General Valentin Korabelnikov, the 1st Deputy Chief or Number Two of the organization, was five years ahead of Skripal on the career ladder and a twenty-year veteran of GRU. As 1st Deputy his job was to oversee the intelligence-producing directorates of the organization but in the months before Skripal’s return he had spent a great deal of his time in Chechnya trying to gain the upper hand over the separatists there. When Dzhokar Dudayev, the man who had led the Caucasian statelet to independence and strife, was killed by a missile strike in April 1996 it provided the Russian military with a welcome win after months of dismal news (and thousands of fatalities).
Dudayev was killed by an impressive intelligence-led operation. While he was talking on his satellite phone, the GRU locked onto the signal, and an Su24 fighter-bomber circling high above the mountains fired a missile targeting the car he was sitting in. General Korabelnikov took credit for this strike, and returning to Moscow, assumed acting control of the intelligence agency (its director at the time being on sick leave), a post in which he was confirmed in May 1997.
During his previous time in the Glass House, Skripal had got to know Korabelnikov. He considered the general to be approachable, highly educated in his profession, and very smart. Happily for Skripal – and indeed eventually for MI6 – the coming man in the GRU had some reciprocal respect for the paratrooper colonel from Kaliningrad.
In his role as personnel director, Skripal sat on what the GRU calls its 1st Commission, a management board dealing with the overall running of the organization. In this way agent FORTHWITH became privy to the affairs of the whole concern. And there was more.
Throughout the Cold War years, the GRU had been able to keep out the KGB internal-security types who could be found in virtually every concern in the country. From colleges to factories or institutes, the 1st or ‘Special Department’ had been responsible for maintaining ideological purity. In civilian life the term ‘1st Department’ was more common, and people tended to refer to KGB as chekists. The osobii otdel, or Special Department, performed the same role in army units, where it had the formal function of counter-intelligence. The people who belonged to it, nicknamed osobists by soldiers, poked their noses into all kinds of business and were widely despised as a result. This was particularly the case in the airborne forces, where Skripal had acquired some of this contempt.
Everywhere else in society, the KGB had been used to control people, asserting its role as ‘sword and shield’ of the party. But the GRU was entrusted with such sensitive secrets that it had been given a special dispensation. It was reckoned capable of looking after its own leaks. If there were to be mole-hunts in Russian military intelligence, they would in the first instance be investigated by its own security section, and this sat in the organization under the personnel department which was, as of October 1996, under the command of Colonel Sergei Viktorovich Skripal.
He had learned a good deal during his previous spell at the Centre about catching spies, not least from his involvement with the Baranov case. That was why he had insisted to Richard Bagnall that there would be no meetings once he returned to Russia, and also why he knew that it would be quite impossible for him to leave the country while he sat at the GRU’s top table. Self-preservation would have to trump communication. Skripal was hoping in any case for promotion to major general, if he played his cards right.
As the months progressed, the army’s concerns about the Chechen situation had intensified. Much of this drama played out while Skripal was serving in Spain.
It began with the wiping out of an entire motor rifle regiment as it entered the Chechen capital, Grozny, in late 1994. In June 1995 an unknown number of Chechen militant fighters, probably in excess of a hundred, struck well outside their troubled enclave, taking over a hospital in the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk, and with it hundreds of hostages.
After a couple of days’ stand-off there was a series of assaults in which one by one each of Russia’s main security organizations displayed its incompetence. Alpha Group (formerly the KGB’s elite assault force) failed, as did the army, and the Ministry of Interior special troops.
The cost of this was truly shocking. Around a hundred and thirty hostages were killed (the numbers are still disputed) and more than four hundred wounded, many of them cut down by the military’s bullets rather than the terrorists. When the guns fell silent with the hostages still under Chechen control, the Russian government negotiated a deal whereby the kidnappers returned to Chechnya (triumphant), the Russian military announced a ceasefire, and peace talks began. During the talks Dudayev was killed by the GRU operation.
It was in November 1996, as he settled into the personnel department, that papers were signed outlining the new relationship between Chechnya and the Russian state. The whole venture had been the most awful disaster. There were more than five thousand dead Russian soldiers, tens of thousands of Chechens, and Grozny had been utterly flattened. At times during the Russian assault, twenty thousand artillery shells a day had been fired into the Chechen capital. But there was also something bigger at stake, so soon after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and of the USSR itself.
For officers of Skripal’s generation the loss of the old Soviet republics (following the failed coup of 1991) had already robbed Russia of its protective shield in Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. But now, having been outmanoeuvred by a bunch of Chechen fanatics, he could see the next line of defence, the autonomous republics of the north Caucasus, crumbling too. Almost everyone of his generation and military background looked upon these events with alarm and some anger.
In this security turmoil Yeltsin had faced the other way as the KGB, broken up after its involvement in the 1991 coup attempt, started to reconstitute itself. Its 2nd Chief Directorate, previously responsible for the domestic surveillance state, evolved through being a security ministry and counterterrorist service into, in 1995, the Federalnoye Sluzhbe Bezopasnosti – the FSB, or Federal Security Service. It took possession of that forbidding building in Moscow’s Dzerzhinsky Square, the Lubyanka. There, with the toppling of KGB founder Dzerzhinsky’s statue in August 1991, the revolution reached its symbolic climax.
In was in 1996–1997 though, as Skripal established himself in his new job and his patron General Korabelnikov was ascending to the helm of the GRU, that the FSB started to make its presence felt again in all sorts of ways. The Chechen conflict had produced acts of terrorism in Russian cities and, understandably, there was a public desire to see some kind of effort to counter the bombers. But the end of communism had produced all sorts of other changes too, ones many people welcomed, like seeing Western companies open operations in Russia, much more foreign travel, and interactions of many other kinds with foreigners.
The FSB, little by little, began to reassert itself. In some places, familiar faces, those burly chekists in leather coats, reappeared in the old 1st Department offices, particularly of institutions engaged in any kind of sensitive dealings with the West. Prosecutions started, like that of Alexander Nikitin, a former naval officer, that seemed to sit badly with Russia’s newly espoused democratic principles. He was arrested in 1996 and charged with treason. His crime was gathering information about nuclear contamination for an environmental group. It took him until 2000 to get acquitted.
As the Nikitin case rumbled on all sorts of new FSB files were opened: on Russians working with Western NGOs; on people doing business in certain areas deemed sensitive; and on journalists covering certain topics, notably the Chechen conflict. The KGB veterans who had slipped back into positions of command throughout the FSB saw these contacts with foreigners as part of something much more sinister, an epidemic of actual espionage enabled by the dissolution of the iron curtain.