Did Putin kill Lindsey Graham?
Putin likes eliminating his opponents with poisons. Graham's cause of death can be induced by chemicals. The Russians have a motive, the means of attack and have even made several specific threats.
Senator Graham was certainly not on Vladimir Putin’s Christmas card list.
Graham has been outspoken against Putin and in favor of Ukraine since at least 2014, when the Russians first invaded. When Obama’s response was to send blankets to Ukraine, Graham pounded the table for weapons. When President Trump sent Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine in 2017, Graham was the force behind it. The Javelins - and Ukrainian bravery - kept Ukraine alive until more weapons could arrive. President Biden would not let the Ukrainians use American weapons inside Russia. Graham had advocating the policy change for months when Biden finally allowed it in late 2024, days after Trump was elected.
Senator Graham’s last efforts in this world were to make life miserable for Vladimir Putin, gaining Trump’s approval on his long-suffering sanctions bill and telling President Zelensky “I think it would be a huge mistake for America not to work with Ukraine in the drone space.”
Senator Graham’s death may be natural, but it fits the pattern of Putin’s previous assassinations.
The best example comes from 2006 when Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot five times in the elevator of her apartment building on October 7, Putin’s birthday. She was Graham-like in her criticism of Putin’s atrocities in the Chechen war and his erosion of civil liberties in Russia. Much like Graham’s death may derail the Senate bill increasing Russian sanctions, her assassination came on the day before she was to publish an article detailing allegations of torture by Ramzan Kadyrov, Putin’s Chechen Muslim ally. She was also a witness in a criminal case against Kadyrov that may have derailed his ambitions to be president of Chechnya.
This was the second attempt on her life. She was poisoned on a commercial flight from the Russian city of Rostov on Don to Moscow. Media is reporting that Senator Graham flew commercial to and from Warsaw on his trip to Kyiv.
There’s more.
Alexander Litvinenko was a former FSB (the successor organization to the KGB) officer who became critical of Putin in 1998 and defected to the UK in 2000. He had worked with Politkovskaya on her investigations and was delving into Putin’s role in her murder. On November 1, 2006, just weeks after Politkovskaya’s death, Litvinenko met with two former FSB agents in a London bar. He became ill immediately after and died within weeks of polonium-210 poisoning. His killers were sloppy with the polonium-210 and left a radioactive trail around London.
Bellingcat is a not-for-profit, non-governmental open source intelligence gathering organization founded in 2014 that linked Russian military units to the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine. Bellingcat identified a team of FSB agents who were surveilling Litvinenko at the time of his death. The FSB poisoning team has been linked to several other high profile assassinations and attempts, including Putin opponent Alexi Navalny, poisoned in 2020. Bellingcat records show the FSB poisoning team on 30+ commercial flights with Navalny.
Poison is Putin’s favorite technique if he can’t find his victim close enough to a window to defenestrate them. The initial cause of Senator Graham’s death was ruled aortic dissection, a tear in the aorta. A man Graham’s age and physical condition has about a 1 in 5,000 chance of dying from an aortic dissection. It is relatively rare, but not shockingly rare. Heart disease (as opposed to aortal disease) is 1 in 639. Stroke is 1 in 2,590. Alzheimers is 1 in 3,690. It is plausible Senator Graham died naturally. It is also plausible that the Russians killed him.
An aortic dissection is something that can be induced by stimulants, cancer treatment drugs like Sorafenib or Sunitinib, or any other substance that can cause an acute spike in blood pressure. The revealing information will come from a toxicology report.
Or not. The Russians have probably the longest-running program in the history of the world to develop poison as an assassination tool that is tasteless, odorless and undetectable in a toxicology report. The program started in 1921, first known as the “special office” and ultimately became know as Kamera - The Cell in Russian.
The Soviets developed a poison that caused a death to look like a heart attack, an aerosol sprayed out of a specially designed poison spray gun. We know this, ironically, because it was used in 1957 to kill a Ukrainian independence leader in Munich. The death was believed to be a heart attack until 1961 when the Soviet assassin defected to West Germany and revealed the plot. We can read about it now in a 1964 paper on Soviet assassination methods unclassified in 1993.
Many are saying that if Graham was poisoned, it was likely done in Kyiv. Counterintuitively, the Russians have not demonstrated a consistent ability to assassinate people inside Kyiv. By my count, only seven assassination attempts have occurred in Kyiv in the 53 months since the full scale invasion, plus one kidnapping. As someone on a Russian hit list, I pay close attention to these things. Some say this is because the Ukrainian SBU (their version of the FBI) once worked closely with the Russian FSB. The SBU knows all the bad guys and rounded them up early on.
On the other hand, Russia has shown a rather impressive ability to operate in the US. The Havana Syndrome has crippled US clandestine service, the humans who deploy overseas to collect intelligence on our adversaries. The Havana Syndrome is characterized by the victim feeling a sudden pain in one side of the head and hearing a loud screeching noise. Some feel as though they have been physically struck, although they have not. Afterwards, in many cases for years, victims have vertigo, confusion, severe headaches and in some cases vision problems.
