The discovery of what looked like preparations to bomb another building, in the Russian city of Ryazan, late that September produced a widespread conspiracy theory. Initially announced as another thwarted apartment atrocity, it was soon linked to the FSB, whose spokesmen said it had been a ‘training exercise’. Opponents of Yeltsin (and later Putin) would charge that the Ryazan incident proved the bombings that shocked Russia so deeply had been carried out by the FSB in order to justify a new Chechen war.
This book is not the place to dissect this theory, which I have never found particularly convincing, but it was to become an important part of the case made against the FSB and Putin by some people who are important later in our story, and the apartment bombings defined the moment that Colonel Sergei Skripal finally left the army and the GRU.
For it was in September of 1999 that Skripal, then aged forty-eight, was retired. He later explained to me that he had accumulated thirty-eight years’ pensionable service, the months he had spent in Afghanistan, and years in Malta and Madrid counting as double time and time and a half. However this pension had been reduced by inflation to a pittance, and in any case Skripal had no intention of sitting idle.
A few months later, he got a job in local government, in the Moscow region administration. He started a private business with some old comrades from the army engineers, selling demolition services for the construction industry, and, it seems, offered his skills as a ‘fixer’ with local government connections to some contractors who were building a big housing development in Lobnya, north-west of the capital, near Sheremetyevo airport. By blurring the lines between his official and freelance work, in a way that was quite typical in 1990s Russia, he was able to bring in a decent side income.
But what of his relationship with MI6? Would they still even want to deal with him? Quite clearly they did, not least so as to have more detailed conversations about his three years at GRU headquarters. His two lengthy reports to London, sent via Liudmila in the form of secret writing, had naturally prompted many questions from British intelligence analysts, queries they had been unable to ask until that moment.
For Skripal had decided that it was now safe for him to travel. Crudely, he knew he still had value to the British. He told me that he had held some information back in his 1996 Madrid meetings and reporting from Moscow. Better not to give them everything at once, for even spies have to consider their longevity.
So, early in 2000, Skripal decided the moment was ripe for him to enjoy some winter sun, and some of the pleasures of Spanish life he’d been missing. It was time for him and Liudmila to take a break. They boarded a flight from Moscow to Malaga, part of the typical crowd taking advantage of low-season prices.
There, in a Spanish hotel, they were delighted to see Richard Bagnall once again. He’d met up with Liudmila a couple of times, but had not seen Sergei for three and a half years. He asked after Sasha and Yulia, and warm greetings were exchanged as well as toasts drunk.
In private, Sergei and the MI6 officer had business to transact. For his part, Richard had important news from Vauxhall Cross, and there was someone else he wanted the Russian to meet.
8
BACK INTO THE LIGHT
For a couple of days in Malaga, Skripal met and discussed things with his British friends. For him it was a pleasurable trip; there was winter sunshine, good food, and wine, he enjoyed chatting with Richard, and of course he was being well paid for his time. But the presence of the other SIS officer, *Stephen Jones, was a harbinger of the news from London.
After five years in the Russian agent-running section, Richard was moving on. Whereas many CIA or MI6 officers go their entire careers without making a meaningful recruitment, Bagnall, so people in British intelligence say, had successfully pitched several Russians. But MI6, like any other branch of the civil service, has its career structure, and as a fast-stream officer who’d notched up these recruitments he was being given his own overseas station to run. Malaga was a handover meeting, and Stephen was taking over as Sergei’s new case officer.
Agent-runners the world over worry about handovers. While it’s true there are examples of the relationship between a case officer and his ‘Joe’ lasting decades, that’s rarely the way. The anxiety in any service is that the asset, who has been living a double life, often taking great risks, will see the departure of his or her old handler as a natural moment to break the cycle of deceit, stress, and subterfuge.
In Skripal’s case there was no danger of this. He sized up Stephen, seeing someone closer to his own age than Richard’s, more typical perhaps of what he had always expected of an MI6 officer. Stephen was a fluent Russian speaker, naturally, and a graduate of one of England’s great universities, a quiet professional. A colleague describes him as ‘careful, diligent, and a member of that core group that stayed on the Russia side of operations for much of their careers’.
During their early meetings Stephen Jones’s job was to take Sergei back through his reports from Moscow, filling in areas where the analysts in London had further questions, expanding on points that now seemed to be growing in importance as a new Russian president was assuming power. If the FSB was triumphant, extending its powers and getting an old chekist into the Kremlin, what were the chances of a military coup? How was Skripal’s old patron, General Korabelnikov, faring at the GRU? If Skripal had worried that they might lose interest now he’d retired from the service, he was soon reassured that this was not the case.
Richard Bagnall meanwhile disappeared from the scene as far as Skripal was concerned. The Russian agent had no idea whether he would ever see him again. That was a shame. But they were professionals and such were the exigencies of the service. Even so, Skripal felt they had established a strong bond, a friendship that went beyond the purely professional.
In May 2000, Vladimir Putin was sworn in as President of the Russian Federation. One of his first acts in office was to place the FSB under his personal control. The Second Chechen War was in full swing, and Putin had come to power promising to smash the rebels. There were foreign spies to be caught also, so Putin knew he would need the agency operating to full effect.
In Western countries, leaders welcomed his appointment. For many this went beyond extending the diplomatic courtesy due to a peer who has just won an election. Yeltsin’s final years had been an embarrassment, so after the political tumult and violence of the 1990s it was a relief that power had passed by constitutional means. The transition also marked the start of what would become a repetitive hallmark of policy towards Russia in this new decade: there might be many things going on there that Downing Street or the White House didn’t like but this gave the chance for a ‘re-set’.
Late in 1999, President Bill Clinton, speaking by phone to British Prime Minister Tony Blair (in transcripts only released years later), said, ‘Putin has enormous potential, I think… he’s very smart and thoughtful. I think we can do a lot of good with him.’ Blair attracted political flak for visiting Putin in St Petersburg shortly before the 2000 Russian election, as Russian troops were fighting their way into Chechnya. ‘The Russians have been subjected to really severe terrorist attacks,’ Blair said in defence of the visit, noting, ‘it is still right that Britain has a strong relationship with Russia’. BP had started investing big in Russia in 1997, and a host of other major companies were looking for opportunities there.
Other nations wanted to get in on the act too. And if doing business with the Russians meant boosting Putin’s international standing, so be it. Asked on German TV whether the Russian president was an exemplary democrat, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder replied, ‘I believe him, and I’m convinced that he is.’