Even if the State Department had not unleashed this retaliation by late summer everyone in Whitehall was expecting Scotland Yard to name and charge suspects from the Russian poisoning team, following up with an extradition request. While many predict the Kremlin will refuse, the expected battle of wills looks set to give hardliners on the Salisbury issue the advantage over those who want Anglo-Russian business to get back on a more even keel.
And what of the man who was the original target of all this? What was to be done with him? From the British government perspective it was better that he remain quietly out of view, even if a statement like Yulia’s might follow. In theory he was free to do or say anything, whether that be launching a blistering attack on the British government for failing to protect him from Putin’s assassins to pleading it had all been a terrible misunderstanding and could he go back to Russia now please.
Viktoria Skripal though had shown them how, even starting with the best intentions, going public carried the risk of creating untold family pain as well as serving the Kremlin’s interests. Sergei and his daughter were so dependent on the British government at this time that there was every reason to follow the advice of those around them.
They were still receiving medical treatment, and benefited from police protection too. They were not in a position to work, and their home remained a quarantined crime scene. Even once it was clear, the idea of Sergei just going back to Christie Miller Road was out of the question. Instead the British taxpayer stepped in to acquire the property. Clearly, his life in that street was over. While the months passed and they considered the future they were dependent on the British government for almost every part of their daily existence.
Perhaps he thought back to that fateful meeting in el Retiro park back in 1996. On that day, twenty-two years earlier, he had reached a resolve, his agreement to work for MI6, that had defined the rest of his life. It had been such a long, hard road from Lefortovo, to IK 5, and even the safe house where they found themselves whiling away the summer days. Sergei though is not a man for regrets. That much was clear from my meetings with him. Once resolved, he entrusts himself to providence, like the paratrooper hurling himself through the door of an aircraft. Sergei Skripal had taken the plunge, first as a spy for his own country, and then for Britain, at a very particular point in history. His recruitment by MI6 came at a time when the intelligence services of Western countries were triumphant and, it is clear, signed up dozens of new Russian sources. As Vladimir Putin sought to exercise control of the state, curb corruption, and reimpose discipline in the military and espionage services, he knew he would have to make examples of agents of foreign powers.
While the FSB, through the late Nineties and early 2000s, produced impressive-sounding figures for how many foreign spies it had arrested, the truth is that it had only limited success in blunting the efforts of the CIA, MI6, or other countries’ agencies. This was shown most clearly in the 2010 Vienna spy swap, when the US traded ten Russian agents for just four people (including Sergei) − and two of them were not actually Western spies at all. There were simply no others in Russian custody to make the exchange more even. The trial of Sergei Skripal, and quite likely the attack upon him in Salisbury, grew out of a determination to send messages − that treason against the Russian state would be punished severely. And arguably, having caught so few real ‘hirelings’ of these foreign agencies, the Russian organization that targeted him may have decided that a more extreme sanction might have to be the substitute for elusive convictions.
Gazing on the house in Christie Miller Road that summer, it is a place robbed of life. The front door, along with many fixtures and fittings, was removed, both as evidence and a source of potential danger to the police there. In its place, wooden panels have been used, creating a new front porch, through which forensic officers in protective suits go in and out. There were things Sergei and Yulia had touched on 4 March, and there were places their shoes, having trodden on the contaminated threshold that day, spread the Novichok also.
On a shelf in the living room the little model cottage that Richard Bagnall gave to Sergei back in 1996 still sits. Even after everything, it carries its promise of a better future, a happier one in that mythical place where a man’s home is his castle. This English Eden is a vivid, imagined world, where an old colonel might while away the days of his autumn, relishing happy memories of Kaliningrad, Fergana, or Malta, free from the ugly brutality of those who rule his mother country.
INDEX
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Abramovich, Roman
acetylcholinesterase
Aeroflot
Afghanistan
All Russia Movement to Support the Army
Alpha Group
Alternative Futures
Ames, Aldrich
Amesbury poisonings (2018)
Amin, Hafizullah
Andropov, Yuri
apartment block bombings, Russia (1999)
Atlangeriev, Ruslan
Atlantic Partnership
Atomic Weapons Establishment Aldermaston
atropine
A230 (Novichok agent)
A232 (Novichok agent)
A234 (Novichok agent)
see also Novichok nerve agent
Babchenko, Arkady
Bailey, Detective Sergeant Nick
Baranov, Vyacheslav
Barashevo, Russia
BBC
Berezovsky, Boris
Berlin Wall, fall of (1989)
biological weapons
Bishop’s Mill pub, Salisbury
Blair, Tony
Blanshard, Dr Christine
Blum, Michael
BND (German foreign intelligence service)
Bokhan, Colonel Sergei
Bourne Hill police station, Salisbury
BP
Brexit
Brezhnev, Leonid
British Military Mission (Brixmis), East Germany
Brown, Gordon
Budyonnovsk hospital hostage situation (1995)
Burgess, Guy
Bush, George H. W.
Bush, George W.
Buzzfeed
BZ (toxic chemical)
Cambridge spy ring
Cassidy, Mo
Cassidy, Ross
CESID/CNI (Spanish intelligence)
Chapman, Anna
Chechnya
First Chechen War (1994–96)
Second Chechen War (1999–2009)
Cheka
chekists (KGB members)
chemical weapons
see also Novichok and individual chemical weapon name
Chemical Weapons Convention (1993)
Cherkesov, Viktor
Chernenko, Konstantin
China
cholinergic crisis
Christie Miller Road, Salisbury
CIA
Clark, Sister Sarah
Clinton, Bill
Cobra emergency committee, UK
Cold War (1947–91)
Comiso airfield, Sicily