It took a long time before any substantive details emerged about how Sergei and Yulia Skripal came into contact with Novichok, and even now it’s not entirely clear precisely how they were exposed to the agent. However, the subsequent death of Dawn Sturgess and the recovery of her partner Charlie Rowley from the effects of the nerve agent did serve to clarify both the possible method of attack used by the Russians and also the means they had used to get the Novichok into the United Kingdom.
Charlie Rowley found what he believed to be a sealed Nina Ricci perfume bottle, though he told the police he couldn’t remember exactly where he had discovered it, and then gave it to Dawn Sturgess. She obviously sprayed herself with it, and later died from the effects of the nerve agent, but this was some three months after the Skripals fell ill. Of even more concern was that the ‘perfume’ was in a sealed box, presumably discarded by the Russian assassination team once the attack on the Skripals had taken place, meaning that it could not have been the source of the agent administered to the two Russian targets.
That also raises the possibility that the original container of the nerve agent is still out there somewhere in Wiltshire, having been dumped following the first attack, and that there may well also be other discarded bottles or objects containing Novichok. The advice given to residents by the police – to only pick up something if they know they dropped it – is very sensible.
The obvious presumption is that the Russian hit team – or possibly teams – managed to smuggle the Novichok into Britain by concealing it in apparently sealed bottles of perfume. This would not arouse suspicion at an airport’s security check, especially if the bottle was in a bag from a duty-free shop, and it could be carried by a man or a woman, either as a ‘present’ – if by a man – or by a woman for her own use.
The fact that the first attack was carried out and that a second sealed bottle was found weeks later suggests that the Russians probably arranged for at least two, and possibly more, containers to be smuggled into the United Kingdom, perhaps by different couriers to provide redundancy in case one of the people were to be stopped. Once the Skripals had been attacked and moved beyond the reach of the hit team, the assassins would have had no further use for the Novichok and simply dumped the containers. But, tragically for Dawn Sturgess, her boyfriend Charlie Rowley found one of them and gave it to her.
The suggestion that the Novichok didn’t come from Russia is laughable, despite completely unsubstantiated claims that it was the result of a leak from Porton Down or had been concocted in some shed in Wiltshire by persons unknown for reasons of their own. Manufacturing such an agent requires government or state direction, sophisticated and secure laboratory facilities and a high degree of expertise. If Sergei Skripal had offended somebody in Britain so grievously that they wished him dead, a knife or a hammer or a shotgun or some other weapon would have done the job. The only entity capable of producing Novichok and then administering it to one specific target is the Russian government, or more accurately one of its intelligence organs acting on instructions from the Russian government.
When looking at any murder or an attempted murder, the identity of the victim often provides a clear indication of the likely identity of the killer. In this case, the victim was a former Russian spy and dissident, the weapon used was a Russian-designed nerve agent known to be manufactured in Russia, and the only entity known to want to harm the victim was the Russian government. So how likely, really, is it that somebody else was responsible?
The most probable units are the G.U., the Glavnoye upravleniye, the foreign military intelligence arm of the Russian armed forces, the SVR, the Sluzhba vneshney razvedki Rossiyskoy Federatsii or Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation, or a Spetsnaz – Russian Special Forces – team working for the FSB, the Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti, the Federal Security Service.
To give it its full name, the G.U. or Glavnoye upravleniye is the Гла́вное управле́ние Генера́льного шта́ба ённых Сил Росси́йской Федера́ции which translates as the Main Directorate of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Until 2010 it was known as the GRU, the Glavnoye razvedyvatel’noye upravleniye, the title meaning the Main Intelligence Directorate, and this abbreviation is still in common usage, despite the word ‘intelligence’ being dropped. It can be argued that it wasn’t just the word intelligence that was dropped, as it’s now been established that the putative assassins of the Skripals were a couple of GU agents.
