Читать книгу From Russia with Blood - Heidi Blake - Страница 7
ОглавлениеSalisbury, England—March 4, 2018
The fog that enveloped the city overnight had cleared by lunchtime, revealing the cloud-tipped spire of Salisbury Cathedral to the smattering of Sunday diners ambling up Castle Street. The afternoon was cold and quiet, and a light rain was fizzling on the medieval rooftops as two figures emerged from a columned restaurant door. The couple—a smart, plump, snowy-haired man with a blonde some decades his junior—would have gone unnoticed among the lunch crowd at Zizzi, where they had been washing down risotto with white wine, had it not been for his outburst midway through their meal. The pair left the restaurant suddenly after he flew into a loud temper, ducking down an alley and hurrying away from the marketplace, but their pace slackened once they emerged and crossed the bridge over the swollen river. Across the Avon lies a small tree-fringed playground where children were feeding ducks in the drizzle, and the man paused to press some bread he’d saved from lunch into their hands before the pair strolled on toward the edge of the green. It was here that they came to a sudden halt. Within minutes, passersby would stop to stare at a bizarre scene.
The man and woman were slumped together on a bench—she unconscious, he making strange hand gestures and apparently transfixed by the sky. As onlookers cautiously approached, the man seemed to freeze. Then the woman began convulsing, her eyes white and mouth foaming.
The Sunday shoppers who rushed to help were unaware of the seismic global significance of what was unfolding before them. This was the latest salvo in a secret war being waged on the West by a hostile foreign superpower, and their peaceful Wiltshire city had become a battleground: the site of the first chemical weapons attack unleashed on European soil since the Second World War. Still more alarming, the good samaritans themselves were being exposed to a lethal poison even as they stood on the green sheltering the stricken pair under umbrellas while they waited for paramedics.
The couple on the bench were Sergei Skripal—a former Russian spy turned double agent for MI6—and his thirty-three-year-old daughter, Yulia. Skripal, then sixty-six, had arrived in the United Kingdom eight years earlier, after being freed from a Russian prison where he was serving time for high treason. The onetime senior military intelligence officer had been convicted of selling secrets to Britain and blowing the cover of some three hundred Russian agents in 2006. He was released four years later, along with three other men convicted of spying for the West, in exchange for the return to Moscow of ten Russian spies caught living under deep cover in suburban America. The agents were traded on the tarmac of the Vienna airport in the biggest East-West spy swap since the Cold War—but no sooner had the Russian returnees stepped safely onto home soil than Vladimir Putin made his intentions toward the men he had released clear.
“Traitors will kick the bucket,” he announced on state television. “Trust me. These people betrayed their friends, their brothers in arms. Whatever they got in exchange for it, those thirty pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them.”
The events unfolding on the green in Salisbury proved the Russian president true to his word. Sergei and Yulia Skripal lay choking on the bench as their airways were shut down by a deadly chemical that had been smeared on the door handle of his suburban home hours before.
By the time they were admitted to the intensive care unit at Salisbury District Hospital, the Skripals were both suffering convulsions as their lungs filled with fluid and their hearts slowed to a near stop. Doctors were initially perplexed, but when police informed them that the man in their care was a Russian turncoat living under British government protection, the symptoms began to make terrible sense. The Skripals were showing all the signs of having been exposed to a nerve agent—a military-grade chemical that attacks the central nervous system and causes the collapse of all vital bodily functions. These poison gases, fluids, and vapors are so indiscriminately deadly that the world had banned their development or stockpiling some two decades before. In the unthinkable event that the pair had been attacked with a chemical weapon on the streets of Salisbury, wouldn’t there be other casualties?
Those fears were compounded with the arrival of a new patient in intensive care. Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey was a decorated officer of the Wiltshire Police who had been deployed to search Sergei Skripal’s home, and he had been hit with all the same symptoms as the spy and his daughter. Soon after, two more police officers were admitted with itchy eyes and respiratory difficulties. Then came the three children who had taken handfuls of bread from Sergei Skripal to feed the ducks and an off-duty doctor and nurse who had rushed to administer mouth-to-mouth to the Skripals in advance of the paramedics arriving. Before long, twenty-one people had presented with signs of nerve poisoning.
