There are lots of reasons to doubt yesterday’s sensational claims by Andrei Lugovoy, the Russian accused of murdering Alexander Litvinenko, that it was in fact the British Government wot did it.

He’s a KGB officer, for starters. That’s the kind of job that doesn’t tend to encourage or reward guileless declarations of unimpeachable fact before the television cameras. Then there’s the problem that Mr Lugovoy’s case isn’t helped by the lack of any supporting evidence of British government involvement, nor by the awkward fact of the long trail of polonium-210 that seemed to follow his own movements across Europe in the days surrounding Litvinenko’s murder.

But the biggest reason for suspicion is that, if what he said is true it would mark a wholly implausible reversal of fortunes in the decades–long struggle for supremacy between Russian and Western intelligence agencies.

The truth is that we in the West may have won the Cold War but when it came to the intelligence battle, we came in a distant second. The Litvinenko affair – a hit job carried out with evident impunity by Russian agents on foreign soil – is a sorry reminder of how overmatched we were in the Cold War in the spy business.

Other than Olympic shot-putters chemically propelled to athletic excellence by a dehumanising regime desperate for some ersatz legitimacy, intelligence was about the only thing the Russians did really well. They may not have been able to make the trains run on time or increase wheat production in Moldova, but by golly they knew how to eavesdrop, wiretap, blackmail and bribe their way into the most sensitive of the West’s inner sanctums.

Consider a Cold War balance sheet. They bumped off Soviet defectors at will and almost killed the Pope. We had a cunning plan to explode cigars in Fidel Castro’s beard.

They had Philby, Burgess, MacLean, Blunt and just about every clever undergraduate at Cambridge who ever responded warmly to any man who sidled up to them over a late-night sherry. We had a few brave but terrorised dissidents who invariably ended up in the Lubyanka or Siberia.

We gave them our atomic secrets so they could build the weapon that saved their regime – at least for 40 years. They gave us lectures at the UN about human freedom.

Not that they always got it right. There’s a nice story about a French diplomat, caught in flagrante delicto with a couple of Soviet beauties, who received the customary incriminating photographs readied for copying to his wife back in Paris along with a letter inviting him to cooperate.

Go ahead, he told them. I haven’t lived with my wife for 20 years and I can’t wait to see her face when she gets a look at the new me.

But cock-ups, as it were, like that were rare in Soviet Russia. And since the Cold War ended the story hasn’t changed much.

Our intelligence agencies have developed an unhappy knack of uncovering threats where there are none and failing to find them where they are. They didn’t really spot the terror of al-Qaeda until it was way too late. They told us in 1991 that Iraq was nowhere close to developing nuclear weapons when, it turned out, they were on the very brink. Then they told us in 2003 that Iraq might be on the very brink of developing nuclear weapons when it turned out they were nowhere close.

None of this is to speak too harshly of the efforts of MI5, MI6 or the CIA. It is merely a reflection of the asymmetric struggle between intelligence agencies in democratic and totalitarian societies. Penetrating regimes that are run on a premise of domestic terror requires really painstaking and risk-laden effort. Finding out what goes on in open democracies? Not so much.

The Lugovoy-Litvinenko saga underscores the fact that this basic imbalance has not changed in the 16 years since we won the Cold War. We remain, paradoxically, the victim of our own freedoms, which they exploit ruthlessly – including, as yesterday, leading along a fabulously credulous media. They remain, paradoxically, secure in their own paranoia and insecurity.

It’s partly why I think Vladimir Putin is so nostalgic for another Cold War. He worked for the KGB, remember, and in hard intelligence terms those were heady days for their side. That we have entered another troubling phase in our relations with Russia is not in doubt.

We may not have to fear the dawn of another nuclear winter – at least not one that rises over the Urals. But there’s a troubling boldness now about Russia. A divided and somewhat demoralised West has left Moscow feeling confident enough to try it on – knocking off its critics in London; taking out large chunks of Estonia’s cyberspace; bullying Czechs and Poles into submission over their plans for a US defensive system; tightening its stranglehold on gas and oil supplies for an energy-starved Europe; sabre-rattling on behalf of its nice friends in Serbia again.

We on our side need to be bold too. We may not be able to beat them at their intelligence games but we need to show some more of the backbone that won the Cold War. There have been times in the past few years when, distracted by events in the Middle East or worried about our loss of economic and political power in a rapidly changing world, we have been distracted from the challenge.

There are now encouraging signs from unlikely places. In Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, the two traditional powers of continental Western Europe actually now have two “eastern European” heads of government, as they have been called. Mrs Merkel is a former inmate of the Soviet prison camp called East Germany; Mr Sarkozy is the son of a Hungarian refugee. Both are directly and painfully familiar with the Cold War days for which Mr Putin evidently hankers. They will be emboldened by increasingly alarmed Eastern European members of Nato and the European Union. With increasing British estrangement from Moscow, and a US Administration steadily grasping the challenges, we can look for ways to push back.

But it probably won’t be done by our spies. As for those claims by Mr Lugovoy that British intelligence is actively trying to destabilise the Russian President, I sincerely hope they are true. But if I were him, I wouldn’t be losing any sleep.

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