On the other hand, there were things about this person that seemed to confirm that he was exactly what he said he was: a Gibraltarian businessman who’d made a lot of money in the oil business in Africa and was now looking for a partner in Russia. Sergei had him checked out by the GRU after a couple of meetings. Richard did indeed have offices in Gibraltar, the phone numbers were answered, and his name or rather his pseudonym was known in various places. And of course they’d been introduced by a mutual Spanish acquaintance.
If it was a cover, it was an excellent one, because Richard splashed the cash as you might expect a successful businessman to do, eating at the best restaurants and staying at excellent hotels when he was in Madrid. And the oil fields in the Tyumen or Komi republic of Russia had at that time become a sort of Klondike where people with the right connections could make millions – or indeed billions. What Richard needed, he said, was those right points of contact to get his hands on some of that black gold. It was the mid-1990s and everything in Russia was for sale, or appeared to be. Why was it so surprising that someone wanted to get in on the act?
As they strolled in the park they spoke mainly in English. While Skripal could speak Spanish tolerably well, Bagnall had mastered it. His pseudonym, his style of dress and above all his easy manner combined to make him seem quite genuine.
There was something so open and guileless about this guy also. He had asked Sergei’s wife Liudmila and their kids to join them at a flamenco club for an afternoon’s entertainment. After he’d met Sergei’s family a couple of times, this mystery man had appeared with presents for little Yulia and Sasha. ‘The kids loved him,’ Skripal reflected.
Arriving from a trip to London, the businessman had given Sergei something. It was a small model of a typical English country cottage. It was the type of thing that you could pick up for a few pounds in a tourist shop, probably made in China for all he knew. But for reasons he couldn’t exactly define, Sergei rather liked the brightly painted resin miniature, with its creeping plants, sagging roof, and arched front door.
Richard could drink too – gin and tonics, glass after glass of Spanish wine, then brandy – and to a Russian that gave him a sort of authenticity. This behaviour really didn’t sit well with how Sergei expected the British or Americans to carry out a cultivation. Conventional wisdom in the GRU held that these Western intelligence officers would avoid a target’s family for a whole lot of reasons. Not least, if your kid tells someone about the curious foreigner who keeps bringing gifts and seems to be your dad’s new best friend, the Russian diplomatic compound is going to start taking an interest.
Of one thing, Sergei had become sure: if Richard was a spook, he wasn’t a Spanish one. There was no way, given the long history of rivalry over the ownership of the Rock, that a Spanish operative was going to be basing himself in Gibraltar. Might he be CIA? The GRU colonel knew something else in his bones too, that if his persistent suitor was a CIA man, then he wasn’t interested. He wasn’t willing to take the risks that would be involved in treason for America, if that’s what this angst-ridden young man was indeed building up to.
As Richard built to ‘the pitch’, that moment when a spy finally asks someone to betray their country, the nervous tension, the temperature rose even higher. So much training, thinking, and advice fixates on that moment. It is romanticized by espionage authors and deconstructed in role plays at the Fort, where the UK’s overseas espionage agency, the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS, but more often called MI6, trains its new officers, and now he, Richard Bagnall, who’d only been in the service for a few years, was about to pitch a GRU colonel.
‘Sergei, I have a friend who would really value your information on what is really going on inside Russia. He works for the British government. Do you think you can provide that for us? You would be looked after, of course.’
OK, Sergei thought, we have got to the point now. This guy is indeed a British intelligence officer. Yes, he’d be happy to meet again. ‘I was ready,’ Skripal would say years later. But how had that happened? How had he gone from arch-patriot, paratrooper, and senior GRU officer to somebody who was prepared to sell it all out for MI6?
2
SERGEI’S JOURNEY
It didn’t take long for Sergei and Richard to meet again. The second rendezvous was another quick one, but cards had been put on the table. And essentially, terms had been agreed. Yes indeed Mr Skripal was actually Colonel Skripal of the GRU, and his interlocutor was working for the British government. The Russian was willing to trade information for money. And if it all went wrong he needed some guarantees. ‘I wanted to know what MI6 would do for me; documents, passport, legalization.’
Richard would have known that back at ‘head office’, his service’s garish new headquarters on the bank of the River Thames at Vauxhall Cross, there were those who looked upon this budding relationship with a little less euphoria than he did, when he raced back from el Retiro that July day to report that he had made his pitch. The Service details an officer to look critically at each new agent recruitment. This person ‘plays the role of professional devil’s advocate’, explains a former intelligence officer. Even on the basis of this initial commitment to Skripal, Her Majesty’s Government was exposed to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds. In those days when the Cold War was over and the agency’s ‘customers’ were so much less interested than they had been in Russian intelligence, why bother?
In the mid-1990s senior MI6 people were saying that the Soviet collapse had produced so many would-be defectors ‘that we had to turn them away’. To qualify for the resettlement package, they had to have something truly remarkable. But Skripal was not a defector, he was something much more precious than that; an agent in place at a senior level in Russian military intelligence. How had he come to be talking to a deep-cover MI6 officer in the first place? Why was he willing to tread this path for a new life away from Russia, since he clearly still loved his country?
Sergei Skripal experienced an archetypical childhood of the early post-war USSR. Born in 1951 in Kaliningrad, formerly the east Prussian fortress city of Königsberg, he grew up surrounded by the legacy of the Second World War. Viktor Skripal, his father, had been an artillery officer during some of the Red Army’s titanic battles, and for his sons his stories were still very fresh. Ruins and bomb sites were everywhere, even in the late 1950s and early 1960s when Sergei and his older brother Valery scampered among them playing war. The city had been pummelled by the Red Army during the final months of that merciless conflict, after which Stalin had driven out the native German population and replaced them with his own people.
The years of his childhood were ones when everyone saw evidence of the country’s sacrifice all around them, from broken mothers who’d lost all their sons at the front to ordinary men from the neighbourhood who’d received the highest orders and decorations. And although Sergei’s parents would have had a tough life, living in a communal flat, these were years where those who had survived the 1940s witnessed rapid improvement in living standards. Those growing up in the 1960s were therefore inculcated in the strength of the Soviet state – both in defeating the Nazi menace and recovering so quickly after the war.
At school Sergei proved to be a good all-rounder, rather than a genius or a dolt, and an excellent sportsman. Given an hour or two alone in the library he came back time and again to books about knights, conquests, and heroism. He particularly liked the one he’d found about Richard the Lionheart. At home he and Valery were fussed over and cherished by their mother Yelena, who inculcated them with self-belief for good measure.