It looked abundantly clear that a deadly chemical had been used to attack the Skripals—indiscriminately endangering the lives of potentially hundreds of British citizens. The medics in Salisbury District Hospital braced themselves for an all-consuming public health crisis while counterterrorism officers from Scotland Yard swept in to take over the investigation from the local police and 180 military personnel were deployed alongside specialist investigators in white protective suits to comb the streets for traces of a nerve agent. But without identifying the exact chemical that had been used in the attack, it was impossible to know where it had come from—or how its awful effects could be treated.
To the northeast of Salisbury, encircled by barbed wire and set in seven thousand acres of open land, is a sprawling complex of windowless labs and bunkers that harbors some of Britain’s most closely guarded secrets. The Skripals had been poisoned just a few miles from Porton Down, home to the British government’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, one of the world’s foremost centers for research into chemical and biological weapons. As soon as medics spotted the signs of possible nerve-agent poisoning, samples were taken from the Skripals and rushed to the top-secret laboratory for testing.
It did not take long for the government scientists to identify the poison. This was a pure strain of Novichok—a chemical weapon as deadly as it is conspicuously Russian—and researchers at Porton Down had been studying nerve agents like it for years. The toxin was developed in the 1970s and 1980s under a Soviet program code-named Foliant at the Shikhany military research base, in southwest Russia. The existence of the Novichok stockpile was exposed by two Russian state chemists in 1992, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union and just as the country was signing on to the Chemical Weapons Convention outlawing the development and retention of chemical and biological weapons—and MI6 had been gathering intelligence about its adaptation for use in targeted assassinations ever since. The discovery that the Skripals had been poleaxed by this distinctly Soviet poison was met with stark astonishment. This wasn’t just a covert attempt to liquidate a traitor and settle a score: it was also a deliberately overt act of aggression. The poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal was a message, and the return address was clear. The Kremlin.
The prime minister needed to be briefed. Theresa May called her intelligence chiefs to a meeting, where she heard evidence that Putin had sent state agents to exterminate the Skripals on British soil. MI6 had compelling intelligence that the Russian president had personally overseen a program to repurpose an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, including Novichok, for use in targeted assassinations over the past decade. Specialist hit squads had been trained in the use of nerve agents to target individual enemies of the Russian state—and they had been specifically taught to smear the chemicals on door handles, where the highest concentrations of Novichok were identified in samples taken from Sergei Skripal’s home. Russian spies had been showing an interest in the Skripals as far back as 2013, when the country’s military intelligence unit had hacked multiple email accounts owned by Yulia. More alarmingly still, Sergei’s wife and son had both died suddenly in the years since the family relocated to the UK, and there were suspicions that they, too, may have been poisoned.
The British government had no option but to act. On March 12, eight days after the Skripals collapsed, the prime minister announced on the floor of the House of Commons that it was “highly likely” that Vladimir Putin was responsible. “Either this was a direct act by the Russian state against our country, or the Russian government lost control of this potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent,” she said, demanding an explanation from the Kremlin by midnight the following day. Russian officials hit back immediately, calling the remarks a provocation and describing the prime minister’s statement as a “circus show in the British parliament,” but no explanation was forthcoming. Two days later, May announced the expulsion of twenty-three Russian spies operating under diplomatic cover in London. Russia quickly followed suit, ejecting twenty-three British diplomats from Moscow.
The accusation that Russia had carried out a chemical weapons attack in Britain sparked an unprecedented international reaction, leading to the expulsion of more than 150 Russian diplomats from twenty-eight Western countries. The leaders of the United States, Britain, France, and Germany issued a joint statement condemning Russia for “the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War,” describing the attack as “an assault on UK sovereignty” and a breach of international law that “threatens the security of us all.” The fallout plunged relations between Russia and the West to the kind of subzero temperatures not seen since the end of the Cold War. For a Britain increasingly isolated by its decision to leave the European Union, the attack on the Skripals had occasioned a heartening show of international solidarity. And, at least ostensibly, it enabled a prime minister beleaguered by bruising failures in the Brexit negotiations to reposition herself as a redoubtable global stateswoman. But back in Moscow, Putin was looking on with scarcely disguised glee.