All of this raises the obvious question: if the Russian government wanted Sergei Skripal dead, why didn’t they just arrange for somebody to shoot him? The answer is also fairly obvious. People perceived by the Russian government as being undesirable tend to end up dead in one of two ways. If they are living outside Russia, they face long and lingering deaths, often as a result of innovative and unusual triggering mechanisms, or die in a way that a dimmer than usual coroner or police officer could perhaps be persuaded was accidental. But if they are still based in the Confederation of Independent States, as it is now known, they tend to just be shot. What follows mentions just a few of the more obvious examples, because the long and lethal reach of Moscow into Western nations takes place far more often than most people think:
In 1978 the Bulgarian dissident writer and broadcaster Georgi Markov was assassinated by a hitman using an air weapon disguised as an umbrella that shot a tiny metal ball filled with ricin into his leg on Waterloo Bridge. The weapon was supplied by the KGB, the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, the Russian Committee for State Security, and the man wielding it has been identified as Francesco Gullino, a Danish man of Italian extraction, who was working for the Komitet za dǎržavna sigurnost, the Bulgarian Committee for State Security.
On 23 November 2006 Alexander Litvinenko died from polonium poisoning, the radioactive substance most probably administered by a former KGB agent named Dmitry Kovtun – who left identifiable traces of polonium in a house and car he had used in Hamburg – or Andrei Lugovoy, also a former KGB man. Litvinenko had met Kovtun and Lugovoy on 1 November, and fell ill later that day.
In the latest attack, the Russians wanted Sergei Skripal – his daughter Yulia was just collateral damage, of no consequence whatsoever – to die a long and lingering, and very public, death, so that he suffered for as long as possible. And that would have been intended as just one more clear message to any other Russian dissidents who fell out of favour with Moscow: wherever you go, and no matter how well you hide, we can and will always find you. And when we do, you will die a prolonged and painful death.
What is not generally known is that the Russians have a government facility commonly known as Kamera, which translates as ‘The Cell,’ specifically responsible for the development of poisons and chemicals intended for covert operations in the West. Created in 1921 and then known as the ‘Special Office,’ its name changed to ‘Laboratory 1’ in 1939, and to ‘Laboratory 12’ in 1953. In 1978 it became a part of the First Chief Directorate (FCD) of the KGB as the ‘Central Investigation Institute for Special Technology,’ with an unchanged remit. Since 1991 it has expanded to occupy several laboratories and is now a part of the SVR, the lineal successor of the KGB’s FCD.
Kamera is known to have tested numerous lethal substances, including curare, cyanide, digitoxin, mustard gas and ricin and, in the interests of thoroughness, in the days of the gulags they tested these various concoctions on ‘enemies of the people’ – various human subjects – noting down the physical effects and the time taken for each person to die. What Kamera was trying to do was perfect an odourless and tasteless chemical combination that would kill efficiently and that would not be detectable at an autopsy. Eventually the unit produced a combination known as C2 or K2 – carbylamine choline chloride – that seemed to fit the bill. People who ingested it died within about fifteen minutes, and after taking it became weaker, calm and silent. Again in the interests of being thorough, male and female victims with different builds and physical characteristics and of different ages were fed the concoction and the results clinically recorded.
The ricin that killed Georgi Markov was prepared in this laboratory, and the Bulgarians were even given a choice of weapons to be used against the dissident: either a poisonous gelatin that would somehow have to be smeared onto his skin, or the ricin pellet fired by the modified umbrella. As we know, the Bulgarians picked the umbrella, probably because the concealed air weapon would be an easier device to use in the attack. It has not been conclusively proved, but the polonium used to fatally poison Alexander Litvinenko was most likely prepared in one of Kamera’s laboratories. Kamera is also the most probable source of the Novichok employed against the Skripals.
The other side of the coin is the fate of people who are perceived as domestic undesirables by the Russian government. People who ask the wrong questions, or who persist in trying to open doors that the powers that be have decided will remain closed. People like Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya.
