Snatched for Stalin’s torture cells
Salisbury poison victim Sergei Skripal was a double agent and a vital MI6 asset. And as he reveals in a riveting new book, he thought he’d got away with it — until the net closed in ...
BEFORE he was poisoned in the Novichok nerve agent attack in Salisbury in March, Russian defector Sergei Skripal talked in great detail to defence specialist MARK URBAN about his life as an MI6 spy. In Saturday’s nail-biting account we learned how he fell out of love with Russia and was turned by British intelligence. Here, in the concluding part, we reveal how he learned he had been betrayed ...and the horrifying consequences
SNATCHED, hooded and handcuffed by heavies from the Russian security service, Sergei Skripal was bundled into a van and driven to Moscow’s dreaded Lefortovo Prison. Once booked in there, you entered a netherworld.
Since Tsarist days, its most noted prisoners had always been those accused of dissent, espionage and treason. Under Stalin, its cell blocks were a key part in the industrial process of torture, confession and liquidation.
In 1996, the new thought police, the FSB, had taken charge of the prison.
After his arrest late in 2004, Skripal — a retired colonel with a distinguished army record and a high-flying officer in the GRU, the military intelligence arm of the Russian military — was reduced to the status of a common prisoner, sharing a cell with two others.
One of them, he told me when I interviewed him last year, was ‘a real Moscow bandit, who’d killed three policemen and was charged with terrorism rather than a simple crime’. His body was tattooed with Nazi themes.
The other was smaller and quieter, and Skripal instantly clocked him as an informer. Burly Skripal gave him a good beating, pumping his paratrooper-trained fists into his cowering cellmate, and the man was removed.
The routines of Lefortovo came to dominate every hour of Skripal’s life during the crushing, dark weeks of his first winter there. The prison day ran from 6am to the 10pm ‘lights out’.
But conditions were surprisingly reasonable for a prisoner on remand awaiting trial. There were three meals and a packet of cigarettes a day. Bed sheets were changed every week and he was even allowed visitors. Once a month, his wife Liudmila arrived with home-cooked meals. She also managed to get him a TV and a small fridge.
But these comforts apart, life was hard with the endless interrogations he faced. Twice a day, he was led from his cell for four-hour sessions in a screened-off room — always the same mind-numbing questions about his identity, his service, his routines, his contacts with foreign intelligence services.
HE COUNTED 17 different interrogators during the almost two years he was in Lefortovo, all trying to get him to confess in return for a lighter sentence. Other prisoners were beaten but Skripal wasn’t.
‘They never used physical force against me,’ he told me. They knew that with his tough military training he could take pain. However, there was always the fear that they might just do away with him.
He couldn’t be executed as the death penalty had been shelved in Russia, including for high treason and espionage. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t just disappear — just as he knew another GRU agent working for a Western intelligence agency had. He later turned up dead, strangled, with his fingers hacked off.
In front of his interrogators, Skripal tried to remain calm. From their questioning, he wondered which of those trips he’d made to Malta, Italy and Spain, where he had secretly been in contact with British agents, had been logged. Had he been under surveillance for much longer than he had realised?
But he stuck doggedly to his explanations. The writing in invisible ink they’d found in his flat? As an intelligence officer, he needed it to show his own agents how to communicate. Yes, there were large cheques paid into his bank account, but after leaving the GRU he’d become a businessman.
And as for his last couple of trips abroad, well, if they’d actually spotted him talking to British spooks, why not confront him?
It became clear they couldn’t tie him to anyone specific in MI6 and nor could they prove he’d passed any intelligence to the British.
Skripal came to the conclusion that someone must have betrayed him to the FSB, but that the rat had to be protected and could not give evidence against him in court. As the questioning went on, he told himself that if he just hung in there, refusing to give an inch, they’d have to let him go.
His hopes were in vain. In October 2006, a closed military court sentenced him to 13 years in a labour camp.
In Russia, his trial made headlines, with pictures of him caged in the dock as his sentence was passed, followed by much blackening of his name, angling in on the moral corruption, greed and egocentricity of those who spied for the West.
It was claimed that Skripal had been paid a total of $100,000 (€75,000) by MI6 for his spying activities, though my calculations suggest the figure was more like $70,000 (€58,000).
Russian news reporting also tried to damage MI6’s faith in him by suggesting he had made a full written confession and had tried to plea-bargain a cut in his sentence. Skripal denied this.
In Russia, each penal colony has its number and its purpose. IK5 in the remote forests of Mordovia, 500 miles east of Moscow, was ‘a camp for people with epaulettes’, as Skripal put it wryly. Many of its 1,200 convicts were policemen, army officers, and even the odd disgraced FSB type.
As a new zek (prisoner), for selfpreservation Skripal needed to find allies quickly and he gravitated towards a group of convicts who, like him, had served in the airborne forces. ‘They formed my first circle of protection in the camp,’ he said.
