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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 spoonfed 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.
(Speaking of the CPA, UK investigators now say they’ve found traces of Polonium 201, the radioactive isotope believed to have killed Litvinenko, in the London offices of Erinys, a private security company. As I noted in CounterPunch back in December 2003, Bush’s CPA gave Erinys’ Iraqi branch – formed as a joint venture with business cronies and family members of bigtime shadowlander Ahmad Chalabi – $40 million to guard oil pipelines in the conquered land. This has grown into a much larger stashn, not to mention an armed force of 16,000 men – something of a militia, one might say. The freebooters also bagged big money riding shotgun for Halliburton and Bechtel in those palmy CPA days of yore. And as the Guardian reports, Erinys is also active in Russia. You pull at one string in the shadowlands, and a whole tangled nest of other dark business starts shaking somewhere else.)
The leaping lord’s PR shop has also represented Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko, another victim of a spectacularly ham-handed poisoning laid at the Kremlin’s door. Yet another client was former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, whose “miraculous” 1996 election victory – in the face of single-digit approval ratings – was engineered by a small group of oligarchs who were later given carte blanche to plunder Russia’s state-owned enterprises and vast natural resources for private profit. The acknowledged leader of this clique – which had muscled its way to riches and power in the brutal, Hobbesian free-for-all that characterized the Yeltsin years – was of course a certain Boris Berezovsky.
As one of the prime vetters of political aspirants in the Yeltsin court, Berezovsky was instrumental in bringing the obscure but presumably biddable ex-KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin to power. But Putin had a clique of his own, based in the security organs – and soon the oligarchs found themselves out-muscled, on the receiving end of the state machinery they had manipulated for so long. Most fled abroad, where they’d stashed their billions; some were jailed. Berezovsky, charged with embezzlement and money laundering, repaired to sumptuous digs in London and environs, there to become Putin’s most ferociously outspoken critic. He also found new friends in high places – including Neil Bush, George W.’s scandal-ridden brother. Berezovsky is one of the backers of Neil’s “educational software” company, which peddles a dumbed-down “interactive teaching” system called COW to public school systems loath to risk their federal funding by rejecting a First Family boondoggle.
This then is the team that controlled the flow of information during the three agonizing weeks it took Litvinenko to die. They set out the basic storyline that was followed, with scarcely a variation, by all the leading UK papers and most of the world media. The Cold War had come again, we were told: a bold dissident against the tyrannical Putin regime had been assassinated in the streets of London by the undead KGB, wielding strange poisons concocted in secret laboratories. (All this while the latest James Bond movie was having its gala premiere!) A carefully composed photograph of the martyr was released by the baronial PR outfit, and quickly became the global emblem of the case. This is what Putin has done, Litvinenko was said to have said: see his evil handiwork with your own eyes.
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