Things were done in the first few days, before the nerve-agent diagnosis firmed up, that left many of those in the Devizes operations room with a whole new set of worries. The fire brigade had done ad hoc decontamination in one or two places simply using hoses – which led to discussions in the coordinating group about whether the nerve agent might have been washed into the Avon, and everyone should be told to look for dead fish or wildfowl. Would it end up in the water supply? The questions multiplied apace during those early days. There were uncertainties about the public health advice also – would it be enough just to wash your clothes if you’d been in Zizzi’s?
For members of the Coordinating Group meeting in Devizes almost every morning for the first month, this crisis required an unprecedented response. In all more than 1,200 police and 300 members of the military were brought in to deal with it. Much of this, put in place under the codename Operation Fairline, was about securing various sites while evidence was gathered and they were made safe. But of course it was also quite natural that the police would want to catch those responsible if they possibly could.
On 6 March the Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorist Command had taken control of the investigation. An official from Public Health England had been dispatched from Porton that evening in order to report the nerve-agent diagnosis to the Cabinet emergency committee in Whitehall first thing on Wednesday 7th.
Outside the hospital, meanwhile, the world’s press was descending. Reporters from CNN or Al Jazeera stood there round the clock, doing their live shots to TV newsrooms around the globe. Journalists fanned out across the little city, seeking eyewitnesses, with some contacting the doctors and nurses directly. The hospital reminded everybody of their duties of confidentiality towards their desperately ill patients. Coming in and out each day, often to shouted questions from the press, the staff jokingly christened their hospital ‘Fortress Salisbury’.
Sergei and Yulia were of course entirely oblivious to all of this activity. They were lying on Level 4 of the hospital deep in what the newspapers call ‘a medically induced coma’. The doctors don’t like that term, preferring instead ‘deep sedation’ or similar phrases. Whatever the argument about terminology, the reality of Sergei’s fight was plain enough. He was clinging to life by the slenderest of threads.
18
THE FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL
The morning of Wednesday 7 March saw the medics at Salisbury District Hospital with three patients, each presenting a different clinical picture. The best of them was Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey. He had suffered from a relatively modest contamination, and was classified as ‘serious’ rather than critical. He was conscious though hardly able to speak.
Yulia Skripal and her father on the other hand were both ‘critical’, and receiving what is termed Level 3 care – ventilation, deep sedation, and the full battery of support available in Radnor Ward. There were differences between them. Even though Yulia had not been breathing when found on the bench in the Maltings the paramedics had clearly done something for her because she was fleetingly responsive as she came through the Emergency Department and before the doctors put her under deep sedation.
Sergei was in a worse way. He had shown almost no sign of life and although experts cautioned us at the time against expecting age to make a difference when a substance this deadly was having its effect, his diabetes, his lifestyle, and the extra pounds he was carrying cannot have counted in his favour. That evening, speaking to someone who was ‘in the loop’ before going on air, I was told he was not expected to survive the night.
These three patients had each been found a room just off the main or open-plan part of Radnor. There was an armed guard in place outside each one, but apart from this presence the relatives of those who lay just yards away, locked in their own fights for life, continued to come and go. For Sergei and Yulia though there was nobody to offer prayer by their bedside or stroke their heads, urging them on. Their weeks in intensive care passed without family – except for one another and the tight-knit team caring for them.
With the diagnosis of nerve-agent poisoning the military side of Porton Down became more involved. Their judgements defined much of what happened during those early days, and not just in the hospital. Everything from public health advice for those who’d been in the Maltings and were worried to the language used in Parliament or pointers given to detectives about how long before their collapse the Skripals had been poisoned was conditioned by what the scientists said about the type of agent used, and how and when it could have entered the body.
Initially the supposition was that it might be an agent such as VX, a military chemical weapon produced in large quantities by both the US and Soviet Union during the Cold War. This was the type of agent used to assassinate the North Korean leader’s half-brother Kim Jong-nam in Kuala Lumpur airport in February 2017, killing him swiftly. However this theory was soon questioned.
An Incident Response Team from Porton that had gone to the key sites in Salisbury with a chemical-agent monitor (hand-held detection equipment) had not found any traces of VX. What’s more, it had not turned up any of the other well-known nerve agents such as soman or sarin either. The word coming out of the research establishment was that it was ‘something very exotic’. But for as long as the agent remained a mystery, key questions were left hanging; from treatment options, to how it entered the Skripals’ bodies, when that might have happened, and therefore how far back detectives should be looking at their movements as well as harvesting CCTV images from around the city. Everything therefore rested with a handful of scientists trying to find a testable sample.
For a fleeting moment, early in the investigation, there were hopes that they might be able to trace any residues to a specific facility. This remarkable science had been used on samples from Halabja, where Saddam Hussein used sarin against Kurdish civilians. Essentially it involved finding the molecular signature of the agent and its constituent chemicals, unique identifiers resulting from the water and other environmental factors at the production site. With the Halabja samples a precursor chemical had been traced to a German factory. But as we will see, the Salisbury poison was to prove altogether more obscure, and therefore the chances of being able to match it to known samples from particular factories fell.
The Porton experts knew that if the basic detection equipment couldn’t produce results, they would have to send items or swabs back to their labs several miles to the north. There they could be subjected to the dual process of gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (often shortened to GC/MS by the chemical warfare experts), using large lab machines that can’t be shifted to the locations being investigated. The first stage of this analysis involves burning a sample and studying the flame produced, and the second weighing the atoms of the residue. Each test took time and there was a small number of testing rigs: that produced a major bottleneck as samples started coming in from all over the city. The GC/MS at Porton Down did though begin pointing the scientists towards an answer, and it was Novichok. That word, unknown to almost everyone outside the chemical-weapons community, was soon to be on people’s lips the world over.
Many different compounds had been researched and tested during the dying days of the USSR’s chemical-weapons research programme – in fact the dissident scientist who wrote about them in the mid-1990s suggested that there were actually up to a hundred different Novichok formulas, and to confuse matters further some Russian scientists referred to them by different names. However, the picture was not as complicated as it at first seemed. Only three of these compounds had been developed to the point where they could be weaponized – used to fill bombs or shells.