The house in Christie Miller Road had been bought for Skripal, in his own name, in 2011 for £260,000. The MI6 investment in bricks and mortar thus dwarfed what he had earned in his career as an agent. Welcome to Britain. The FSB had emptied his bank accounts at the time of his arrest but he may have had a little cash squirrelled away in Spain. The Skripals sold their dacha also to help with the costs of a new life in Britain. The UK government would also be paying him money from time to time.
Ross Cassidy and his wife Mo soon made friends with their new neighbours. Cassidy, who was in his early fifties at the time, was a road-haulage contractor and former Royal Navy submariner. Although he and Sergei became firm friends and drinking buddies, they never discussed his espionage career during the years that followed. Cassidy quickly drew his own conclusions about the new family in the street, and of course you could always google ‘Skripal’, but as a former member of the Silent Service, he knew better than most not to pry.
Ross and Mo sometimes discussed whether Liudmila was happy in her new life in Britain. He thought her a fish out of water, but Mo believed that maybe it was simply Liudmila’s limited grasp of English that held her back. Yulia at that time was clearly ahead of the rest of the family in mastering the language.
For some months after Liudmila joined him in Salisbury they had lived very happily. During his latter years in IK 5 she had been suffering from the effects of uterine cancer. She had been treated for this in Russia, though it has been suggested that she eschewed surgery while Sergei was in prison, saying that she would deal with the problem upon his release. But symptoms emerged again in Salisbury, and then came the dread news that it had spread. She underwent further treatment, both in the UK and Russia, but it was to no avail. In the summer of 2012 she died, aged fifty-nine.
The loss of Liudmila was undoubtedly a hammer blow to Sergei. ‘She was a formidable woman,’ notes a friend, ‘he simultaneously admired, adored, and feared her.’ She was buried at Salisbury’s London Road cemetery, and he frequently visited her grave, often more than once a week.
With her passing, Sergei’s focus inevitably shifted to his daughter and son. Yulia spent a good deal of time in England as he established a new life, and once again with her language skills and positive attitude had no difficulty finding employment. Among other jobs, she worked in the conference and events team at the Holiday Inn, Eastleigh, near Southampton.
Yulia though, it is clear, at that time saw her future in Russia, and by 2014 was looking once more for a job there. She would continue visiting her dad, of course, but she wanted to get on in life, not least in finding a soulmate.
With Sasha matters were more complicated. I met him on a couple of my visits to Salisbury. He was polite, shy, and a little diffident. His grasp of English didn’t seem to match his father’s. One time, as Sergei and I sat deep in conversation in their front room, Sasha returned from the shops with a big bag of straw. We greeted one another and he soon disappeared. The straw, his father explained, was for the guinea pigs they kept in a hutch out the back. Superficially one might have thought that this was a happy cohabitation of a lad and dad. But there was much pain and awkwardness in the relationship.
Sasha after all was forty-three by this time, with a failed marriage and a good deal of alcohol abuse already behind him. However, he had found a new girlfriend (in Russia) and this was a cause of some hope. But in company Skripal used tough love, saying quite unambiguously, ‘My son cannot drink, he is an alcoholic.’ On the occasion that Sasha disappeared with the straw, Sergei leant forward, lowering his voice slightly: ‘He has been told that if he drinks again it will kill him. But I know he drinks secretly sometimes. He thinks he can hide it from me,’ he shook his head slightly, ‘but he can’t fool his father.’
A few weeks later, Sasha flew back to Moscow, planning a trip to St Petersburg with his girlfriend. According to his cousin, Viktoria, Sasha was already drunk when Yulia picked him up at the airport. Sasha collapsed on board the train to St Petersburg and was taken to hospital where a few days later, on 18 July, he died of liver failure. Viktoria commented to one of my BBC colleagues, ‘You make your own fate in life – that’s what Sergei used to say about it.’ While she would later become a controversial figure, this remark of Viktoria’s was indeed quite in keeping with Sergei’s views.
A few weeks after it happened, I rang Sergei to offer my condolences. Frankly, after everything Sasha had been told, his father said, his decision to hit the bottle again ‘was a kind of suicide’. You say what you can, but of course I was not an old friend and feared I could not rise above platitudes in this dreadful situation. ‘Yes,’ Sergei summed up at the end of our conversation, ‘life will not be so easy for me now.’
Skripal, it is clear, did not regard his son’s death as suspicious. Rather he saw it as the culmination of many wrong turns or missed opportunities. But if anyone had been tempted to run checks on his corpse it would not have been possible, because he was swiftly cremated in Russia. British diplomats assisted with bringing the urn containing his ashes to Britain, where it was placed close to the entrance of the London Road cemetery.
Even before this tragedy the people who took an interest in Sergei’s life had been trying to keep him busy and engaged with the world. Although he was on friendly terms with the neighbours, particularly Ross and Mo Cassidy, I got the impression that the ones he was closest to were ‘Team’, said without the article, those from the intelligence agencies looking after his welfare. He was evidently in regular contact with them, and had a special mobile phone that went direct to their duty officer.
There is a special section within MI6, Agent Resettlement, or AR, that looks after the service’s old Joes. MI5 are also involved with the protective security aspects of this, it’s a joint operation. The agencies’ bosses have learned over the years that looking after old assets is vital to the credibility of their operations – and indeed an important element of getting new people to spy for them.
Sergei spoke about ‘Team’ with a good deal of affection, mentioning recent visits, and using a few of their first names. He implied that he had made them aware of my visit and this was no more than common sense, given that allowing someone alone into his home carried an element of risk. Skripal harboured concerns, no doubt about it, but expressed them in terms of his kids and their ability to travel to and from Russia. But of course he had also some awareness about protecting his own security. It wasn’t an obsession, because after all he had received a presidential pardon, as well as serving a good deal of his sentence. There was every reason to believe that if he didn’t make political statements or give lots of interviews, life would continue in its sedate, if sometimes mournful, fashion.
For Sergei the latter Salisbury years presented a series of sorrows. His brother, Valery, passed away in 2016. And Yelena, his mother, fell and broke her hip in 2017, leaving her increasingly frail as she entered her nineties. Sergei and I did not discuss her health during our meetings but I have learned that he was deeply perturbed at not being able to care for her in person. ‘Team’, his Whitehall minders, apparently even offered to bring Yelena over to the UK and buy Skripal a bigger house so that they could live together.
At the end of 2010, a few months after he arrived in Britain, the Skripals had seen in the New Year together via Skype; Sergei and Liudmila in Salisbury, Yelena, Valery, and his daughter in Yaroslavl. It brought them comfort as they adapted to life apart. Sergei kept up the regular phone calls to his mother but did not, following her accident, use the video feature of Skype. Watching her in this predicament, fading away, when he could do nothing practical to help was too much for him, perhaps.