Things were happening very quickly to these men who had spent years languishing in the Gulag. They had no luggage, they were sitting there in dark grey prison clothes, and they had little idea what would become of them. Hoffman presented them each with a bag though he urged them not to open them until they got to Vienna. There were so many questions. Skripal knew what had happened with some previous defections – how the KGB had kept families apart for years. He was anxious about that.
‘What about my wife? When will she be able to join me?’ Skripal asked. ‘Don’t worry,’ Hoffman answered, ‘it’s all been agreed with the Russian authorities.’ That came as some comfort, at least.
After touching down just outside the Austrian capital, the four Russian prisoners were taken by bus across to a Boeing belonging to the suitably obscure Vision Airlines, taking their goody bags up the stairway. They were greeted there by Rick DesLauriers, the FBI agent who had masterminded Operation Ghost Stories.
The Russian illegals had arrived from the US on the same jet, but had already been taken across to a private terminal. Skripal and the others did not, therefore, see them. However, having got his released prisoners onto the American jet, Hoffman doubled back to the Tupolev, after the Russian party had boarded, to make sure everything had been done to plan.
Once Hoffman was on board the Boeing, the relief became palpable. The Russians were invited to open the bags they’d been given, each one containing a tracksuit, some underwear, toiletries, and a soft drink.
‘Keep looking,’ Hoffman told them, as the men, rooting around, discovered one by one that he had put a small bottle of Scotch in each bag also. It was time to toast freedom. Skripal and the other two former intelligence officers knocked back the amber nectar with relish. Sutyagin, apparently, abstained.
The Boeing took off, its pilots having filed a flight plan for RAF Brize Norton and from there to the eastern seaboard of the US.
On board the climbing Tupolev meanwhile, there was Juan Lazaro, actually Mikhail Vasenkov, who had been living undercover for so long that he just wanted to go back to his retirement in the US. Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley, or rather Andrei Bezrukov and Yelena Vavilova, were Siberians who had joined the SVR many years before as a real-life couple. They had their sons on board also, two boys who had grown up believing themselves to be Canadians. The illegals were heading back to Moscow, where they would be feted as the ardent chekists and master spies their government and media wanted them to be.
The Boeing made a short stop at Brize Norton. Some people from MI6 came abroad, greeted their two Russians, and bade the rest of the party a safe flight to America. Making their way across the pan, the freed men were accompanied by the senior SIS officer to an RAF helicopter. It flew them southwards, across the rolling hills and hedge-lined fields of Wiltshire and Hampshire, down towards the south coast, or to be more precise, the Solent.
Arriving at the Fort, they were shown their rooms before being ushered by their MI6 host into another. ‘It was full of clothes, very good clothes, and shoes,’ Skripal explained, ‘and he told us to take what we wanted. Really, there was no limit. It was all for us.’
Burdened by his goodies, Skripal went back to his room and decided to take a shower. Suddenly he caught sight of himself in the mirror: although he was in southern England he was still wearing the rough prison uniform from IK 5. He had come all the way from Mordovia to this place without having the chance to change. ‘For days,’ he explained to me, ‘I didn’t believe it was real.’
There was elation, but the weeks that followed were also tinged with disquiet for Skripal. His days were taken up with debriefing. Gordievsky’s debrief in the same place had lasted months. It would be quicker for Skripal. They went over many matters with him, and of course he learned certain things from them, like the arrest and imprisonment of Roberto Florez in Spain. It was a time when the spies sat talking for hours, each trying to reach their own forms of closure. How much had Skripal told his interrogators about Bagnall, Jones, and their meetings? These were delicate questions.
In conversations years later, Sergei and I discussed Florez. Certainly he held the Spaniard responsible for his arrest. He knew Florez hadn’t provided his name, but simply alluding to penetrations in the GRU’s operations in that country would have been enough to start the mole-hunt. Skripal did not express anger towards Florez, rather he seemed to accept that spying had its risks, and he had always been aware of them.
Since Sergei had just spent years in a camp, he had a right to know about his betrayal and that of Burlatov and to get some sense of how the leak had been detected.
There was a host of practical things also. The SIS people quickly spruced their two guests up, and took photos for their new passports. That was important psychologically, in underlining their new identity. And they asked Skripal where he wanted to live, did he want to stay in England or go to Spain? They knew from their clandestine meetings with him that Sergei had sometimes talked about a future in the Spanish sun. No, on reflection, he would prefer Britain. They would get people looking for some possible homes – within the Service’s budget, of course. Where would he prefer? Winchester, Chichester, or Salisbury? He would have to think it over.
While business went on in the Fort, back in Russia Prime Minister Vladimir Putin went to a party to celebrate the return of the SVR’s illegals. As he left, a group of journalists asked him questions. Was it true he’d been singing karaoke with them? Not quite, they had sung a song together called ‘Where Does the Motherland Begin’ and some similar numbers. This tune first featured in a 1968 series called The Sword and the Shield, which extolled the heroism of the Soviet secret police.
Putin then quoted President Medvedev, saying that the compromise of this agent network was the result of treachery, adding, ‘and traitors always come to no good, they end up in a ditch either drunk or on drugs. The other day one such traitor kicked the bucket, exactly like that, abroad.’ One of the reporters, almost egging on the former FSB chief, asked whether these traitors living abroad wouldn’t be punished. ‘I think it’s an improper question,’ Putin answered, ‘and such decisions are not made at a press conference. Intelligence agencies have their own code, and all their staff follow it.’
No doubt there was something uniquely infuriating to Putin, a one-time Department S man, about Poteyev’s betrayal of the deep-cover network. The resources involved were so enormous in creating it, and the personal sacrifices made by the Russian officers serving as illegals could hardly be imagined.
A few months later, when asked again about treachery at an end-of-year press conference, he returned to the theme of treason, but in a more general way, making a statement that clearly went beyond Poteyev and the American spy ring. While denying that Russia still has assassination squads, he still predicted a grim end for those who’d betrayed the Motherland: ‘With regard to traitors they will kick the bucket on their own, I assure you,’ Putin seemed to promise, noting, ‘Whatever thirty pieces of silver those people may have gotten, they will stick in their throat.’