In seeking the diplomatic high ground, the UK then invited experts from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (or OPCW), the United Nations-backed international watchdog, to come to Salisbury to verify the UK’s claim of Novichok poisoning. Russia tried but failed to thwart this, calling unsuccessfully instead for a joint UK– Russia investigation.
The OPCW team sent its first members to Salisbury a fortnight after the poisoning and concluded its work a few days later. Most of its eventual report is classified but the published summary noted that having taken samples from various places and the three people involved, the OPCW team ‘confirm the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury’. It added, ‘the toxic chemical was of high purity’, having an ‘almost complete absence of impurities’.
Many people focused on the confirmation of the UK’s Novichok claim but the line about purity was arguably more important, particularly to chemical weapons nerds. It was a hat tip to the people who made it, suggesting both chemistry and labs operating at a very high level. You could forget terrorists or the Mafia, the implication was that this was a substance that could only have been made in one or two places in the world.
Although the UK had secured a considerable diplomatic advantage in the second half of March, it was a long way from having an unimpeachable international argument. In its information war, the Kremlin took the Prime Minister’s phrase ‘highly likely Russia’ and used it as a hashtag, a taunt, suggesting a case that was light on fact.
Of course there were weaknesses in the UK position: it was not claimed that the agent A234, although identified, could be forensically tracked to Russia’s labs; if it had specific intelligence about how the Skripal operation was mounted, the UK was not releasing it; and of course there were no police photos of suspects seen boarding planes to Russia or other points east shortly after the poisoning, let alone a Lugovoi-style named suspect.
If the British government was to maintain its diplomatic momentum it needed a break. Perhaps Yulia or Sergei would come round sufficiently to give some new information. What was really needed was some kind of breakthrough in the police investigation, but that proved a forlorn hope.
20
THE INVESTIGATION FALTERS
On 23 March, just as doctors were starting to lighten Yulia Skripal’s sedation, the Metropolitan Police issued an update on its Salisbury investigation. Early statements were given in person outside the New Scotland Yard headquarters but this was released in a low-key way, and it reflected a vanishing of any early optimism on the part of investigators. It was an exercise in expectation management.
‘The investigation is highly likely to take many months and, where it is operationally possible, updates will be issued to the media,’ said the police, adding, ‘Locally, updates are being provided to the community of Salisbury by Wiltshire Police. Searches are ongoing in the Salisbury area and at this stage it is not possible to put a timescale on how long these may take to conclude.’
So how had two hundred and fifty officers experienced in complex counter-terrorism investigations achieved so little, nineteen days after the poisoning? Like almost everyone else responding to the event of 4 March they had been hampered by the time taken to identify the poison, and of course by the skills of those who had planned Skripal’s assassination. And although many initially saw the similarities to the Litvinenko affair, there was a glaring difference: in 2006 that victim had been able to give a statement to detectives on his deathbed pointing the finger at Andrei Lugovoi as his principal poisoner.
The Salisbury investigation had started with just two people: Nick Bailey and the other detective who went to Christie Miller Road soon after Skripal was taken ill. There were only six or so Wiltshire Police on duty in the city at the time. Within days this mushroomed to a force of hundreds mobilized from across the south of England; the uniformed officers had a growing number of places to cordon off and guard, the detectives all manner of leads to follow up.
Like doctors, ministers, or diplomats, the police had to respond to each new discovery from the Porton Down people and during that first week important changes came almost daily. With the shift in analysis from opioid, to unnamed nerve agent, undetectable ‘exotic’ agent, Novichok, and finally A234 the police were forced to change tack. People were pouring in, trying to find desk space, clear orders from someone in authority, and find something constructive to do.
An officer who experienced the goings-on at Salisbury’s Bourne Hill police station during that first week told me, ‘It was absolute mayhem. There were people from [plainclothes] squads coming in giving orders, absolutely crazy orders, like “evacuate that street”, or “seal off this place”, without any real reason. Nobody had a clue what they were doing.’
Events took a surreal turn when parts of Bourne Hill station itself were sealed off. Contamination was found on computer keyboards used by Nick Bailey after his 4 March visit to the Skripals’ home. Results coming back from Porton also suggested Novichok traces in his locker (presumably because he’d put his gloves or other equipment in there) and the station’s evidence store where some items recovered on 4 March had been placed.
Meanwhile the number of sites cordoned off by uniformed officers multiplied to include Bailey’s car; Skripal’s vehicle; the tow truck that had removed it from the centre; two ambulances and a police car at the hospital; the bench in the Maltings; Zizzi’s; the Bishop’s Mill pub; Liudmila’s and Sasha’s plots in the cemetery; and of course the house in Christie Miller Road.
It did not take long for Gold Command at Police HQ in Devizes to realize that the police might be able to manage the cordons but they couldn’t do all the sample-gathering and removal of vehicles. By 9 March therefore the military had been called in to help.
Those charged with decontamination found it slow work. They lacked basic things, like containers the right size to fit chairs or tables that had to be removed. The slowness of the lab-based GC/MS testing procedure at Porton Down also tried people’s patience, working in ‘the hot zone’, as contaminated sites like Skripal’s house or Bourne Hill police station became known. During this deliberate surveying and decontamination at 47 Christie Miller Road it was discovered that the Skripals’ guinea pigs had died, and their cats, apparently driven to distraction by hunger, were put down.
With each additional site cordoned or specialist deployed the people of Wiltshire and a watching world looked on with disbelief. Operators in bright yellow hazmat suits were at the cemetery, while up at the hospital the army was wrapping ambulances up before taking them away on low-loaders. Rumours were flying, some widely reported such as the one that they were about to exhume Sergei’s wife and son (no matter that only an urn of his ashes was there), others reaching the police and army such as that scientists had asked everybody to keep an eye out for dead birds, which would be collected for analysis.
Initial advice from Porton experts did little to resolve the confusion. Manuals on VX nerve agent, for example, said it took anything from ‘a few minutes’ to eighteen hours to do its work. Unlike a gun or knife attack, instant in its effect, this gave investigators a wide window to look at. In following up that timeline, the detectives followed a standard procedure in backtracking from the bench in the Maltings.
If the nerve agent had been inhaled or ingested it would work fast, so they should be looking at passers-by in the Maltings, or others in Zizzi’s restaurant or the Bishop’s Mill pub where Sergei and Yulia had been earlier. Even this set of possibilities produced an enormous workload. CCTV would have to be harvested from many places in the city centre, and hundreds of people tracked down. All kinds of techniques were employed in this, from mapping credit-card usage to seeking images from bank ATMs of those making cash withdrawals.