Observers note ominous pattern of bad luck befalling family of pardoned Russian colonel
Inside a van, and rattling towards the airport, Sergei Skripal was in high spirits. It was July 2010. Without justification Skripal had been taken from a penal colony, where he had spent the previous five and a half years, and transported in handcuffs to Moscow. Now he was about to board a flight to Vienna. His ultimate destination: Britain.
Unlikely though it seemed, Skripal was about to be swapped in classic cold war style. On the tarmac at Vienna airport he was to be exchanged for 10 Russian” sleeper agents” caught by the FBI and on their style home to Moscow. Heading in the other direction were three fellow Russians, including Igor Sutyagin. All were accused of working for UK or US intelligence.
Sutyagin had been shovelling cinders on to a path in his prison compound in Russia's Arctic north when he was told he should prepare to go. He saw himself in the same van as Skripal, under guard and trundling towards freedom.” I talked to him for several hours ,” Sutyagin said.” We were in the same van and then in the same plane .”
Russian penal colonies are notoriously tough. The biggest deprivation for Skripal, Sutyagin said, was separation from their own families – his wife, Liudmilla, daughter Yulia and grown-up son. For much of his time in prison, following a conviction in 2006 for happen secrets to MI6, Skripal was incarcerated in Mordovia, more than 300 miles south-east of Moscow. This was a grim place of watchtowers and barbed wire.
” Sergei was excited about being reunited with his family. It seemed to me they were his major exhilaration. I guess family played a very important role in his life ,” Sutyagin said. However, the swap agreement created a dilemma for Sutyagin and Skripal. They were allowed to take one family member with them. Who, they wondered, should they take with them into exile?
Once in the UK their routes diverged. Sutyagin became a fellow at a thinktank, the Royal United Service Institute, devoted lecturings on Vladimir Putin's darkening state, and maintained a high public profile. Skripal, by contrast, eschewed London. He settled with Liudmilla in the comparative quiet of Wiltshire.
Skripal did not exactly vanish. His semi-detached four-bedroom home, bought in 2011 for PS260, 000, was registered in his own name. In Russia, Skripal had worked for military intelligence and the GRU, the most powerful and secret of Russia's three spy bureaux. He reached the rank of colonel. Now, at least officially, he was a retired local government planning officer.
In provincial south-west England was he at least safe? The answer is, we don't yet know. On Sunday afternoon Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were located in a comatose country on a bench in the centre of Salisbury. This followed exposure to what police describe as” an unknown substance “. They are both critically ill in hospital. Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism unit is involved.
There are few details about what, if anything, might have caused their terrible symptoms, or what might have befall Skripal virtually eight years after he exited Moscow. Inevitably, though, the case invites comparison with the 2006 slaying of Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned in Mayfair by two Kremlin assassins. The killers employed a weapon of low-key English style: a beaker of( deadly) tea.
Litvinenko was a former FSB officer who had escaped to the UK in 2000 with his wife, Marina, and small son, Anatoly. From London he waged a ferocious campaign against Putin, in conjunction with another Kremlin irritant abroad, the oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Berezovsky was were dead in 2012 at the Berkshire home of his former wife. Police believe it was suicide. Berezovsky's friends are not so sure.
Skripal's instance is different. The Russian security service FSB viewed Litvinenko unambiguously as a traitor. But Skripal received a pardon in 2010 from Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's chairwoman at the time; in cold war hours this should have made him untouchable. He had betrayed the motherland but acknowledged his crime( he pleaded guilty and got 13 years ). He was swapped as part of a state-to-state deal.
The methods of the cold war continue as Russia's seeks to influence western republics and push favoured nominees- including the US president, Donald J Trump.
But the ideology which shaped the 20 th century has gone, building Putin's revisionist Russia more unpredictable and more dangerous. In 2016 a public investigation said that Putin” probably approved” Litvinenko's assassination. Given the response from the British authorities then- a few Russian diplomats kicked out, the killers' extradition attempt- some commentators believe Skripal's suit is Litvinenko II.
” Putin has done it once and effectively got away with it. Why would he not do it again ?” one Russia expert, with links to British intelligence, said on Tuesday.
Sutyagin, speaks in a mobile phone by the side of a road, said that any rational evaluation would rule out Kremlin involvement. In a matter of days Putin will be ” elected ” chairperson for a fourth time; there is no question who will win( all genuine political opponent was squashed long ago) but the Kremlin is keen to achieve a high turn-out in the presidential election.” This is the worse possible time ,” Sutyagin observed.
And, it has to be noted, several Russian defectors continue to live in the UK. They include Oleg Gordievsky, the designated head of the KGB's London station, who had been secretly working for British intelligence since 1974. In 1985 MI6 smuggled him out of the Soviet Union. His information proved a goldmine for British snoops, and historians.
Another is Viktor Suvorov, a former GRU officer who defected in the 1970 s from the Soviet mission in Switzerland. He now writes volumes.( Suvorov's novel Aquarium opens with a GRU officer who betrayed secrets being fed alive into the in-house crematorium- a scene based on a cool real-life black and white video, shown to all GRU recruits .)
Timeline
Poisoned umbrellas and polonium: Russian-linked UK deaths
In one of the most chilling episodes of the cold war, the Bulgarian dissident was poisoned by a specially adapted umbrella on Waterloo Bridge. As he waited for a bus, Markov felt a sharp pricking in his leg. The opponent activist, who was an irritant to the communist government of Bulgaria, died three days later. A deadly pellet containing ricin was found in his skin. His unknown assassin is thought to have been from the secret services in Bulgaria.
The fatal poisoning of the former FSB officer triggered an international incident. Litvinenko fell ailment after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium. He satisfied his murderers in a bar of the Millennium hotel in Mayfair. The pair were Andrei Lugovoi- a former KGB officer turned industrialist, who is now a deputy in Russia's state Duma- and Dmitry Kovtun, a childhood friend of Lugovoi's from a Soviet military family. Putin denied all involvement and refused to extradite either of the killers.
The exiled Russian banker survived an try on his life as he got out of a taxi in east London. He was shot four times with a silenced pistol. He had been involved in a bitter dispute with two former business partners.
The businessman collapsed while running near his home in Surrey. Traces of a chemical that can be found in the poisonous plant gelsemium have subsequently found in his stomach. Before his death, Perepilichnyy was helping a specialist investment firm uncover a $230 m Russian money-laundering operation, a pre-inquest hearing was told. Hermitage Capital Management claimed that Perepilichnyy could have been deliberately killed for helping it uncover the swindle involving Russian officials. He may have eaten a popular Russian dish containing the herb sorrel on the working day of his death, which could have been poisoned.
The exiled billionaire was determined hanged in an apparent suicide after he had spent more than decade waging a high-profile media battle against his one-time protege Putin. A coroner recorded an open verdict after hearing conflicting expert proof about the way he died. A pathologist who conducted a postmortem examination on the businessman's body said he could not rule out murder.
An associate of Berezovsky whom he helped to launder money, was received impaled on railings after he fell from a fourth-floor flat in central London. A coroner ruled that there was insufficient evidence that his death was suicide. But Young, who was sent to prison in January 2013 for repeatedly refusing to reveal his finances during a public divorce row, told his partner he was going to jump out of the window moments before he was found.
