That comment goes to an essential truth about the post-9/11 period. While some Western intelligence people argue with my characterization of their Russia work having ‘lower priority’, suggesting it didn’t suffer because the total resources available to the agencies expanded greatly to take on the counter-terrorist task, it can hardly be disputed that the political focus had shifted to the jihadist threat. When President Putin flew home from a visit to London in December 2001, Tony Blair described the UK–Russia relationship as ‘unprecedentedly close’. He announced efforts to intensify intelligence collaboration.
As for President Bush, who relied on Putin’s cooperation to facilitate US operations in Afghanistan, the turnaround was even more dramatic. The two leaders now had a common cause against the jihadist foe, and Putin was able to portray his campaign in Chechnya as part of the same struggle. ‘He has confronted some serious attacks in his country,’ President Bush remarked, ‘I know the strain, I know the agony, I know the sadness that comes with seeing innocent people lose their lives, and we have shared that.’ In terms of Russia’s wider situation, Bush praised ‘an amazing transformation… I applaud President Putin’. The CIA, like MI6, was tasked to intensify its cooperation with Russia.
To many in the spying business, Putin’s masterstroke was to convince the Washington policy elite that they could not be pursuing multiple agendas. ‘In the 1980s we did arms control deals while at the same time we were killing them, in Afghanistan,’ a senior CIA officer explains, ‘but now the Russians always want us to believe that all these policy areas are linked, so we never hold them accountable.’
This was all the more regrettable for the Russia House at Langley because Bush, during the early months of his presidency, had shown himself willing to ‘go big’ on the Kremlin’s spying operations. Soon after Bush’s inauguration in January 2001, the FBI mole Robert Hanssen was arrested, and it emerged what extraordinary damage he’d done to US intelligence operations during years of spying. President Bush expelled fifty Russian diplomats, six of whom had been directly involved in running Hanssen, as a way of showing his displeasure. This readiness to be much firmer in the face of Moscow’s spying operations was to prove short-lived, though. 9/11 imposed new imperatives. Keeping supply lines to Afghanistan open meant American diplomats wanted to look the other way when it came to SVR or GRU activity.
For the American or British agent networks in Russia, however, the risks remained the same, even if the bureaucrats in Washington or London were less interested in the product. While the reports coming from penetration operations in Russia were to some extent sidelined, as a consequence of the focus on Middle East terrorism as much as anything else, and the will to prosecute counter-espionage cases in the UK or US evaporated (‘diplomatically embarrassing’), the same was not true in Russia. For as Putin had explained to that Russian journalist, enemies you can accommodate or deal with. Traitors must be crushed.
Alexander Zaporozhsky was a case in point. He had been an extremely valuable CIA penetration while serving as deputy chief of the SVR’s North America desk. It was rumoured that he might even have been responsible for the exposure of Robert Hanssen. Zaporozhsky had been recruited by the Americans during the free-for-all of the mid-1990s, quitting the SVR a couple of years later, in 1997, before being exfiltrated to the US.
Just two months after the 9/11 attacks, the SVR man, who lived near Baltimore, had been chatting over the phone to friends in Russia who suggested that he join them for a big celebration they were planning. Was that wise? The CIA advised him against travelling back to Russia, but Zaporozhsky’s contacts were quite persistent and assured him that he would be perfectly safe. After all, the international mood had changed dramatically, cooperation was the new order of the day between these agencies. What the hell, he would make the trip.
Flying in to Russia late that November, Zaporozhsky was promptly arrested by the FSB. He was put on trial in 2003 for espionage, found guilty, and given a long sentence. Packed off to a labour camp, he will return later in this story.
The Russian authorities had also decided in 2002 to try in absentia Oleg Kalugin, the former KGB general residing in the US, and Alexander Litvinenko, an FSB officer and ardent Putin critic who had gained political asylum in the UK. These two trials, ending within days of one another, ‘sent an icy chill through the system’, says someone working in Vauxhall Cross at the time: ‘This willingness to go after those in exile underscored the priorities of the new people in charge.’ With the Putin circle reliant on the power ministries for their grip on power, hardliners held sway, says a CIA type who notes, ‘they are out for blood when it comes to counter-intelligence – they see that [Western spying] as an existential threat’.
Skripal meanwhile continued travelling to his meetings with Stephen Jones during the years that followed the 9/11 ‘new page’ in relations. In this sense, intelligence professionals on both sides continued to wage their secret war. It looked like business as usual. But the difference was that the priority given to it by Western spooks had lessened, along with the will to prosecute Russian penetrations. It’s possible that the relative improvement in the climate of international relations may have convinced Skripal that the danger involved in what he was doing had diminished but if he was labouring under any illusions of this kind, they were shattered in 2004.
He flew that October from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport to Izmir in Turkey, then took a cab to the Hilton Hotel in the centre of town. From there it was a short walk to the pleasant promenade beside the Aegean, a few decent restaurants, and the luxury hotel where Stephen Jones had checked in. There the MI6 case officer delivered an unwelcome bombshell.
Earlier that year, word had reached the British of the panicked flight to Spain of a Russian woman, *Irina Burlatov, and her two young daughters. Immediately upon arrival in the airport they asked for political asylum and were soon interviewed by an officer of the Guardia Civil who, realizing the importance of these circumstances, alerted the national intelligence service.
Irina was the wife of Captain Yuri Burlatov, the Madrid rezidentura GRU officer who Skripal had pinpointed in 1996 as having been involved in the diversion of official funds. The British had passed this on to their allies, and, presumably using this kompromat, the Spanish recruited Burlatov. Upon the completion of his tour a few years after Skripal, the captain had also returned to work in the Glass House in Moscow. Anglo-Spanish cooperation had thus delivered a great intelligence bounty: they had maintained penetration of GRU headquarters across several years through these two assets. But something had gone dreadfully wrong.
In the spring of 2004, Burlatov had been arrested and subjected to harsh FSB interrogation then delivered to a military hospital for a psychological check-up. When she came to see him on a visit, Irina found her husband dead in his hospital bed, showing marks of strangulation and with some fingers cut off. The official explanation was suicide, but by the severing of fingers a grisly message was being sent. Traumatized, Irina had swiftly taken the decision to leave for Spain. Understanding their debt to her husband, the Spanish granted her asylum and compensation for his secret work.