Heidi Blake - From Russia with Blood

Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism command had deployed its finest officers to hunt the state agents who had deployed the Novichok, but for six months there was no sign that their inquiry had turned up any leads. Then, on September 5, the country’s premier police force announced two men were being charged with the attempted assassination of the Skripals. They were identified as two serving members of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, who had entered Britain under false names. Police released photos of both men along with CCTV stills of the grinning assassins arriving at Gatwick Airport, traveling to a shabby hotel in East London, and carrying out a reconnaissance mission to Salisbury before returning to the city on March 4 to deploy the nerve agent.

A spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry dismissed the fruits of the British investigation as a “big fake.” Then Putin announced that Scotland Yard’s two suspects had been found living innocently in Russia, declaring that they were “civilians” and would be coming forward shortly to tell their story. The two men appeared in an interview aired by the Russian propaganda network RT the following day, claiming they were tourists who had visited Salisbury simply to admire its cathedral.

Later that month, the investigative website Bellingcat identified one of the suspects as a GRU veteran named Colonel Anatoliy Vladimirovich Chepiga, who had served in Chechnya and Ukraine and had been personally decorated with the nation’s highest honor by Vladimir Putin. Soon after, the site identified the second man as a GRU doctor named Alexander Mishkin.

The Kremlin dismissed the reports just as Britain’s intelligence agencies confirmed them. In a speech the following month, Putin denounced Skripal as a “traitor” and a “scumbag” before angrily denying GRU involvement in the events in Salisbury.

In the corridors of Whitehall and the riverside headquarters of the security and intelligence services, officials were asking themselves how it had come to this. The propensity of Russia’s enemies for dying strange and sudden deaths in Britain had long been regarded with a degree of indifference. If you were a Russian robber baron who got rich on the spoils of the fallen Soviet state or a dirty financier who helped launder an ill-gotten fortune in the West, and if you met a sticky end—well, then, maybe you got what you paid for. Even after the West began to wake up to the menace of the man in the Kremlin, the deaths were seen as individual cases unworthy of much consideration by officials playing catch-up from years of inattention and struggling to get to grips with bigger issues like Russia’s new nuclear capabilities and its troop movements in Ukraine. But now that hundreds of British citizens had been exposed to a nerve agent, and there was no sign of remorse from the Kremlin, it was hard to deny that Putin’s killing campaign had been allowed to spin out of control. How could he be stopped?

Vladimir Putin’s covert war was, finally, in the spotlight. But for all their flustered protestations, Britain’s leaders could not claim with any sincerity to be surprised. They knew they had turned away as Russia’s assassins stalked the streets. They knew they had stood by as Putin’s enemies and their British fixers died.

This is the story of the men who lived and died in the Kremlin’s crosshairs on British soil—and the secrets, buried with them, that successive governments never wanted to be told.

Part One

i

London—1992

The flamboyant young lawyer always made it his business to get a seat up front on the Concorde flight from New York to London. The first three rows of the supersonic jet were reserved for the most significant people on the plane, and he liked to number among them. He’d sat next to Jackie Onassis on one occasion, and another time his neighbor was Eric Clapton, so he always watched the other passengers boarding with a frisson of anticipation, eager to spot which notable might be joining him next.

The young couple who settled across the aisle in seats 1B and 1C captivated him instantly. It was a crisp autumn day, and the man, who didn’t look much older than thirty, was sporting an Armani couture coat with a magisterial brown fur collar. He was tall, tanned, and athletic, with designer stubble and a cloud of dark curls framing an appealingly open face. His slight female companion had pointed features, with waves of blonde hair tumbling over the shoulders of a soft leather jacket, and a newborn baby asleep in her arms. The lawyer thought them fabulous—and clearly very much in love. They must come from very important families, he hypothesized, since British Airways had seen fit to discriminate in their favor by placing them in row 1.

Not until the jet was soaring over the Atlantic did the tall man lean across the aisle and proffer his hand to the lawyer. “Scot Young,” he said with an unexpected Scottish lilt. “Should I know you?”

The lawyer was pleased at the opportunity this question afforded. He’d been enjoying a lot of publicity lately for his work on behalf of superrich and famous clients.

“You might,” he said cheerily, shaking Young’s hand. “I’ve been on the television recently. I’m a lawyer.”

Young’s smile broadened. His fiancée, Michelle, was busy breast-feeding their baby daughter, Scarlet, and he was bored. The family had been holidaying at the ultraluxe Sandy Lane resort, in Barbados, and had flown back via New York to do a bit of shopping en route. Young let it be known, with a confidential air, that he had paid for the entire trip—flights, five-star hotels, designer acquisitions, and all—in cash. That was a revelation that piqued the lawyer’s interest. Perhaps it explained their presence at the front of the plane, he thought. But Concorde tickets cost about eight thousand pounds each for a round trip. What sort of people paid for them in cash?

The two men passed the rest of the flight chatting pleasantly, and when they had landed at Heathrow and the bridge was being attached, Young asked for the lawyer’s card.

“I’ve got a little tax issue I’d like to talk to you about,” he explained as they stood and stretched their legs.

A fortnight later, Young strode into the lawyer’s central London office and closed the door.

“I’ve been robbing banks all over Europe,” he said matter-of-factly. “And every time I try to spend my money in the UK, the tax man wants to know where it came from.”

This struck the lawyer as an unusual predicament. Most of the criminal clients he had so far acquired—a group he referred to affectionately as “my crims”—tended to confine their activities to the UK. Young, it appeared, was a man of more international ambitions; an altogether more interesting class of crook. He assured his new client that he could help straighten things out. But first he would need to know more.

Young was a man who seemed to have been born in a hurry. Ever since he could remember, he’d wanted to put as much distance as possible between himself and the tumbledown tenement block where he grew up in the gritty Scottish port city of Dundee. He had dropped out of school early and started dealing drugs in the pubs and clubs of his home city before making his way to Edinburgh to ply his trade on a grander scale in the smoky cellar bars of the Scottish capital. What Young lacked in formal education he made up for in charm, eloquence, and cunning. He could talk almost anyone into anything, and his great gift was the art of making a deal. It was this talent that would eventually set him on the path to becoming a self-styled “superfixer” for some of the world’s richest and most politically exposed men. But first he needed to make it big on his own.