Putin Fingerprints on Poisoned Teapot?

ABC has more news on the poisoning of Litvinenko, with a teapot at the aptly-named Millenium Hotel now the suspected vehicle for delivering a fatal dose of radioactive beverage by czarevitch Vladimir Putin. The glow-in-the-dark teapot was circulating in the hotel for weeks afterwards before the MI-6 super-sleuths picked up its radiation.

Former senior KGB operative Putin's role in the polonium-210 poisoning of a leading critic of his regime will doubtless never be uncovered. One of the first things this pocket-rocketeer did upon election was to close down access to Soviet archives, so like the Venona eye-peep before, we had only a small glimpse subsequent to Russification at the nefarious political culture under Lenin, Stalin and the derisory "detente" that ended with the invasion of Afghanistan. Now it appears that malicious culture may unfortunately have been reborn in the Kremlin with the FSB now acting at the behest of 'lil czarevitch Vlad to eliminate his newspaper critics and political threats.

I am reading John O'Sullivan's excellent book on The President, The Pope, and the Prime Minister which has a short sub-chapter on the suspected Soviet complicity in the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. Despite the acquittal in an Italian court of a Bulgarian KGB operative in '81, the Italian Mitrokhin Commission in '86 discovered subsequent well-nigh conclusive evidence that the East Bloc was behind this wretched assassin's attempt on the Pope's life, though the deluded hit-man probably did not know just whom he was working for. KGB water-cooler talk in Moscow had Directorate S of Bureau S, the double-secret KGB unit in charge of political assassins, as the prime mover in the attempt, which was probably sanctioned verbally by Brezhnev. [The Sovs were oh-so-delicate about bureaucratic paper-trail evidence in these kill-squad forays.]

The world accepts Sov and East Bloc disinformation as urban legend nowadays, such as the dissemination of Pope Pius XII's collaboration with the Nazis by East German Stasi disinformation operatives, when indeed, the Pope had been decorated by the state of Israel for saving hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing the Holocaust.

But don't look for the compliant MSM to pick up the poisoning of a Russian dissident and run with it. Too much research and tiresome journalism involved, though to give Brian Ross at ABC credit, he is the excepti