She was a writer, journalist and a prominent activist for human rights with a particular interest in Chechnya. Her very public criticism of the Russian government and Vladimir Putin in particular made her known nationally and internationally, and resulted in her frequent intimidation, death threats, being threatened with rape, her arrest in Chechnya where she was beaten and suffered a mock execution, and her poisoning on an Aeroflot aircraft when flying to Chechnya.
This latter event was certainly not accidental: she was given a cup of tea by an Aeroflot stewardess and almost immediately began to suffer the effects of whatever poison had been used. Nobody else on the aircraft was affected, and she was lucky to recover. The substance that nearly killed her almost certainly came from a Kamera laboratory and it was probably administered on an aircraft precisely because only basic first aid – if that – would be available to treat her.
But her life would end very differently, and much more violently.
Possibly the last straw for the Russian government was when she published her book Putin’s Russia in 2004. In that volume, written primarily for a Western audience, she showed that Russia still has many of the characteristics of a police state, run by a corrupt coterie of oligarchs and politicians, and is not that dissimilar to the state of the country in the days of Josef Stalin.
On 7 October 2006, Putin’s birthday – which may not have been a coincidence – she was shot to death in the lift in her apartment building in central Moscow. Her killer fired four shots into her at point-blank range: two in the chest, one in her shoulder and one in her head, an obviously professional, and probably a contract, killing. Five men were convicted of her murder almost a decade later in June 2014 after an earlier trial ended in acquittals. One of them may have been the man who pulled the trigger, but it is still unclear who actually ordered her assassination, probably because they have covered their tracks too well.
She wasn’t the only one. A lawyer named Stanislav Markelov who had been involved in the investigation of several of the abuses unearthed by Politkovskaya was shot to death on the streets of Moscow on 19 January 2009, along with the journalist Anastasia Baburova. And in July of the same year Natalia Estemirova, one of Politkovskaya’s principal sources and an important informant, was grabbed off the streets in Grozny. Her body was found a few hours later.
Speaking the truth in Russia is still a dangerous and potentially fatal thing to do.
In March 2013 the DCRI, the Direction centrale du renseignement intérieur, the original name of what is now the DGSI, the Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure, France’s principal counter-espionage and counter-terrorism organisation, demanded that an article be removed from the Wikipedia website. The French-language article was entitled Station hertzienne militaire de Pierre-sur-Haute and discussed a seventy-four acre French military radio station located in the Rhône-Alpes region of France.
The Wikimedia Foundation, quite reasonably, asked why, on the basis that virtually all of the information published was already in the public domain, having been broadcast in a 2004 documentary by the French television channel Télévision Loire 7, a programme that had been made with the cooperation of the French Air Force and was readily available online to anyone who wanted to watch it. The Foundation asked what specific parts of the article had generated the demand from the DCRI for it to be deleted. The DCRI refused to respond, and simply ordered that it had to be removed. The Wikimedia Foundation refused to comply.
On 4 April 2013 a man named Rémi Mathis, a French resident, a volunteer administrator of the French-language version of Wikipedia and the President of Wikimedia France, was ordered to report to the DCRI offices. In the building, he was instructed to delete the article in question immediately, in front of DCRI officials. If he refused, he was told that he would be arrested, held in custody and then prosecuted on unspecified charges. In retrospect, it’s difficult to see what charges could actually have been levelled at Mathis, because he had never edited the article in question, or read it, or probably even knew that it existed, and even in France it should be obvious that you cannot prosecute a person for something done by somebody else. But no doubt the DCRI would have concocted some kind of offence to charge him with.
Facing immediate arrest, Mathis felt he had no choice but to comply and deleted the article. Then he warned other Wikipedia volunteers in France that undeleting the article could lead to legal action being taken against them.
The article was restored a short time later by another Wikipedia contributor living in Switzerland and hence outside French jurisdiction, and for a brief period of time the article became the most-read page on French Wikipedia with some 120,000 page views over a single weekend. It’s still available now, together with a version written in English.
