Putin, however, believed in his own very specific form of democracy, one guided by Russian values. He considered that these were best embodied by people with similar backgrounds to his own. Campaigning on a promise to bring in ‘a dictatorship of law’, this pledge was soon used to put the squeeze on the oligarchs who had surrounded Yeltsin. They faced arrest and imprisonment, and some started to choose exile rather than face politically motivated proceedings.
The new elite were those who shared with Putin a background in the KGB and/or the St Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) connection. Intelligence reports told of the supremacy of the ‘Ozero Circle’, the group of Putin’s mates who had come together through their ownership of plush dachas on Lake Ozero near that city. Nikolai Patrushev, who succeeded Putin at the helm of the FSB, was a typical example of this group. Extolling the virtues of his officers, he said they were not motivated by money, nor by decorations, rather, ‘their sense of service, they are, if you like, our new “nobility”’.
Key Putin placemen were put in charge of other criminal, security, and defence agencies too. They became known as the ‘siloviki’ or powerful ones as they came from what Russians called the ‘power ministries’. This new elite saw themselves as the salvation of Russia, the people who would bring order to the chaos unleashed during the Yeltsin years. This sense of manifest destiny was expressed by one of this new elite, a former KGB man called Viktor Cherkesov, who Putin appointed to crack down on drugs:
We [siloviki] must understand that we are one whole. History ruled that the weight of supporting the Russian state should fall on our shoulders. I believe in our ability, when we feel danger, to put aside everything petty and to remain faithful to our oath.
Tied to this world view was an emphasis on conflict, one in which the Chechen war, spying, or the latest NATO encroachments in what the Kremlin regarded as its natural sphere of interest all came together in a vivid tableau of Western aggression motivated by anti-Russian prejudice. It was the job of the siloviki to stand firm in the face of this, for the salvation of Russia, and to root out those who would play the role of Judas, selling out their Motherland for foreign money.
One courageous journalist took Putin to task in 2001 because of the growing violence against Russian reporters. He was reassured by the president, ‘You know Aleksei, you are not a traitor, you are an enemy.’ What was the difference, and how on earth was that supposed to come as some sort of comfort? Putin explained:
Enemies are right in front of you, you are at war with them, then you make an armistice with them, and all is clear. A traitor must be destroyed, crushed.
In these statements, by people like Patrushev, Cherkesov, and Putin, the mindset of Russia’s new elite was expressed succinctly – and Sergei Skripal would have understood it very well. The GRU were an integral part of the security state, after all. His own decision to betray the organization was expressed to me repeatedly in terms of ‘the oath’, and in his mind the fact that the entity he had sworn allegiance to, the USSR, no longer existed had absolved him from it. Similarly, while he would have understood Putin’s hatred of treachery, Skripal considered that it was not possible to betray an allegiance to something that now existed only as a memory of happier, less conflicted, times.
For MI6, trying to understand these new power realities in the Kremlin, agent FORTHWITH still had value. He got to know his boss at the Moscow regional council, General Boris Gromov, the last commander of the Soviet 40th Army in Afghanistan, and an important silovik. And of course he remained part of a tight network with his former colleagues.
It was Putin himself who said, ‘There is no such thing as an ex-KGB man,’ and the same applied to the GRU. When I asked Skripal what sort of intelligence he had provided during the early 2000s he gave this example:
So say I would go to a party, and I would ask one of my friends, ‘How is Viktor Ivanovich?’ They would say, ‘Oh he is excited, he is going soon to Paris,’ and this way I would know he was the new rezident there and could pass this on.
These titbits were passed from FORTHWITH to Stephen during meetings held in a number of European countries. The FSB was consolidating its power step by step, in 2003 for example absorbing the frontier forces and much of Russia’s civilian electronic eavesdropping capability. The GRU though remained a distinct centre of power, one independent of Putin and his ‘Ozero Circle’. Skripal was well aware from former colleagues how nervous they were about the FSB’s growing dominance, and the threat to the GRU’s autonomy. During this time, Skripal told me, there were mutterings in the military about launching a coup against Putin, something he was able to tell Stephen about.
Following their introduction in Malaga, there were seven or eight meetings between 2000 and 2004, usually under the cover of Skripal family holidays but sometimes ‘business trips’. The drill was usually the same, Stephen would relay the time and place (invariably a hotel room) and Skripal would turn up for a debriefing.
Skripal’s respect for his new handler grew with each meeting. He would go through the answers to each of the questions twice, once in English and again in Russian, methodically ironing out any ambiguities. The Russian considered him ‘a very professional officer’. No doubt the care with which Jones took down this information reassured Skripal of its continued value.
The MI6 case officer met Skripal during these years in Spain, Portugal, Malta, Italy, and Turkey. It seems that SIS paid Skripal by the meeting, usually around $3,000. While he tried to be as useful as possible in gathering the specific information that Stephen Jones asked him for, occasional thoughts must have crossed Skripal’s mind about how long MI6 would continue to find the relationship worthwhile. For while he retained unique insights into the GRU, there were things happening internationally that were causing dramatic changes in the intelligence business.
The al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001 cost thousands of lives and brought about tectonic shifts in international security. President George W. Bush declared a ‘Global War On Terror’, mobilizing the USA’s military, diplomatic, and intelligence resources to the goal of hunting down the jihadist leaders ‘dead or alive’.
This call to action was felt across the secret world. Having lost their ‘mega-threat’ with the passing of the Soviet Union they were given a new one – only more so. Richard Dearlove, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service at the time, later revealed that whereas the Soviet Bloc (the USSR and its East European allies) had never consumed more than 38 per cent of MI6’s resources at the height of the Cold War, counterterrorism soon grew to more than 50 per cent of the UK agencies’ activity. Dearlove, himself responsible for overseeing this great refocusing of effort, later commented that 9/11 ‘cast a very dark, long, and enduring shadow’ over the intelligence world. It made them complicit with torture, involved rendition of suspects to ‘ghost sites’, and spawned a major programme of assassination by US drone strike.
In the context of this story though Dearlove’s remark goes to another enduring consequence of 9/11: the relegation of work against Russia to a lesser priority and the emergence of Vladimir Putin, for some years at least, as an ally in the counter-terrorist battle. For those involved in Whitehall’s secret world there were all kinds of implications to this. Harry Murdoch, who for a few years had galvanized MI6’s Russia operations, was sent back to the Middle East and became a key figure in its counter-terrorist effort. And reports from assets like FORTHWITH, alias Skripal, were suddenly of less interest. ‘Unfortunately for him,’ a Whitehall type who lived through the early 2000s comments, ‘Skripal was a fantastic agent, but at the wrong time. After 9/11 his product ended up being only of interest to a handful of CI [counter-intelligence] nerds.’