Back in southern England, at the MI6 training base, there were procedures for these debriefs, honed over the years, among them that the newcomers were kept in a rather British form of ‘quarantine’. It was more comfortable than the Gulag version, for sure. They could get outside and walk (escorted) along the coastline and enjoy a well-cooked meal and few drinks of an evening. But what Skripal couldn’t do was make a phone call to Moscow, not from the Fort at least, and that made him anxious. He needed to talk to Liudmila and his mum.
After one month, the formal debrief was near its end. Skripal was taken somewhere where he could call his loved ones, and ‘after I spoke to them, I became calmer’.
It had been so hard talking to his mother. He knew the deal with Liudmila was that she could come over to Britain. But although his mother was allowed under the US–Russian agreement to join him she showed little sign of wanting to uproot herself. He must have doubted whether he would see his poor old mother, and embrace her, ever again. He had tried to comfort her with some hopeful words. Maybe one day he would be allowed to come back, they would be united again. ‘Don’t even think about coming back to Russia,’ she told him firmly, ‘you would never be safe.’
The women in Sergei’s life had always been so central to it, anchoring him through all the ups and downs he had come through from the army, to the GRU, and prison. Now there would be a subtle realignment within this constellation. His mother would be further away, beyond his reach, and Yulia’s gravitational pull would grow. When he was arrested she had just been a girl in his eyes, a university student. Now she had matured into a confident young woman who, with her gift for languages, after graduating, had quickly got a job in Moscow with Nike.
It was Yulia’s turn to lead the way for those left behind in Russia. She flew to Britain while her father’s debrief was wrapping up at the Fort. She took the house-hunting upon herself, touring around the three towns that had been discussed with her father. She did not take long to reach her conclusion. With the money that the British government would give them they would be able to have a house too, not a flat, a proper Englishman’s castle. The place she had fallen for was Salisbury.
16
CHRISTIE MILLER ROAD
Driving down to Salisbury one morning in June 2017, I was heading for Sergei Skripal’s home. Approaching from London you pass the city’s main cemetery, and head around the town centre on the ring road before branching off uphill, towards the area where he lived. The houses are newish, well kept, and in many ways undistinguished.
It was almost as if he and Yulia had set out to choose an anonymous location, an archetype of middle England. The British intelligence people guiding her house-hunting may also have liked Christie Miller Road because the dwellings there were built as houses for the police. Although the Wiltshire force disposed of them, among residents of this cul de sac there are apparently still quite a few retired officers.
While they had not ended up in Sergei’s archetypal tumbledown English country cottage, the cathedral city certainly gave them a rich sense of history. In its centre medieval buildings nestle alongside the proud Regency stucco and the boxier form of more recent constructions. There are any number of restaurants and bars to relax in, many of them lining the River Avon running through the middle of Salisbury. On the plain above this well-incised valley there are pleasing walks, like the one up to the fort at Old Sarum which offers a fine view of the cathedral.
Sergei and I had already met somewhere else and had a long talk about his life. We had spoken subsequently by phone and he had agreed I should come to his home for a proper working session of half a day, with notebook, to drill down into his experiences. So I was in a state of some excitement when I reached Christie Miller Road. Driving up towards the end of the cul de sac, scanning the houses for numbers, I couldn’t spot his, 47. My momentary confusion ended when he emerged from his front door, directing me with military-style hand signals to park right outside the entrance. He welcomed me, and noticing the lucky horseshoe over the entrance, I followed him in.
Turning left from the front door we entered his sitting room. It was cosy, well worn, and certainly not affluent. Things were tidy, as you might expect from an old military man, but not fastidiously so. What caught my eye immediately were the signs of someone who had grown used to killing time. There was a stack of jigsaw puzzles for grownups – not quite two-thousand-piece ones of a summer sky, but you get the idea. I also saw an Airfix scale model of HMS Victory. Sergei had put Nelson’s flagship together, including rigging the masts with cotton, a fiddly task requiring considerable patience. I read later that he also spent a great deal of time playing online tank games, though I didn’t spot his computer on that occasion.
He showed me some items that had been brought from their old flat in Moscow by Liudmila and his kids. It was a way of making things more homely. There was a picture on the wall and some ornaments on a bookcase. It was with particular pride that he picked up the resin model of an English country cottage, the one that had been given to him twenty-one years before in Madrid by Richard Bagnall as part of his cultivation. To me the small resin casting didn’t look like much, it was a typical souvenir. But it set me thinking about the cottage’s meaning to Skripal. He had, after all, taken it from Spain back to Moscow and made sure, after all those years in prison, that it was brought over to his new place in Salisbury.
My reason for visiting Sergei that day was that I was intending to write a book about East–West espionage and how it had carried on despite the end of the Cold War. That’s a big and amorphous subject, so my intention was to focus the story on a handful of people, using their stories, and the moment these narratives intersected at Vienna airport, during the swap of 2010, as the key to its structure. Skripal was to be one of the central half-dozen or so stories in this book. That said, I was doing this in my own time – there was no contract. The only sense in which this was a ‘book’ in June 2017 was in my own imagination.
Skripal said he would be happy to help. I could use everything he told me, but as for direct quotation, we would need to talk further. When he offered me a hot drink, we stepped into his kitchen. Tea or coffee? Sergei is an inveterate tea drinker. I asked for coffee, and as he reached for an ageing jar of instant, thought to myself, ‘wrong call’.
‘I’m sorry, you know,’ he said as he was spooning the Nescafé into my cup. He wanted to explain his nervousness about being directly quoted. ‘It’s because of Putin,’ he said. We talked a little about how his kids were essentially based in Russia, they wanted to be able to come and go freely from there, and he added, ‘You see, we are afraid of Putin.’
Later, during our conversations, I said to him that he was talking to me so freely, giving so much detail, that it would be obvious that he had spoken to me, however we dealt with the issue of quotation. ‘You can use everything,’ he reiterated.
As we sat down, getting to business, I opened my notebook. He asked whether I was going to record it. I said no, because these were research interviews. I didn’t want to record on my iPhone, the only suitable device I had on me at the time, it might get hacked. Then the FSB, GRU, whoever, would have incontrovertible proof. He agreed. It was a decision I would come to regret enormously later, but at the time I took it as a good sign; he was comfortable enough talking to me not to mind being recorded.