Mark Urban - The Skripal Files

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The explosive story of the poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and what it reveals about the growing clandestine conflict between the West and Russia Salisbury, England: March 4, 2018.
Slumped on a bench, paralyzed and barely able to breathe, were a former Russian intelligence officer named Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. Sergei had been living a quiet life in England since 2010, when he was expelled from Russia as part of a spy swap; he had been serving a lengthy prison sentence for working secretly for the British intelligence agency MI6. On this Sunday afternoon, he and his daughter had just finished lunch at a local restaurant when they started to feel faint. Within minutes they were close to death.
The Skripals had been poisoned, not with a familiar toxin but with Novichok, a deadly nerve agent developed in southern Russia. Was this a message from the Kremlin that traitors would not escape violent death, even on British soil? As Sergei and Yulia fought for their lives, and the British government and their allies sought answers, relations between the West and Russia descended to a new low.
The Skripal Files

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Viktoria Skripal though had shown them how, even starting with the best intentions, going public carried the risk of creating untold family pain as well as serving the Kremlin’s interests. Sergei and his daughter were so dependent on the British government at this time that there was every reason to follow the advice of those around them.

They were still receiving medical treatment, and benefited from police protection too. They were not in a position to work, and their home remained a quarantined crime scene. Even once it was clear, the idea of Sergei just going back to Christie Miller Road was out of the question. Instead the British taxpayer stepped in to acquire the property. Clearly, his life in that street was over. While the months passed and they considered the future they were dependent on the British government for almost every part of their daily existence.

Perhaps he thought back to that fateful meeting in el Retiro park back in 1996. On that day, twenty-two years earlier, he had reached a resolve, his agreement to work for MI6, that had defined the rest of his life. It had been such a long, hard road from Lefortovo, to IK 5, and even the safe house where they found themselves whiling away the summer days. Sergei though is not a man for regrets. That much was clear from my meetings with him. Once resolved, he entrusts himself to providence, like the paratrooper hurling himself through the door of an aircraft. Sergei Skripal had taken the plunge, first as a spy for his own country, and then for Britain, at a very particular point in history. His recruitment by MI6 came at a time when the intelligence services of Western countries were triumphant and, it is clear, signed up dozens of new Russian sources. As Vladimir Putin sought to exercise control of the state, curb corruption, and reimpose discipline in the military and espionage services, he knew he would have to make examples of agents of foreign powers.

While the FSB, through the late Nineties and early 2000s, produced impressive-sounding figures for how many foreign spies it had arrested, the truth is that it had only limited success in blunting the efforts of the CIA, MI6, or other countries’ agencies. This was shown most clearly in the 2010 Vienna spy swap, when the US traded ten Russian agents for just four people (including Sergei) − and two of them were not actually Western spies at all. There were simply no others in Russian custody to make the exchange more even. The trial of Sergei Skripal, and quite likely the attack upon him in Salisbury, grew out of a determination to send messages − that treason against the Russian state would be punished severely. And arguably, having caught so few real ‘hirelings’ of these foreign agencies, the Russian organization that targeted him may have decided that a more extreme sanction might have to be the substitute for elusive convictions.

Gazing on the house in Christie Miller Road that summer, it is a place robbed of life. The front door, along with many fixtures and fittings, was removed, both as evidence and a source of potential danger to the police there. In its place, wooden panels have been used, creating a new front porch, through which forensic officers in protective suits go in and out. There were things Sergei and Yulia had touched on 4 March, and there were places their shoes, having trodden on the contaminated threshold that day, spread the Novichok also.

On a shelf in the living room the little model cottage that Richard Bagnall gave to Sergei back in 1996 still sits. Even after everything, it carries its promise of a better future, a happier one in that mythical place where a man’s home is his castle. This English Eden is a vivid, imagined world, where an old colonel might while away the days of his autumn, relishing happy memories of Kaliningrad, Fergana, or Malta, free from the ugly brutality of those who rule his mother country.

INDEX

The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

Abramovich, Roman

acetylcholinesterase

Aeroflot

Afghanistan

All Russia Movement to Support the Army

Alpha Group

Alternative Futures

Ames, Aldrich

Amesbury poisonings (2018)

Amin, Hafizullah

Andropov, Yuri

apartment block bombings, Russia (1999)

Atlangeriev, Ruslan

Atlantic Partnership

Atomic Weapons Establishment Aldermaston

atropine

A230 (Novichok agent)

A232 (Novichok agent)

A234 (Novichok agent)

see also Novichok nerve agent

Babchenko, Arkady

Bailey, Detective Sergeant Nick

Baranov, Vyacheslav

Barashevo, Russia

BBC

Berezovsky, Boris

Berlin Wall, fall of (1989)

biological weapons

Bishop’s Mill pub, Salisbury

Blair, Tony

Blanshard, Dr Christine

Blum, Michael

BND (German foreign intelligence service)

Bokhan, Colonel Sergei

Bourne Hill police station, Salisbury

BP

Brexit

Brezhnev, Leonid

British Military Mission (Brixmis), East Germany

Brown, Gordon

Budyonnovsk hospital hostage situation (1995)

Burgess, Guy

Bush, George H. W.

Bush, George W.

Buzzfeed

BZ (toxic chemical)

Cambridge spy ring

Cassidy, Mo

Cassidy, Ross

CESID/CNI (Spanish intelligence)

Chapman, Anna

Chechnya

First Chechen War (1994–96)

Second Chechen War (1999–2009)

Cheka

chekists (KGB members)

chemical weapons

see also Novichok and individual chemical weapon name

Chemical Weapons Convention (1993)

Cherkesov, Viktor

Chernenko, Konstantin

China

cholinergic crisis

Christie Miller Road, Salisbury

CIA

Clark, Sister Sarah

Clinton, Bill

Cobra emergency committee, UK

Cold War (1947–91)

Comiso airfield, Sicily

Communist Party of Great Britain

Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Corbyn, Jeremy

counter-intelligence

counter-proliferation

Crimea

CX (intelligence from human agents)

Czechoslovakia

Czech Republic

Daily Mail

Dearlove, Richard

Defence Languages School, Beaconsfield

DesLauriers, Rick

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Dubrovlag penal colony, Russia: Izpravitelno Kolony 5 (IK 5)

Dudayev, Dzhokar

Duma (Russian parliament)

Estonia

European Commission

Evans, Jonathan

Fair, Craig

FBI

Fergana, Ubekistan

First Channel (Russian state TV)

Florez, Roberto (Teofilo)

Foreign Office, UK

Fort, the (Fort Monkton), UK

Fradkov, Mikhail

Fridinsky, Sergei

FSB (Federalnoye Sluzhbe Bezopasnosti)

A Mole in the Aquarium (documentary) and

apartment block bombings and (1999)

Berezovsky and

birth and growth in influence of

Burlatov murder and

corruption and

counter-proliferation and

GRU, struggle for power with

Illegals Program spy swap (2010) and

Investigations Department

Kovalyov alleges a wave of spying by foreign agencies in post-communist Russia (1996)

Lefortovo and

Litvinenko and

mission to catch foreign agents

Moscow counter-intelligence operatives

organised crime and

Patrushev as head of

Putin takes charge of

Roberto Florez (Teofilo) and

Salisbury poisoning (2018) and

Sergei Skripal and see Skripal, Sergei

Starovoitova and

Sutyagin and

Yeltsin shelving of death penalty and

Gaidar, Yegor

Gallyamov, Abbas

gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS)

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