Her father meanwhile remained deeply sedated. The tests being given to him suggested his kidneys, liver, and other organs were having a hard time getting back to normal. Sergei was still far behind his daughter, and therefore that much closer to death.
With Yulia beginning her journey out of deep sedation there were hopes she might be able to talk to police. Outside the intense, insular world of Radnor Ward there was an international crisis playing out.
19
‘HIGHLY LIKELY’ RUSSIA
Early on Wednesday 7 March, a group of senior ministers and officials made their way to the Cabinet Office on Whitehall. They processed through the high-security entry system, juggling cups of coffee, passes, and briefing papers, and down to the basement and Cobra. The government’s emergency committee is one at the same time a group, a place, and an acronym: Cabinet Office Briefing Room ‘A’. In its modern form it is a windowless place, electronically swept to prevent bugging, and plugged into a wide range of communications equipment including secure phones and video-teleconferencing facilities.
Around thirty people arrived that morning to find Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, and a couple of officials waiting. Tall, precise in manner, and already well briefed, she would be chairing the session. Among the others filing in were Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, and two dozen other ministers and officials.
None of them harboured any doubt that Russia was responsible for what had happened in Salisbury. But in appointing Rudd to chair the meeting, the Prime Minister was concerned firstly to deal with urgent practical questions arising from the poisoning and secondly not to rush into publicly blaming Russia. But one figure at the Cobra table on the 7th had already come very close to doing that.
The meeting followed remarks in the House of Commons the previous day by Boris Johnson. He and the Home Secretary, entrenched on opposite sides of the Brexit debate, were also quite different political animals: Rudd the more deliberate and measured, Johnson given to rhetorical flourishes and shooting from the hip.
‘It is too early to speculate as to the precise nature of the crime or attempted crime that has taken place in Salisbury,’ Johnson told MPs, ‘but I know members will have their suspicions. If those suspicions prove to be well founded then this government will take whatever measures it deems necessary to protect the lives of the people in this country.’
Having urged parliamentarians and the watching world to avoid jumping to conclusions, Johnson had then himself spoken of the ‘echoes’ of the Litvinenko case, and the ‘malign’ influence of Russia in recent world events. His insinuations were undoubtedly informed by an initial briefing from the intelligence people. These remarks nettled Downing Street, which, used to finding him a force of nature who would often stray off script, decided to sideline him in the response to Salisbury.
In the Cobra room, Rudd had the advantage that she had already received detailed police and intelligence briefings. It was the format of Cobra that she relayed this information to her colleagues, who then came up with a common response to the challenges identified. Crucially from No. 10’s point of view, it was the Home Secretary who would lead in the public presentation of what was going on – from visiting Salisbury to giving TV interviews.
That morning Cobra heard the Public Health England determination that the Skripals had been poisoned with a nerve agent, the latest on the police investigation, and a résumé of the intelligence (circumstantial as it was) about Russian responsibility and motive. I have talked to people at various levels about the response to Salisbury, and all can remember questions that were discussed with great urgency and seriousness at the time but proved in hindsight to be not worth worrying about.
In that first Cobra meeting, the possibility that the poisoners might still be in the UK, with additional nerve agent to use against other targets, apparently gave rise to a good deal of debate. It might have seemed alarmist, but nobody at that stage wanted to be complacent or to underplay the seriousness of what had happened.
Reporting to Parliament on 8 March, Rudd’s statement reflected both the early take of Whitehall officialdom and her desire to strike a more measured tone than Johnson’s. ‘If we are to be rigorous in this investigation, we must avoid speculation and allow the police to carry on their investigation.’ She avoided even using the word ‘Russia’ on this occasion, let alone reciting a list of Vladimir Putin’s recent misdemeanours.
The other noteworthy thing about Rudd’s initial message is that it reflected some optimism on the part of the police that they could soon find suspects. She spoke of ‘a fast-paced criminal investigation’, and while asking for time for investigators to do their thing, promised, ‘The investigation is moving at pace, and this government will act without hesitation as the facts become clearer.’
It is evident that the counter-terrorist police who were briefing her were guardedly optimistic based on their recent experiences of quickly unravelling jihadist plots, and the early scientific advice they were hearing from chemical-weapons experts. This emphasized the possibility that the Skripals had breathed or ingested poison, so that its effects would therefore have come on in minutes. The investigation focused on who was about in the Maltings and Zizzi’s restaurant in the hope it might quickly yield suspects. As we will see, things would go very differently.
There were a number of reasons why her initial readout was more cautious in attributing blame than the Foreign Secretary. She wanted to put clear blue water between herself and Boris Johnson, evidently. But she and those briefing her were also conditioned by the investigators’ desire to bring people to trial for Salisbury, and to avoid saying anything that, by pointing a finger before the evidence was clear, might prejudice the process. In this way the early reactions of the Home and Foreign Secretaries reflected the classic division between evidence and intelligence. The latter would be available much sooner than the former, and would not have to pass the same standards of proof.
Among those briefing key decision-makers during these days following the poisoning was Harry Murdoch, who nearly two decades earlier ran the Operations section of P5, galvanizing MI6’s Russia agent recruitment, but who by 2018 was serving in a more senior role. Murdoch may have felt a sense of personal affront about the Skripal affair, having had the GRU man operating as an active case during his years working the Russia target. He and other senior intelligence officials set in train a series of assessments that looked at the question of Russian responsibility and were presented to ministers during the first ten days of the crisis. This work soon found its focus in the re-examination of previous material in two key areas: CX or agent-reporting about Russia’s continued possession of chemical weapons; and traces, mainly electronic, showing that the Skripals had been kept under surveillance by Russia.
His erstwhile colleagues across the river in Vauxhall Cross were in a state of shock during the early days after the poisoning. One insider characterized the mood as ‘bewildered’. He might have added ‘angry’, because the Salisbury poisoning was threatening to the agency on many levels: by showing it could not protect someone like Skripal it might deter anyone tempted to spy for Britain, threatening MI6’s core business; the exposure of security around him as inadequate simultaneously demonstrated the agency’s underestimation of the threat; and although they would be able to deliver intelligence relevant to the incident, none of their sources was able to give detailed insight into how the operation had been mounted, still less to warn it was about to happen.