‘What do you make of this?’ I was asked by two of our senior editors on Newsnight within minutes of one another. I filled them in with a good deal of background about Skripal, after which one of them asked, ‘But how do you know all of this?’ Taking them into my confidence, I explained about my meetings with Sergei, but also that it had been for a book project, he hadn’t anticipated it being used on the BBC, and that I would prefer not to compound his difficulties in his hour of crisis by talking publicly about our conversations.
That night, Monday 5th, we led Newsnight with a brief report and interview about the poisoning. Although I was not going to state explicitly that I had interviewed Sergei, I loaded a great deal of detail into this live ‘two way’: about the circumstances of his recruitment, his role in the GRU, and the type of intelligence he had been able to pass on to MI6. Much of this was not in the public domain. Many colleagues, I think, shared that ‘How does he know all this?’ feeling that my editors had voiced earlier that evening.
Watching the news that evening at home not far from Salisbury, Ross Cassidy was horrified. Having got to know the Skripals soon after they moved into Christie Miller Road, Cassidy, his wife, and Sergei had travelled up to Heathrow just a couple of days earlier (on Saturday 3rd) to collect Yulia. Sergei had been worried about the snow, and Ross owned an Isuzu D-Max pick-up, so they had decided to make an outing of it. After dropping the Skripals at their home around 5.30 that evening, the Cassidys had arranged to see them later in Yulia’s stay. Now this. Cassidy called the police, who later that same night conducted the first of what would be many interviews.
The following morning, Tuesday, things became even more fraught. Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey had been admitted to the hospital having fallen ill during the night. After entering the Skripals’ home on Sunday, Bailey had gone back to the Bourne Hill police station to type up a report on the day’s events. Taking off his gloves before he did so, he had become contaminated with a small amount of poison.
It took another twenty-four hours before he began to come down with the symptoms. Although DS Bailey was also dealing with sweating, heart, and vision problems he did not need ventilation. He was never classed as ‘critical’, presumably due to having absorbed a much smaller dosage. Those though are the judgements of hindsight: on 6 March his condition caused alarm at the hospital. With the poisoning becoming big news, some people who had been out in town on Sunday afternoon also started turning up, reporting odd symptoms.
‘There was a real concern about how big this could get,’ Lorna Wilkinson, Director of Nursing, told me later, recalling thinking on 6 March, ‘Have we just gone from two index patients to having something that actually could become all-consuming and involve many casualties?’ The decision was taken to move to ‘barrier nursing’, the type of additional precautions taken when people have infectious diseases or compromised immune systems. The nurses working directly with the Skripals used visors, aprons, gloves, and so on. However they never donned army-style protective suits or used full isolation techniques.
By Tuesday afternoon, results were also coming back on some toxicology tests that had been carried out for the hospital several miles away, at the Porton Down laboratories of Public Health England. The civilian facility, supporting the health service in matters of rare diseases, radiological, or chemical contamination, nestles close by the military research establishment. Initially, they had been asked to look at all kinds of indicators since the Skripals might have been hit by anything from opioids to shellfish or snake toxins. One thing came back clearly from the lab: the Skripals had levels of a key enzyme, acetylcholinesterase, that were so low that they were barely measurable.
This substance regulates the body’s nervous system, effectively switching off the impulses transmitted by its biological opposite in activating nerves, acetylcholine. Without acetylcholinesterase certain functions, like sweating or urinating, remain ‘switched on’. Critically, respiration can speed up, as the diaphragm is overloaded with messages, to the point where the muscles give out and the person stops breathing. Furthermore, if the patient remains in this state for any length of time, the brain can become flooded with acetylcholine, which acts as a neurotransmitter, effectively short-circuiting the central nervous system with the potential for lasting damage. The patients were evidently in a dire way because of this bodily emergency, something experts call a cholinergic crisis.
There’s a considerable body of medical knowledge about cholinergic crises, much of it stemming back to the period when people on farms became accidentally contaminated with large amounts of (now banned) organophosphate insecticide. It was the development of these substances, designed to kill insects by blocking the release of acetylcholinesterase, in the 1930s into something much more potent, becoming chemical weapons that could wipe out people in large numbers, that created the first nerve agents. There are plenty of staff in Salisbury District Hospital who know about these substances, some of them ex-military with training in chemical warfare, as well as some who worked with scientists at Porton Down. Just a few weeks earlier the hospital had been put through a major-incident exercise dealing with chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons, so the indicators of nerve-agent poisoning were fresh in many people’s minds.
By the end of the working day on Tuesday, a diagnosis was firming up: the Skripals had been poisoned with a nerve agent. It was a time for rapid consultations among doctors. Dr Stephen Jukes, one of the intensive-care consultants who became part of the team caring for the Skripals several days after their admission, had been poring over anything he could find in the way of medical literature. He and the others exchanged ideas frequently using a consultants’ WhatsApp group.
As he made his way up to the Radnor Ward, there were immediate signs that the usual atmosphere of the place had been upset. Armed officers from the Metropolitan Police had taken station outside the doors of the rooms off the central intensive-care bays where the Skripals lay. These guardians would remain there for weeks, along with detectives who were anxious to question them as soon as they regained consciousness. If they ever did. Dr Jukes recalled:
When we first were aware this was a nerve agent we were expecting them not to survive. We would try all our therapies. We would ensure the best clinical care. But all the evidence was there that they would not survive.
This then was the depressing panorama that greeted the doctors. While they fought their desperate battle, the machinery of national incident control and crisis management was swinging into action.
A major incident-control room, the Strategic Coordinating Group, was established at the police headquarters in Devizes, with Paul Mills, the Deputy Chief Constable of Wiltshire, as Gold Command, leading the response. His boss, Chief Constable Keir Pritchard, had only taken over in post the previous day. Although emergency service senior management regularly exercise for terrorist incidents or major accidents, they were in uncharted territory. ‘There isn’t a plan on the shelf for nerve-agent attacks in a small city such as Salisbury,’ Mr Pritchard said later, ‘this was brand new, and it was brand new for many of us across the country.’