PM seeks advice on spy drama
A former senior KGB agent who turned double agent then fled to Britain has told of an attempt to poison him in Auckland.
Boris Karpichkov made the claims which Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was seeking to confirm on Wednesday while appearing on TV programme Good Morning Britain in the wake of the poisoning in of double agent Sergei Skripal in an English city. Skripal’s Spanish links have also seen interest re-emerge in the littleknown case of a Russian agent who lived in Madrid under a fake Kiwi identity, apparently stolen from a dead baby.
Skripal – a former Russian military intelligence officer who was a double agent for the British in the 1990s and early this century – and his daughter Yulia,
33, are critically ill after being poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent known as Novichok and developed in the former Soviet Union.
The prime minister said she shared Britain’s concerns over the use of the globally banned nerve agent, and New Zealand had used an international platform to speak out against it.
Ardern said she had not been aware of the incident Karpichkov claimed to have happened in 2006. However, she had sought advice on it from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
When asked if she was concerned that New Zealand may not be exempt from such attacks, Ardern said that was why she was seeking advice.
Karpichkov, a Latvian, was recruited by the KGB. Then when Latvia became independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union he joined that country’s intelligence service but continued to work for KGB successor agency the FSB.
After his cover was blown he slipped out of Russia.
Karpichkov has previously said he lived in New Zealand for more than a year after fleeing Britain in
2006 when his life was threatened by Russian security services. He reportedly used a forged Lithuanian passport.
He told Good Morning Britain he received a warning by ‘‘burning telephone’’ on February 12, this year, from a FSB operative telling him ‘‘something bad’’ was going to happen to him, Skripal and some other people.
He also talked about the Auckland incident in which, he said, he was approached in Queen St midmorning in 2006 by someone who looked like a ‘‘common beggar’’. He had also noticed other people following him.
The person tried to grab his bag. ‘‘Next what I felt was kind of dust thrown into my face. Then beggar just walked away.’’
Karpichkov walked about 50-100 metres then almost passed out, His head was spinning and he started sweating.
That evening his nose and eyes were running, his eyes were scratchy and his chest was covered with a red rash.
A doctor told him he had the common flu but in the next two months he lost 30 of his 90kg.
Another link to the Skripal poisoning to have re-emerged is the case of Russian agent Sergei Cherepanov who lived in Madrid – where Skripal is thought to have been turned by Western intelligence agencies – for nearly two decades under a fake Kiwi identity. Skripal reportedly took up a position in the Russian embassy in Spain in 1993 or 1994, and is thought to have been recruited by British intelligence in 1995.
In 1996, Skripal went back to Moscow where he worked for Russian military intelligence, the GRU.
He resigned in 1999, but continued to make trips to Spain. He was arrested in Moscow in December 2004 and convicted of espionage.
In 2010 he was freed in a spy swap and moved to Britain.
According to news website Politico, which wrote about him in mid-2016, Cherepanov or Henry Frith was said to have been born in Ecuador to an Ecuadorean mother and a New Zealand father.
The only trace of a ‘‘Lawrence Henry Frith’’ in New Zealand was of a boy who died in 1937 in Hamilton, aged 1.
The Frith name may simply have been chosen in a cemetery by a Russian embassy employee in New Zealand, Politico reported.
An Independent article reported a number of sources were saying British and Spanish security agencies had been in liaison since the poisoning of Skripal.