Since the first attacks in Havana (thus the name) in 2016, we have seen 1500 reported cases in 96 locations worldwide.
The hundreds of victims, mostly intelligence officers, believe that the cause is a Russian directed energy weapon. For years, the intelligence community has denied the existence of such a weapon. With no defenses against it, no training to defeat it, little research on how to treat it and the denial of its existence by the US government, intelligence officers have been understandably reluctant to take field jobs. Great news for our adversaries.
Why would the government deny the existence of the program? Some say that were the US government to acknowledge the existences of such devastating attacks on our clandestine services, it would be an admission that Russia is attacking us. It would be an act of war and we would have to do something.
The attack locations are not all far flung. Olivia Troye, at the time a counterterrorism advisor to Vice President Mike Pence, reported an attack while going to her car in the White House ellipse. Two more unnamed officials on the National Security Council reported the same. A joint investigation by The Insider, 60 Minutes, and Der Spiegel geolocated operatives from GRU Unit 29155 near the White House at that time. GRU is the acronym for Russian military intelligence, and 29155 is the unit responsible for assassinations and covert operations in foreign countries. The operatives were later awarded medals for work with “non-lethal acoustic weapons.”
If the Russians are brazenly using directed energy weapons to attack West Wing officials walking out of the White House, slipping poison to a US Senator seems well within the scope of reason.
Russians close to Putin have made personal threats against Senator Graham. Most notably, Alexander Dugin, the intellectual Godfather of Putin’s dream of a Russian world said last year “Better to k*ll this guy he is the problem for Trump. The world will be better without him.”
The editor-in-chief of RT, formerly known as Russia Today, called for Senator Graham’s assassination in 2023, saying “It's not even hard. We have his address.” The address of the home where he died.
Around the same time, the Russian Ministry of the Interior issued an arrest warrant for Senator Graham. Graham’s response:
And more:
Putin has the motive, the means and his people have made the threats against U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham.
Senator Graham’s death is personal to me. My father, George Gorton, may have been poisoned by the Russians. George was a highly sought after political consultant from California in the eighties, nineties and early oughts. In that span, Republicans actually won campaigns in California, and George was the strategist with the most wins with California governor and Senator Pete Wilson. George took Arnold Schwarzenegger from someone Californians viewed as a thug in a leather jacket in 2000 to California governor in 2003.
He and I and two other Wilson strategists, Joe Shumate and Dick Dresner, spent five months in Moscow in 1996 advising Boris Yeltsin’s campaign for president. As documented in a TIME Magazine cover story, Rescuing Boris, and on ABC’s Nightline, we helped Yeltsin’s daughter and campaign manager devise a strategy that took Yeltsin from 6% in the polls in February to a 13 point win in July.
Not all of Yeltsin’s entourage were happy we were there. One day while George and I were in a crowd in Moscow he felt a sharp pain in his leg, as if he were pricked by a needle, and complained of sudden sense of weakness. Shortly after, he developed Parkinson’s-like symptoms which debilitated him for the next 25 years and ultimately killed him. Was he poisoned by the Russians? Our family will never know, but I certainly enjoy my work helping Ukraine. I really do. I hope Senator Graham’s family, staff and many friends find more closure.
Anya and I had the honor to work with Senator Graham and his staff over these last four years. His staff is always sharp, on top of everything Ukraine and great to work with. Every time I met with him, he was an inspiration. Senator Graham’s death may be the catalyst that makes the American public aware of the very real threat posed by Putin against our country.
51% of Republicans in the house vote against aid for Ukraine, nearly that amount in Senate as well. The framing of your article is conveniently hagiographic. I think you forgot the part where he insulted Zelenskyy because Trump insulted Zelenskyy. I think you forgot that he brought up javelins to distract us from Donald Trump extorting Ukraine in 2019. I think you forgot that those were stored in the west of this country we live in. And I think you forgot that the Trump administration publicly announced that that's where they would stay and they were merely a defensive deterrent which is ridiculous because the Russians were in the east still invading. Yes Lindsey Graham was an advocate for Ukraine but he was a very strange and fickle 1 at that. He has no John McCain. And when you say that did not allow strikes in Russia again that's a very simplistic view considering that the united NATO position was a big part of this. This is amateur level interpretation of how a collective security entity is going to respond to Ukraine. I really respect your enthusiasm for Ukraine no doubt but sometimes what you write is just… Not based in the facts enough for us to get to the changes needed. We need a substantial change in the Republican parties national security posture about Russia and we needed a long time ago instead of these hagiography posts. No more of this 51% voting against what is correct to do. No more ignoring that that's what it keeps being. Either way thank you for your enthusiasm for Ukraine.
No. Dissecting aorta is not from poisoning. Waiting for the tox screen…but seriously, 99 percent no