This dreadful drama had played out shortly before the Izmir meeting. While Skripal had his suspicions about Burlatov’s possible recruitment, and the two had remained professional acquaintances in Moscow, he had not, for the good of the two of them, ever delved into detail about whether the captain had also become an agent. MI6’s Russia operations people decided, though, that Skripal had to be told about Burlatov’s exposure and arrest. They likely spared him some of the awful detail that Irina had told the Spanish but the key point was that if one asset had been exposed, it was quite possible that Skripal had also been. Stephen asked the Russian if he wanted to be exfiltrated, or simply not return to Moscow. Ways could be found to bring Liudmila and Yulia. His son Sasha was already out of the country.
Skripal thought it over. He didn’t consider himself under particular risk. He hadn’t noticed anything suspicious, and his unfortunate colleague might have been discovered in various ways. No, he would return to Moscow. It was a bad decision.
As he made his way back from Stephen’s hotel to his own there were plenty of people on the tree-lined street. After the long summer, Turks and foreigners alike were enjoying the autumnal evening cool. Skripal might have fancied his counter-surveillance skills, or been over-confident perhaps after eight years of this double life. But he was being followed, and had not detected it.
PART TWO
PRISONER
9
INSIDE LEFORTOVO
The block where the Skripals lived in Krilatskoye, west of Moscow, had risen in the early 1980s, thrusting confidently skywards just as the party’s gerontocracy faltered, power passing between four leaders in the few years it took to build the estate.
The Skripals’ flat was in a seventeen-storey tower where hundreds of families raised their kids, brought home their monthly roubles, and prayed that the elevators didn’t pack up. Yulia had gone to School No. 63 nearby, the shops were a short walk away, and there was even a neighbourhood police office in the next block. And it was to that local Militsia post that Skripal made his way on 15 December 2004.
The colonel’s permit to keep firearms at home was up for renewal. And since he kept the little .22 pistol that Yuri Burlatov had given him in Spain it was best to sort things out. But he barely made it through the door.
Masked men leapt on him, twisting his arms behind his back, then pulled his coat down around his shoulders to immobilize him further. Nobody wanted to take chances with a prize boxer. The FSB men then snapped on cuffs and hooded him. There was one guy filming, and before they put the bag on his head they made sure to get some nice footage of him squirming. Then they bundled him into the dark blue minivan that had just pulled up. He had been lifted by the FSB.
The journey from Krilatskoye took the best part of an hour. Trussed up in the FSB’s van, the prisoner was sped east, across the Moscow River, and on to the Third Ring Road, heading around the north of the city. From there it was a short stretch up the Lefortovsky Ban to a place that has brought dread to generations of Russians.
Skripal was booked in as a prisoner at Lefortovo. Everybody understood that once you were at Lefortovo you were entering a netherworld.
Lefortovo was finished in 1881, and immediately assumed the character of a political prison. That’s not to say there were not some straightforward villains among its inmates, as Skripal would soon discover, but that its most noted prisoners had always been those accused of political crimes: dissent, espionage, and treason.
The Tsars’ secret police, the Okhrana, had used it to beat confessions out of student radicals, but it was really under the Bolsheviks that it became a key part in the industrial process of torture, confession, and liquidation. It was the Cheka’s facility, then the OGPU’s, the MGB’s, the NKVD’s, and finally the KGB’s. The acronyms had changed but the process had continued, generation following generation, the cycle of political crime and punishment. The fabric hadn’t altered much either, four storeys of solid brickwork and the curious layout of the cell-blocks, forming a ‘K’ on one flank of the central prison admin building.
In 1996, the new thought police, the FSB, had taken charge of the jail. Back in the 1930s many an inmate had been dispatched in the central yard, a cold Tokarev to the back of the head, a plaintive cry from the prisoner of ‘Long Live Comrade Stalin!’ and then oblivion. ‘Sentenced without right of correspondence’, as the secret policemen euphemistically called it. After the Stalin regime, things changed. Summary execution was out, mind-numbingly long interrogations of dissidents like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the ‘Refuseniks’ including Natan Sharansky became the order of the day. Political prisoners from the Brezhnev years spoke of cells without beds, damp concrete floors, and trying to stop themselves going mad in a twilight world where they were never fully asleep or wide awake.
The KGB had termed Lefortovo an ‘Investigative Isolator’, and although it would be fair to say the regime had liberalized somewhat after the collapse of Soviet communism, even in 2004 its obsession with isolating the prisoners from one another held true.
Walking under escort to his cell, Skripal noticed the curious and obsessive rituals observed by the turnkeys, procedures that certainly went back to the Soviet years and perhaps even to the tsars. Approaching each security door, stairwell, or junction the guards would stop and click their fingers. If they heard clicks returned from around the corner or through the door, further wordless signals would follow. At intervals along each corridor there were cupboard-like boxes, and if a warder divined that he must give way to a colleague escorting another prisoner, the first would be walked into one of these odd cubicles and the door shut behind him. The other detainee would then pass, unseen, through the corridor, and once at a safe distance, signalled by more of the inevitable clicks, the first man would be brought out of the cupboard, and his journey resumed. These routines of signalling were so much a part of daily life in the jail that inmates of Lefortovo ended up scrutinizing the warders’ hands. Some carried metal clickers. Why not? You might wear your fingers out otherwise with this crazy routine. Skripal soon grasped the purpose of it. The old KGB concept of ‘investigative isolation’ dictated that people accused of involvement in a conspiracy should never be able to see whether their co-accused were in there, let alone communicate with them. Control would then remain in the interrogators’ hands, to use the ‘your friend has told us everything’ ploy, or engineer a dramatic face-to-face confrontation between a turned suspect and an unbroken one.
Reaching his cell, the retired colonel soon realized that he was not going to be held in solitary. The surprisingly spacious room had three beds, each bolted to the floor. He endured the first night, always the hardest, and began to get to know his cellmates and the Lefortovo routine.
There was Sasha, ‘a real Moscow bandit, he’d killed three policemen and for this reason he was charged with terrorism rather than a simple crime’. He lived up to the popular image of a hardened criminal, ‘190cm high, broad too, and covered with tattoos’. There are elaborate jailhouse codes spelt out in the ink on a Russian convict’s body. They can show the type of crimes he’s been convicted of, his gang affiliation, even sexual preferences. But what the retired colonel noticed was that many of Sasha’s tattoos seemed to have far-right, even Nazi, themes.