Documents show UK long worried about Russian nerve agent
WASHINGTON — Once-secret U.S. government documents show that Western powers have quietly worried for more than a decade about the mysterious and deadly nerve agent Novichok, which British investigators now believe was used in the attempted assassination of a former Russian spy living in Great Britain.
British investigators and Prime Minister Theresa May believe ex-Russian spy Sergei V. Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in the city of Salisbury earlier this month with the nerve agent. The substance is made only in Russia, and the British — backed by the European Union and the United States — say Russia is responsible for the attack.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov mockingly dismissed those accusations as “nonsense.” Russia has never openly confirmed the existence of Novichok, which was revealed to the world in the mid-1990s by two former Soviet scientists who acknowledged they helped create it. Lavrov’s office said Sunday on Twitter that the nation’s chemical weapons stocks all had been destroyed.
Documents found in the massive trove of leaked State Department cables published in November 2010 by the self-described transparency organization WikiLeaks underscore that Russia’s possession of Novichok has been an ongoing fear.
Since the mid-1980s, a number of likeminded nations, now more than 40, have met annually for informal private discussions about preventing the spread of chemical and biological weapons through export licenses and other forms of control.
These meetings came to be known as the Australia Group, and members are parties to global conventions on chemical and biological weapons. Several former Soviet-bloc countries joined after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Russia refrained.
Two secret State Department documents, one sent to the CIA and five agencies, were found among the more than 250,000 cables published in 2010 by WikiLeaks. These two documents summarized the information shared by the Australia Group participants, including concerns about Novichok, which in English translates to “newbie” or “newcomer” from Russian.
A State Department document dated June 20, 2006 — labeled “SECRET” and sent to unknown recipients — followed a meeting of the group in Paris days earlier and indicated that the Canadian delegation was concerned about Russia. Canada noted that Russian President Boris Yeltsin confirmed in 1992 his nation had a biological weapons program and would halt it.
“Since that time, Russia has repeatedly denied ever having an offensive weapons program,” the summary of the Canadian response said, pointing to reports that first emerged about Novichok in the mid1990s from two former Soviet scientists who helped develop incarnations of the nerve agent.
The Canadian went on to complain that “Russia has failed to acknowledge public statements made by former Russian CW (chemical weapons) researchers on Novichok, CW agents.”
At the same meetings, the British delegation, in concerns that now seem prophetic, said that Russia retained an offense-minded chemical weapons program.
“The UK thinks that Russia may have a CW mobilization capability and stores precursor chemicals. The UK believes that Russia’s export control enforcement is feckless,” said the summary, adding that “Russia’s BW (biological weapons) program was the largest in history, involving thousands of scientists, so the potential for proliferation is enormous.”
Less than four months later, former Russian spy and Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko fell ill on Nov. 1, 2006, in London, in what became the first known poisoning with radioactive polonium 210. Litvinenko died on Nov. 23 of acute radiation poisoning and Great Britain blamed Russia.
Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer who became a double agent working for the British, appears to have been the latest victim of Russia’s retribution. Skripal had been arrested by Russian authorities in 2004 and convicted of high treason, but was freed in a spy swap and had been living in Great Britain since 2010. His daughter was visiting from Moscow.