Mark Urban - The Skripal Files

The Russian could see Bagnall’s pleasure as he scanned the document. The power relationship between them had fundamentally changed. In this business one was now not just the buyer, but held the power to destroy the other completely. Skripal understood and accepted this unequal bargain, reflecting, ‘I wanted to do the very best for Richard.’ A successful recruitment, one veteran Western case officer comments, ‘requires him to believe that you will never do what you have just persuaded him to do, betray everything’. Perhaps Skripal’s desire to please his handler derived from an understanding of this, that his fate was now completely bound up with this young Englishman and the organization he worked for.

As for the colonel’s document, it was indeed something. And of course London was delighted. Having an agent in place, in the GRU? MI6 hadn’t done that since Colonel Oleg Penkovsky in the late 1950s. He had given astounding insight into the Kremlin’s decision-making and weapons programmes at the height of the Cold War. But the risks involved in communicating with his handlers eventually led to his arrest and execution in 1963.

The Americans fancied they had engineered the greatest-ever penetration in Soviet military intelligence. Major General Dmitri Polyakov, codenamed TOPHAT, had been recruited by the FBI while he was stationed in the US in the early 1960s. Returning to the Soviet Union, Polyakov had revealed the identity of illegals sent to the US, pinpointed four American officials who were providing secrets to the USSR, and provided vital reporting on Communist Party politics, nuclear weapons developments, and war-fighting plans.

Polyakov’s success was such that he achieved the ‘home run’ of retiring from the army in 1980 and devoting himself to hunting and fishing at his dacha. It seemed to all intents and purposes like the perfect case: a highly placed mole delivering stunning intelligence for a long period and then quietly fading from the scene, producing no dramas, family repercussions, or leak inquiry in the enemy camp. However years later, Polyakov was betrayed by Aldrich Ames, and executed in 1988 following a secret trial.

Back at Vauxhall Cross, hotfoot from the hotel meet, Bagnall must have been received with acclamation. Skripal had established his bona fides all right. It was game on. Following the usual protocol, MI6’s new agent was given a codename: FORTHWITH. It was now up to Bagnall, guided by his bosses, to see how much valuable intelligence he could extract from him.

The next few weeks raced by, each weekend following the same format. After the hotel meet, MI6 had put things on a different basis. A flat had been hired as a clandestine meeting point. It was in one of the better areas of Madrid, not too far from the Calle de Velázquez – part of a typical block where the tenants came and went routinely. It had been agreed that these sessions, there were five or six of them as the Skripals’ last weeks in the city sped by, should not be on weekdays. Better to avoid FORTHWITH having to give explanations to colleagues about where he was going.

So what did he tell Liudmila about these disappearances, for hours at a time? There was so much to do, workwise, getting things ready for his departure from Madrid. Best she head off, do some last-minute shopping, money being suddenly more plentiful, and he’d see her later.

SIS officers are trained to begin agent meets with what one jokingly calls ‘the Holy Trinity’: How long have you got? Where and when will our next meeting be? And if someone discovers the meeting, what’s our cover story? As the two men met in this Spanish flat, those issues were swiftly dealt with.

The questioning during those sessions started with the GRU organizational diagram, mining away at the connections between departments and the individuals who ran them. What was this man’s background? Who were his allies and who were his rivals? All that might help P5 Operations back in London, as it identified more people for targeting.

Skripal wanted to talk also about the set-up in the ‘glass house’, the stikliashka, or GRU headquarters. ‘We don’t call it the Aquarium,’ he would insist, ‘it’s called the stikliashka. ’ This physical geography was extremely useful when added to the picture of the personal and organizational relationships. It might assist one day with technical surveillance of the building, or directing another agent towards a point of interest. After so many years without any real insight into the affairs of the GRU, MI6 was now getting it in glorious Technicolor.

And what about Skripal personally? The service had tracked him through his previous posting and of course had its reasons for thinking he might be suitable for cultivation. But this was their chance to verify some of these things from the horse’s mouth.

Skripal was proud of his achievements in Malta, boasting that he had ‘recruited six agents, one of them a minister’. His interviews in Madrid produced ‘CI leads’, pointers for the MI6 counter-intelligence people to follow up. After the collapse of the USSR and his abortive resignation, his attitude to making recruitments had changed.

‘I wasn’t working as I did in Malta,’ Skripal explained to me, ‘when I came to Spain I was already thinking of a life outside Russia. I wanted to make business contacts, get some money and then maybe, later, resign.’ In his plan, the post-GRU future might consist of keeping the flat in Moscow, but spending much of the year in the warm, convivial surroundings of Spain.

As the Scientific and Technical Secretary at the embassy, Skripal had to maintain his cover, working on exchanges between experts, as in Malta. He also played a part helping the Russian state railway company place an order for Spanish rolling stock. However he spent a good deal of time trying to get into the property business.

With Russians free to travel far more freely, Spain was becoming a popular holiday destination. From the Costa Brava to Puerto Banus, the Mediterranean coast brought them in large numbers. Seeing the direction of travel, Skripal got involved with a plan to build a hotel in Malaga. It was a big project, which he hoped might pay him substantial long-term dividends.

While he waited for the property business to mature, Skripal entered into another trade, something altogether riskier, to become FORTHWITH. In return he received a few thousand dollars for each meeting and of course the promise of an exit route if it all went wrong.

Week followed week as the agent poured out his initial torrent of secret intelligence. The conversation switched regularly between English and Russian. It was a pleasant revelation for Skripal to discover Bagnall’s grasp of his native language, something he had never guessed at during the weeks of cultivation. The British intelligence officer had stuck to his cover, wisely keeping that skill to himself. ‘If he had spoken Russian,’ Skripal joked, ‘it would have been like turning up in uniform.’

For officers who had spent months watching him before the pitch, the Russian sitting in that flat also held the key to understanding what was really going on in the Madrid rezidentura. The Spanish intelligence services had agreed to the MI6 operation to recruit the GRU colonel on their turf. Passing on some of this information would help keep the relationship sweet.

At the head was the chief of station or rezident, Rear Admiral Vladimir Kasatkin. Although the GRU had sometimes adopted the subterfuge of having a rezident under cover as a chauffeur or in another nominally minor role, Kasatkin was hardly difficult to spot, serving as the senior military attaché. He had been posted to Madrid in July 1993, just a few months before Skripal. Under him were a couple of deputies and some operational officers, the people who ran agents, such as they still had, in Spain. The GRU station also had its own eavesdropping station, used both offensively (trawling for interesting traffic) and defensively (trying to learn the frequencies and activities of those conducting surveillance of the embassy).