Lonely in exile

It was hard to miss Skripal in Salisbury. head Matthew Dean, of Salisbury’s City Council, recalled one spotting him day at a modest establishment with electronic poker machines and framed prints of racehorses. owner, Dean is a pub familiar with Salisbury’s categories one did of drinkers. This not belong.

‘It was a Sunday afternoon, and he was drinking,’ Dean recalled. ‘He was extremely loud, and he was wearing a white track suit. I remember saying,

‘Good God, who is this person?’

Skripal tiptoed around the question at of his past, at least the beginning.

‘He missed Russia,’ said Ross

Cassidy, a burly former submariner who became one of his closest friends. Lisa Carey, another neighbour, observed the Russian on his daily rounds, walking to the Bargain

Stop in his tracksuit to buy scratch tickets. ‘He used to boast about being a spy, and we would all laugh at him,’ she said. ‘We thought he was mental.’

He did have secrets, though. Skripal travelled regularly on classified assignments organised by MI6, offering briefings on the GRU to European and US intelligence services. Such assignments may be devised as a way to keep a former spy busy, said Nigel West, a British intelligence historian. It is not unusual, he said, for defectors to feel bored and underappreciated, something he called ‘post-usefulness syndrome’.

Whatever they got in exchange for those it, 30 pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them. Believe me. They will have to hide their whole lives.” Vladimir Putin | Russian president