At the outset - 11-19 November - the finger of suspicion was pointed at the meeting with Scaramella at the Itsu.  This was still the case when the story broke in the MSM on 19 November - as in the Sunday Times report by David Leppard with which `eternalcityblues' led off the initial diary.

On 20-21 November, Gordievsky and Goldfarb shift the focus of suspicion onto Lugovoi.  However, the meeting at which Litvinenko is supposed to have been poisoned is unequivocally placed before the meeting at the Itsu, and according to Goldfarb involves Lugovoi and a mysterious Russian, unknown to Litvinenko, called `Vladimir'.

On 24 November, Lugovoi appears, and says, yes I did meet Litvinenko on 1 November, but I was accompanied by Kovtun, who is called Dmitri and whom Litvinenko already knew.  This is covered at the end of the initial ET thread - but the crucial fact that the meeting Lugovoi described, in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel, occurred after the meeting at the Itsu is not mentioned.

What then happens is like something of 1984.  Key associates of Litvinenko - including Goldfarb, but not Gordievsky, change their story, so that they are now claiming that the dead man pointed the finger at the Pine Bar meeting. And this is the version the police adopt. At the same time, claims about the evidence of the radiation trail are adjusted, in an effort to sustain the unsustainable claim that Litvinenko had no contact with polonium prior to the Pine Bar meeting.

There are really only two possible interpretations of what I call the `Orwellian transformations' in the claims made both about what Litvinenko said and about the radiation trail.  One is that none of his associates knew anything about the Pine Bar meeting - the other, that some at least knew, but both wanted to hide what had happened there, and thought Lugovoi would too.  Neither interpretation meshes easily with the conventional wisdom about how Litvinenko died.