The West’s response to the attempted assassination of the Skripals could not have been more of a gift to the man in the Kremlin. The Russian presidential elections fell on March 18—a fortnight after the attack—and Putin needed to mobilize his electorate. True, he did not have much competition. The opposition figurehead, Alexei Navalny, had been repeatedly attacked and imprisoned during his campaign before ultimately being banned from running, and Putin’s previous leading opponent, Boris Nemtsov, had been gunned down on a bridge outside the Kremlin three years earlier. The election result was a foregone conclusion. But Putin wanted a resounding victory as he closed his grip on another six years in power, and that meant getting a strong turnout at the polls. To achieve his goal, he needed to rouse the Russian people into a state of patriotic fervor and distract them from the dire state of Russia’s sanctions-stricken economy, rampant corruption, crumbling infrastructure, chronically underfunded health service, and failing education system. What better way to do that than to invoke the looming menace of Russia’s enemies in the West, from whom only he could be trusted to defend the motherland?
That had been the principal objective of the state of the nation address Putin delivered three days before the attack on the Skripals, in which he announced that Russia had developed a new arsenal of nuclear missiles capable of penetrating US air defenses. Squaring up to the podium in a sharp-shouldered black suit and deep-red tie, he declared: “I would like to tell those who have been trying to escalate the arms race for the past fifteen years, to gain unilateral advantages over Russia, and to impose restrictions and sanctions…The attempt at curbing Russia has failed.” Behind him, two vast screens lit up with footage of snow-covered rocket launchers blasting gigantic missiles into a glowering sky, followed by animations charting a ballistic trajectory encircling the entire globe.
Putin’s warmongering state of the nation was the first turn in his well-practiced pre-election performance as a global strongman, and the attack on the Skripals made the perfect sequel. After Britain pointed a finger at the Kremlin and the countries in the United States–led NATO alliance followed suit, all the mechanisms of the Russian state went into overdrive to whip up national hysteria about the iniquity of its Western enemies. Even by the prodigious standards of the Russian propaganda machine, rarely had such a dazzling variety of alternative conspiracy theories been spewed out by the state’s multiplicity of troll factories, fake-news farms, and organs of agitprop. Britain had deliberately put the Skripals into a coma and fabricated evidence to frame Russia—or to detract attention from its difficulties in the Brexit negotiations, or to smear Putin ahead of the presidential election or to destroy Russia’s reputation as a “peacemaker” in Syria, or out of sour grapes over having lost the right to host the 2018 World Cup. MI6 had poisoned Skripal out of fears he would flip and start selling British secrets back to Moscow. The pro-Western government of Ukraine was behind the attack. Sweden, Slovakia, or the Czech Republic was responsible. A mafia group had taken out a contract on the Skripals. The Novichok had originated from the lab at Porton Down, or the United States had made its own version of the nerve agent or stolen it while performing chemical weapons inspections in former Soviet states. So the theories wound on and on.
Sergei Naryshkin, the director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, called the poisoning a “grotesque provocation rudely staged by the British and US intelligence agencies”—and Putin himself was scornfully dismissive, describing Britain’s accusations as “delirium and nonsense.” But the president and his propagandists also took care to fan the flames of suspicion.
Three days after the attack on the Skripals, before Britain had publicly accused Russia of the attempted assassination, the Kremlin’s Channel One TV station used the main bulletin of its flagship current affairs show to issue an unambiguous warning. Skripal was “a traitor to his country,” the host said. “I don’t wish death on anyone,” he continued, “but for purely educational purposes, for anyone who dreams of such a career, I have a warning: being a traitor is one of the most dangerous professions in the world.” Anna Chapman, the glamorous linchpin of the network of ten Russian sleeper agents caught spying on the United States in 2010, also publicly accused Skripal of treachery. And, on the cusp of the presidential election, Putin himself used a specially commissioned documentary to issue his own monition. Asked by the handpicked interviewer if he was capable of forgiveness, the president nodded. Then a glacial smile crept across his face.
“But not everything,” he said. The interviewer wanted to know what it was the president could not forgive.
“Betrayal,” Putin spat back.
The Russian people are used to living with this sort of cognitive dissonance. This is how a nation is hypnotized: sowing confusion with conspiracy and contradiction, distorting debate with disinformation, and muddying fact with falsehood so that the collective consciousness is clouded by a perpetual fog of ambiguity in which nothing is true and no one is accountable. Sergei Skripal betrayed the motherland by selling Russian secrets to the West—and Putin is a strongman, so traitors will kick the bucket. The West is smearing Russia with false accusations to threaten its power—and Putin is a strongman, so only he can save the nation. These were the dissonant messages that the people of Russia received—and, by and large, believed.
When election day came, Putin swept to victory with 77 percent of the vote and a turnout of more than two-thirds of the population. Almost as soon as the polls had closed on March 18, his campaign spokesman attributed the success to a single event.
