Skripal’s camp regime had its rigours but also its small pleasures. A well-cooked dish, a satisfying workout, or a classic movie on the TV all helped to lift his spirits. He found solace also in sipping a hot cup of cheffir, tea stewed so long and so heavily sugared that it had the consistency of soup. ‘For 99 per cent of people it’s terrible,’ he joked, ‘but I liked it.’
At home in Moscow life was far from easy. While some of their friends came through, others made themselves scarce. The shame of treachery, instilled in Soviet times, was still alive and well in ‘democratic Russia’, especially among the older generation. Things were particularly difficult at the flat. Because so many GRU officers lived in the building, Liudmila faced frequent insults as she came and went. This climate of disapproval was hard to bear – all the more so as her own health began to suffer and a little support from the neighbours might have gone a long way. For it was while Sergei was in Mordovia that she first developed cancer, having to face this trial without her husband by her side.
The question of what Liudmila knew occurs again. Sergei told me with some pride that during his years of imprisonment she had not used an emergency phone number that he had given her, presumably belonging to the team handling him at MI6. How had he explained this number exactly? Was it just ‘friends who might help in an emergency?’ Whatever minimal explanation he might have given, she knew better than to ask more. And following his conviction why do something to confirm the accusations made against him, given the atmosphere of shame they had to contend with?
And it hung about the family as a whole. Skripal’s mother Yelena had gone to live with Valery in the city of Yaroslavl, east of Moscow. Valery’s daughter Viktoria felt conflicted after Sergei’s conviction; ‘as a citizen I have to accept that there was a court verdict and he was convicted. But as a relative, I can’t accept it.’ Yelena and Valery tried to do their bit, supporting Sergei in IK 5 with food parcels and letters. Viktoria though saw her cousin Sasha sink into despair during his father’s prison years.
Talking to those around Skripal, it is clear that the emergence of Sasha’s drink problem was a source of great sorrow during this time. As Viktoria explains it, Sasha, who idolized his father, was hit hard by the conviction and its accompanying social ostracism. However, others point to a complex of reasons for his problems. Sasha’s marriage broke down at this time, without producing the kids he had wanted so dearly. Physical exercise, something he had always thrived on, also became much harder due to a back injury. Having gone from being a highly ranked handball player, Sasha was dealing with a great deal of pain. There were lots of reasons then why he hit the bottle.
As for Sergei’s daughter, she also had to deal with fellow students’ comments at university. Her college years came and went while her father was in Lefortovo and IK 5. It seems that at one point, fed up with the jibes, she even tried to change her surname. But if that marked a nadir, Yulia managed to keep going, staying true to her father’s ‘life is what you make of it’ philosophy. College friends say that Yulia closed down the subject of her father’s conviction, ‘she simply wouldn’t talk about it at all’.
Yulia graduated and began working while her father was inside. Her priority became finding a decent job, not least to help her mother financially. The parcels and visits to Mordovia were all well and good, in terms of keeping her dad going, but it all cost money.
Month followed month, 2006 became 2007 and slowly he started to scale the mountain that was his thirteen-year sentence. He was getting things in IK 5 sorted out, life was becoming a little more comfortable. Or a little less shit. But it was still a labour camp, and apart from quarterly visits he had been wrenched from his family. He was missing so much, not least the pride of seeing his daughter graduate from Moscow’s Humanities University.
Even so, he managed to entertain some hope about the years stretching ahead. ‘I knew I would not be in a prison camp for thirteen years,’ he told me. Instead he looked at the very least towards the distant prospect of parole, which he would be eligible for after eight years, including the pre-trial years in Lefortovo. His dream of the future involved walking out of the gates and then leaving Russia, making a new life abroad.
In fact the answer to the questions he found himself ruminating on time and time again in IK 5, who had betrayed him and when would he get out, would be resolved in what might be called the manner that is central to the whole business of spying: betrayal. And the resolution of these issues would take not just one episode of treachery, but three – as we will see.
The snow lies in the shadows and hollows of Mordovia until June. Spring often comes on with a riotous energy, for a few weeks there is colour and a new warmth, and then it gets uncomfortably hot. And during that longed-for spring a few flowers delight the prisoners and hordes of forest insects come out to devour them.
As for the people who had run FORTHWITH – and indeed the other agents that the FSB was scooping up – they knew there was simply nothing to be done. ‘You think about them every single day, and my God it’s hard to live with,’ a Western case officer says, ‘but you know that any move you make could just make things worse for them.’
The post-9/11 honeymoon between Western leaders and Russia was all very well, but from the Kremlin’s perspective, the cooperative atmosphere had been abused. As for the State Department or Foreign Office advocates of continued good relations with Russia, their challenge was about to get a whole lot harder.
12
HITMEN
In June 2007, Ruslan Atlangeriev flew from Moscow to London. To any casual observer he looked like just one more Russian businessman taking advantage of the opportunities to combine some work and pleasure in a great world city. He’d even taken his son along for the trip, and because he wasn’t short of money, he had checked in to the London Hilton on Park Lane. That was handy for the sights, the designer shops in Knightsbridge or on Bond Street, and of course for the business meeting he was expecting to have a stone’s throw from the hotel.
MI5 knew that Atlangeriev was coming. They knew which flight he’d be on, and what day. More importantly they knew why he was coming. He was coming to London to kill somebody.
The intelligence, passed to the Security Service by MI6, was explicit and stark. As a result, from the moment the visitor picked up his bags from the carousel at Heathrow he was being tailed by watchers from A4, MI5’s surveillance section. For the watchers it made a nice change from the counter-terrorism work that had taken over their lives since the jihadist London bombings of 2005.
Those who’ve seen A4 in action can be evangelical about their prowess. They sometimes deploy dozens of watchers against a single target, all kinds of people from middle-aged ladies to hipsters. Mobile surveillance can switch slickly in minutes between a builder’s van, a motorbike, and a London cab. Targets conditioned by spy or cop movies to expect two thirty-something men sitting in the front of a Ford or Toyota saloon will never spot A4.
So they mounted surveillance on Atlangeriev. Like most intelligence-led operations MI5 had some pieces of the puzzle but not all. They knew why Atlangeriev was in London, and they knew who his target was, but they didn’t know how exactly he planned to strike. His room at the Hilton was checked for weapons and they found none. Because of the unknowns, and concern that there might be more than one hitman, the decision was taken to move the target out of harm’s way.