Secret Salisbury files point finger at
UK’S release of classified information reveals that Moscow believed victims were ‘legitimate target’
Jack Maidment
Gordon Rayner
DOWNING Street yesterday took the highly unusual decision to release previously classified information about the Salisbury poisonings in order to debunk Russian propaganda.
In a letter to Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretary general, Theresa May’s national security adviser gave the most detailed assessment to date of why the UK has blamed Russia for the attack.
Sir Mark Sedwill set out in clinical terms why Russia had the means, the experience and the motive to carry out the attempted murders of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.
Russia had the means
Scientists at Porton Down defence laboratory identified the nerve agent used in the March 4 attack as belonging to the Novichok family, a finding which was confirmed by Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigators on Thursday.
Sir Mark made clear in his letter that “a combination of credible open-source reporting and intelligence shows that in the 1980s the Soviet Union developed a new class of ‘fourth generation’ nerve agents, known as Novichoks”.
Russia claimed to have destroyed its chemical weapons stockpiles but the letter says that Russia has “produced and stockpiled” small quantities of Novichok “within the last decade”.
It adds: “The Russian state has previously produced Novichoks and would still be capable of doing so.
“Russia’s chemical weapons programme continued after the collapse of the Soviet Union. By 1993, when Russia signed the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), it is likely that some Novichoks had passed acceptance testing, allowing their use by the Russian military. Russia’s CWC declaration failed to report any work on Novichoks.
“Russia further developed some Novichoks after ratifying the convention. It is highly unlikely that any former Soviet republic (other than Russia) pursued an offensive chemical weapons programme after independence. It is unlikely that Novichoks could be made and deployed by non-state actors (eg a criminal or terrorist group), especially at the level of purity confirmed by OPCW.”
The Novichok laboratory
The origin of the nerve agent has been a source of intense speculation ever since the Government announced its assessment that the substance found was of a type developed in Russia.
The failure by ministers to specify exactly where the substance was made has been used by critics to question the Government’s decision to formally blame Russia for the poisonings.
But Sir Mark’s letter suggested the nerve agent used in the attack was most likely to have been made at a laboratory in Shikhany, near Volgograd, a branch of the State Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology.
It sets out that the code name for the weapons programme, of which Novichoks were one part, was FOLIANT and states that it is “highly likely that Novichoks were developed to prevent detection by the West and to circumvent international chemical weapons controls”.
Vladimir Putin’s connection
The Russian President, who served as a KGB operative between 1975 and 1991, said Moscow “does not possess such agents”.
“We have destroyed all our chemical arsenals under control of international observers,” he said after he was reelected to a fourth term in March. He also dismissed claims of Russia being behind the Salisbury attack as “nonsense”.
But Sir Mark’s letter claimed that “in the mid-2000s, President Putin was closely involved in the Russian chemical weapons programme”.
Mr Putin was elected to his first presidential term in 2000.
Russia had the experience
The Kremlin has been linked to the deaths of numerous prominent Russian dissidents and Sir Mark said in his letter that “Russia has a proven record of conducting state-sponsored assassination”.
He specifically referenced the public inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko which concluded in January 2016 that the former spy was deliberately poisoned with Polonium 210 and that there was a strong probability that Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) had directed the action.
The inquiry also concluded that President Putin “probably approved” it. Sir Mark quoted the Owen Report into Litvinenko’s death as saying that in the years before his murder “the Russian state may have been involved in the assassination of Mr Putin’s critics” and that “the Russian state may have sponsored attacks against its opponents using poisons”.
Sir Mark said: “Since 2006, there have been numerous suspected Russian state-sponsored assassinations outside the former Soviet Union.”
Russia had the motive
Mr Putin said in 2010 that Russia’s special services do not kill turncoats but added “they will croak all by themselves… Whatever equivalent of 30 pieces of silver they get, it will get stuck in their throats,” he said.
Sergei Skripal was a former Russian military intelligence officer and he was convicted of espionage in 2004.
Sir Mark said it was “highly likely that the Russian intelligence services view at least some of its defectors as legitimate targets for assassination”.
The door handle
Police have said that the highest concentrations of the Novichok nerve agent were found on Mr Skripal’s front door, suggesting that was where the nerve agent had been deposited.
Sir Mark revealed in his letter: “During the 2000s, Russia commenced a programme to test means of delivering chemical warfare agents and to train personnel from special units in the use