“Turnout is higher than we expected, by about eight to ten percent, for which we must say thanks to Great Britain,” said Andrey Kondrashov.
“Whenever Russia is accused of something indiscriminately and without any evidence, the Russian people unite around the center of power. And the center of power is certainly Putin today.”
The attack on Sergei Skripal was a blatant provocation designed to give Britain—and the West—no choice but to react exactly as they did, and the gambit had paid off handsomely. But it was also part of a far bigger and more sinister picture.
The truth was that Putin had been using deadly force to wipe out his enemies from the first days of his presidency, and the West had long been looking away. Dissenting politicians, journalists, campaigners, defectors, investigators, and critics had been gunned down, poisoned, hit by cars, thrown out of windows, beaten to death, and blown up on Russian soil since his ascent to the Kremlin on the last day of 1999. Turning a blind eye to this brutality was the cost of doing business with an economically renascent nuclear power that had a stranglehold on Europe’s energy supply and a superwealthy class of oligarchs pouring billions into Western economies. Successive leaders had let themselves be lulled into the belief that Putin was a man they could do business with—a man who, with the right coaxing, might finally come in from the cold and integrate the world’s largest country into the warmth of the rules-based liberal world order. That had proved a catastrophic misjudgment.
Putin never really wanted to join the club. He remained what he had always been: a creature of the totalitarian Soviet security state. To his mind the collapse of the USSR, with its mass killings, censorship, political repression, and bellicose isolationism, was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” and he blamed it on the West. The 1989 revolutions that led to the fall of the Iron Curtain, the reunification of Europe, and the accession to the EU and NATO of the former Soviet satellite states—these were outrages to be avenged. So he had risen through the ranks of the KGB and arrived at the Kremlin ready to use all the tactics in his Soviet security-service tool kit to restore Russia to its former glory. While the leaders of the United States and Europe courted him with summits and state visits, handing him the presidency of the G8 and establishing the NATO-Russia Council to foster closer military and political relations, Putin was smiling for the camera, shaking hands, and plotting a silent war on the liberal institutions and alliances upon which the stability of the West depends. The fox was in the chicken coop.
The systematic extermination of enemies, traitors, and opponents was at the core of Putin’s clandestine campaign. Covert killing is a deeply Soviet form of statecraft, a prized lever of power that had rested for more than half a century in the hands of the feared USSR security service from which the new president had emerged. The KGB had led the world in the art and science of untraceable murder, with its poison factories and weapons labs churning out such deadly marvels as plague sprays, cyanide bullets, lipstick pistols, and ricin-tipped umbrellas. Those capabilities had dwindled since the USSR fell—but not on Putin’s watch. While the West welcomed him to the fold, the Russian president was busy reviving the KGB’s targeted killing program. He plowed public money into researching and developing chemical and biological weapons, psychotropic drugs, obscure carcinogens, and other undetectable poisons, and he armed specialist hit squads to hunt down his foes at home and abroad. He restored the fearsome power of the Soviet state security apparatus—enriching and empowering the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency, and giving its agents special worldwide powers to kill enemies of the state with impunity. Anyone who betrayed the motherland, anyone who threatened the absolute power of the Russian state, anyone who knew too much—all put themselves squarely in the Kremlin’s crosshairs. And every dead body sent a signal. If you cross Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, there is no safe place for you on earth.
The covert killing campaign was one crucial line of attack in a much wider war of subversion. As soaring oil prices swelled the state’s coffers, Putin shoveled resources not only into the development of cyberweaponry capable of shutting down foreign infrastructures at the touch of a button but also hacking labs that could gather kompromat on his adversaries. He ramped up Russian espionage operations to Cold War levels, inserting Anna Chapman’s illegal sleeper cell into the American suburbs, pouring spies into every major European capital, and developing a network of agents of influence to push the Kremlin’s agenda in the corridors of Western power. He weaponized Russia’s fearsome organized crime complex, enmeshing the country’s powerful mafia groups ever more deeply with his government and security services and extending their tentacles around the world as an unofficial outgrowth of the Russian state. He grew a sprawling international propaganda machine to disseminate disinformation, assembled a troll army of social media warriors running millions of fake accounts to stoke conspiracy theories and sow chaos in the West, and built black-money channels to finance extremism, terror, and despotism abroad. And he doubled down on defense spending, pumping the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars into a sweeping military modernization program to replace crumbling Soviet weaponry with hundreds of spanking-new bombers, submarines, warships, and intercontinental missiles.
