In the summer of 1997 then, as Skripal was back in the heart of the GRU, talk of coups – constitutional or otherwise – was again the order of the day in Moscow, following failed attempts to seize power in 1991 and 1993. The struggle also between the army and the re-emerging FSB that was an important theme of his last years in military intelligence was something that concerned him deeply, and he felt he should share it with MI6. ‘I wanted London to have a more or less correct picture of what was going on in Russia,’ he said.
His daily work was also giving him all manner of information that he knew London would pay for. Running the personnel department he knew the details of who was in which overseas GRU station and what their functions were. He knew who was being prepared to go out in order to take over too. All of this was valuable information for the counterespionage services of Western countries. In times of reduced budgets, how many Russians could they afford to follow around or listen in to? If you knew who in a particular rezidentura was truly important, well, that was valuable knowledge.
He would also have been acquiring some information about the GRU’s own agent networks, though given the strict compartmentalization of intelligence observed in the Glass House this would have been little more than hints or scraps. Each one of these though might provide a counterintelligence lead for MI6 or its partners in the CIA.
There was much then that Skripal wanted to share, but equally he was quite clear in his own mind about the risks he was not prepared to take in communicating with MI6. It had been drummed into them time and again at the academy: an agent’s communication with his or her handlers is one of their principal points of vulnerability. Dead drops could be placed under observation, agents or couriers could be followed, and emails or other electronic means intercepted. None of these traditional methods of tradecraft was foolproof. You could use short-wave radios and one-time pads for encryption, as a generation of Soviet agents had, but if these were discovered in your home in Russia you would get a one-way ticket to the Gulag for sure. Hadn’t the boss of the FSB said that the country was facing its biggest wave of foreign spying since the war?
As for Liudmila or Yulia, well of course their reality was different. They were ruled by the school year and the seasons, like normal people were. And as 1997 wore on, missing Spain as they did, they decided to head back there, taking a holiday with some other friends from Moscow. Sergei knew that he could not accompany them. Officers working at GRU headquarters simply couldn’t do that.
So with hugs and kisses he saw his wife and daughter off. They flew to Alicante and checked into their hotel.
There, after a decent interval, Liudmila got a call from an old friend, Richard Bagnall. He dropped by to say hello to her. He arrived with a gift, something for Sergei. And Liudmila had brought something from Moscow for him also. Sergei had sent Richard a book, a Russian novel, a small token of his friendship perhaps, but one that he knew would mean so much to his friend from MI6.
7
THE VIEW FROM VAUXHALL
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.