National Post (National Edition)
Was it PRESIDENT PUTIN in THE U.K. with the GUN ROPE KNIFE HAMMER POISON?
ADRIAN HUMPHREYS ON WHY RUSSIA ASSASSINATES ITS ENEMIES WITH DRAMATIC FLAIR,
In movies, a devious and complicated assassination ploy inevitably preludes a fast-paced thrill ride to the brink of catastrophe before another daring act of spycraft yanks the world back to safety.
After an alarming attack on a former Russian spy living in exile in Britain last week set nuclear-power sabres rattling, the movies don’t seem so improbable, or as relaxing.
The March 4 attack had brutal flair, from the victims, Sergei Skripal, a 66-year-old Russian former spy, and his 33-year-old daughter, Yulia, through the rare, exotic weapon, a military-grade nerve agent, to the setting, the cathedral town of Salisbury near the prehistoric circle of Stonehenge.
Before collapsing into unconsciousness on a bench, witnesses said Skripal was “doing some strange hand movements, looking up to the sky” and his daughter frothed at the mouth with eyes “wide open but completely white.”
Still in comas, it is unclear if they will survive.
The British government says an attempted assassination by Russia’s secret services is the “only plausible explanation” for the attack, an assessment “heightened against the background of a pattern of earlier irresponsible Russian behaviour.”
Critics link more than three dozen deaths and near-deaths in several countries to political assassinations by Russian agents in recent years. The list of victims includes various enemies of President Vladimir Putin: political opponents, business rivals, those branded traitors, anti-corruption champions and crusading journalists.
Some, such as Boris Nemtsov, 55, an influential Putin critic who was killed on a bridge in Moscow in 2015, and Denis Voronenkov, 45, a former member of the Russian parliament who died in front of a Kiev hotel last year, were simply gunned down in the street.
But the Kremlin has also employed far more exotic methods, attacks springing from the invisible hand of state espionage and the paranoia of the Cold War such as radioactive tea, toxic umbrella tips, tainted letters and poisonous essence of flowers.
And now a weaponized nerve agent.
Skripal was certainly a spy, or at least once was. A double agent, he worked as a Russian intelligence officer while secretly feeding information to British intelligence until his arrest in 2004 in Moscow. He was sent to prison but released as part of a spy swap: spies caught by the Russians were traded for spies caught by the Americans in 2010.
Soon after the Russian sleeper agents arrived home, Putin hailed their efforts and said they were discovered not by their incompetence but by internal betrayal.
He then added: “Traitors don’t live long.” He is taken at his word. “After Putin came to power, we saw all of these different killings of people who were critics of Mr. Putin and critics of the Kremlin,” said Amy Knight, a U.S.-based Russia specialist and author of Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder. Some cases are mysterious or merely suspicious while others are clear cut.
“The Kremlin was caught red-handed, as it were.”
The most notorious assassination of a Kremlin enemy is the attack on Alexander Litvinenko, a dissident Russia intelligence officer granted asylum in Britain, where he continued as a public critic of Putin’s regime. He made serious accusations, including that the FSB — the Russian security service — was responsible for the deadly apartment bombings in Russia that were branded terrorist attacks and used as justification for the subsequent war in Chechnya. Putin’s hard line on security in the face of the attacks contributed to his rise in popularity and power.
Litvinenko, 43, had a hard, drawn-out death after drinking tea in a London hotel. In the very English twist on the Russian game, the china tea pot had been poisoned with highly radioactive polonium-210.
The difficult to obtain weapon, which requires a nuclear reactor for its manufacture, pointed to state involvement. A detailed British inquiry declared the murder an FSB operation “probably approved” by Putin.
When he fell ill, Litvinenko said he knew exactly what was happening. Even before he was attacked, he told The New York Times that the FSB retained an old KGB laboratory specializing in poisons.
“The view inside our agency was that poison is just a weapon, like a pistol,” Litvinenko said in 2004. ”It’s not seen that way in the West, but it was just viewed as an ordinary tool.” It did, however, require approval at the highest level, he said in a radio interview. The head of the FSB, Litvinenko insisted, would never approve a political murder without consulting Putin.
But the Russian art of assassinations goes even further back.
The most legendary example is the failed poisoning of Rasputin, an unpopular religious figure who had great influence over the czar’s wife. In 1916, the account goes, a cabal of elites laced his wine and cakes with cyanide. But the poison had no effort — forcing them to shoot him several times in a panic before he finally died.
