BORIS IN THREAT TO BOYCOTT WORLD CUP
Putin warned over claim he ordered poisoning of Russian double agent
BORIS Johnson yesterday threatened a World Cup boycott by British VIPs should Moscow prove to be behind an assassination attempt on UK soil.
The Foreign Secretary indicated officials would be told to stay away from the tournament this summer in Russia if Vladimir Putin’s government is implicated in the alleged poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33.
Mr Johnson told MPs: “Should evidence emerge that implies state responsibility, then Her Majesty’s Government will respond robustly.” Police were last night continuing urgent inquiries into what left the Skripals fighting for their lives after being found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury, Wiltshire, on Sunday afternoon.
In dramatic Commons scenes the Foreign Secretary branded Moscow a “malign” force in the world
A SECRET weapons research laboratory was last night conducting tests into the suspected poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.
Military scientists at Porton Down in Wiltshire were examining samples of a mystery substance taken from the scene where the pair were found slumped on a bench outside a shopping centre in nearby Salisbury on Sunday.
Scotland Yard anti-terror officers have been drafted in to lead the investigation into the apparent attempted assassination.
Last night a relative in Russia said former spy Mr Skripal had always feared his past would catch up with him. The relative said: “From the first day he knew it would end badly, and that he would not be left alone.”
Mr Skripal, 66, and Yulia, 33, are fighting for their lives in hospital after the attack.
The pair were filmed on CCTV minutes before collapsing as they strolled through an alley that leads from a Zizzi pizza restaurant branch.
The restaurant and a nearby pub The Mill pub remained sealed off yesterday as scientists trained to deal with chemical, biological and radiological material worked at the scene.
Up to 10 other people, all believed to be from emergency services, were treated for symptoms including vomiting. All but one has been released from hospital.
Mr Skripal was jailed in Moscow in 2006 for selling secrets to MI6 but was released in a Cold-War style spy swap in 2010 and set up home in the medieval cathedral city.
He slipped into obscurity and it had been believed he had been given a new identity and pension.
Businesswoman Yulia, who works for Pepsico, had travelled to see him from her home in Moscow.
Suspicious
Mr Skripal’s new life has been dogged by tragedy. His wife Liudmila died aged 50 in 2012 after suffering cancer and his son Alexandr, 43, died last year from liver failure while visiting Russia.
Mr Skripal, a former colonel in the Russian military intelligence, was said to be “deeply suspicious” about his son’s death.
Mr Skripal and Yulia were overcome by the effects of the suspected poisoning on Sunday afternoon while they were walking through the city.
Eyewitness Graham Mulcock spotted the spy in a “catatonic” state at around 4.15pm.
He said: “The paramedics seemed to be struggling to keep the two people conscious.
“The man was sitting staring into space. He was just staring ahead of himself.”
Gym worker Freya Church, 27, said: “She was just leaning on him, slumped.
“She looked passed out and he was looking up gesticulating upwards. His eyes were glazed. To be honest I thought they were just homeless.”
Mr Skripal is thought to have rented a property in the city before buying his four-bedroom semidetached home where the family settled down in 2011. He paid £260,000 for the house in cash.
Friends told how he was “polite and friendly” and was a popular member of the Railway Social Club in Salisbury.
Shopkeeper Ebru Ozturk, 41, said he would come in and buy a particular type of Polish sausage and spend up to £40 on lottery scratchcards each time he visited.
He said: “I really look forward to him coming in. He often wins money. He’s very lucky. Whenever I saw him he was happy.”
Neighbour James Puttock said: “He seems to be a happy person. I would say hello, he would say hello.”
SUMMER of 1974. Ibiza was the happening place, still a laid-back hippie, pinescented island at the time but now the go-to destination for sun-seeking, clubloving Brits. It was also the era of the Cold War. I’d partied in Ibiza three times that year, mostly because I was embroiled in an affair with a Russian defector, Ramon, a motorcycle champion who had defected from his homeland, moved to Paris and wound up working in Munich as a journalist for Radio Free Europe, or Radio Liberty as it was then known. This was a USfunded station broadcasting daily to the countries where a free press was banned. He later told me he had become fed-up with Munich and opted to be a DJ in Ibiza.
To a mini-skirted 20-something secretary working on a Sunday newspaper Ramon was fascinating and sexy if somewhat mysterious. He would weep when he talked about his native country, the place to which he could never return.
Back in London I met some of Ramon’s Iron Curtain defector friends – he had insisted I look them up, especially Anne, a charming administrator in the London office of Radio Free Europe.
Anne turned out to be at the epicentre of a small group of Londonbased Eastern European exiles, all men who had risked everything to defect to the UK. She was delighted when I rang her to say “Hi” from Ramon and invited me to a party at her St John’s Wood home.
At the party I met these defectors. One or two told me their stories: such as Oleg, a Russian film director, had turned up in the West End. He had walked into Savile Row police station. Unable to speak English he had somehow made it known who he was.
“They sat me down and gave me tea,” he said. “That was when I knew I’d be OK.”
After Oleg I was introduced to another defector, sleekly beguiling. Devastatingly attractive really. I didn’t normally go for older men but he was exceptional, with a courtly Eastern European charm.
His name was Georgi Markov. A journalist at the BBC World Service he had defected first to Italy then to Britain in the late 1960s from his native Bulgaria. In London he broadcast through Radio Liberty to countries behind the Iron Curtain, including Bulgaria.
I was pleased when Georgi asked me to lunch. Then he suggested we have dinner one Saturday in London. Afterwards we went back to his flat in Clapham. That night I didn’t leave. I didn’t want to. He was seductive and I was a girl who relished the “live for the moment” philosophy of the times. Sleeping with this man was no big deal.
YET I didn’t believe a word of the stories he told me – how the authorities in Bulgaria wanted him dead because his broadcasts were revealing the truth about the country and the people who ran it. “I tell the people the truth about what happens in Bulgaria so they can know who their leaders really are, their corruption, their lies,” he told me. “But the leaders are angry about me. They want to kill me. One day they come here to kill me.”
I wasn’t especially well-versed in the politics of the Cold War, although it was all very exciting this defector stuff, quite brave really, running in desperation into the arms of another country because your own was so awful.
Yet the idea that someone – indeed anyone – wanted to kill any of these fascinating men I had met, none of whom seemed remotely spy-like to me, seemed so farfetched, so beyond what I thought I knew about such things that I laughed it off as some kind of James Bond fantasy. Kill this handsome man, now working for the good old BBC? How ridiculous, I thought. He was just trying to impress me, I reasoned afterwards. Who would want to kill a journalist here in grimy old south London? It was b ******* , I decided. Just another way to spice up his existence.
Georgi and I chatted on the phone a couple of times after this, made some vague plans to meet but my life was too hectic and I didn’t see him again. I was unaware that the following year he had married and started a family.
By the spring of 1976 I’d packed my bags, said goodbye to Fleet Street and headed for a new life in Sydney, Australia. I’d forgotten all about Ramon, Georgi and the defector circuit. When the story broke around the world the day after Georgi’s death on September 11, 1978, I was as horrified as everyone else. On September 7, he had been standing at a bus stop en route to the BBC at Bush House when he had felt a sharp pain at the back of his thigh. He looked round to see a man picking up an umbrella and then watched as the man got in a taxi. Four days later Georgi died, aged 49, in a London hospital, poisoned by ricin, a toxin with no known antidote that had been lodged into a tiny metal pellet embedded into his calf by the umbrella tip. I was dumbfounded. Georgi hadn’t been spinning me a yarn after all. The Bulgarians really had wanted him dead and had eventually found an assassin to do their deadly work. Georgi was silenced for ever. When I really thought about it afterwards I realised that I had been drawn to these people quite innocently because I was such a curious girl, wanting to know about everyone, everything.
IT HAD never really occurred to me that their lives once they had left the Iron Curtain and communism for good were perilous and involved a certain amount of compromise. In a way, they were all inextricably caught up in the EastWest spying game simply because of what they’d done.
I had never even questioned why Anne, so sophisticated and friendly, had welcomed me into her world. We had socialised and remained in touch until I departed for Australia in 1976. I never heard from her again. And yet… I had worked for a national newspaper, I mused later.
I wasn’t a journalist then but Anne was incredibly keen to meet my journalist friends. Just as Ramon, who had vanished from my life too, had been for me to contact her in London. I had accepted it all without question but perhaps I had been too naive to look any further. And even when one of these men had told me that his life was imperilled by his broadcasts from London I’d ignored it, rejected the reality of Georgi Markov’s world.
His death 40 years ago was the first time anyone had ever known this type of ruthless assassination on the streets of Britain.
Tragically, however, it was not to be the last…
Jacky Hyams is the author of White Boots & Miniskirts and Bombsites & Lollipops (John Blake, £7.99 each). To order either title call the Express Bookshop with your card details on 01872 562310 or visit expressbookshop. co.uk UK delivery is free.