Spy Story: A Little Fish With a Big Enemy in Moscow
role in the poisoning of Mr. Skripal, who survived and has gone into hiding. But dozens of interviews conducted in Britain, Russia, Spain, Estonia, the United States and the Czech Republic, as well as a review of Russian court documents, show how their lives intersected at key moments.
In 2010, when Mr. Skripal and three other convicted spies were released to the West, Mr. Putin had been watching from the sidelines with mounting fury. Asked to comment on the freed spies, Mr. Putin publicly daydreamed about their death.
It hardly mattered that Mr. Skripal was a little fish.
Even if they didn’t die, he added, they would suffer. “They will have to hide their whole lives,” Mr. Putin said.
Mr. Putin took back power in 2012, and he set about undoing every element of Mr. Medvedev’s little thaw.
But Mr. Skripal and the others, delivered into the hands of Western intelligence agencies, had already scattered.
It was hard to miss Mr. Skripal in Salisbury, England, where he ended up. “It was a Sunday afternoon, and he was drinking neat vodka,” a town official recalled. “He was extremely loud.”
Mr. Skripal’s solitude deepened after Lyudmila died of cancer in 2012, two years after the swap. “He missed Russia,” said Ross Cassidy, a burly former submariner who became one of his closest friends.