Returning to London from Alicante, Richard Bagnall waited for the technical experts behind the green-tinted, triple-glazed windows at headquarters to do their stuff. Inside the book sent to him from Moscow was page upon page of secret writing. During long hours in the privacy of his flat, Colonel Skripal had turned one of the tradecraft tricks he’d learned at the academy against his GRU employers; writing in invisible ink. In this way he had crammed his years’ worth of secret reporting to British intelligence into the volume he’d given Liudmila to take on her Spanish holiday as a present for Richard.
Skripal insisted to me that he had not shared his secret life as an MI6 agent with his wife – not at the time at least – and that she was unaware of the critical role played by the apparently innocent volume she had taken out of Moscow. However the ‘present’ that Bagnall sent back with her to Moscow consisted of thousands of dollars in cash. Perhaps Sergei had claimed it was payment for consultancy work he’d done for their friend from Madrid days. If Liudmila had her suspicions she did not press Sergei too closely, the wife of a spy soon learning that what you do not know, you cannot reveal.
In using secret writing, Skripal had chosen one of the most ancient techniques known in espionage, certainly one going back thousands of years. Early experiments with lemon juice, vegetable extracts and milk produced inks that became visible when a page was warmed by a candle or other source of heat. The techniques had been used to get messages into besieged cities in the ancient world and were revived by European spymasters during the Renaissance.
Early in the twentieth century more advanced compounds, derived from silver, cobalt, and other elements were tried. Some of these required a chemical reagent to be applied to the page. During the Cold War both the KGB and Western agencies developed highly tailored invisible inks that could only be revealed at their destination by equally specific chemical formulas, thus defeating a casual inspection using heat, ultra-violet light, or one of the silver-based reagents.
Whatever the process used by the Vauxhall Cross boffins to reveal agent FORTHWITH’s reports, this first book yielded a large amount of information ranging from Skripal’s views on the emerging GRU–FSB rivalry to the posting plans for European intelligence stations and CI leads, i.e. clues to be given to the mole-hunters in Western counter-intelligence organizations.
The treatment given to these pointers towards the identity of GRU assets varied according to the specificity of the information. It might be vague, such as evidence (to use a hypothetical example) that ‘a man in the French finance ministry’ was a Russian mole. These might cause spy-hunters months of fruitless head-scratching. Even when in receipt of far more specific information, the results rarely produced any kind of formal police enquiry. A CI lead was by its nature problematic as evidence, particularly if it could not be used without endangering the source.
It was the late 1990s, most Western politicians believed the Cold War was well and truly over. Prosecuting Russian spies would be embarrassing, and anyway these espionage cases were notoriously hard to prove. In the rare examples where prosecution had been tried, such as MI5’s 1993 case against Michael Smith, or a couple of FBI ones in the USA, there had often been an element of entrapment: a Western agent impersonating a Russian handler in order to lure the suspect into breaching the law.
Skripal’s reporting was sent out by MI6 in various forms. Suitably sanitized to disguise the source’s precise role, some went out in the form of ‘CX’, sometimes called the Blue Book in Cold War days, a bulletin of secret intelligence sent to other agencies and government departments with a suitably high security clearance. In many cases though FORTHWITH’s product was put out as a specific message from Vauxhall Cross to another service. A short report announcing the imminent arrival of the new GRU rezident in Berlin, for example, might be shared with the Germans but few others. In all of these examples of dissemination, the need-to-know principle ruled. The best way to preserve an agent was to keep knowledge of his or her reporting as restricted as possible.
Some of Skripal’s reports were ‘extremely well received by the Security Service’, a Whitehall figure told me. FORTHWITH had helped pinpoint GRU assets in the UK. Since no prosecution resulted we can only imagine that the individual(s) he unmasked as spying for Russia or subjects of cultivation by the GRU were disrupted in other ways: by being explicitly warned; professionally sidelined or dismissed; or fed disinformation by British intelligence to send back to Moscow. However, not all of Skripal’s CI leads were quite so valuable.
Work on the information he had provided about his agent recruitments in Malta did not produce any prosecutions. Indeed it may only have revealed a couple of US military personnel who were actually counter-intelligence operatives leading the GRU man on. As for the Maltese, little information could be found that suggested active treachery.
What seems to have emerged from the investigation of Skripal’s Maltese contacts was a pattern that became very familiar to Western counter-espionage officers in the 1980s and 1990s. Since ambitious SVR or GRU officers were pressured to make recruitments in order to remain in their coveted overseas postings or get another job abroad after a few years back at the Centre, ‘a culture of systematic exaggeration emerged’, says one MI6 officer. Westerners who had met the Russian intelligence officer a few times and were happy to keep in touch were reported back as agent recruitments, but most often were not producing anything that could be characterized as secret intelligence.
Skripal’s reporting became an important element in MI6’s picture of what was going on inside Russia. He was, after all, the first GRU agent in place that they had recruited since Penkovsky in the late 1950s. Two factors, however, limited what they could expect from him. In the first place, Skripal’s healthy self-preservation instinct meant that his gifts of books to Richard arrived only occasionally. Indeed when Liudmila presented him with a second volume, during a holiday in Malaga in 1998, this seems to have been the only other use of this channel of communication. Each of these volumes may have been packed with secret writing, but there were only two deliveries of this kind during FORTHWITH’s years inside the Glass House.
The other factor that had emerged by this time was abundantly clear to the colonel’s colleagues at the GRU Centre. He had developed diabetes, producing some lengthy bouts of sick leave before treatment brought his symptoms under control.
Skripal’s illness contributed to personal disappointment in this final phase of his career. On three occasions he was passed over for promotion to major general, something which, by rights, he felt should have been his as head of personnel and a member of the GRU’s 1st Commission. Receiving a general’s shoulder boards might have allowed him to serve for longer.
While Skripal’s recruitment remained a source of considerable professional pride to the Secret Intelligence Service he was just one of several agents in place, and this period, the late 1990s, coincided with a new impetus being given to source recruitment in Russia. After the fall of communism the attitude of the Russia specialists in Western intelligence organizations started with guarded optimism, evolved into suspicion, and was by the late 1990s becoming a great concern. Politicians, by and large, remained much more upbeat, regarding the democratic transformation of Russia as an emphatic win for humanity and stability, even if it was still very much a work in progress. A gap had therefore opened up between the leaders in the UK, Germany, and the US and their secret servants. Since nobody wanted a return to the Cold War the spooks were left discovering developments that disturbed them, exchanging highly classified papers about them, and then essentially remaining silent while Western companies sought to exploit the Russian Klondike. In this context – because of its later relevance to the Skripal story – it is worth looking a little at the issue of chemical weapons.
As the Cold War ended, Soviet experts were working on new nerve agents under a secret programme. In part these were seen as a retaliatory step to the US fielding of new bombs containing a binary (or two-part) version of the VX nerve agent. In the early 1990s a dissident scientist and former head of security at the Soviet chemical weapons organization had revealed the existence of these new compounds, which he said were being developed under the name ‘Novichok’. This was awkward because an international treaty ban, the Chemical Weapons Convention, was in its final stages of drafting, and it didn’t specifically cover these new agents. This ambiguity would be resolved at a later date by the international chemical weapons watchdog.
Initially MI6 and the other experts in Whitehall saw the emergence of Novichok as the result of inertia on the part of labs and factories where thousands would be made unemployed by the new treaty. The secret agencies went along with the public line that President Yeltsin was being kept in the dark about these developments, maybe scammed by unreformed members of the military-industrial complex. Politically, that was a better alternative than the British or US governments calling out the Russian president publicly.
By the mid-1990s evidence had emerged that some people connected with the chemical weapons industry had been trying to sell their services to Syria, with the idea of producing new nerve agents there. For a time, when they were charged by the FSB in 1996, this actually appeared to be an area where UK cooperation with Russian intelligence might be possible. Avoiding proliferation of such weapons was a mutual interest, after all.
But by the late 1990s there had been a distinct shift in the intelligence analysts’ interpretation of developments in Russia. Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, managed to bring a defector out of the chemical weapons establishment, complete with a small sample of a Novichok nerve agent. His secret flight to the West produced intelligence that was circulated in 1998, the year after Russia signed the Chemical Weapons Convention. The BND shared its Novichok sample with labs in Sweden, the US, UK, Netherlands, and France. Thus it was at this time that the British chemical weapons labs at Porton Down in Wiltshire first got their hands on the substance about which they had heard so much.
This development was doubly disturbing: first, it became clear that the new Russian nerve agent was undetectable by standard NATO equipment; second, it suggested that research and testing of quantities well above the minute amounts permitted under the new treaty (for the purpose of developing protective measures) were likely still going on in Russia. If Yeltsin’s people had signed up to the Convention with no intention of keeping it, or perhaps believing that it didn’t cover their latest research, then this was worrying. In later years additional sensitive intelligence about the Novichok programme would reach the Western agencies. But in 1998 it formed just one strand in a web of secret reporting out of Russia that was raising concern among the experts.
It was around this time, while Skripal was serving in GRU headquarters, that steps were taken to up MI6’s game against the Russians, making it fit for the post-communist era. This did not result from a particular bureaucratic moment or decision, rather it was guided by two particular individuals who were key to redefining what MI6 was doing in Russia, and how it was achieving its goals.
The first of these was John Scarlett, who was expelled from Russia in 1994 and went back to a desk job in London, and was now Controller Central and Eastern Europe. Although he was also dealing in this post with the emerging Kosovo crisis in the Balkans, Russia remained a key concern. Scarlett was one of those secret mandarins who, far from seeing a contradiction between friendly relations and spying, believed that it was essential to keeping exchanges between the UK and Russia honest. With his clipped delivery and intense manner, the Controller was able to convince many in Whitehall of the need both to focus on the Russian target, as Yeltsin faltered, and to organize the means to improve collection there.
At about the same time, *Harry Murdoch was appointed under Scarlett to be Head of the Russian operations and targeting elements of P5 at MI6. Murdoch was the type of bespectacled, donnish figure familiar from spy fiction. An Oxford graduate and Ph.D. to boot, his earlier career in MI6 had taken him to the Middle East. Consumed by work, and afflicted by the unpredictable life of a spy, Murdoch had not married.
In his late forties when he was placed in charge, Murdoch did not suffer fools and ‘upset a lot of people by demanding an altogether higher performance from them’, says one Vauxhall Cross insider. ‘He is an astonishing judge of character,’ observes another, ‘he could weigh up people’s strengths and weaknesses straight away, and was rarely wrong – I’m just glad he never wrote my annual report.’ Murdoch’s role was to deliver more penetrations over a broader range of targets, and as one observer remarks, ‘he is an excellent operational officer who operationalized everything’.
The old idea of a Soviet bloc ‘Master Race’ in MI6 was finally laid to rest. Instead Murdoch dispatched Bagnall and the others in his team of agent runners pitching their way across Europe, Russia, and wherever else in search of the people who could give profound insight into what was really going on.
In the early 1990s SIS tasking on Russia had been narrow in its scope, covering counter-intelligence targets to make sure there were no high-placed Russian moles in Britain, the hidden chemical and biological weapons programmes, and certain issues that worried Whitehall decision-makers relating to nuclear-warhead security as well as the security of the command system for these weapons. By the end of the decade the Russian target was being looked at very differently. So it was around this time that SIS began using partnerships with the nascent services of some former Soviet republics, notably the Baltic ones, to up its game.
It was all very well to think defensively, going for the SVR and GRU, but Murdoch wanted to know more about the FSB also, as it sought to reconstitute its power within Moscow. And with many of its Russian assets now reporting powerful connections between the FSB, organized crime, oligarchs, and politicians, the net would have to be cast wider. You only had to read the Russian press to see all manner of conspiracy theories about state organizations becoming criminal enterprises, but if this was true, what were the wider implications for UK foreign policy?
During this time, people were to approach many targets as they travelled in former Soviet republics or Eastern Europe. Some of the old Master Race war horses who had held on in the agent-running section for rather too long, living on past glories, were also moved on. At this time also, MI6’s P5 sections also stepped up operations designed to capitalize on the new freedoms enjoyed by Russians, allowing them to target and run people at a far lower cost. A consultancy could be set up in the UK or another Western country, and a visiting Russian businessman asked if he’d like to submit reports in return for cash. He could just fax them over, or, as the technology evolved, use email. In this way, British intelligence might tap into all sorts of expertise, whether it was someone working in defence exports or the oil business. The FSB’s suspicion of NGOs and Western businesses would, in this sense, become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Events in Moscow, meanwhile, were moving by the summer of 1998 to an important moment, a turning point in the battle between reformist forces and post-communist orthodoxy.
In the early hours of 3 July 1998, masked men entered a dacha in Klokovo, south-west of Moscow. There they found retired general Lev Rokhlin and his wife Tamara, both of whom had been drinking. Rokhlin had been forced out of the chairmanship of the parliamentary defence committee some weeks before, but he and his movement to support the army remained a potent threat to President Yeltsin. The retired officer had talked of impeaching Yeltsin, but the president characterized him and his supporters as planning a coup.
So that warm summer’s night in 1998, the intruders shot the general in the head. More than ten thousand people attended his funeral in Moscow. In the days that followed, Rokhlin’s wife was framed for the crime and charged with murder. That was a neat twist, since in the years it took for the case against her to collapse people did not look elsewhere and other leads were not investigated.
Some time after the crime, Murdoch’s section at Vauxhall Cross received some revelatory intelligence about the murder. There were allegations flying about Moscow that a shadowy ex-KGB type in Yeltsin’s presidential administration, one Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin, had arranged it. Three weeks after Rokhlin’s murder, Yeltsin appointed Putin as Director of the FSB. In the view of MI6’s source, a grateful president used this promotion to reward Putin for taking care of the Rokhlin business.
During its period with Putin at the helm (it was just over a year), the FSB became more assertive, the political murder rate increased, and Russia began lurching towards a new war in Chechnya. Four and a half months after Rokhlin’s murder, assassins claimed the life of another Duma member, Galina Staravoitova. At the other end of the political spectrum to the general and his movement, she was the liberal who’d tried to move legislation banning former KGB men from power.