Neither the DCRI nor the French Ministry of the Interior, the ministry responsible for the DCRI, have subsequently commented on this event.
The submachine gun has been around for a long time. The precursor to the weapon was a double-barrelled Italian device known as the VP or Villar Perosa that dated from 1915 and was capable of emptying its magazine in two seconds. The VP’s design influenced the Germans who produced the first true submachine gun, the Bergmann Muskete or MP18, first issued in 1918 at the end of the First World War. The purpose of the weapon was to provide an individual soldier with much greater firepower – largely inaccurate but rapid firepower – than was possible with the rifles of the time, many of which were bolt action, making them accurate but slow to reload.
Other countries then got in on the act, with the Thompson submachine gun, better known as the Tommy gun, patented in America in 1920, while in Germany the Bergmann Model 34 and the Schmeisser 28 were produced. The Italian Beretta company manufactured the Model 38 and in Hungary the Model 43 made its appearance. All of these were essentially evolutions of and variations on the earlier designs. The Second World War brought further innovations, including the British Sten gun, the Russian PPSh M1941 and PPS M1943, the German MP38 and MP40 weapons and the American M3, commonly referred to as the grease gun because it looked remarkably like the tool used on automobiles.
After the end of hostilities, other weapons were developed, including the Israeli Uzi, named after its inventor Uziel Gal, an officer in the Israeli army who came up with the design after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, partly basing it upon an earlier weapon manufactured in Czechoslovakia. This was a compact, robust and reliable weapon that saw service around the world. Then there was the MAC-10, which fired blindingly fast and virtually silently as long as it was fitted with a suppressor, but which was so astonishingly inaccurate that most professionals regarded it as only suitable for close combat in a very confined space, such as a telephone box. The joke with the MAC-10 was that it was the only weapon you could fire inside a barn and still not manage to hit the doors, walls, floor or ceiling. The Škorpion was very much another horse from the same stable.
The rounds fired by these weapons were almost invariably low velocity cartridges, often the same rounds fired by the pistols of the day, such as the nine-millimetre Parabellum round, which limited their effective range but meant that a soldier only needed to carry one type of ammunition for both weapons. This commonality did not extend to the name: in Germany, where the weapon had essentially been invented, they were known as machine pistols, while in Britain they were referred to as machine carbines. But eventually most nations followed the example set by the Americans and called them submachine guns.
As a device for making enemy soldiers keep their heads down, the submachine gun proved to be an almost ideal weapon, within its limitations. One of these was the speed with which it could empty its magazine if the soldier firing it simply kept his finger on the trigger. Typically, after two or three seconds he would essentially be unarmed until he could insert a fresh magazine and cock the weapon.
When Mikhail Kalashnikov designed the assault rifle that bears his name in 1947, the Avtomat Kalashnikova 47 or AK47 which is the commonest weapon of this type in the world, he was very aware of this problem. To tackle it, he fitted a three position catch on the right-hand side of the assault rifle. Fully up meant the safety catch was engaged, while fully down switched to semiautomatic fire, one round being discharged every time the trigger was pulled, and fully automatic was the mid position. His reasoning was simple and effective: if a soldier was suddenly fired upon, his immediate reaction would be to arm the weapon, and he would probably push the firing lever all the way down, then aim it and pull the trigger. If that had been the fully automatic setting, the magazine would be emptied almost immediately, but by making it the semiautomatic selection, the soldier would be able to fire a single shot towards the enemy, and then take his time over the next shot.
In 2010, two computer security experts named Eric Chien and Liam O Murchu who worked for Symantec detected a brand-new computer virus that became known as Stuxnet. Most viruses do one of two things. They either do temporary or permanent damage to an infected computer by deleting files, or they attempt to steal sensitive information, like credit card numbers and bank account details.
