I’m afraid he’s in charge of the clattering train, as we say in the UK. Somebody has to be responsible, and we in the UK think that the evidence, the culpability points to the Russian state, as it did in the case of Alexander Litvinenko. You remember that the trail of polonium led back very clearly to the Russian state. In the end, Mr Putin is in charge, and I’m afraid he cannot escape responsibility and culpability.
All the key decision-makers in the British set-up met in the Cabinet Office on the morning of 12 March, sitting as the National Security Council (NSC), to formulate a strategy. It was in this forum that the intelligence agency heads joined the Prime Minister and those Cabinet ministers involved in the earlier Cobra sessions. Mark Sedwill, another alumnus of MI6, runs the NSC and was to prove a key figure in galvanizing Britain’s allies to join in joint action against Russia.
Two key developments relative to attribution had happened between the first Cobra meeting on 7 March and this NSC meeting five days later. First, Porton Down moved on from its generic ‘nerve agent’ determination to a specific identification of Novichok A234, a substance it assessed had been developed and produced – historically – at the Shikhany facility in southern Russia. The second, more sensitive, resulted from British assessments about the efforts that the Russian intelligence services had made to keep tabs on Sergei and Yulia Skripal, as well as to intercept their communications. Armed with this new information Theresa May was confident enough to escalate the international blame game.
It was following this meeting that the Prime Minister made her statement to the House of Commons, quoted at the start of this book, in which she said it was ‘highly likely’ that Russia was responsible for the attack.
The approach agreed in the NSC then mapped out in the Commons aimed to snare the Russians in a series of bear traps: giving them the choice of taking responsibility for the attack or admitting that the nerve agent had been stolen, simultaneously trying to place them in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, and implying that Putin was responsible in an overall sense for what had happened even if the specific proof that he’d ordered it was lacking.
Russia, as we will see, had its own strategy, answering these allegations in a way that would retain the Kremlin’s political freedom of manoeuvre. A full-blown information-warfare battle had been joined. It took a few days for the Russians to find their feet in this – a delay that may be attributed to awaiting instructions from Putin or perhaps wanting to wait and see just what kind of evidence the British might produce.
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s veteran Foreign Minister, bit back hard when asked by a BBC reporter about the Skripal affair on 9 March during a visit to Africa:
We have not heard any concrete fact, we only watch your colleagues on TV with serious faces pompously saying that if it is Russia, then such a response will come that Russia will remember for ever. This is not serious. This is pure propaganda. This is just whipping up hysteria.
As for the Kremlin, it was slower off the mark. Even one week after the attack Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, declined to comment, noting Skripal ‘worked for one of the British intelligence services, the incident occurred in Great Britain’. On the same day that Theresa May challenged his government (12 March), Putin, who was campaigning in southern Russia, gave his first reaction to BBC correspondent Steve Rosenberg. Asked whether Russia was behind the poisoning, the president replied, ‘Get to the bottom of things there and then we’ll discuss it.’
Other voices were far less cautious. Vyacheslav Volodin, Speaker of the Duma, was one of the first to suggest the assassination plot was a false-flag operation, claiming Theresa May was ‘inappropriately attempting to shift suspicion away from Britain’. In this conspiracy, the British themselves wanted to kill Skripal as a pretext for further demonization of Russia. Sergei Stepashin, who briefly ran Russian security after the dissolution of the KGB, asked rhetorically, ‘What kind of idiot in Russia would decide to do this? Where is the logic?… The English just hate us because the World Cup will be taking place in our country.’ This type of statement simply seemed to confirm the possibility that attacking Skripal was connected with Putin’s long-term messages about Russia being besieged by hostile powers.
On 14 March, having had no answer from the Russians to her ultimatum, Theresa May reappeared in the Commons to set out her retaliation. There would be twenty-three Russian diplomats expelled, and a host of other measures relating to Russians visiting the UK and keeping their money in the country. And that wasn’t the end of it. The Foreign Office had been busy, urging allies around the world to take coordinated action.
While some Tory politicians briefed journalists that the British response should include everything from arranging a boycott of the football World Cup to deporting oligarchs, the approach taken by the diplomats and intelligence professionals was rather more restrained. The view of one retired intelligence officer shortly before Britain’s expulsion announcement was, ‘There should be another clear out, leaving only a single acknowledged security officer through whom the necessary counter-terrorism intelligence could be exchanged, and a minimally staffed defence attaché group.’
This indeed was how the Foreign Office calibrated their action. The list of twenty-three heading home actually left a couple of Russian intelligence officers in post in London. In this way, the British spooks’ desire to keep a minimal channel open, even in the midst of this grave international crisis, was gratified. In consultations with allies, Foreign Office diplomats were pleased to find that they were pushing at an open door – the number of countries that regarded the Skripal affair as a welcome opportunity to strike back against Russian spies grew. As will be clear, for example from the period Skripal spent in training before his first posting in Malta, Russia devotes years preparing its people for work in embassies overseas, so the disruption caused by throwing them out can be considerable.
During the days that followed, more than a hundred and fifty Russians were expelled: sixty from America; the twenty-three from Britain; thirteen from Ukraine; four each from Canada, France, Germany, and Poland; and so on. Notwithstanding that Russia threw out more than a hundred and sixty from these countries in response, the Foreign Office considered it a famous victory. They had assumed there would be retaliatory expulsions but had succeeded in orchestrating a global action larger than any Cold War move against Soviet or Russian espionage networks. By way of comparison, the tally following Litvinenko’s murder was just four expulsions carried out by the UK alone, without similar gestures elsewhere.
That differential in the tally – more than a hundred and fifty in 2018 versus four in 2007 – tells us how far an international consensus had solidified about Russia’s rule-breaking. Those who questioned the quality of proof Britain had shown its allies over Salisbury were only emphasizing that point in a way: many countries were itching to make examples of Russian spies for all sorts of reasons, and Putin’s paradigm of a Russophobic West had, to an extent, become a self-fulfilling prophecy. ‘I was surprised by the speed of reaction, the degree of hatred of the Russians,’ one senior British figure told me, ‘for many Salisbury was a tipping point because of what was going on internationally more broadly.’