Anyone looking for a prisoner to put the squeeze on would be mad to pick on a guy within a gang of paratroopers. And pretty soon, Skripal’s military experience, age, physical presence and rank of colonel made him leader of the pack.
But conditions in IK5 could break even the strongest inmate. In winter, there is snow on the ground for four to five months, while temperatures can drop to below -30C.
Many prisoners succumb to despair — but Skripal kept himself busy, sewing army and prison uniforms in the workshop.
HIS Moscow bank accounts had been emptied by the FSB (though the money MI6 had been paying him was safely secreted abroad), but Liudmila sold some family possessions to give him more spending power to bribe the guards. He was also determined to keep his edge, physically and mentally, pushing weights for hours. Camp food was rubbish, but ever-loyal Liudmila sent a parcel of
ingredients every month that he could cook on a stove in his hut.
In Moscow, life was far from easy for the family he’d left behind. Friends deserted them and neighbours made nasty comments about his treachery. This was hard for Liudmila to bear — especially when she got cancer.
The rest of the family felt the shame of his downfall. His son Sasha sank into despair and began drinking heavily, while daughter Yulia had to deal with fellow students’ snide comments at Moscow University for the Humanities.
Meanwhile, in IK5, with his appeal against conviction and sentence rejected by a court, time dragged.
Elsewhere, however, wheels were turning in the espionage world. In New York, a glamorous red-headed Russian agent, Anna Chapman was settling down at a table in an internet cafe to send her report back to Moscow via a laptop belonging to Russian intelligence operatives sitting nearby. But there were problems with the transfer and she was left talking to the man she assumed was her handler. In reality he was an undercover FBI agent, and he gave her a fake passport that could later be used as evidence against her. She had stumbled into a trap. After one of the longest and most elaborate counter-intelligence operations ever mounted, the FBI was about to pounce on a whole group of deep-cover sleeper spies, known as ‘illegals’.
Tasked to infiltrate a country’s ‘ruling circles’, they gravitated towards academia, think tanks and the financial world, hoping to ensnare top civil servants, CIA people and bankers.
They were supported by agents like Chapman, who delivered money and gave assistance. (She herself was not an illegal but a ‘Noc’, the term American intelligence types use for those operating under Non-Official Cover, living under her real name).
Four couples were known to be operating in New York, Boston, and Washington DC after being identified to the FBI by a mole in Russian intelligence. Now the moment had come to reel them in.
In a co-ordinated round-up in June 2010, teams of FBI agents poured into the illegals’ homes.
As news of the raids reached Moscow, there was panic at the Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR. Their complete American spy ring was in the bag, and they had to assume the entire network had been compromised. They had no idea what to do about it.
ON JULY 4, the phone rang at SVR headquarters. On the line was Leon Panetta, director of the CIA in Washington, wanting to speak to his opposite number, SVR boss Mikhail Fradkov. He’d got their people, Panetta informed Fradkov. He proposed an exchange. The Russian agreed. It was game on for a spy swap.
The tricky question for the CIA, though, was if they sent the Russian illegals back, who did they want in return?
Two days after Panetta’s call to Fradkov, a guard went into Skripal’s accommodation block in camp IK5. ‘Get all your stuff ready and be at the HQ block in ten minutes,’ he ordered.
At the camp office, he was told, without explanation, that he was going to Moscow and was bundled into a FSB car.
They drove for more than six hours without anyone saying a word to him. When he finally saw road signs for Moscow, his spirits climbed: it was definitely not another camp he was going to.
A little later they pulled up at Lefortovo Prison, where he settled down, he told me, for ‘a nice meal, and a sleep’.
While he slumbered, officials in Washington were putting the finishing touches to their exchange deal. They had settled on two men to bring home. But there weren’t any more. So they asked the British if they had people they wanted released? Agent Forthwith, alias Sergei Skripal, was MI6’s obvious choice.
The next morning, Skripal was taken to an upstairs office at the prison where Daniel Hoffman, the formidable head of the CIA’s Moscow Station, broke the news that an exchange had been arranged.
Skripal had seen a newspaper report about the illegals being arrested in the US and understood the background to the swap, but he still wanted more details on how it was going to work.
Hoffman told him the first thing he had to do was sign a document requesting a pardon for his crimes from the Russian President.
Skripal baulked at this. Signing amounted to an admission of guilt. Even after nearly six years in jail, he was determined not to give the FSB the satisfaction.
Hoffman told him the Russians were insisting on this because their detained officers in the US were having to acknowledge that they were foreign agents operating illegally. The FSB wanted a reciprocal admission from Skripal. And if they didn’t get it, there was a danger the whole deal might miscarry.
Hoffman explained to Skripal that these conditions were nonnegotiable. After one last night in a cell in the Lefortovo, Skripal was taken down to the courtyard and put into a van with the three others who were being swapped. They were then driven to the airport where a Russian government Tupolev airliner was waiting.
