Litvinenko: Not EEEgore. EYEgor!

A Murdoch rag reports that it knows the name of Alexander Litvinenko's killer:

UK's News of the World newspaper claims that they know who poisoned former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, but only print his middle name - Igor "for legal reasons."

The 46-year-old expert in covert operations belonged to Russia's Spetsnaz special forces, the paper states and was fingered in a document Litvinenko received right before he was poisoned with radioactive polonium-210.

Litvinenko handed Scotland Yard the dossier he received at London's Itsu sushi bar, and it contains a long hit-list with his name on top, News of the World claims.

This is getting silly. Russians use the patronymic as the middle name. "Igor" is impossible, although "Igorovich" -- son of Igor -- is possible. How likely is it that the Murdochian media would have truncated the patronymic? Not very.

I've come to suspect that the entire death of Litvinenko has been a well-engineered spectacle from the start. The onstage corpse may be real, but much of the surrounding theatrics have been concocted. See here:

Of course, one of the chief obstacles in assessing the situation is the fact that almost everything we knew about the case for weeks was spoon-fed to the media by the most elite PR operation in Britain. Almost from the moment that Litvinenko fell ill, he disappeared behind a phalanx of handlers paid for by his patron, Boris Berezovsky, the fugitive Russian billionaire and shadowlands operator par excellence. To handle - and generate - the publicity surrounding the incident, Berezovsky called on his old friend Baron Bell of Belgravia, who, back when he was just plain old Tim Bell, served as the private propaganda chief for Margaret Thatcher, as Sourcewatch reports. The baron has also flacked for disgraced media mogul Conrad Black, disgraceful media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and the Coalition Provisional Authority, the mechanism set up by the Bush administration to eviscerate Iraq.

Ah, the smell of greasepaint. I think we can now safely presume the fictional nature of Litvinenko's deathbed "J'Accuse!"

My own take on this affair solidified when I found out that, among many other iffy propositions (such as the "FSB runs Al Qaeda" canard"), Litvinenko had provided alleged "insider" confirmation for Michael Ledeen's "KGB shot the Pope" yarn. The moment I read that gem, my reaction was straight out of vaudeville:

Slowly I turned...step by step...inch by inch...!

That whole theory was conclusively proved to be a concoction of Reagan-era neoconsters (a term little-used back then) intent on provoking war between the USSR and the United States. If you doubt my words, read Hermann's The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection, the starting point for all research into the matter. If you don't have that volume under your belt, read before speaking.

Note too that Litvinenko spread crap about Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi -- a disinformation barrage designed to keep Bush enabler (and P2 member) Silvio Berlusconi in office. And our late Russian friend tried to claim that the Red Brigades acted on Moscow's order...! We know that, in fact, the "left-wing" Italian violence of the 1970s was actually stage-managed by SISMI -- or rather "Super-SISMI," the P2 faction within Italian intelligence. A classic "false flag" operation.

The accusations against Prodi and Putin metastisized over time, as Litvinenko kept "remembering" things that far outdistanced previous statements. If you recall the Judith Campbell Exner disinfo (every five years, something new), you know the drill.

Note that something called "Mitrokhin Commission," a creation of Berlusconi's party, lurks in the background of this shady business. I've long felt that Vasili Mitrokhin's recollections were massaged by neconsters intent on writing long-held Cold War fantasies into the history books. These far-rightists have long memories and they also know that he who controls the past controls the future.

The neocons, as we now call them, did not emerge onto the scene in the Bush era. See the remarkable documentary The Power of Nightmares (online here) to get some understanding of just how long they've been practicing their deceptions. Note in particular the section about the Ford era's "Team B."

The first thing you have to understand is that Litvinenko was a liar. Like Anatoli Golitsyn, he was in the business of selling hallucinations. In the 1960s, we had "The Sino-Soviet split is a fraud!" In the 1970s, we had "The Russian military is lightyears ahead of ours!" In the 1980s, we had "The KGB shot the Pope!" Today, we have "Putin controls Osama!" In each case, the faux-hip bought into the lie in order to prove that they knew more than the average bear, and that their vision transcended both ideology and convention. In the end, they proved only their own gullibility.

Litvinenko, I suspect, started to balk at his assigned function, at which point his masters decided that he was more useful as a martyr. Right now, his funders can borrow a tactic from L.Ron Hubbard's heirs and publish a stream of "newly discovered" Litvinenko writings -- about Prodi, about Putin, about anyone who annoys the neocons. The public will not ignore these post-mortum works as it ignored the pre-mortum crap.

The current "Igor" nonsense provides further evidence that we are watching a movie. Pass the popcorn.