As Putin expanded his web, his use of targeted assassination beyond his own borders grew more brazen. By 2006, he was sufficiently emboldened to pass new laws explicitly giving the FSB a license to kill Russia’s enemies on foreign soil. Since then, his regime’s critics, opponents, and traitors have dropped dead in violent or perplexing circumstances in both the United States and Europe. But nowhere has Putin pursued his killing campaign with more vigor—or greater impunity—than in the United Kingdom.
London proved the perfect playground for superrich Russians on the run from Putin’s regime. Its booming banks and skyrocketing property market gave them a safe place to stash the money they had looted during the smash-and-grab post-Communist era, while its opulent hotels, luxury department stores, and star-studded nightclubs made for appealing places to spend it. England was a land where both an ill-gotten fortune and a tarnished reputation could be laundered to look as white as a sheet in a flash. Its world-class lawyers and accountants were on hand to help siphon cash safely out of Moscow and into respectable-looking UK companies via opaque offshore structures. Its estate agents were ready to hand over the keys to the country’s most prestigious addresses without asking too many questions, and its lacquered PR gurus flocked to polish away any lingering reputational taint from the mucky business of getting rich in Russia. An endowment to an Oxbridge college here, a donation to the ruling party there, a stately home, a child enrolled at Eton—it didn’t take much more to make a new arrival from Moscow look presentable in the loftiest circles of British society.
Before long, billions of pounds’ worth of Russian money was pouring into London’s banks and properties each year. The governments of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron were all anxious to preserve this new lifeline for an economy increasingly dependent on financial services to supplant its dying manufacturing industry. That was why grants of political asylum and investment visas were doled out so liberally to the wealthy new arrivals from Moscow. But it was equally important to cultivate close ties with Putin and smooth the path for British energy investments in Russia. And that was why the establishment discreetly averted its eyes when the Kremlin’s enemies started dropping dead on British soil.
Boris Berezovsky was the linchpin of the community of exiled Russians who fled to Britain after Putin came to power. The brilliant Soviet mathematician had become a billionaire by looting state assets during his time as a high-ranking member of Boris Yeltsin’s government, and he viewed himself as the kingmaker who had plucked Putin out of obscurity. But when his protégé lurched toward autocracy and began quashing all opposition, Berezovsky used the newspapers and TV channels he had amassed to launch blistering attacks. Enraged, Putin had warned publicly that oligarchs who stepped out of line would be crushed and began demolishing Berezovsky’s business empire in Moscow. But to the president’s fury, the oligarch had escaped to the green hills of England with his fortune intact.
Berezovsky found a network of British lawyers and financiers to help spirit his money out of Moscow and stash it out of the reach of the Russian authorities in a byzantine network of offshore vehicles. Then he began using his vast expatriated fortune to finance an international campaign of opposition to Putin’s regime from his new home in the English countryside and to bankroll the activities of a group of dissidents, including the whistle-blowing FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko, who joined him in Britain. Within a matter of months, the man who had helped bring Putin to power had made himself the number one enemy of the Russian state.
Berezovsky and his turbulent associates thought they had found a safe haven in England. They hoped that their grants of political asylum from the government would be enough to save them from the long arm of the Kremlin. They were wrong. One by one, in the years that followed, the lawyers, fixers, dissidents, and businessmen in Berezovsky’s circle would drop dead in strange or suspicious circumstances. One by one, the British authorities would close the cases with no investigation and carry on courting the Kremlin.
There was a single exception. The 2006 murder of Litvinenko with radioactive polonium in a London hotel was an act of provocation the British government could not ignore. The two assassins sent to poison the FSB defector botched their mission so badly that they left a radioactive trail all over the capital. Litvinenko died slowly in the full glare of the world’s media, allowing time for images of his gaunt and hairless frame to be beamed around the globe and for him to solve his own murder by accusing the Kremlin of ordering his killing in a statement issued from his deathbed.
