’t go in a perfectly straight line. They will bounce of the wall between the apartments a small degree, so the KGB agents are putting themselves at risk as well.
It would seem to me that something like like polonium or ricin is a much easier and discreet way to kill someone.
Edit: I see I was beaten to the punch by polonium…but I still got dibs on ricin!
I remember an episode of Monk or Psyche or CSI where they used a magnet. The guy liked to lift weights. One day when they knew he was on the bench press they turned on their electromagnet in the apartment below him and it pull the bar enough to crush his wind pipe.
Not too realistic, but it was a cool idea.
The electromagnet method is probably impossible in reality, as the force of a magnet decays rather quickly with distance. There is most likely no reasonably portable magnet that could provide enough force through the floor to do that.
The idea that someone is aiming X-rays at you is a classic paranoid delusion.
Apart from the problems already mentioned with trying to do this from an adjoining apartment, it sounds terribly slow and inefficient for the KGB. The Soviets were known for sending out hit men to eliminate enemies; it was easy enough in some cases just to ring the target’s doorbell* and either shoot him, or kidnap him for later disposal.
*There’s a case where the hit man did this and when the target answered the door, asked to come in and confessed the plot over tea, later defecting to the West.
Actually, polonium poisoning is about the least discreet method possible for killing someone. It’s easily detected, doesn’t biodegrade or become otherwise chemically neutralized, and it’s effectively impossible to get enough of it without the resources of a government. The KGB wanted everyone to know, without a doubt, that it was them who killed Litvinenko.
I agree an X-ray generator would be impractical. If you want to kill someone with radiation, it would be easier to use a radioactive isotope. Break into the apartment and put a chunk of Cobalt-60 under the bed, for example. (Or rent the apartment below and stick it to the ceiling under the bedroom.)
Instead of an electrical X-ray machine, you could use one of the radiation sources used to X-ray pipes and such on job sites. They consist of a shielded container with a shutter mechanism that can uncover the source material. The one I saw was about the size of a medium sized picnic cooler. No electricity needed. Might be more powerful than any portable electrical device as well.
Yeah it isn’t really such an outlandish proposition. A KGB operative could easily carry a lead shielded container filled with a large amount of radioactive cesium or cobalt and adequately irradiate an adjacent room. The same principle used to be used all the time in medical radiotherapy, and is still used in specialized techniques such as gamma knife radio surgery.
The radiation sources that industrial x-ray crews use can be really potent, too. Exposing film on the other side of 4" thick steel takes a hot source if you want to do it in a timely manner. They rope off a pretty wide area when performing shots on thick material, a sheetrock wall would be no protection.
Juergen Fuchs, an East German dissident, allegedly was irradiated by the East German secret police while in prison. I have no idea how much truth there is to that allegations.
Per the assassination angle, the Cobalt 60 units are pretty heavy–good luck trying to lug one up the stairs into an apartment. A former boss of mine’s father use to sell medical equipment (note: back in the 70s). He told me his Dad had a Co-60 source with a collimator in the garage; so just for fun, they dragged the unit out of the garage (He said it held at least a cubic ft of lead), took a plate with zinc-sulfide on the surface, attached it to a wooden rod and slid open the cover off the top of the unit while standing 25 feet away. So he claims, the Zn sulfide glowed like a flash-light. I’d like to believe he made this up, but his tales about lasers and other things always panned out. Feel free to punch holes in my story. I’d been on the other side of a football field using a robot if I’d had the guts to do it. And no, I don’t know what happen to the source, I was amazed they even did something that crazy.
Good old human ignorance can be just as dangerous.
A coworker impressed me with the following story about his last job: he serviced steel thickness detectors around the world. In Peru, he went to the a steel plant to repair a unit. As he walked up to it, he notice the source didn’t look like any model he’d seen before until he realized the workers had removed the top of the source (Co-60, IIR) to “try and fix it”. :eek: He turned right around and told them to put the cap back on, but use a pair of tongs.
Not related, but still interesting, if tragic: He had finished up a job in a PRC steel mill and was watching the workers carry bag after bag of powder to clean up an oil spill–He asked the “person-in-charge” if it was some sort of cat litter; “No, it is asbestos.” He didn’t stick around, and gave notice at his job a few weeks later.
Don’t underestimate what an electronics tech can do with a microwave oven!
Where I used to work, we bought a bunch of microwave ovens to use as test chambers. They were all shielded and everything, with a well-designed door and latch. We just had to remove the actual microwave-generating part of the oven. I often wondered what happened to the magnetrons and control circuitry. With appropriate wave guides and impedance matching, you could make a dandy microwave pistol (assuming you solved the problems of packaging and power supply…)
