Aye spy: The day hitman horror came to Scotland
HE liked a natty bow tie and was licensed to kill, but as I stared into the shark-like eyes of Vinko Sindicic, I knew that was where any similarity between him and urbane James Bond ended.
With police marksmen on the roof, the High Court convened in Dunfermline, Fife, to try him for attempted murder.
Sindicic played his cover story to the hilt. Hitman dispatched by Communist Yugoslavia to assassinate a dissident in a nondescript Kirkcaldy street? He blinked, bewildered.
Me, sir? A humble waiter, in Britain only to watch Yugoslavia play Scotland…
The jury saw straight through it. Sindicic had turned up at the door of a Croatian exile one overcast Fife day in 1988 and shot him four times, first in the face.
Sindicic made ready to shoot his prone victim in the buttocks – that way the bullet would dodge any body armour and reach vital organs – but time was short and he ran.
Amazingly, the victim lived and the hitman was at Heathrow before he was apprehended – an alert Fifer had noted his car registration on an earlier reconnaissance of the street.
The day the jury were to deliver their verdict, a garrotte fashioned from blanket ticking was found in Sindicic’s cell at Saughton Prison. He had planned to take a guard hostage.
Spies, hitmen, state-sponsored murder. It’s the stuff of novels, yes, but evil walks among us in real life and its latest visitation was in Salisbury – where a Russian double agent and his daughter have been left on the brink of death by a horrendous chemical weapon.
Russia and the Soviet Union before always valued Western Useful Idiots, admirers of their ‘restoration of national pride’, who are their accessories at worst and apologists at best.
They have been out in force since the nerve agent was used to fell Sergei Skripal and his daughter Julia.
Key among them are aching liberals who think the Russian Revolution was an enlightened uprising of downtrodden masses, not the start of a terror on a par with the Nazis that still be nights millions.
They say Skripal is ‘just a spy’ and, anyway, our spies get up to the same murky stuff…
The policeman who was first on the scene and became gravely ill thanks to a military-grade nerve agent was no spy and nor is Julia Skripal. Families out on a Sunday in Salisbury could easily have been victims of a horrific, indiscriminate weapon.
THE books of John le Carré are the most authentic guide to what he calls The Circus, the nexus of Britain’s spooks. In Our Kind of Traitor, made into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Alicia von Rittberg, agents from the Secret Intelligence Service – formerly MI6 – are most worried about not exceeding expenses limits.
Dealing death from the muzzle of a Walther PPK pistol or with poison dust? Our spies simply do not operate like Putin’s assassins.
And think the lethal tentacles of Communist revenge can’t reach here? They already did – in Fife 30 years ago.