Britain had no option but to respond, and the authorities charged the two assassins with murder in absentia after they fled back to Russia. But even in the face of a blatant act of nuclear terrorism on the streets of the capital, the government’s reaction was muted. The UK expelled a mere four Russian diplomats, and four British embassy staff were sent packing from Moscow in return. When Russia refused to extradite the two killers, foreclosing any hope of a criminal trial, the government stood in the way of efforts by the dead man’s widow, Marina Litvinenko, to secure a public inquiry into her husband’s murder. Theresa May personally intervened to quash the possibility during her tenure as home secretary, citing the need to protect “international relations” with Russia. It was a full decade later, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea had made reparation with the Kremlin impossible, that the government finally relented to demands for the inquiry, which ultimately found that Litvinenko had likely been assassinated on Putin’s orders. But back in 2006, Britain had too much at stake to pick an unwinnable fight with the Kremlin.
The cold, mercenary reality was that Anglo-Russian business was booming. The UK had become the biggest investor in Russia’s energy sector by the time Litvinenko was poisoned, and the British oil giant BP signed on to a historic joint venture with the then state-owned Russian energy company Gazprom just a week after the two countries played tit for tat with their diplomatic expulsions over the murder. Russian energy firms were investing big in the UK, too, and initial public offerings by Moscow firms were by then worth tens of billions of pounds each year to the London Stock Exchange. All that was a critical prop to the British economy, and it suited Putin just fine. Inward investment in Russia, and the global expansion of homegrown business, meant more rubles to pour into his campaign of foreign subversion, cyberweaponization, and military revampment. And as much as Putin was a creature of his Soviet training, he was also a kleptocrat. He wanted to make Russia great again, and he intended to enrich himself and his inner circle in the process. The more money that flowed into Moscow, the more he could siphon off into the secret network of offshore accounts, trusts, and properties that would ultimately make him, by some estimates, the world’s richest man.
But still, the diplomatic pain caused by the row over Litvinenko’s murder impeded Anglo-Russian relations at a time when Britain wanted nothing more than to stay in step with the rest of the West and keep the Kremlin close. In the years that followed, when Russian émigrés and their British fixers died with ever greater frequency, the authorities were all the more steadfast in their determination to look the other way. And the more the British government showed itself willing to shut its eyes, the more emboldened Russia became.
The reasons for Britain’s inaction were more than just financial. Russia’s murderous organized crime and state security complex began encroaching on the West just as the September 11, 2001, attacks drew all the firepower of Anglo-American intelligence and security machinery into the war on terror. Security-service officials at MI5 and counterterrorism detectives at Scotland Yard tasked with tracking organized crime groups and monitoring the subversive activities of foreign states were yanked off the job and redeployed in the fight against jihadist extremism while foreign intelligence chiefs at MI6 downsized the Russia desk and poured the lion’s share of their resources into the Middle East. When Berezovsky and his fellow exiles arrived in Britain, they brought with them extensive organized crime connections and came tailed by teams of Russian spies, turning London into a crucible of Russian secret service and mafia activity just as Britain’s security and intelligence establishment had taken its eye off the ball.
The few officials who did remain dedicated to monitoring Russian threats in Britain faced a Sisyphean challenge. Russia’s criminal networks are so deeply entangled with its state security apparatus, and Berezovsky and his associates were themselves so extensively connected to organized crime, that when threats were detected it was often impossible to tell whether they emanated from the government, the mafia, or both. The FSB would frequently enlist organized crime hoodlums to carry out crude hits on its behalf, while powerful mafia groups could enlist moonlighting state assassins to conduct more refined killings if required. And when the state was involved in a murder, the sophistication of its methods was often way beyond the ken of Scotland Yard, let alone the rural police forces that often picked up the job when rich Russians dropped dead in the home counties. FSB assassins were expert at disguising murders as accidents or suicides—even using drugs and psychological tactics to drive their targets into taking their own lives—and the state’s weapons labs had developed an arsenal of undetectable poisons designed to make a murder look like a natural death. Even if Britain’s spy agencies had strong intelligence pointing to an assassination, it was often impossible to share classified material with a court or a coroner without blowing the cover of sources and revealing highly sensitive methods. In such instances, it was easier to pronounce a death unsuspicious than to stoke diplomatic tension and public alarm over an accusation of political assassination that would be unlikely to stand up to judicial scrutiny.