Stuxnet was different because it did neither. It contained a thing known as a zero-day exploit, which is a flaw in the operating system coding that nobody is aware of. In the version of Windows available in 2010, there were twelve zero-days, and Stuxnet exploited four of them. That was unusual enough, because it implied that whoever created the virus was far more accomplished than most virus writers, but there was more. The virus was very small and extremely tightly written, with no redundant code at all. It was also written in an extremely unfamiliar programming language, a language designed to control things called PLCs, Programmable Logic Controllers. These are small computers that control machinery used in factories.
The way the virus worked was also unusual. When it infected a new computer, it searched for a PLC attached to it, and would then fingerprint the PLC and only take action if it found one particular model that was itself connected to the right type of machinery. When it found the correct PLC, the virus copied itself into the controlling software and then did nothing apart from monitor the equipment that the PLC was controlling to establish the working parameters of the machinery. It looked to Chien and O Murchu like some kind of industrial espionage.
They were wrong. They discovered that every time the virus infected a computer system, it confirmed the location of that computer to an anonymous server, if an Internet connection existed. They also discovered that every computer the virus had infected was located in Iran. That rang immediate alarm bells, because Iran was believed to be trying to manufacture nuclear weapons, and it looked as if Stuxnet was attacking some part of that programme.
This was confirmed in November 2010, when they were contacted by a man in Holland who specialised in communication protocols for PLCs. He told them that all equipment controlled by PLCs had a specific ID number, and there was a catalogue available where those numbers could be checked. So they did, and discovered that all the devices attached to the infected PLCs were frequency converters, devices that changed the speed at which machinery ran. They also discovered that these particular frequency converters were highly specific. They controlled the speed of centrifuges in nuclear facilities.
Centrifuges are a vital part of the manufacturing process needed to produce nuclear weapons and are used to enrich the uranium needed for the warhead. By correlating this data with information from other sources, they discovered that all these PLCs were located in a single nuclear plant in Iran, the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant.
They then found out exactly what Stuxnet was designed to do. The program launched one of two alternative attacks. The first of these increased the frequency of the centrifuges to over 1400 Hertz, which caused the aluminium tubes inside the centrifuges to vibrate uncontrollably and then shatter. The second attack did the exact opposite, reducing the speed to only two Hertz, which caused such a huge imbalance in the units that they also failed. But while this was going on, the Stuxnet virus had a couple of further refinements.
First, it took over the operating system display screens, where workers at the plant monitored the state of the centrifuges, and it played back the data which it had patiently collected while it had been monitoring the equipment and the centrifuges had been running normally. So as far as the operators were concerned, everything would have appeared normal. And then, when the centrifuges started falling to pieces and it was quite obvious that things had gone wrong, it also intercepted the shutdown signal before it could be sent to the centrifuges, so the attack and the damage continued until the entire system could be powered down.
The total extent of the damage has never been publicly admitted, but Western intelligence sources are satisfied that Stuxnet destroyed at least 1000 expensive centrifuges and would have set back Iran’s secret plan to develop nuclear weapons by about two years.
The other interesting aspect of this particular attack was that the Iranian nuclear facility was a highly secure environment and was not connected to the Internet, the usual route used by viruses to spread. That means it was either introduced by a spy, somebody who worked at the plant and who was suborned by Western intelligence, or simply by accident, by somebody acquiring a USB stick or a CD and running it on a computer attached to the system. That aspect of the attack has never been clarified.
The obvious question to ask is who built Stuxnet. Again, this has never been admitted, but it was almost certainly America, with the assistance of the Israelis, and it was the world’s first genuine and effective cyberweapon.
But one of the problems with creating this kind of virus is that it can escape from the target location, and that’s what Stuxnet has done. It has now been found outside Iran, and the best estimates suggest that it’s infected over 100,000 computers. Of course, unless you’re building a nuclear weapon, it is unlikely to do any damage to your computer. Or not yet, anyway. The danger is that the virus could be employed by another group of hackers and re-engineered to attack an entirely different target.
Sometimes, even the best-intentioned actions can have entirely unforeseen consequences. Now that Stuxnet is out in the wild, there is no telling what it might eventually do.
You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.