It looks like Thursday will be a big newsday for those of us following the Litvinenko story. That is the day Andre Lugovoi, the man Britain wants to charge with Litvenko’s murder, is going to hold a press conference to expose new aspects of this case – most likely implcating Boris Berezovsky in Litvinenko’s death, and possibly exposing aspects of why Lugovoi and Litvnenko were meeting so much in London and why Polonium-210 surrounded all their encounters:

Andrei Lugovoy, the Russian businessman British prosecutors accuse of murdering Alexander Litvinenko, said Monday he would reveal details of the former KGB agent’s death this week.

Lugovoy, who denies any involvement in Litvinenko’s murder last fall, said he would hold a press conference Thursday to talk about Litvinenko’s death.

‘It will be sufficiently interesting, but right now I wouldn’t want to unveil its content,’ Litvinenko said of the planned conference in remarks run on Monday by Russian daily Kommersant.

After Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) last week said it would charge him in Litvinenko’s murder, Lugovoy promised to make a ‘sensational’ announcement about Russians living in exile in the British capital.

Only a few stories go so far as to communicate the not so veiled claims against Berezovsky:

Berezovsky, currently living in London “undoubtedly plays an enormous role in this story, a role that he is creating himself primarily to attract attention,” he said. “I regard myself as being at war because the UK has declared war on me. I accept the challenge,” Lugovoi said.

What will be interesting is to see how much of a connection between Lugovoi and Berezovsky is exposed. Even the Litvinenko ally who claims to have seen Lugovoi in London on Oct 12th, prior to any of the previously publicized trips to meet Litvinenko and Berezovsky, notes Lugovoi’s long time connections to Litvinenko and Berezovsy:

I just couldn’t believe this Monday’s announcement by the British crown prosecution service that, after examining all the evidence in the murder of my friend Alexander Litvinenko, it had decided to prosecute my former colleague Andrei Lugovoi only and request his extradition from Russia.

…

Andrei worked for the secret service, yes. But he wasn’t a secret agent like Alexander. He was mainly involved in guarding people as a bodyguard, and he was not involved in anything as daring as masterminding daring and secret assassinations of the kind Alexander had been involved in as a lieutenant colonel for the KGB. The fact that it was smeared all over London makes clear that the assassin had no idea of its properties, but how on earth would Lugovoi have thought of Polonium 210 in the first place, let alone have access to such a substance?

The clear inconsistencies in this line of thinking is obvious to anyone not wedded to the Hollywood Cold War Era image of the USSR conveniently disguised today as a democratic Russia. An assassin picks his tools very carefully. To get access to Po-210 requires even a modest amount of investigation. The danger of the material is trivial to uncover as I and many other boggers did in the matter of hours. To select a substance for murder and not understand its characteristice begs belief. The credibility of this oxymoronic line of thinking is stretched beyond belief. A person able to get access to Po-210 and to be able to smuggle it would not be ignorant of how it can be detected and how it leaves a trail. The fact is those who left the trail were unaware they were doing so – and therefore should be assumed to be unaware of the Po-210 itself.

140 people were exposed to the PO-210, 17-19 of them (depending on whether Lugovoi and Kovtun are included in the list) has worrisome levels of exposure. The fact the UK is dismissing a smuggling operation is the epitome of short sightedness. The amount that killed Litvinenko was much smaller than the amounts traipsed all over London, Germany and Moscow. So why was there so much more material than required to do the assassination? The UK authorities have not yet been forced to address this concern, which if I lived in London I would want addressed. How can they be so sure this was NOT a smuggling effort and there is not more Po-210 out there?

Again, what I note from all this is how close Lugovoi and Berezovsky and Litvinenko all were to each other, and how the Po-210 encircles ALL of them:

The next peculiar thing about Mr Lugovoi is his list of friends and clients.

If Mr Lugovoi is an agent of the Russian state, as some have suggested, then he keeps pretty strange company.

His oldest client, the man who first hired him as a bodyguard after he left the KGB, is none other than Boris Berezovsky.

For those who are not familiar with Mr Berezovsky, he is the Russian billionaire who was once close to President Vladimir Putin, but is now his most avowed critic and enemy.

From his base in London he runs a vocal and visceral campaign against Putin’s Kremlin.

Mr Berezovsky was also the closest friend and benefactor of a certain Alexander Litvinenko.

On the very day that Andrei Lugovoi is accused of poisoning Litvinenko at the millennium hotel in London, he also went to visit Boris Berezovsky at his Mayfair office.

The subject of their meeting? A contract for Mr Lugovoi to protect the billionaire’s daughter.

Andrei Lugovoi is, in other words, a man who was well trusted by both Mr Berezovsky and Alexander Litvinenko.

Litvinenko was the intelligence agent for Russia who ended up in the pay of a man who was no friend of Russia. Lugovoi was the bodygaurd, the personal security agent. He was not associated with the Chechen rebels like Litvinenko and Berezovsky. The same rebels who are historically noteworthy as the only group to plant a nuclear dirty bomb in a Western city (1995 in Russia). I suspect Lugovoi will be making some amazing disclosures on Thursday. What I do not want to see is a media so wedded to their theories their egoes get in the way of exploring what Lugovoi says. If the response is to try and rationalize the news away we are in trouble. If the response is to bolster the assassination theory by disproving the smuggling-gone-bad theory, then we shall all be working to the same end: understanding what happened in London last October with the movement of a nuclear material that has as its twp top uses nuclear bomb triggers and a potentially deadly dirty nuclear bomb core. Its use as a weapon of assassination (compared to the millions of better, cheaper, stealthier options in the world) is far much more fetched. But I only care about being assured there is no more Po-210 out there and this was all to the situation.