NEW YORK - Even if you don't read Russian, a recent print ad for Louis Vuitton is something of a visual joke: Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the old Soviet Union, sits in a limousine as it passes a remaining segment of the Berlin Wall, an open Louis Vuitton bag beside him.

If you do read Russian, the ad seems to be even more curious: Poking out of the bag is a publication with the headline The Murder Of Litvinenko: They Wanted To Give Up The Suspect For $7,000.

The reference is to Alexander V. Litvinenko, the former KGB spy who died last November after being poisoned with a radioactive isotope, polonium 210.

On his deathbed, Litvinenko accused Russian president Vladimir Putin of orchestrating his murder. The British authorities have accused one of Litvinenko's associates, Andrei Lugovoi, of the crime, and have requested his extradition from Russia, which the Kremlin has refused.

Last week, as the translation of the headline in the ad started circulating on the Internet, some natural questions arose. Was the message placed there deliberately? And what did it mean?

Both Louis Vuitton and its ad agency, Ogilvy & Mather, were quick to dismiss any significance.

'Our company has absolutely no intention to pass any other messages than the one on 'personal journeys',' said Mr Pietro Beccari, director of marketing at Louis Vuitton, in an e-mail message.

Besides, he said, if the placement had been deliberate, the words would not have been put 'upside down, in Cyrillic and in need of a magnifying lens to be read'.

The ad was photographed on June 1 by Annie Leibovitz. And 'personal journeys' is the theme of the campaign.

Mr Daniel Sicouri, Ogilvy's chief executive for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, also denied any political undertones, saying Leibovitz's stylists took Russian magazines to the photo shoot to make the pictures look authentic and any reference to the Litvinenko affair was coincidental.

'Remember, at that time, this was the news of the day,' he said. 'Whatever the news of the day is includes political information.'

A representative of Mr Gorbachev said he had been unaware of the contents of the magazine during the photo shoot.

He 'was perplexed by this thing when it was brought to his attention a few days ago', Mr Pavel Palazhchenko, his personal aide and translator, said in an e-mail.

'As a separate matter,' he added, 'Gorbachev's position on the Litvinenko affair is that it should be thoroughly investigated as a criminal case.'

But not everyone is convinced that this was all serendipitous.

'In an industry where sesame seeds are hand-placed on a hamburger bun by food technicians before a shot, one would reasonably assume that this was not something that happened by chance,' said Mr Robert Passikoff, president of brand research consultancy Brand Keys.

'Ads like these get art-directed to the very millimetre and airbrushed so that the advertisers gets exactly what they want.'

Perhaps the advertiser is getting just that, Mr Passikoff said.

'Given that Louis Vuitton and Ogilvy are receiving precisely the kind of attention and buzz that is regarded as being the measure of success these days, it counteracts those effects if they admit to doing it,' he said. 'Once you declare it was an overt and planned act, it has no meaning.'

NYT

'In an industry where sesame seeds are hand-placed on a hamburger bun by food technicians before a shot, one would reasonably assume that this was not something that happened by chance'

Mr Robert Passikoff, president of brand research consultancy Brand Keys