In amplifying her point, Mrs May added a load of accusations against Russia that testified to how bad relations had become by the spring of 2018: it had illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine; it had fomented large-scale violence by separatists in the east of that country; it used nuclear threats against the West; and of course it had murdered a dissident, Alexander Litvinenko, using a rare radioactive isotope as a poison in London in 2006.
But who was this man, this former colonel who was now lying critically ill, apparently because of a decision made many years earlier to spy for British intelligence? He certainly wasn’t a Litvinenko, in the sense of somebody who had campaigned noisily against the Russian president, accusing him of all manner of evil. Sergei Skripal, on the contrary, had virtually no public profile. After coming to Britain in a spy swap years earlier, he had simply disappeared.
Alone among the journalists watching the Prime Minister’s statement on 9 March, and the unfolding of a wider crisis, I had not only met Skripal, but spent many hours interviewing him during the summer of 2017. I had kept what I had learned to myself but understood of course that the time would come to tell his story. At that moment though, far more importantly, what I and so many others wanted to know was whether he and his daughter would survive.
The answer to that question would play out in a small room on Level 4 of Salisbury District Hospital. There a man of sixty-six who had been poisoned with a substance so exotic that nobody had ever treated its effects before was locked in a fight for life. In this battle blood tests, pharmacology, and the very best of medical ingenuity would decide the issue, rather than politics and bluster.
Skripal and his daughter were connected to every device needed to keep them alive: the ventilator, with its bag puffing in and out as it pushed air down their throats; the drips feeding them atropine as well as all the other drugs being pumped into their systems; and lines carrying their blood out to be scrubbed before being pumped back in. In order to tolerate all this invasive medical technology and save their brains from the nerve agent, doctors had put them into the deepest of medically induced sleeps.
How had this poor patient, in many ways so typical of Russians of his generation, an everyman almost, come to be in this mortal struggle and at the centre of a major international crisis? His story is in many ways an allegory. Certainly it guides us through decades of distrust and espionage between Russia and its Western rivals. It was a battle that never stopped after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, simply paused for a year or two, then resumed, growing more intense and merciless with the passage of time. For Skripal, that conflict had produced a personal reckoning twenty-two years before the poisoning, in an altogether happier time and place.
PART ONE
AGENT
1
THE PITCH
It is high summer in Madrid, 1996. Two men are walking in the Parque del Retiro. It’s a working day so they are wearing office attire, which just raises the temperature still further.
The older of the pair is a couple of weeks past his forty-fifth birthday, big, with a boxer’s physique. He is fair-skinned and looks a little out of place among the Spaniards who flit along the paths pushing their kids in strollers or walking hand in hand. The other, maybe a decade younger, maybe more, appears to be Spanish. He’s darker, dressed the way the Madrileños might dress, and outwardly he appears more at home. But at the same time he doesn’t quite look relaxed.
The park’s thoroughfares tell the story of the pet projects of Spain’s Bourbon monarchs and statesmen. There is one section created in the formal French style with neat trimmed hedges and gravel paths; other thoroughfares are a little wilder. In July there are puppet shows and other activities for children, and the place has a real holiday atmosphere. Under the shade of broad boughs Madrid’s youth and beauty gather to picnic and canoodle.
There are hothouses, statues, and a boating lake. That gave a choice of rendezvous and its broad avenues, lined with horse chestnuts, poplars and maples, and narrower paths branching off them, offered ways to embrace the crowds or avoid them. With its myriad identities, el Retiro was perfect for the business at hand.
The bigger man is Sergei Viktorovich Skripal, the 1st Secretary (Scientific and Technical) from the Russian embassy. Actually that’s just his cover. His real business in Spain is as a colonel in Russian military intelligence, the GRU. He is operating in Madrid on a particularly sensitive mission reporting direct to the Centre. As for the man he is talking to, *Richard Bagnall (he is calling himself something else of course, a local alias), and as the stroll through the park goes on, he is growing increasingly nervous.
Richard has seen the older Russian several times now and he knows he must make a move. Skripal is coming towards the end of his three-year posting and anyway this little dance has gone on for long enough.
After a while with this sort of thing, if you don’t make things plain, the other person just begins to despise you, and heaven knows Richard had thrown out a few hints since their first meeting that April. He knows also that Sergei doesn’t have very long. That just adds to the pressure, as if there wasn’t already enough of that.
What the passers-by on that summer’s day in 1996 ambling along in el Retiro cannot know is that Richard is engaged in a carefully choreographed seduction. There is nothing sexual about it. Rather it is the beginning of a different kind of relationship, one that will last their whole lives, and is freighted with risk. Indeed the ‘thing’ that this younger man wants to start could quite possibly destroy Sergei’s life completely and utterly.
He is no fool, the Russian. He’d toiled for four years at the Military Diplomatic Academy, the GRU’s secret training college in Moscow, to prepare him for foreign service as an intelligence officer. Time and again in those airless rooms listening to the instructors, they had been warned about foreign spies and all the different ways that might be used to compromise and recruit them. And they had learned about recruiting their own agents, the tricks of the trade, how to lead a person past a whole series of moral turn-offs until the only road they could follow was to spy for you.
As Richard made his awkward small talk, building up to the moment, Sergei studied him. He looked so young, and so nervous, the GRU officer thought. How long had he suspected this dapper olive-skinned man, chatting away in the park? Certainly after two or three meetings some alarm bells had gone off.
This suspicious fellow had managed to turn the conversation to current events time and again. And once or twice he had strayed directly towards asking Sergei what he ‘really did’ at the embassy. One time, as they dined together, Richard had left a copy of a book, Aquarium, on the table, claiming it was what he happened to be reading and asking what Sergei thought of it. Aquarium was an exposé of the GRU by a former officer under the pseudonym Viktor Suvorov.
Skripal knew what he thought of that book. Its author, real name Vladimir Rezun, had defected to the UK in 1978 while serving at the Geneva rezidentura. Skripal attended the Military Diplomatic Academy soon after this fateful event, and heard Rezun described as a vile traitor who had betrayed his Motherland for a few pieces of silver. And what had he really known, this Rezun? He’d just been a captain in the GRU on his first foreign posting. Now he was skulking in the West, trying to make some money by exaggerating his own importance. If Richard had hoped to lure Skripal into talking about intelligence work in that Spanish restaurant, it was never going to happen. The colonel simply brushed him off, saying he knew nothing about the GRU.