GCHQ chief plots revenge on Russia
Robert Mendick, Dominic Nicholls, Gordon Rayner
Kate Mccann
THE head of GCHQ promised last night to retaliate against the “brazen Kremlin” for Russia’s nerve-agent attack in Salisbury.
Jeremy Fleming, the director of GCHQ, said the Government’s cyber intelligence agency would “deploy the full range of tools” to counter the threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Mr Fleming’s intervention – part of a co-ordinated response to the Novichok attack orchestrated by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency – ratcheted up the pressure on the Kremlin.
Whitehall sources said Britain had the “offensive cyber capability” to target the GRU and individuals linked to it.
Theresa May said on Wednesday that the GRU had dispatched two senior officers to the UK to carry out the attempted assassination on March 4 of Sergei Skripal in the Wiltshire city.
Mr Fleming, giving a speech at the Billington Cyber Security Conference in Washington DC last night, said: “The threat from Russia is real. It’s active. And it will be countered by a strong international partnership of allies.”
He said GCHQ, based in Cheltenham, was “ready to reject the Kremlin’s brazen determination to undermine the international rules-based order”. He said the attack was “reckless” and “barbaric”.
Mr Fleming also made official the role played by GCHQ in identifying the two Russian men – named as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov and charged in absentia. The men travelled on false names but it is understood intelligence agencies know their true identities and linked them to the GRU. Yesterday Mrs May secured the backing of Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel in her mission to dismantle the GRU.
The leaders of the US, France and Germany along with Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, issued a joint statement voicing “full confidence” in Britain’s assertion that two GRU agents carried out the attack. They also agreed the poisoning was “almost certainly” approved at a senior level of the Moscow government. Their backing for Mrs May presents the Prime Minister with a diplomatic coup.
Britain is pushing for new sanctions on Russia and stepping up efforts to confiscate dirty money linked to allies of Mr Putin in an attempt to put pressure on Moscow to hand over the agents.
Mr Skripal, 67, a former GRU colonel, and his daughter Yulia, 33, were critically injured along with a Wiltshire detective who attended the scene. Mr Skripal had been convicted in Russia of spying for Britain and sent to the UK in 2010 in a spy swap.
Dawn Sturgess, 44, died in July after coming into contact with a perfume bottle containing Novichok that was discarded by the Russian men and picked up by her boyfriend Charlie Rowley.
Ben Wallace, the security minister, said Mr Putin bore responsibility for the action of his intelligence agents while Karen Pierce, the British ambassador to the UN, criticised Russia at a meeting of the UN Security Council in New York.
It was reported last night that the Novichok dosage brought over by the assassins was strong enough to kill 4,000 people.
By Robert Mendick, Hayley Dixon, Izzy Lyons, Daria Litvinova
and Alec Luhn in Moscow
THE Russian hitmen sent to assassinate Sergei Skripal had posed as businessmen from St Petersburg to obtain a visa to enter the UK, according to a security source.
The men were given false identities by their handlers and travelled on official Russian passports under the names Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov.
Their real identities have not been made public, but British intelligence services and counter-terrorism police are understood to know who they are.
The Daily Telegraph has been told that Petrov and Boshirov, both in their 40s, had posed as businessmen to obtain their visas from the UK consulate in St Petersburg.
According to the source, they told the UK authorities that they were working in international trade and produced both business cards and bank accounts showing thousands of pounds in assets. Visas are only handed out if visitors to the UK from Russia can demonstrate they have the wealth to return.
The claim will bolster Britain’s insistence that the men worked for GRU, Russia’s disruptive military intelligence unit, which had provided them with full, but fake, identities.
UK authorities have said it would have been impossible to spot the men coming into the UK two days before the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, but the source claimed: “They had compiled some history, but given how difficult it is for Russian people to get a visa you would think that these two men were exactly the kind of people who should have raised red flags.”
New CCTV footage emerged of Petrov and Boshirov engaging in casual window shopping as little as half an hour after making the attempt on Sergei Skripal’s life by smearing Novichok on his front door handle.
The footage shows the Russian agents stopping to look at old coins in Dauwalders, an antiques shop on Fisherton Street in Salisbury, about a 20-minute walk from Col Skripal’s house.
The pair were heading back towards Salisbury train station at just after 1pm on Sunday March 4 when they were picked up by the shop’s cameras. They even appeared to try to enter the shop before realising it was closed on a Sunday. Paul Dauwalder, the owner, told reporters: “From the way they were behaving, they looked like coin enthusiasts or collectors. The mind boggles. I’m just glad we were closed.”
Fontanka, a respected St Petersburgbased independent website, reported that Petrov and Boshirov bought their airline tickets to London with passports that were identical save for the final digit.
The pair had booked two return flights, one on the evening of March 4 and one on the evening of March 5, the report said. The men had also visited Amsterdam, Geneva, Milan and Paris in the two years between 2016 and 2018 on the same passports.
An Alexander Petrov with the same birth date reported by Fontanka was listed as an employee of Microgen, the state immunological firm.
The only Facebook profile for Ruslan Boshirov said he had studied land hydrology at Moscow State University in 2004, but a list of all that department’s graduates did not include his name.
Headway, the company listed in Boshirov’s account as his place of work, told The Telegraph that no one named Ruslan Boshirov had ever worked there.
‘From the way they were behaving, they looked like coin enthusiasts’