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.