The collection built up by Florez (and eventually seized in his flat) would be listed at his trial, including: ‘complete document titled “document and classified material security plan”’; ‘complete document titled “Counterintelligence Division”’; ‘Alphabetical personnel list’, this being the entire agency staff; and a complete ‘organigram’ or organizational chart of the CNI. In the context of our story, though, the most interesting paper was one he purloined, which was described in court as an eighteen-page document called ‘Double Agents in the GRU and SVR stations in Spain’.
Central to the prosecution case was ‘Card 1’, a document drafted on a computer, but – it was argued by the state – printed out and sent with an accompanying package of documents to establish Florez’s bona fides with the Russians, then posted to an address where it would find its way to the SVR rezident or station chief in Madrid, one Pyotr Melnikov. In this card, Florez wrote:
I am an operative of CESID who is interested in communicating his readiness to collaborate with the service and country you represent. As proof that I belong to the Centre I would simply point out the documents and information attached to this card, on the assumption that your service is interested in this collaboration, I inform you that in order to make this relationship work the precondition is, in exchange for this first delivery of documents, the amount of two hundred thousand American dollars in cash.
He provided details, kept secret from the court, about how this money should be paid to him. In the body of the message Florez said he was offering Melnikov ‘information on the working procedures the Centre uses against your country (in Spain as well as in the Russian Federation and third countries)… as well as the operations, sources, and procedures used by the [CNI] to achieve its global role’.
The issue of whether Florez had betrayed his country – and by extension been the author of all of Sergei Skripal or Yuri Burlatov’s misfortunes – would now be tried in court.
For people in Vauxhall Cross or Langley a view had been reached about the Spanish intelligence operative years before, following his arrest and the seizure of so much compromising documentation. Nothing though had happened quickly in this case. The arrest had taken place in July 2007, and the counter-intelligence types had been trying to figure out what had happened ever since 2004 and the arrest of Skripal and Burlatov.
For their part, the Spanish had launched their first serious mole-hunt in July 2005, four and a half years before the trial. The CNI gave evidence in court that it noticed distinct changes in the operating procedures of the Madrid GRU and SVR stations from December 2002 onwards. These had allowed the Russians to nullify certain surveillance programmes that they were subject to. Although the likely compromise of these operations triggered concerns at the CNI it would seem from the dates that it was the arrest of Burlatov and Skripal that gave the more serious impetus to their efforts – Skripal having failed to turn up for his last meet with Stephen Jones a few months before the full CNI leak inquiry started. At MI6 the lights were flashing about a possible penetration and it was apparent from the outset that there was a Spanish connection with these two compromised Russian assets.
The business of hunting moles though is one where only fools rush to judgement. How certain could SIS be that it wasn’t one of their own people who’d betrayed the two agents? Or maybe it was someone in a third country who had been indoctrinated in their intelligence? People at Vauxhall Cross grew confident their own people weren’t the source of the leak, but best make certain inquiries, examine who had access to what, before pointing a finger at the Spanish. This took time, and indeed the initial Spanish searches proved fruitless. Florez had left the CNI in the spring of 2004 and perhaps there was an element of him being out of mind once he was out of sight.
Assessing the whole matter afresh, there were other questions for the Russian espionage team in MI6: why had Burlatov been murdered in prison and not Skripal? The agency’s Russia people came to a conclusion that Burlatov had made a fatal mistake during his interrogation at Lefortovo in 2004. They believed that he tried to bargain with his knowledge of the corrupt goings on in the Madrid GRU rezidentura, notably the diversion of the funds assigned for Moscow’s technological shopping spree. Burlatov’s ‘roof’ or protector was a certain senior officer at GRU headquarters, General *Volkov. He had taken his cut, allowing the field man in Spain to keep siphoning off funds without fear of an investigation. ‘Between these people,’ Skripal told me, ‘money decided everything.’
However, General Volkov must also have had his own fears about discovery so he had paid off someone himself. The trail led ultimately to the top of the FSB and its director, General Nikolai Patrushev. Once Burlatov revealed the corrupt goings on to officers interrogating him (members of Patrushev’s organization), the decision had been taken that he had to be disposed of. And the FSB didn’t want its fingerprints on the deed either: it couldn’t happen in Lefortovo. So Burlatov had been transferred to the military psychiatric ward for an evaluation and murdered there by GRU people. Volkov had thus contained the scandal, and insulated high-ups in the FSB from ultimate blame.
Skripal had played things rather more wisely during his interrogation. What knowledge he had about the diversion of official funds in Madrid, and it is clear that he not only knew about it but had shared his suspicions with his MI6 handler, he kept to himself in Lefortovo. It may well have saved his life.
How did the investigative net finally close on Florez? One Spanish newspaper suggested that the Americans had relayed a lead from one of their Russian penetrations. It would be entirely unsurprising if this cycle of betrayal from Skripal, to Florez, and then back to an unknown Russian agent did indeed provide the critical starting point. I have not asked further questions on this theory, not least because of the danger that anyone who had provided the Florez lead would be in. But comments made to me by interviewees imply there was indeed intelligence that a Spaniard had communicated with Russian intelligence. This ‘CI Lead’ from a mole, presumably in Russia, was then the second of the three betrayals needed to answer Skripal’s questions in prison camp because it compounded the suspicions circling by early 2007 around the Spanish suspect, who at that time was living in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, with his girlfriend. It would emerge that for some time before his arrest, the CNI had been intercepting Florez’s phone calls and had covertly entered his apartment, finding his stash of classified material.
The discovery of ‘Card 1’ and the other documents in the Tenerife flat caused many uncomfortable questions to be asked at Vauxhall Cross. If Florez had indeed communicated with the SVR and in particular provided them with the stolen document ‘Double Agents in the GRU and SVR stations in Spain’, had Skripal been blown soon after that message was written in December 2001? And if the Russians had figured out what he was up to had they been feeding useless or misleading information to their man for much of the four-year period after FORTHWITH left the GRU and before his arrest?