Few politicians in Western countries followed Russian affairs in any great depth. Some, briefed by their intelligence agencies, understood that allegations of corruption swirled around Yeltsin and his family. But publicly most stuck to the line that democratic Russia had become a friend, and this was no time to threaten that amity.
In Vauxhall Cross concerns of this kind had strengthened Scarlett and Murdoch’s hand in pushing for more resources, and getting the CX reports produced by his section taken more seriously around Whitehall.
Even early in 1999 it had become apparent that change could be afoot in Moscow. Growing doubts were being expressed about Yeltsin’s health and fitness to run for reelection in 2000, and a power struggle to succeed him was beginning. Many fancied Yevgeni Primakov, another former KGB man, and after the 1991 coup, director of the newly created foreign espionage arm, the SVR.
In April 1999, a tape allegedly showing Russia’s chief prosecutor, Yuri Shkuratov, cavorting naked with prostitutes found its way onto Russian TV. It was a classic example of kompromat, blackmail material gathered (or as was claimed in this case, faked) by the old KGB to destroy someone or control them. It ruined not only Shkuratov but also the fortunes of his good friend and political ally Yevgeni Primakov, who withdrew from the presidential race.
How had this kompromat been created and found its way to the TV channel RTR? Remarkably, a journalist was told by someone working at the station, the tape had been hand-delivered ‘by a man who looked like the head of the FSB’. Whether or not it was him, Putin followed up his special delivery by publicly calling on Shkuratov to go.
Visiting the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in May 1999, the FSB boss was asked by journalists about rumours of coup plots. Was he planning one?
‘Why would we need to organize a coup d’état?’ Putin replied. ‘We are in power now. And who would we topple?’
‘Maybe the president?’ a reporter replied.
‘The president appointed us,’ came Putin’s answer. It looked to many like he was already in control. Just a few months later, in August, Yeltsin installed Putin as prime minister, putting him in a position to succeed him as president.
What followed later that summer produced anguish among Russian democrats and paved the way for Putin’s succession to the presidency. A series of bombings of Russian apartment blocks, claiming hundreds of lives, was blamed on Chechen separatists, triggering a large-scale military operation into the breakaway republic.
The discovery of what looked like preparations to bomb another building, in the Russian city of Ryazan, late that September produced a widespread conspiracy theory. Initially announced as another thwarted apartment atrocity, it was soon linked to the FSB, whose spokesmen said it had been a ‘training exercise’. Opponents of Yeltsin (and later Putin) would charge that the Ryazan incident proved the bombings that shocked Russia so deeply had been carried out by the FSB in order to justify a new Chechen war.
This book is not the place to dissect this theory, which I have never found particularly convincing, but it was to become an important part of the case made against the FSB and Putin by some people who are important later in our story, and the apartment bombings defined the moment that Colonel Sergei Skripal finally left the army and the GRU.
For it was in September of 1999 that Skripal, then aged forty-eight, was retired. He later explained to me that he had accumulated thirty-eight years’ pensionable service, the months he had spent in Afghanistan, and years in Malta and Madrid counting as double time and time and a half. However this pension had been reduced by inflation to a pittance, and in any case Skripal had no intention of sitting idle.
A few months later, he got a job in local government, in the Moscow region administration. He started a private business with some old comrades from the army engineers, selling demolition services for the construction industry, and, it seems, offered his skills as a ‘fixer’ with local government connections to some contractors who were building a big housing development in Lobnya, north-west of the capital, near Sheremetyevo airport. By blurring the lines between his official and freelance work, in a way that was quite typical in 1990s Russia, he was able to bring in a decent side income.
But what of his relationship with MI6? Would they still even want to deal with him? Quite clearly they did, not least so as to have more detailed conversations about his three years at GRU headquarters. His two lengthy reports to London, sent via Liudmila in the form of secret writing, had naturally prompted many questions from British intelligence analysts, queries they had been unable to ask until that moment.
For Skripal had decided that it was now safe for him to travel. Crudely, he knew he still had value to the British. He told me that he had held some information back in his 1996 Madrid meetings and reporting from Moscow. Better not to give them everything at once, for even spies have to consider their longevity.
So, early in 2000, Skripal decided the moment was ripe for him to enjoy some winter sun, and some of the pleasures of Spanish life he’d been missing. It was time for him and Liudmila to take a break. They boarded a flight from Moscow to Malaga, part of the typical crowd taking advantage of low-season prices.
There, in a Spanish hotel, they were delighted to see Richard Bagnall once again. He’d met up with Liudmila a couple of times, but had not seen Sergei for three and a half years. He asked after Sasha and Yulia, and warm greetings were exchanged as well as toasts drunk.
In private, Sergei and the MI6 officer had business to transact. For his part, Richard had important news from Vauxhall Cross, and there was someone else he wanted the Russian to meet.