Whatever the outcome of the Litvinenko affair, the damage to East-West relations has been done. Or perhaps, it has simply exposed the latent Russophobia that still resides in the West.

Day by day, the story of a grisly tyrant taking out a good ole boy scout has fallen apart. But the propaganda machine is still running, albeit running on empty.

Funniest gaffe of the week from the Times, which ran the headline, ‘Murder Witnesses Run For Their Lives‘. That’s because they couldn’t find wobbly source Yevgeny Limarev. Well, Yevgeny just happens to have a blog on MSN spaces and the Times could easily have sent him an e-mail. Limarev put more egg on the face of the Murdoch paper by denying the hit-list story. Meanwhile even KGB veterans had never heard of him. Ouch.

That short-of-money Sasha was being used - alive and dead - there is no doubt.

Almost everything put out by Berezovsky and Bell PR has been exposed as a lie. Litvinenko wasn’t on a hit-list. He wasn’t investigating the death of Politkovskaya. He was working as an intermediary for ’security’ firms - private armies and mercenaries. It even looks like he was under contract to Erinys.

Totally discredited is Litvinenko’s deathbed conversion to Islam which, like his deathbed speech, was somehow supposed to come from a man too weak to speak, who hardly spoke English and who was mostly unconscious. Even his wife didn’t seem to know anything about it until some mullahs barged into the funeral.

I’ve commented before that there’s any number of reasons why no one would ever use Polonium as a murder weapon. Which is presumably why no one ever has. And now that there’s simply too much Polonium at too many locations for it to be a simple hit, it’s finally dawned on Scotland Yard too. It’s fortunate that the German police aren’t taken in by British newspapers. They turned out from day one with proper protective clothing and decontamination equipment. Only the Italian police thought to check into Scaramella’s background on nuclear smuggling. So only now has the British police force hurriedly ordered some proper protective kit. The Bell PR media hype even addled the British police brains.

Why did everyone want a scary Kremlin story so much? The self-interest of exiles facing extradition is obvious. But it’s also true that Putin has been making enemies right and left. Poland has a beef ban and an energy problem. Poland has a port blockaded by Kaliningrad. The lifeline Odessa-Plok pipeline has just been shelved. Estonia has a fish ban from Russia, Lativia a sprat ban, Georgia and Moldova a wine ban and assorted sanctions. Lithuania has an oil ‘delivery problem’ to its major refinery. And that’s without mentioning Shell’s Sakhalin woes, while Hambro’s Russian goldmining licenses are under threat as we speak. Putin is taking back Russia. Hey, he’s not supposed to do that.

So, while it all looks increasingly like a smuggling accident, one can’t rule out the possibility that Litvinenko was helped to have an accident. A reporter reminded me the other day of the truism that ‘assassins have to be opportunists’. Any number of parties would have an interest in framing Putin at this time, given half a chance. A radioactivity sweep of MI6 offices would be revealing, now wouldn’t it?