Eventually Langley came up with Gennady Vasilenko. His was a long and involved story, going back to a Cold War spy game in which an American officer and Vasilenko each tried to recruit the other. The Russians had prosecuted Vasilenko in 2006 on a charge of keeping an unlicensed weapon – there being no credible evidence of actual espionage.
As the British had been junior partners in the global Ghost Stories takedown, acting in Madrid and a couple of other places, it was decided to ask them if they had people they wanted released in the impending swap. Skripal’s name, like Zaporozhsky’s, was easily arrived at. FORTHWITH had after all been a high-value asset, giving excellent insight into the GRU, prior to his arrest. But as for others, that wasn’t simple.
They would like to have freed Valery Ojamae, an SVR officer who had been convicted in 2001 of spying for the UK, but he was known to have died while serving his sentence. Yuri Burlatov, although primarily a Spanish asset, had of course also perished, believed murdered, in 2004 while in custody. However there was another name they were interested in, Igor Sutyagin. He had been imprisoned for espionage in 2004 after three trials, having become something of a cause célèbre for the Russian human-rights movement. Michael McFaul, President Obama’s Russian-policy staffer, had already put his name into the mix.
The case against Sutyagin was hardly a compelling one. Having been arrested in 1999 he had been charged with spying for the West simply because, as a member of a Russian academic think tank, he had agreed to write a paper for a foreign consultancy. The FSB had claimed it was passing secrets, Sutyagin that it contained nothing more than open-source data and his own analysis. Many saw the charges as another of the FSB’s attempts to clamp down on NGOs, academic exchanges, and contact with Westerners in general. Sutyagin had endured a nightmare journey through the Russian criminal justice system, undergoing repeated trials and languishing for years in a succession of labour camps.
MI6’s decision to put Sutyagin on their list did not however result simply from a desire to right a particularly egregious injustice. It came, rather, from their guilty conscience because in this unusual case, the FSB’s paranoia happened to be justified. I discovered while researching this book that Alternative Futures, the consultancy that the Russian had written a paper for, was indeed a British intelligence operation. It had been set up at that time in the late 1990s when Russia operations were being ramped up again and, even in an agency known for its sometimes ruthless behaviour, Sutyagin’s arrest had caused recriminations. Revealing that this operation had flouted safeguards about making an agent aware that he was providing information to the British government, an MI6 man comments, ‘his arrest and imprisonment raised some difficult ethical questions for the Service’. Another Western official puts things a little more starkly saying, ‘Sutyagin had got screwed big time – they [MI6] should have been ashamed.’
It was time, then, for MI6 to do something for the man they had caused such hideous difficulties. His name was given to the Russians, and he had been brought from the penal colony where he was serving to Lefortovo.
Having had his night’s rest, Skripal was taken on the morning of 7 July to an upstairs office. In this airless room he found two Russians and three Americans: Daniel Hoffman, the CIA Moscow Station Chief, and two others. Hoffman had been the agency’s point man in bringing together the prisoners for the swap, as well as making sure there was a formal agreement with the Russians on the terms of their release. The CIA man was one of those formidable characters hardened by the agency’s missions of the previous decade: ex-military, he had run Russian agents in Moscow in the late 1990s before serving in Pakistan and Iraq after 9/11.
It was Hoffman who broke the sweet news to Skripal that an exchange had been arranged. Skripal had seen a newspaper report about the illegals being arrested in the US so he already understood the background. Hoffman told the prisoner that under the agreement with the Russians he could soon leave the country but that the choice was his.
Skripal asked how the swap was going to work and the CIA man told him that he would first have to read and sign a document. It was a request for a presidential pardon from Dmitri Medvedev. A sense of unease was growing in the prisoner. Eventually, Skripal told them he wouldn’t sign because the paper amounted to an admission of guilt. Even after nearly six years in jail, he was determined not to give those FSB bastards the satisfaction.
Skripal was not the only prisoner to object to this paper. Igor Sutyagin, considering himself entirely innocent, felt the whole thing was very suspect.
It was Hoffman’s turn to be anxious. Knowing Russian officialdom, he understood that these bureaucrats would not simply turn a man free, let alone allow him to fly out of the country, without paperwork setting the whole thing on a proper legal footing. The Russians had insisted that the prisoners do this because their detained officers in the US were being asked to acknowledge that they were foreign agents operating illegally in the US. The FSB wanted reciprocal admissions from the convicts in Lefortovo.
At this stage there were plenty of people in Washington and London who thought the deal might miscarry. And of course in that cramped office in Lefortovo the prisoners whose signatures the agency people now sought had enough bitter experience of the FSB mindset not to take anything at face value.
First gently, then in a more direct tone, Hoffman explained that he had not set these conditions but that they were nonnegotiable. If Skripal wanted to leave the country he would have to sign.
The Russian asked for time to think it over and, later, saw the CIA station chief again, putting pen to paper. The CIA man allowed his two companions to take the pictures and deal with the forms needed to issue Skripal’s travel documents.
Returning to his cell, Skripal realized that he was a free man, or soon would be. He had rights, including to phone calls. So he tried to contact Liudmila but was disappointed to discover that she was out of Moscow, on a trip to Kaliningrad. His son, Sasha, who was in town, hastened over to Lefortovo in her place and was allowed in to visit. They discussed what might happen next. Skripal was anxious above all that his family be able to join him, wherever he might end up.
The following morning, Skripal was taken down to the courtyard outside the Lefortovo administration building. He was put in a van where he met the other three: Zaporozhsky, Sutyagin, and Vasilenko. Skripal was disturbed to see that the two men on the American list appeared to have been beaten. It seemed some angry chekists wanted to have the last say with those two, but parked as they were inside the prison precincts, it was not a time for questions. None of them knew what was going to happen next. They were taken to the airport where a Tupolev jet belonging to the Ministry for Emergency Situations was running through its pre-flight checks.
Inside, the aircraft was laid out as a transport for senior officers. In place of the usual rows of seating it was arranged more like a train compartment, with seats facing each other across tables. Picking one of these, Sutyagin and Skripal sat on one side, Zaporozhsky and Vasilenko on the other.
With palpable tension, and just before the doors were closed, Hoffman and some other Americans came aboard and went to the cabin’s forward section. For Skripal and the other three, having spent years in the Russian prison system, they were only too used to the raising and dashing of hopes. But slowly the Tupolev taxied, and then, with a roar of its engines, took to the sky. There were others on board, an uneasy mixture of FSB, SVR, and CIA people, all there to make sure things happened as they were supposed to. Not long after take-off, Hoffman unbuckled and came back to the four released prisoners. He explained that they were flying to Vienna where the exchange would take place. From there, two of them would go to the US, and two to the UK.