Hoffman explained that they were en route to Vienna where the exchange would take place. From there, two of them would go to American, and two to the UK.
Sitting there in his dark-grey prison clothes, Sergei Skripal worried about what was going to happen to his family.
‘Don’t worry,’ Hoffman answered. ‘It’s all been agreed with the Russian authorities.’
After touching down in Austria, the four Russian prisoners were taken by bus across to a Boeing. The Russian illegals had arrived from the US on the same plane and were waiting in a private terminal for their own flight home.
On BOARD the American plane in Vienna, he and the others lifted their glasses and toasted freedom. The Boeing landed at Brize Norton RAF base in Oxfordshire, where Skripal and one other Russian disembarked before the plane carried on to the US. A helicopter flew the two of them to Fort Monkton, a specialist MI6 training camp, to begin weeks of debriefing. First, though, they were ushered into a room which Skripal recalls was ‘full of very good clothes and shoes. ‘We were told to take what we wanted,’ he said. It was all for us.’
Their minders took photos for their new passports — important psychologically in underlining their new identity.
‘Traitors always come to no good’
And then they asked Skripal where he wanted to live. He would prefer to remain in Britain, he told them, and they said they would get people looking for possible homes.
Russia, meanwhile, was celebrating the return of the ‘illegals’ from the US, feting them and flaunting them as master spies.
As he praised them, Putin couldn’t resist putting the boot into the defectors who’d gone the other way in the spy swap. ‘Traitors always come to no good,’ he declared.
AREPORTER egged him on, asking whether those traitors now abroad would be punished. Putin replied obliquely but ominously: ‘Intelligence agencies have their own code, and all their staff follow it.’
The deal with the Russians meant Liudmila could come over to Britain to join him. So, too, could his mother — but she was in her 80s and didn’t want to uproot herself.
On the phone, he tried to comfort her with some hopeful words. Maybe one day he would be allowed back to Moscow. ‘Don’t even think about coming back,’ she warned. ‘You would never be safe here.’
Yulia, his daughter, had matured into a confident young woman who, with her gift for languages, had quickly got a job with Nike in Moscow. Now she flew to Britain to go house-hunting on behalf of her parents. She did not take long to decide. The place she had fallen for was the quiet and unassuming cathedral city of Salisbury. Surely, they would be safe here. The house in Salisbury bought for Sergei Skripal and his wife Luidmila cost £260,000 (€292,000). He had a little cash squirrelled away in Spain and the UK government would also pay him money from time to time, but he couldn’t be considered rich.
On my first visit to his home, I could see it was not affluent. The Skripals seem to have been happy in the months after Liudmila joined him in Salisbury, late in 2010, but her health was failing. She’d developed uterine cancer when her husband was in the gulag and it had re-emerged and spread. She died, aged 59, in 2012.
His wife’s death was a hammer blow to Sergei. ‘She was a formidable woman,’ notes a friend. ‘He simultaneously admired, adored and feared her.’
With Liudmila gone, his focus shifted to his children. Yulia spent a good deal of time in England and had no difficulty finding employment — but she saw her future in Russia, and by 2014 was looking for a job there. Yulia would continue visiting her dad, but she wanted to get on with her own life.
With his son, matters were more complicated. Sasha was 43 by now, with a failed marriage and a good deal of alcohol abuse already behind him. He died of liver failure in hospital in 2017.
By the time I met him, Skripal was carrying a few more pounds than when he’d arrived in Britain and his hair had thinned, but it would have been a great mistake to underestimate his mental or, indeed, physical toughness.
Life may have lobbed him some gross misfortunes but he still intended to live every day of it to the full. The people closest to him were probably what he called his ‘Team’ — the officers from MI5 and MI6 who looked after his welfare. Naturally, he was aware that he had to protect his own security, but it wasn’t an obsession.
After all, he had received a presidential pardon, as well as serving a good deal of his sentence.
Sometime he would travel up to London for the day, and occasionally MI6 made use of his services. As far as I could establish, this work involved talking to some military audiences.
Did he have relationships with foreign intelligence agencies, as was claimed in the aftermath of the attempt on his life?
Piecing Skripal’s travels together, I found that he went to the US in 2011 and the Czech Republic in 2012, and there were a couple of visits to Estonia.
In the summer of 2017, our interviews were interrupted by a weeklong trip he made to Switzerland to talk to their federal intelligence services.
Some of his travels, particularly to places that were formerly in the Soviet bloc, might be seen as reentering the game, particularly if the person reporting it to Moscow exaggerated Skripal’s role.
Had I been able to question him after the poisoning, queries about these foreign trips would have been near the top of my list. But despite many attempts by me, he chose not speak to me after he and Yulia were struck down with Novichok.