Spy vs. Spy

Well this is unsurprising. According to The Telegraph, a senior official intelligence official in Britain has privately acknowledged that Gordon Brown's government believes the Russian security service FSB to be behind killing of anti-Putin dissident Alexander Litvinenko:

"We very strongly believe the Litvinenko case to have had some state involvement, there are very strong indications that it was a state action," the senior security official told the BBC.

Marina Litvinenko, the widow of the murdered agent, has been pressing for official recognition that the use of radioactive polonium 210 must have been state-sanctioned.

To date the Government has remained silent on the responsibility for the killing merely requesting the extradition of Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB bodyguard who is the main suspect in the case.

Such a conclusion will likely have little effect on Mr. Putin's apologists in the western media (does anything?), nor will it substantially affect British or American diplomacy with his hand-picked successor, Dimitri Medvedev. Score one for the FSB. In related news, after his first meeting with Medvedev, President Bush refrained from commenting on the condition of the new president's soul, though he did offer the penetrating insight that he was dealing with a "smart guy."

I wrote about Putin's power grab here and Cathy Young's "fun facts about Putin's Russia" can be read here.