During those days the questions asked of the Secret Intelligence Service, and indeed of the other intelligence agencies in the UK and worldwide, ranged across three broad areas: motive; timing; and how exactly the operation was carried out.
When it came to motive, many people, from the officers on duty in Wiltshire Police control room to the Foreign Secretary, had quickly pointed to the similarities with Alexander Litvinenko’s poisoning in 2006. But how was Skripal comparable?
Litvinenko had been an outspoken public opponent of Putin, accusing him of all manner of crimes, not least blowing up apartment buildings (killing hundreds of Russians) to frame Chechen separatists. The murder of Litvinenko was also part of an acute period of confrontation between the Kremlin and Britain, in which an upsurge in espionage activity as well as sedition by Litvinenko and his paymaster Berezovsky were all seen as part of a pattern of unacceptable activity by Putin and the siloviki. The FSB boss Nikolai Patrushev had indeed even publicly voiced their suspicions of an extensive anti-Kremlin British plot, an implicit explanation of why a message had been sent, by means of polonium.
Skripal by contrast had never gone public or campaigned in this way. Nor was there a Berezovsky figure in the picture either, actively calling for the overthrow of Putin and doing so with the help of the onetime GRU man. Was there anything Skripal had done to make the Kremlin or even his former employers angry enough to kill him?
The security people examining the case soon focused on Skripal’s relationships with foreign intelligence agencies. Could there be something here that would have provided a trigger for an assassination plot – particularly, they reasoned, if there was a Russian agent in one of them who had reported back to Moscow about the help Skripal was giving?
Piecing Skripal’s travels together I found out that he went to the US in 2011 and the Czech Republic in 2012, and there were a couple of visits to Estonia. In the summer of 2017 our interviews had been interrupted by a week-long trip that he had made to Switzerland to talk to their federal intelligence services. That last one might seem innocuous but it will be recalled that Litvinenko had been helping investigators in Spain shortly before his murder, and there were a number of investigations of corruption linked to Russian officials ongoing in Switzerland.
I have heard it said also that Skripal had been talking to the Ukrainian security service, the SBU, though not apparently in Ukraine itself. The GRU had played a key role in channelling Moscow’s support to Putin’s proxies in the east of their country. Might Sergei have given the SBU some advice on his former organization’s methods? I find this idea ironic, given the disdain Sergei showed for Ukrainians when we met. And certainly when we chatted he made no mention of having helped them as a consultant. But if he had played the role of ‘good shepherd’, that could easily have nettled people in Moscow.
These rumours are, I’ve been told, untrue but it is a measure of interest and intrigue generated by the Skripal case that some people have spread them. Some of his travels though, particularly to places that were formerly in the Soviet bloc, might be seen as re-entering the game, particularly if the person reporting it to Moscow exaggerated Skripal’s role. In such a scenario the 2010 presidential pardon might be seen as null and void. Had I been able to question Sergei after the poisoning, queries about these foreign trips would have been near the top of my list. But despite many attempts by me to restart our conversations he chose not speak to me after he and Yulia were struck down with Novichok.
A further idea that gained some traction on social media was that Skripal had been linked to the notorious ‘Trump dossier’ put together by former MI6 man Christopher Steele and his company Orbis in 2016. The ‘Steele Connection’ appealed to some people, who thought the Americans might want to kill Skripal for helping in the embarrassment of Trump, and others, who were convinced that the document had given Russian agencies a motive to assassinate him. My own checks could not produce any hard fact to support this theory (though proving a negative is never possible). Orbis denied any connection with Skripal either singly or through an alleged British ‘former handler’. It’s very hard to imagine Sergei having much to contribute to Steele, given he’d been away from Moscow for many years, and from the intelligence business for even longer. Rather this story, given some weight by pro-Kremlin voices in the old and new media, gained some wider currency among those who found the British government narrative hard to believe.
Another theory that received some attention among Western agencies was the idea that Skripal may have been some sort of victim of a fight between the GRU and FSB or SVR. This might, as in the case of Yuri Burlatov’s murder in Moscow, have been a matter in which corruption was part of the picture also. If the key message being sent was that of targeting a former GRU man overseas, well, there was a pretty limited supply of those. A couple were in the US but quite well hidden there, and in the UK there was also Vladimir Rezun – but having defected in 1978 he really was ancient history. That might have left Sergei as the obvious choice.
Even so this idea of an inter-agency feud did not find much purchase among those in the secret world. One former Western spy boss that I put it to found the notion contemptible, adopting the role of Putin in his reply to my question: ‘I would cut off the heads of those GRU and FSB chiefs if they created an incident like this because of their own infighting.’
If there was some scepticism about an internecine fight between Russian agencies, there was a stronger sense among analysts that Skripal was a traitor who worked for certain intelligence agencies and that might have been enough to make him a ‘legitimate target’. In this context it might have fallen to the GRU, as it had years earlier with Burlatov, to ‘take care of business’ with Skripal, for the sake of its reputation in the Kremlin. And the Putin calculus had changed in the years since Litvinenko, after all. In his quest to assert Russia’s power there had been a good deal more risk-taking, from Ukraine to Syria. Some of the consequences, for example shooting down the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over rebel-occupied east Ukraine with 298 people on board, had been enormous both in terms of loss of life and impact on Russia’s reputation.
The reaction to MH17 or events in Syria though had shown the Kremlin that the hue and cry after a major event was limited. Condemnation, sanctions even, could be weathered, and had the useful side effect of contributing to Putin’s messages about Western hostility to Russia and its people. Many of the counter-theories about the poisoning, ranging from a false-flag operation (i.e., one by someone other than Russia) to wreck the World Cup to ‘why would Putin do it in the run-up to the election?’, ignore this simple truth: the events of the previous few years had shown it was a reasonable bet that an assassination could be carried out without any really serious effect on Russia’s relations with the wider world.
Maybe the main difference between 2006 and 2018 was simply that the Kremlin’s kill threshold had lowered, the murder of its foes having become so commonplace.
For some, using an exotic method of assassination – polonium with Litvinenko and Novichok with the Skripal attempt – was axiomatic to Putin’s purpose. It was a deliberate signal, aimed both at people within his own intelligence agencies and to the wider public, that treachery would never be forgiven, and a way of making a statement of Russian power and impunity. Dan Hoffman, in 2010 the CIA Moscow station chief who had assisted with Skripal’s journey to the West, told me in a BBC interview: