FROM RUSSIA WITH GRUB

CHILLING STORY BEHIND

THIS is the spy summit where details of the plot which would lead to the attempted murders of Sergei and Yulia Skripal were first revealed.

It was an odd collection of spooks who gathered round a candlelit table of Moscow’s Fairy Tale restaurant, which had been emptied of other diners just for them.

And what FBI counter-intelligence agent Robert Eringer heard that night in June 1997 sounded like a fairy tale. His cover was as a publisher interested in commissioning a spy book from the CIA defector Edward Lee Howard.

But Eringer’s real aim was to lure Howard away from Russia to Warsaw, have him snatched by agents and returned to the US.

Also at the banqueting table that night were former KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov and his sidekick Colonel Igor Prelin.

But over smoked Baltic fish and Kindzmarauli, a red wine favoured by Stalin, the conversation turned to an unknown KGB officer. His name. . . Vladimir Putin.

What Eringer was told might have made his hair stand on end had spy training not taught him to avoid giveaways. The KGB old guard planned to install Putin as president to replace Boris Yeltsin. Putin would then recreate the Soviet Union dismantled under Mikhail Gorbachev and the KGB would control the Kremlin once more. Prelin mused: “What will Washington think when the Soviet Union re-emerges?” What has happened since was everything Eringer feared – the invasion of Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea and the assassination