In the 2014 Russian documentary A Mole in the Aquarium there was evidence of some official briefing, presumably from the FSB. The film suggested that the Russian counterintelligence people did indeed disrupt Skripal’s activities. ‘The former GRU colleagues with whom he so persistently wanted to meet were always unavailable due to a clash of appointments,’ said the film commentary, ‘some were on a sudden business trip, some were ill. But when they were eventually able to meet, the conversations stubbornly evaded the topics which interested Skripal.’
The conclusions that the Western damage assessment reached were not quite so simple. Intelligence people have told me that the internal CNI inquiries suggested that Florez was never in possession of Skripal’s name, rather he had passed on to the SVR that there was an asset who was ‘a senior GRU officer who often visited Spain’. This was enough to guide the FSB to quite a short list of potential suspects.
So if the Russians got Card 1 late in 2001, presumably spent a little time verifying it was genuine information, and then a little longer narrowing their search for possible moles onto Skripal, it might be supposed that he was indeed being prevented from gathering information of real value from around mid-2002 until his arrest just over two years later. ‘We have to assume that was the case,’ one of those party to the Western investigation told me.
One thing is clear though, which is that the discovery of Burlatov, Skripal, and perhaps other GRU penetrations who we do not yet even know of at last empowered Putin and Patrushev to bring the military intelligence organization to heel, something they had wanted to do for years. A newly created mandarin of the secret world, the Deputy Director for Counter-intelligence was appointed to the Glass House, GRU HQ, and of course it was someone with an FSB background. The chekists now had one of their people at the GRU’s top table.
All of these events, followed through multiple reporting lines in Western agencies, were collated in Vauxhall Cross during the years that Skripal was in jail. They had reached their own view about Florez and what he had or hadn’t betrayed. But of course, as any intelligence professional knows, the divide between their type of information and the kind that passes muster as evidence in court can often be fundamental. So the CNI and the Spanish prosecutor had much to prove against the man who had gone on trial at the start of 2010.
The proceedings in the Audiencia Provincial lasted five days. They were marked by considerable secrecy, not least in what was disclosed to or withheld from Florez’s lawyer, a pugnacious human-rights advocate named Manuel Ollé. So while the prosecutor had listed the type of documents secreted in the Tenerife flat, Ollé was able to discover little about their content. By contrast, the three magistrates sitting in judgement were allowed to read all the classified material.
Although Florez and Ollé were not allowed to learn the full extent of the case against him, they did their best to construct a defence: the phone taps and other surveillance had not produced any evidence that the Spaniard had ever met any representative of Russian intelligence; and there was no proof that he had ever received any money from them, let alone $200,000.
The critical element of Florez’s defence was his denial that he had ever actually initiated contact with the Russians. Although CNI people gave evidence about the compromise of their operations against the Russian intelligence stations in Madrid they did not present a damage assessment as such to the three magistrates. The betrayal of Sergei Skripal was therefore not mentioned in that Madrid courtroom. It simply wasn’t possible to make such an allegation not least because, at that moment, Skripal was still sitting in IK 5 in Mordovia and any airing of his case in Spain might have been seen by the Russians as confirmation of his service as an MI6 asset, making matters even worse for him.
It was therefore only later that Florez specifically addressed the betrayal of Skripal. ‘Amongst the information in my possession,’ the Spaniard said, ‘there wasn’t a single date, note, diary, tip, paper record, memorandum, [or] document in which the name or circumstances of Sergei Skripal were stated.’
How on earth did Florez explain that fateful letter, Card 1, at his trial? He claimed that it was part of his study on recruiting human sources, a fictional document, almost like a role play, in which he had set out how a Western intelligence officer might offer their services to the Russians.
The magistrates knew though, from another document found on Florez’s computer, called Card 2 in court, that there was some evidence he had initiated contact with the Russians. This second message to the SVR rezident in Madrid was written in March 2002, around four months after the first. Florez began, ‘I understand that the proposition that I sent needs time for consideration’. The prosecutor pointed to this as proof that the first had been sent, and no reply received by that point. Card 2 also underlined the CNI agent’s determination to avoid face-to-face meetings with the Russians, noting: ‘the high number of defections that have happened in recent years oblige me to be cautious’. Interestingly, he deleted Card 2 from his computer, but investigators were able to recover it.
As with Skripal’s trial in Moscow, and the irony could scarcely be more bitter, there were aspects of the CNI’s unmasking of Florez that could not be aired in court. If indeed they had been led to him by an American source still in place in Russia, that was obviously a secret that had to be guarded. The prosecution claimed to have evidence that Card 1 had been sent to the Russians, proof that went beyond the statement in Card 2 that it had been posted but no reply received. This added evidence was never spelt out to the defendant and his lawyer.
When the verdict was announced on 11 February 2010, the court found Florez guilty of illegally removing classified documents, of keeping them at his home, and of treason in the sense that he planned to give these secrets to a foreign state. Manuel Ollé took some comfort from the fact they did not find him guilty of being an agent of another power. Florez was sentenced to twelve years in jail, though it was appealed and reduced to nine years. With time served and parole, he was already free by the time of the Salisbury poisoning in 2018.
One only has to believe that Florez sent Card 1 and that first packet of thirty-nine intelligence documents to Melnikov, as indeed the prosecution alleged, for the rest to be explained. Florez’s assertion that nothing in his possession revealed Skripal’s name or ‘specific circumstances’ is not that different to the conclusion that the CNI and MI6 reached. And it is quite likely that Melnikov did not reply to that initial dump of information, fearing entrapment. Card 2 underlined that the Russians did not take the bait. The fact that Florez left CNI in 2004 just weeks after being posted to the Counter-Intelligence Division would also suggest that there was no ongoing relationship with the SVR because clearly they would have very much valued him in such a post. So it’s quite possible, likely even, that there was no ‘relationship’ with the SVR in the sense of communication going in two directions and that Florez never received a cent, let alone $200,000 from them.
That said, it would only have taken eyes other than Melnikov’s months or even years later to re-examine Card 1 and its enclosed documents and to proceed on the assumption that it was a genuine attempt at treason for all the other pieces to fall into place. The simple reference to penetrations in the SVR and GRU, even without further detail, would have been enough to trigger mole-hunts in Moscow. Knowing from the other papers that the source was Spanish, and the time window in which the information had been learned, the Russians would then quickly have homed in on people with a Spanish connection such as Burlatov and Skripal. Surveillance of them would have started and their fate would have been sealed.