THE SKRIPAL FILES: THE LIFE AND NEAR DEATH OF A RUSSIAN SPY
By Mark Urban
Henry Holt and Company, $30, 310 pages
Speaking to reporters in December 2010, Russian President Vladimir Putin denied that his spy agencies had assassination squads that targeted defectors. But he voiced an ominous warning. “Whatever thirty pieces of silver those people may have gotten, they will stick in their throat.”
Despite his shortcomings as a decent human, give Mr. Putin credit: He carries out his threats. Any person unfortunate enough to cross him is a step removed from the grave.
The civilized world was shocked in March when a defected Russian intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter, Yulia, were stricken with a mysterious poison in the quiet British town of Salisbury. They were in critical condition for weeks but survived. Scientific tests identified the poison involved as Novichok, developed by Russia for germ warfare. It had been smeared on the door knob of the Skripal home.
The attack matched earlier Russian murder operations, notably the poisoning death of defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.
Mr. Skripal, a onetime Red Army airborne colonel, had shifted to the GRU, the military’s intelligence arm. Disillusioned with the Communist regime, he tried to resign, but was refused. (As Mr. Putin himself once said, “There is no such thing as an ex-KGB man.”
Assigned to Spain, Mr. Skripal contacted an officer of MI6, the British spy agency. As a defector-in-place, he gave MI6 intricate details of GRU world-wide operations.
Eventually his association with MI6 was revealed to the Soviets by a Spanish turncoat, one Roberto Flores. But Flores had scant solid evidence of his spying, thus Mr. Skripal was not summarily executed. Instead, after a sham trial in 2006, he was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
What saved Mr. Skripal from execution? Another Russian, Yuri Burlatov, a naval officer, had also been arrested in Spain. Under interrogation, in an apparent attempt at a bargain, he named high officers of the FSB (successor to the KGB) as siphoning off funds from a Russian “technological shopping spree.”
Burlatov charged that officers in the GRU Madrid headquarters were creating false invoices, with the pilfered stolen proceeds being shared up the line of command.
The official ultimately responsible for the corruption was Gen. Nikolai Patrushev, the FSB director and a close ally of Vladimir Putin. (He is now general secretary of the Russian security council.)
Burlatov’s bargaining failed. He was found dead, a claimed “suicide” by self-strangulation. That several of his fingers had been cut off suggested otherwise. The death was a grisly warning of the dangers of offending Mr. Putin’s inner circle.
Mr. Skripal has resigned himself to dying in prison. Then, in 2006, a stroke of luck. An FBI counterintelligence operation broke a ring of deep-cover Russian agents, including couples living in Washington, New York and Boston. Posing as American citizens, their mission was to build careers in banking, government and other institutions. The FBI busted the scheme before they succeeded.
In a spy swap, Mr. Skripal was one of the prisoners the Soviets picked for release. He chose to live in England, and MI6 settled him and his daughter in Salisbury.
Several other resettled spies had spoken out publicly against Mr. Putin and his plutocrat cronies. Such criticism was widely cited as the reason Litvinenko was murdered. Mr. Skripal’s earlier silence on the GRU corruption was apparently taken as a sign that he would not be a whistle-blower.
And indeed Mr. Skripal initially remained silent, with he and his daughter blending in with neighbors. Nonetheless, MI6 permitted him to have long interviews with Mark Urban, longtime national security correspondent for BBC, and the author of 11 earlier books on military and intelligence.
Mr. Urban’s plan was for a book on intelligence during the Cold War. Mr. Skripal happily recounted in detail his work for the GRU, and he also revealed several bombshells, including a short-lived military plot to assassinate Mr. Putin. He also told Mr. Urban about the corruption in the FSB high command.
Did the Russians become aware of the tell-all nature of Mr. Skripal’s interviews? Mr. Urban does not address that question in his book.
Given Russia’s past reputation for tracking down and killing talkative defectors, the British government early on accused Moscow of ordering the poison attacks — denied, of course, by Mr. Putin. The British had street videos of the perpetrators but no proof of their identity.
Nonetheless, Britain and allies (including the United States) expelled some 160 Soviet spies from embassies, which Mr. Urban terms “a global action larger than any other Cold War move against Soviet or Russian espionage networks.”
But Mr. Urban’s book benefited from an appropriate sequel. The week it was published in London, a fledgling investigative website named <a href="http://BellingCat.com" rel="nofollow">BellingCat.com</a> used the street surveillance videos to identify two Russian intelligence officers. One listed a Moscow home address that is the same as the GRU headquarters.
The named Russian would-be assassins claimed innocence, saying they visited Salisbury to admire a Gothic cathedral. Believe them if you wish: The evidence seems otherwise.
• Joseph C. Goulden writes frequently on intelligence and military affairs.
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Spokespeople for the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation commented on the expansion of US sanctions against Russia because of the alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election. According to Russian officials, there is already a round number of anti-Russian restrictions.
“We continue watching the United States practicing sanctions against our country. It appears that it has turned into some kind of national fun there, because yesterday’s anti-Russian measures have become the 60th since 2011,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said.
Ryabkov noted that Washington continues to introduce new sanctions because old ones bring no results.
“We can also see the excitement that has engulfed American politicians, many of whom, being prisoners to their beliefs of their own “exceptionalism,” hope that they need to take a little bit more effort before they can start dictating their conditions to Russia,” Ryabkov said.
“No one will succeed in this ever,” the official continued. “Washington operators of the sanctions machine ought to get acquainted with the history of Russia, to stop the unnecessary fussing,” he added. He also noted that the Americans “thoughtlessly rock global stability by escalating tensions in the Russian-American relations.”
“It’s stupid to play with fire, because it can become dangerous,” the deputy head of the department said.
On September 29, Washington announced the imposition of sanctions on 27 physical and six legal entities from Russia, whom the US administration links with intelligence services and defense institutions. The sanctions were introduced as a response to Russia’s alleged interference in the election of the American president in 2016.
In particular, the United States imposed sanctions on PMC Wagner, the St. Petersburg Agency for Internet Research (known as the “troll factory”), Evgeny Prigozhin’s companies Concord Management and Consulting and Concord Catering. Prigozhin himself, who is dubbed as “Putin’s chef,” also appears on the sanctions list.
The list also includes alleged employees of the “troll factory” and employees of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation accused of interfering in the 2017 presidential vote in the US: First Deputy Head of the GRU Vladimir Alekseev, Deputy Chief of the GRU Sergei Gizunov, GRU supervisor Igor Korobov, Deputy Chief of the GRU Igor Kostyukov.
The list of sanctioned companies includes Defense Ministry’s logistics company Oboronlogistics, an aviation plant in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, MiG aircraft-building corporation and Tupolev aviation design bureau.
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