In Soviet times, there was the case of Leon Trotsky, a Communist revolutionary who helped overthrow the czar and found the Soviet Union. When he ran afoul of colleague Josef Stalin, he was exiled but continued to oppose Stalin from abroad.
In 1940, a Soviet security agent attacked Trotsky inside his home in Mexico with an ice pick. He died in hospital a day later from blood loss. His killer was later named a Hero of the Soviet Union, the country’s highest honour.
In 1978, before the breakup of the Soviet Union, Georgi Markov was a 49-year-old Bulgarian dissident who defected to Britain a decade earlier and remained a critic of the Bulgarian regime. As he waited for a bus in London on his way to work at the BBC he was poked in the thigh with an umbrella. That night, Markov fell ill and he died four days later in hospital.
Markov’s cause of death was poisoning from a ricinfilled metal pellet found in his thigh. Ricin is a highly toxic substance that had no known treatment at the time. The culprits were seen as the Bulgarian secret service; a Russian defector said the KGB provided the ricin.
The inquiry into Litvinenko’s death heard evidence of several other notable deaths identified as likely assassinations by the Kremlin, some using exotic means.
Samir Saleh Abdullah, a prominent Chechen rebel leader known as al-Khattab, had already survived being shot and bombed in 2002 when he opened a letter he thought was from his mother. The letter was infused with sarin, a chemical weapon. The inquiry was told the FSB claimed responsibility.
That same year, former parliamentarian and onetime Putin friend Roman Tsepov fell ill and died in St. Petersburg after suffering symptoms similar to Litvinenko’s.
A year later, Yuri Shchekochikhin, deputy editor of a Russian newspaper and a liberal politician who campaigned against corruption, died shortly before a planned trip to the United States to meet with FBI agents. His symptoms suggest poisoning.
Before crusading anti-Putin journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot and killed in the lobby of her Moscow apartment in 2006, she survived a poisoning. She collapsed aboard an airplane while on a controversial reporting trip in 2004 and later emerged from a coma in hospital.
Viktor Yushchenko, a leading pro-Western candidate in Ukraine’s presidential election in 2004, fell mysteriously ill during the campaign. His face bloated in disfiguring, greyish blotches that made his skin look like it was made of rock. His diagnosis was near-fatal dioxin poisoning with fingers pointing to Russian security forces and Ukraine’s pro-Russian security service. His opponents suggested it was bad sushi. The list goes on. It all raises the question of why such exotic methods are used when gunfire is so efficient, or staged car crashes or other “accidents” would draw fewer headlines.
The best theory suggests those headlines — and the fear and alarm they elicit — is exactly what is intended.
There is an old maxim used in the Mafia and in statecraft: Punish one to teach a thousand.
Tonia Samsonova, a London-based correspondent with Echo of Moscow Radio, suggests Russia’s intent is for the deaths to be noticed, to be unnerving and even for Russia to be blamed.
She thinks many agents in the Russian secret services — as with many Russians, including rich oligarchs — dream of retiring with their families to a prosperous and comfortable life in the West.
“This image of a good retirement they see as a model. It is a desirable lifestyle, for their children to go to good schools,” she said. “Russian people like to live in London.”
Russia has recently placed restrictions on foreign travel for government employees who know state secrets, she said. Despite this, she still sees and hears of Russians who would likely be restricted from travel by virtue of their rank socializing in London’s trendy clubs and exclusive restaurants on weekends, she said. She believes they are investing in property and making plans for a future retreat, perhaps to be funded by selling their secrets.
“It becomes like a signature. A weapon only used by the state leaves no doubt that it is revenge by the state, that it can only be the government,” Samsonova said.
“This sends them a message: We will kill you. Don’t be a traitor.”
What could be a more chilling message than the scene in Salisbury, with a collapsing man raging at the heavens while his daughter froths and slumps beside him?
IT BECOMES LIKE A SIGNATURE. A WEAPON ONLY USED BY THE STATE LEAVES NO DOUBT THAT IT IS REVENGE BY THE STATE, THAT IT CAN ONLY BE THE GOVERNMENT. THIS SENDS THEM A MESSAGE: WE WILL KILL YOU. DON’T BE A TRAITOR. — TONIA SAMSONOVA