It’s not a new strategy for Russia, for the breadcrumbs, so to speak, to lead back to the Kremlin. Part of this is revenge, but the bigger part of this is about delivering a message to Russians inside Russia, to Putin’s own electorate in advance of the elections, and to his security services who are enabling him to remain in power.
In sending a message, who was more deserving, more despised in Putin’s Russia, than a traitor? Here too we see a traditional chekist imperative, of liquidating one who had betrayed the Motherland, a tactic that had faded away during the years after the fall of communism but come back with a vengeance under Putin and arguably intensified still further since Litvinenko’s murder. For those taking the ‘trail of breadcrumbs’ interpretation, the choice of the Novichok A234 agent as poison was intended as a deliberate Russian fingerprint. And here, while acknowledging the many differences from Litvinenko’s murder, one can see a point of similarity: if the aim is to send a message the choice of a very rare poison such as polonium or A234 is a useful way of doing it.
Those who wanted to dispatch traitors to send political signals needed to find victims, though. In this matter, the Western analysts knew, there was evidence that Putin’s agencies were keeping tabs on people who were suitable targets overseas, trying to fix their whereabouts and pattern of life, while a vigorous public-information campaign kept their names alive, but despised, for the Russian public.
There can be little doubt that Alexander Poteyev, the SVR colonel who betrayed Russia’s illegal network in America, would be near the top of any Kremlin list of targets – the damage arising from his disclosures was surely greater than Skripal’s. His work for the Americans had moved Putin to public fury in 2010 with his ‘traitors will kick the bucket’ remarks. But since his exfiltration, Poteyev had been carefully looked after in the US by the FBI. How to track him down?
‘According to certain information’, Interfax news agency reported from Moscow on 7 July 2016, ‘Poteyev died in the USA. At the moment, the information is being verified.’ The news of his death was quickly picked up by Western newspapers and the story travelled around the world. If the Russians wanted to kill Poteyev, who was sixty-four by this time, it would appear to have been too late.
Except Poteyev wasn’t dead, and I was told while writing this book that he is still very much with us. What’s more, the Americans believed that the Interfax story was planted as part of a plot. Russian intelligence would monitor the communications of his friends and family in the hope that their reactions to the news story revealed something about the defector’s whereabouts. If they really hit the jackpot, Poteyev might even send a message himself of the ‘I am still very much alive’ variety and provide a way of finding him.
A few weeks after I learnt about the Poteyev ‘fake death’ plot, the Ukrainian SBU used the same ploy, albeit more elaborately, with Russian exile journalist Arkady Babchenko. Here too, we learned, the aim was to intercept online chatter that might be triggered by the ‘fake news’.
What the Poteyev case shows was not just the ongoing Russian effort to pinpoint traitors but also why, when faced with difficulties in going after their top targets, they might have moved down the list a little to someone that was easier to find. Sergei had never hidden himself. He was on the Salisbury electoral roll – unlike Litvinenko and Gordievsky, who used British aliases provided by the UK agent-resettlement people. And there was another thing that made him easier to find: his communications with Yulia and Sasha when they were back in Russia.
One of the important discoveries made by UK agencies as they investigated the Salisbury affair was one, presumably by the electronic eavesdropping agency GCHQ, that the Russians had hacked into Yulia’s email account in 2013. They traced it forensically back to a server linked to Russian intelligence. If they already knew the ‘where’, Skripal’s home in Christie Miller Road, reading emails might have suggested a ‘when’ in the targeting plan. Yulia’s email hack was one of several signs British intelligence had discovered that the Russian services were tracking the Skripals – other details remain classified but were evidently part of the case that Cabinet ministers and allies had found convincing several days after the attack. There were other curious, circumstantial signs.
Making the 2014 Mole in the Aquarium documentary, thirty-seven minutes no less, relied on FSB assistance, with two of its officers interviewed in the piece. And in February 2018, weeks before the attack, a nationalist Russian YouTube channel that often featured espionage themes uploaded two videos about Skripal’s treason. No point dispatching someone the Russian public had forgotten about.
If the motive in attacking Skripal was therefore a combination of sending a message, the continuing campaign against traitors, and simple opportunism in that he was an easier target than some others, what about its timing? The use of a nerve agent on British streets just a few weeks before presidential elections was claimed to be significant by both believers and sceptics. Putin has suggested that such timing, just before he was voted in for a third term, would be illogically reckless. His enemies in the West, though, argue, much like Hoffman’s ‘trail of breadcrumbs’ concept, that the idea was to demonstrate the president’s power and impunity, perhaps even deliberately stimulating Western reactions that could be framed as Russophobia at a time when Putin’s political machine feared electoral apathy.
The view in Vauxhall Cross seems to have been that the timing was conditioned by tactical factors rather than strategic ones. One former officer told me laconically, ‘I don’t find the timing at all odd – they do not operate according to British civil service priorities.’
From the outset, they regarded Yulia’s flight from Moscow to London on 3 March as key. Those planning the operation could have learned of her intention to travel some time in advance by intercepting her communications with her father. If they’d gained a few weeks’ warning, this could have prompted them to put other elements of the plan into place – critically, obtaining the poison and getting it into the UK. Once she was in Salisbury they could use her phone to locate her father swiftly and precisely. In this scheme the timing, and indeed the whole plan, is entirely about operational factors, a view that fits with the chilling view of Russian actions expressed to me by a senior Whitehall figure: ‘You kill traitors like you brush your teeth. It wasn’t a political matter, it was an operational matter.’
In this interpretation, political murder has become such a well-established tactic in the Russia of 2018 that there is considerable autonomy given to the FSB or GRU to conduct it in the way they see fit. This view fits also with the British 2007–2008 intelligence assessments that the Litvinenko and Berezovsky operations were actions of the Russian state but that Putin could not necessarily be connected personally with a directive to carry them out. These analyses acknowledged that there was no intelligence, no smoking gun, linking Putin with any of these plots, and indeed that such proof would be near-impossible to gather. It also, cynically, might be argued to mean that Britain could still make the case for diplomatic engagement with the Kremlin, avoiding complete rupture.
The arguments rehearsed here about motive, timing, and operational responsibility were those briefed to Boris Johnson, Amber Rudd, and indeed Prime Minister Theresa May during the weeks after the Salisbury attack.
Johnson remained an ultra, continuing to attack Russia in ways that sometimes caused alarm among his officials. In an interview with a German broadcaster he implied that the Salisbury Novichok had been traced back to a Russian factory by Porton Down, a statement for which there was no evidence, not publicly anyway. In the same interview he found a way to blame Putin personally while implicitly acknowledging that his intelligence briefings didn’t go that far: