Russians Among Us

by Gordon Corera

  SALISBURY IS A picturesque, quintessentially English town, an incongruous place to find a former Russian paratrooper and spy. But it was where Sergei Skripal had made his new life. Neighbors were oblivious to the fact that the man barbecuing sausages to the point that they were largely inedible in the garden of his modest home had fought and killed in Afghanistan and exchanged secret messages with British spies. But it was also hard for those who met him to miss the fact that he was a Russian. Any hopes of a quiet, peaceful retirement would prove illusory. First, there had been domestic tragedy. In 2011, Skripal’s wife was diagnosed with cancer. After she died, he would still talk to her as if she were there. His son, Sasha, still living in Russia, had suffered from the stigma of treachery since his father’s arrest. He turned to drink and developed severe liver problems. In July 2017, he died at age forty-three. His body was brought to the United Kingdom and Skripal would visit his grave after his weekly shopping trip, carrying a sense of guilt. Skripal’s brother died in 2016 in a car crash. It was as if death were stalking him.

  THE LIFE OF spies after they defect or are swapped is rarely easy (much has been made of Kim Philby’s time in Moscow listening to cricket matches on the radio). They are a “declining asset” in terms of their value over time, one person who looked after them explains. But those who knew him say Skripal was resilient, enjoying TV documentaries and visiting local museums with a military flavor like the tank museum in Bovington and the Army Flying Museum in the delightfully named village of Middle Wallop. He did miss Russia. He would buy Russian dumplings in bulk and freeze them, eating them while playing World War II tank games on his computer. He gave the odd lecture about the GRU to military academies and European spy services, as former agents often did. But any knowledge would have been dated, given he had left the GRU two decades earlier.

  By spring 2018, Sergei Skripal had lived through much—from Kaliningrad through Afghanistan to Vienna and Salisbury. He was looking forward to the visit of his daughter Yulia, who arrived on Saturday, March 3. On Sunday, they left Zizzi restaurant just after three thirty. It was a popular place with the family. A picture of Yulia and Sergei, her holding up a glass of wine and him, looking happy, holding up a half-drunk pint of lager, would become one of the iconic images of the pair in the coming days. What few realized was that in the mirror behind them you can see the reflection of the person taking the picture, the departed Sasha, the photo taken on a visit before he died. That Sunday afternoon after lunch father and daughter began to feel ill and then staggered to a park bench. Next they were in the hospital, hovering between life and death. But unlike Alexander Litvinenko, they would eventually pull through thanks to good fortune and remarkable medical care.

  Inside the British Secret Service’s headquarters, the realization that the Russians had targeted one of their agents on home soil sent shock waves through the building. It threatened the very core of their business. Protecting agents is vital. If those who chose to betray secrets to MI6 could not be protected in Britain itself, then others contemplating such an act might well think twice. This, of course, was precisely the Kremlin’s intention.

  Why was Skripal targeted? Various motives have been suggested, including that he might have been carrying out operational activity—perhaps in Ukraine or by identifying former colleagues to be approached. But it was simpler than that. He was a traitor, in the eyes of the GRU and of Putin. He was a military man who had gone against his oath for money. But it was not just about punishing him. It was also about sending a message to others—not so much those who had already walked down his path and were living abroad, but rather to those within Russia considering treachery. If you were an SVR or GRU officer or any other Russian official thinking of responding to that British or American pitch you had encountered, did you really want to take that risk? Even if you seemed to have got away with it and cashed out a few million dollars and had a home in Florida or Salisbury, your former colleagues would still come looking for you. Even after close to a decade, when you thought you were living a quiet life, they would still hunt you down and try to kill you and not care about hurting those you loved as they did it. This was the message. It was a message that made perfect sense for a regime that had built its foundations on spy fever. And, as with Litvinenko, the main piece of evidence pointing to the Russian state had been the use of the most unusual of weapons.

  A CALL HAD come into Porton Down, home to Britain’s secretive biological and chemical research establishment, early Monday morning. A rapid-response team was sent out to the scene within hours. The teams work 24/7 attending scenes of terrorist attacks to look for traces of explosives and chemical or biological weapons. For those responding to Salisbury, the most jarring element was that they were carrying out this search almost literally on their doorstep, in the same community where many investigators lived. Soon after the attack, a visit to the usually closed and secretive site revealed a strange landscape with odd-shaped buildings almost like Hobbit homes where explosives are tested, with red warning flags littered around. The site is purely defensive in its work today, officials stressed to me. Inside one 1930s building is a tightly sealed chamber where a robot marches on the spot and live “agent” is pumped in to see how long it takes to burn through the suit it is wearing. Such is the danger that when the chamber is washed out afterward, the tanks that hold the residue have to be carefully destroyed. After the Salisbury incident, samples were rushed back to the labs on-site. They identified a highly unusual poison—A234, a military-grade nerve agent from the Novichok family. It was developed by the Soviet Union specifically to get around NATO’s defenses.

  The revelation from Porton Down added to the sense of shock. A policeman wearing gloves had opened Skripal’s front door, but the Novichok still made it through and poisoned him. It had been smeared messily on the door handle. The perfume bottle it had been carried in was dumped callously in a charity donation box, killing a local woman, Dawn Sturgess, who picked it up and sprayed herself with it three months later.

  The chief of MI6, Alex Younger, made one of his rare public appearances at St. Andrew’s University in Scotland six months after the poisoning. I asked him whether he thought MI6 had failed to do enough to protect its former agent. Younger began with the boilerplate response that it was impossible to confirm or deny who might have been one of MI6’s agents or what arrangements are put in place to protect them. But then his face darkened. “Mr. Skripal came to the UK in an American-brokered exchange, having been pardoned by the president of Russia,” he said in response to my question. “And to the extent that we assumed that had any meaning, that is not an assumption we will make again.”

  The poisoning was a failure, several senior officials who served in British intelligence concede. A risk assessment was carried out when Skripal was swapped out. The view was that he had been pardoned and should be safe and so would not need to be given a new identity. As a “settled defector” he had his own say on what kind of security he wanted to live under. But veterans say that the pardon should never have been seen as counting for much since the Russians would have felt they were forced into it. “People with my background don’t believe in things like that,” says one former spy. Putin, they say, will have bitterly hated being forced into a swap. And the Putin of 2018 was a different Putin from the man he was a few years earlier. There may have once been an unwritten rule that spy services do not go after swapped defectors. But anyone who had been watching Russia should have realized that one thing was now true—Putin no longer played by the old rules.

  Skripal’s risk assessment was never updated to take into account that the Russia of 2018 was very different from the Russia of 2010. British national security officials express surprise at the lack of protection around the spy. There were not even security cameras on his house to watch anyone who came to visit. MI5 and the Home Office did carry out a “refresh” on the security of defectors after the fact, something officials acknowledge was overdue. MI5—now three times larger than
it was in the 1990s—has shifted more resources toward Russia. But it still sees counterterrorism as its core mission, and it has been as busy as ever stopping terrorist plots. Russia was long described as an annoying distraction from the priority of saving lives. But as evidence of Russia’s willingness to interfere politically and kill people on British soil grew, that argument seemed harder to sustain. Suddenly the spying game looked a lot more serious and deadly.

  Detective work would identify two GRU officers who came to Britain as the main suspects. The ease of their identification made the point all too clearly about how spying and maintaining your cover had become much harder in the digital age. A combination of passport data and CCTV images allowed a private investigative group, Bellingcat, not only to name the two officers but even trace dozens of other GRU operatives and their travels. The bizarre appearance on Russian TV of the pair—in which they claimed that they had come to Salisbury as tourists to admire the spire of the cathedral—was met with widespread derision in Britain. The pair, it is fair to say, did not look like tourists who would have come all the way to the United Kingdom for a weekend to see a spire, however impressive. As with Litvinenko’s alleged assassins, it was tempting to see Russia’s spies as bungling and inept. Until you remember that in both cases people died. Salisbury was characteristic of their new approach—highly aggressive, even reckless, in intent but also often sloppy in execution, perhaps reflecting a lack of care about getting caught. After all, even if you are caught, then you can deny everything, as Russia has done, and use your information warfare tools to muddy the waters while also knowing the effect will still be to intimidate.

  RUSSIA HAS LONG had a program to go after those seen as traitors, says one senior official. In the Cold War, it drew up lists of those singled out for assassination. Embassy officers were given the job of establishing their whereabouts and movements, down to what pub they liked to frequent. Department 8 of Directorate S had the task of carrying out any actual killings, though. Over the past ten to fifteen years, officials say there have been at least a dozen cases of individuals being targeted—mostly within Russia or around its borders. Russians abroad have died in mysterious circumstances in a multitude of cases. In some of these cases, there may be nothing suspicious. In others it may be linked to corruption and organized crime, and still others to treachery. But often the investigations have been so cursory that the real answer may never be known, which leaves you wondering if governments may sometimes prefer not to find out and have to deal with the consequences. Russian exiles frequently complain of surveillance by operatives in the United Kingdom or express fears that potential agents may be inserted into their circle of acquaintances in order to report back.

  Why was Skripal targeted in March 2018? Perhaps because Britain seemed weak. Its response to the killing of Litvinenko had been pathetic. And it was on the back foot because of Brexit. That was likely how Moscow saw things. The chances of a tough response, they thought, were low. Those with a close insight into the investigation say the assassination attempt had been a long time in the planning—at least a year. The British government said that the GRU had been hacking into Yulia’s email from as early as 2013, likely for reconnaissance, something that was only discovered when forensics were done on her machine after the attack. The final timing may well have been opportunistic based around tracking Yulia’s travel or when the assassins were available, given that they look to have been busy carrying out operational tasks in Ukraine just before.

  Putin himself never admitted Salisbury was a Russian operation. But when he was asked about events just over a year later, he reiterated his absolutist view on treachery. “Treason is the gravest crime possible and traitors must be punished. I am not saying that the Salisbury incident is the way to do it. Not at all. But traitors must be punished. . . . It is the most despicable crime that one can imagine.” How high up was the operation approved? At a senior level, British officials say, although they cannot be sure Putin gave his explicit go-ahead. One possibility is that there was a standing order to go after traitors and the opportunity simply came up and was taken. Elements of the Russian state—including the GRU—have wide latitude to act within broader orders from the Kremlin and will, on occasion, compete to show how aggressive they are.

  There were reports that former top SVR officials had got in touch with European counterparts shortly after the poisoning to explain they were not responsible. It was a sign of the fallout and infighting—many suspected that information that emerged about the GRU’s role came from the FSB, keen to portray the GRU as a bunch of useless thugs who had been sloppy so they could gain the upper hand in foreign operations.

  London had learned something from its experience with Litvinenko and the reaction was tougher this time. Every known Russian intelligence officer operating under diplomatic cover in the United Kingdom (apart from the declared liaison officer for each service) was expelled—twenty-three in all. They came from all three Russian intelligence services, but British officials say the SVR officers were the most active talent spotters and recruiters of agents and the ones who caused most concern when it came to political influence, cultivating contacts, and looking for sources. The decision was taken to kick out the spies fast—part of the reason being to give them less time to hand over agents they were running and make it easier to detect either those agents or any interim case officers who were going to handle them (they might be working as illegals under nondiplomatic cover). At the British National Security Council meeting discussing the move, the issue of retaliation was raised. The chief of MI6 almost laughed when it was asked whether he had twenty-three officers the Russians could expel in Moscow. The real number was nothing like that, which meant a fair few genuine diplomats would have to pack their bags. Russian spies are nervous about being kicked out of a cushy posting like London, since it leads to being blocked from anywhere in the West. British officials believe they did real damage to Russian intelligence operations in the country but are under no illusions that there are not more spies still at large. And for all the talk of tough action, there was still no significant move against all the corrupt Russian money swilling around London, no denial of access to financial markets for Moscow or restrictions on the purchase of property through shell companies. And it did not take very long for the voices to resurface arguing that it was time to forget all the spy stuff and get back to business. Old habits die hard.

  IN WASHINGTON THERE was surprise at Moscow’s audacity. “It is as if we were to take the time to go after the poor [illegal] families and knock them off. It is crazy,” says Leon Panetta, the former CIA chief who oversaw the Vienna swap. “It’s a reflection that Putin never forgot what happened here and wanted to make a point.” The United States expelled sixty Russian diplomats, twelve of them at the UN. A senior US official said at the time there were “well over” a hundred Russian spies under diplomatic cover, probably around 150. The Russian consulate in Seattle was shuttered (it was reported that Microsoft had been a target as Russian spies looked for employees and coders who could be recruited). It also emerged that some of the Russian facilities dotted around the country that were closed down at the end of 2016 in retaliation for election interference had been used for an operation that had managed to monitor the secure communications of the FBI’s surveillance teams after the end of the Ghost Stories investigation.

  The expulsions and closures damaged Russian operations in the West, but the reality is that throwing out intelligence officers under diplomatic cover makes far less difference than it did in the past. In the Cold War, spies under diplomatic cover and illegals were the primary way the Russians could recruit and run agents and steal secrets. Now there are many more ways. There is cyber espionage, allowing the SVR, GRU, and FSB to steal secrets remotely from behind a computer screen in Moscow. The online world has also transformed human intelligence. In the past, it would take legwork by agents or illegals to research a potential target. Now people post on Facebook or tweet. Spies can the
n use covert access to databases to further build their picture. And the Russians have new options like business cover or people co-opted through cutouts and oligarchs to work on the ground. Russia has also increasingly turned to spies on short-term visas, who are less likely to be the subject of intense surveillance than counterparts operating out of embassies. These “TDY” travelers (military slang for someone on temporary duty) are used increasingly to clear dead drops and collect intelligence. Both British and American security officials say they regularly see spies heading out to the countryside with rucksacks to map out communications infrastructure—satellite links, ground stations, and internet exchange points. They cannot be sure whether it is for espionage—where to put a probe to siphon off data—or for illegals to carry out sabotage in time of war. These spies were also used to carry out reconnaissance on defectors in the United States in the wake of the 2010 arrests, alongside embassy-based counterparts.

  AFTER THE SKRIPAL case, the FBI reviewed its own protection of defectors. Sitting in his comfortable suburban home, a former KGB officer in the United States explains he had always assumed that the long arm of the Kremlin would not reach into America. But would they really not risk the consequences? Not everyone is sure anymore. The Skripal case was just one sign that this assumption might be outdated. After Salisbury, urgent inquiries were made into how easy it might be to find defectors and former agents in the United States. Hundreds of individuals and their families are looked after by the National Resettlement Operations Center, within the CIA. Its staff have always taken extensive precautions, using Moscow-level tradecraft in Washington to make sure they are not followed when they leave their anonymous office to meet defectors for a catch-up. But it is getting harder to protect them now, CIA veterans say, partly because their families want to be on social media. Defectors are normally advised to keep a low profile but even if they take that advice, disappearing is getting much harder to do thanks to their digital trails. Some also share that risky characteristic of spies who lived on the edge—they are sure they will never get caught. The Russian program to track down defectors was boosted around 2014—exactly the moment that its other operations, whether cyber hacking or political interference, were also being unleashed. It was all part of the conflict that the Russians felt they were already engaged in but which the West had not fully appreciated.