As Russia’s activities in the wider world grew more blatantly hostile, the British authorities had a new consideration to add to the calculus. Fear. The government’s security advisers began cautioning that the Kremlin could inflict massive harm on Britain by unleashing cyberattacks, destabilizing the economy, or mobilizing elements of Britain’s large Russian population to cause disruption. Deep police funding cuts following the financial crisis of 2008 had weakened the UK’s law enforcement capabilities, and a decade of focus on jihadist terror had withered the institutional expertise on Russia within the security and intelligence services, leaving the nation exposed and vulnerable. Defense chiefs warned that Putin’s modernized military far outstripped the diminished capabilities of the austerity-ravaged British armed forces, and there were concerns that Russia could be creeping toward a full-scale conflict with the West as its actions became more overtly hostile. Suddenly, the specter of general war with Russia was being discussed in the corridors of Whitehall. If it came, the mandarins agreed, it could happen very rapidly—and Britain would be unprepared. This was no longer just about business. There were genuine existential threats to consider when the government calculated its response to Russian operations on its soil.
Putin had been flexing his muscles more boldly since the murder of Litvinenko. He set his weapons modernization plans in motion within weeks of the killing, quickly followed by a wave of crippling cyberattacks on Estonia, and embarked upon his first foreign military adventure with the invasion of Georgia in 2008. Cyberattacks on Germany, France, and the United States were to come, accompanied by Russia’s increasingly overt financing and support for far-right and separatist groups across Europe. But as the aggressions grew more audacious, the British government found itself stuck between its more hawkish American ally and European partners who remained heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas and who had no appetite for a fight. The invasion of eastern Ukraine was the tipping point.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March of 2014 marked the end of any serious hope that Putin could be coaxed into the liberal fold. Russia was suspended from the G8, the NATO countries ceased all political and military cooperation with Moscow, and the United States and European Union imposed scorching sanctions that, coupled with the slump in global oil prices, threatened to cripple the Russian economy. Undeterred, Putin pressed on with his latest adventure, sending tanks and heavy weapons over the border into the turbulent Donetsk and Luhansk regions and sparking a full-blown armed conflict with the Ukrainian government. Further waves of sanctions followed. Then pro-Russian forces shot down Malaysia Airlines flight 17, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, over eastern Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and fifteen crew members on board—and only then did the British government finally relent and announce a public inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko.
Even after that, the UK authorities continued to suppress evidence of the full scale of Russia’s killing campaign on British soil. It would take an indiscriminate chemical weapons attack on the streets of Britain to force the government to confront the menace it had long ignored.
By the time Sergei and Yulia Skripal collapsed in Salisbury, the West had finally woken up to the severity of the Russian threat. The attack came hot on the heels of a series of jaw-dropping moves by the Kremlin: brazen meddling in the US election in favor of Donald Trump; interference in democracies across Europe with state-sponsored hacking, internet trolling, and financing for extremist groups; an attempted coup in Montenegro; increasingly malignant cyberattacks on Western governments; and a military intervention in support of the Syrian regime as it unleashed wave after wave of chemical weapons attacks on its own people. Russia’s activities amounted to an all-out asymmetric war of subversion, using the full spectrum of state powers to disrupt and destabilize its Western enemies.
At the same time, Britain’s intelligence agencies were facing scrutiny from their US counterparts over their failure to get to grips with the escalating spate of Russian assassinations in the UK. US intelligence officials had been watching the pattern of deaths from across the Atlantic with mounting alarm, concerned that it could spread to American shores. They had for years been sharing intelligence with MI6 connecting the deaths of the men in Berezovsky’s circle and others to Russia and had looked on with consternation as every case was shut down by the authorities without investigation. Fears that Britain’s quiet complicity could be emboldening Putin to ramp up his killing campaign had intensified in 2015, following the strange death in Washington, DC, of Mikhail Lesin, a onetime Kremlin henchman who was preparing to start talking to the US Department of Justice. Relations between senior Russia officials at MI6 and their CIA counterparts were becoming increasingly strained.
Then in 2017, the summer before Skripal’s collapse, a team of investigative journalists at BuzzFeed News published a series of stories laying bare the pattern of Russian assassinations on British soil––and exposing the government’s attempts to suppress the evidence.
When Russia struck again, the prime minister no longer had any option but to take a stand. But the tough rhetoric and waves of diplomatic expulsions that followed the nerve-agent attack on the Skripals did not perturb a gleeful Putin as he careered toward reelection. Just hours after Theresa May accused Russia of a state-sponsored assassination attempt on British soil, the body of another Kremlin enemy was discovered. Nikolai Glushkov was a close friend and business associate of Berezovsky’s and an avowed foe of Putin. He was found at his home on the London outskirts, strangled with a dog leash. Counterterrorism officers from Scotland Yard quickly took command of the investigation, but the killer had not left a trace.
