Agent pardoned by Moscow aided M16 for decades
After arriving in Britain eight years ago as part of an extraordinary ‘‘spy swap’’, Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence agent, had been leading a life of quiet anonymity in the Wiltshire city of Salisbury.
Grateful to have been pardoned by the Russian authorities for his decades of espionage, he was enjoying an unexpectedly peaceful retirement. But all that came to an abrupt end when he collapsed in a shopping centre in his adoptive home town, having allegedly been deliberately poisoned with an unknown substance.
Skripal was arrested in 2005 after his cover was blown, and was charged with ‘‘high treason in the form of espionage’’. He was found guilty of passing the identities of Russian secret agents operating throughout Europe to British intelligence agency MI6.
He appeared in a highprofile trial in Moscow’s main military court in August 2006, paraded before the cameras on Russian TV.
Prosecutors claimed he had been spying for Britain since the 1990s and had taken tens of thousands of pounds in payments from MI6 agents for information.
Skripal was reportedly caught by agents from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) passing intelligence to MI6’s James Bondstyle ‘‘spy rock’’ – a fake stone packed with receiving equipment – in a Moscow park.
He pleaded guilty to all the charges, and reportedly cooperated fully with the FSB. He was initially sentenced to 15 years in prison, but the term was later reduced to 13 years because of his willingness to cooperate.
Skripal was also stripped of all his military decorations and honours. Despite being in poor health, he was sentenced to serve his time in a tough maximum-security prison in Moscow.
But in 2010, in an extraordinary development, he was pardoned by Dmitry Medvedev, then the Russian president. In a scene straight out of the Cold War, he and three other Western agents were exchanged for 10 Russian spies being held by the FBI in the United States.
Among those returned to Moscow as part of the deal was secret agent Anna Chapman, who had previously lived in the United Kingdom.
Chapman moved to London in 2001 after meeting Briton Alex Chapman at a party. After a whirlwind romance, the pair married, and she spent five years living in the UK before moving to New York City. She was arrested by the American authorities in 2010 and charged with spying offences, only to be deported back to Moscow as part of the biggest spy swap since the Cold War ended.
US and British sources insisted they had got more out of the deal than Moscow, because the four who came to the West were regarded as more serious agents than their 10 counterparts who went to Russia.