Meanwhile, Sergei and Yulia Skripal were making a miraculous recovery. That was thanks to the expertise of the scientists at Porton Down and the state-of-the-art treatments they had developed for nerve-agent poisoning. Detective Sergeant Bailey, the off-duty doctor and nurse, and the children from the green were all discharged from the hospital, and when they were well enough, the Skripals were moved to a secure location to complete their recovery. A multimillion-pound military cleanup operation was under way in nine Salisbury locations that had been contaminated with the nerve agent, and it seemed for a while that the British authorities might have contained the crisis without any lives being lost. Then, four months after the initial attack, news broke that two more people in Salisbury had been hospitalized with symptoms of Novichok poisoning.
Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley were a couple in their midforties who had fallen on hard times. On a balmy summer day at the end of June, Rowley had found what he thought would make an elegant gift for his girlfriend while out rifling through local trash cans and dumpsters: a gold Nina Ricci perfume box containing a small bottle with a long nozzle attached to the lid. He took it home and gave it to Sturgess, who sprayed it on both wrists.
The bottle did not contain perfume. It was the vessel that had been used by Russia’s assassins to transport their Novichok to Salisbury, and Sturgess had doused herself with ten times the amount of nerve agent used on the Skripals. She died in the hospital just over a week later. Some of the Novichok had splashed onto Rowley’s hands, but he narrowly pulled through and woke from his coma two days after his girlfriend had died. There were no pallbearers at Sturgess’s funeral. The government’s public-health watchdog had put special measures in place to protect the mourners from contamination.
Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism command had deployed its finest officers to hunt the state agents who had deployed the Novichok, but for six months there was no sign that their inquiry had turned up any leads. Then, on September 5, the country’s premier police force announced two men were being charged with the attempted assassination of the Skripals. They were identified as two serving members of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, who had entered Britain under false names. Police released photos of both men along with CCTV stills of the grinning assassins arriving at Gatwick Airport, traveling to a shabby hotel in East London, and carrying out a reconnaissance mission to Salisbury before returning to the city on March 4 to deploy the nerve agent.
A spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry dismissed the fruits of the British investigation as a “big fake.” Then Putin announced that Scotland Yard’s two suspects had been found living innocently in Russia, declaring that they were “civilians” and would be coming forward shortly to tell their story. The two men appeared in an interview aired by the Russian propaganda network RT the following day, claiming they were tourists who had visited Salisbury simply to admire its cathedral.
Later that month, the investigative website Bellingcat identified one of the suspects as a GRU veteran named Colonel Anatoliy Vladimirovich Chepiga, who had served in Chechnya and Ukraine and had been personally decorated with the nation’s highest honor by Vladimir Putin. Soon after, the site identified the second man as a GRU doctor named Alexander Mishkin.
The Kremlin dismissed the reports just as Britain’s intelligence agencies confirmed them. In a speech the following month, Putin denounced Skripal as a “traitor” and a “scumbag” before angrily denying GRU involvement in the events in Salisbury.
In the corridors of Whitehall and the riverside headquarters of the security and intelligence services, officials were asking themselves how it had come to this. The propensity of Russia’s enemies for dying strange and sudden deaths in Britain had long been regarded with a degree of indifference. If you were a Russian robber baron who got rich on the spoils of the fallen Soviet state or a dirty financier who helped launder an ill-gotten fortune in the West, and if you met a sticky end—well, then, maybe you got what you paid for. Even after the West began to wake up to the menace of the man in the Kremlin, the deaths were seen as individual cases unworthy of much consideration by officials playing catch-up from years of inattention and struggling to get to grips with bigger issues like Russia’s new nuclear capabilities and its troop movements in Ukraine. But now that hundreds of British citizens had been exposed to a nerve agent, and there was no sign of remorse from the Kremlin, it was hard to deny that Putin’s killing campaign had been allowed to spin out of control. How could he be stopped?
Vladimir Putin’s covert war was, finally, in the spotlight. But for all their flustered protestations, Britain’s leaders could not claim with any sincerity to be surprised. They knew they had turned away as Russia’s assassins stalked the streets. They knew they had stood by as Putin’s enemies and their British fixers died.
This is the story of the men who lived and died in the Kremlin’s crosshairs on British soil—and the secrets, buried with them, that successive governments never wanted to be told.
