Salisbury attack: Russia planted conspiracy
Conspiracy linking Salisbury attack to Trump dossier may have been invented by Russian agents
RUSSIAN intelligence created a false trail linking Sergei Skripal, the double agent, to the former MI6 officer behind the Trump dossier, before carrying out the Salisbury nerve agent attack, The Daily Telegraph has been told.
Well-placed sources now believe that the plot to kill Col Skripal may also have included a “black ops” attempt to sow doubts about the veracity of the explosive dossier that claimed Donald Trump received Kremlin backing. The year before the attempted assassination of Col Skripal, a mysterious post on Linkedin suggested his MI6 handler, who is not being named, worked as a “senior analyst” at Orbis Business Intelligence, the firm founded by Christopher Steele, a former head of MI6’S Russia desk, who authored the dossier. Mr Steele’s dossier included the claim that the Kremlin had been “assisting” Mr Trump for at least five years and the allegation that Russia was in possession of a video showing Mr Trump engaged in lewd sex acts.
But a number of sources said the Linkedin profile was false – if it ever properly existed at all – and that the MI6 handler never worked for Orbis.
It is now suspected that the Linkedin profile was created by the GRU, the Russian military intelligence unit that tried to kill Col Skripal.
One reason would be to connect MI6 to Skripal’s murder and flag the possibility that the British secret service was behind the Trump dossier.
A well-placed source said: “It is exactly the kind of operation the Russians would order to sow confusion.”
Nobody can really be sure why the Kremlin ordered the assassination of Sergei Skripal. In March last year, two senior decorated officers in the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence unit, flew with Vladimir Putin’s blessing to Britain to kill the colonel who had sold secrets to MI6.
They smeared military-grade nerve agent on the front door handle of his home in Salisbury and then fled on the next flight back to Moscow, causing a huge diplomatic crisis, and claiming the life of Dawn Sturgess, an innocent resident of nearby Amesbury.
The most likely motive was revenge, although others have suggested Col Skripal, who was sent to the UK in a spy swap in 2010, may have signed his own death warrant by “remaining in the game” and continuing to offer up intelligence to Putin’s rivals.
But there was another possibility – one that was ludicrous and later completely disproved, but which was championed as a conspiracy theory nevertheless – that the death of Col Skripal was not ordered by the Kremlin at all, but carried out by British agents to silence the former Russian intelligence officer.
The reason was simple: Col Skripal, so the theory went, had helped provide information to Christopher Steele, a former senior MI6 officer, who authored an extraordinary dossier on Donald Trump, alleging that the soon-to-be president was effectively a puppet of Putin. The dossier claimed that the Kremlin had been “cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least five years”.
It also made the extraordinary claim that Russia was in possession of a video depicting Trump performing obscene sex acts with prostitutes during a visit to Moscow in 2013. The video was being used as a potential means for blackmail.
But where was the evidence linking Col Skripal to the Trump dossier? There were dots to join but if conspiracy theorists peered hard enough, they could find the clue they were looking for.
It came in the form of an internet hyperlink – no longer working – that suggested the MI6 agent who had recruited and handled Col Skripal had gone on to work in retirement for Orbis Business Intelligence, the company co-founded by Mr Steele. Nobody has ever reproduced the page itself, allegedly from the social network Linkedin, but in an obscure blog posted in January 2017 – more than a year before the Salisbury nerve agent attack – there was a one-line reference to it. Clicking the link didn’t work but there was the claim that Col Skripal’s handler “is a senior analyst at Orbis Business Intelligence”.
The blog post was written by an author giving his identity only as “Oui”, at a time when Mr Steele was being outed as the author of the Trump dossier. It is not clear how Oui came across the Linkedin profile, or even if it was planted on the blog.
Little attention was paid to the claim at the time but when 14 months later Col Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned, the single line took on new meaning. Media outlets spotted the connection and reported on it. A Google search threw up the handler’s Linkedin page as the first result. The link, needless to say, did not work, adding to the mystery that perhaps British intelligence had forced its removal.
Several sources have now confirmed to The Daily Telegraph that Col Skripal’s handler never did any work for Orbis. He was known to Mr Steele from their time together at MI6, where Mr Steele ran the Russia desk. Crucially, neither the handler nor Col Skripal provided any information or help for the Trump dossier. Intelligence sources increasingly believe the Linkedin claim was falsely placed by Russian intelligence, presumably the GRU, as part of a black ops campaign of disinformation. The reason is unclear but could be, according to informed sources, to undermine Mr Steele’s claims in the dossier by suggesting it was an MI6 plot to get Trump and also discredit Col Skripal.
One well-placed source said: “By creating this link, they [the Russians] are suggesting that MI6 are involved with the dossier or Col Skripal or both.
“It adds to the confusion and acts as a wedge between the White House and Downing Street. It is exactly the kind of operation the Russians would order to sow confusion.”
It also suggests Russian intelligence was already laying the groundwork for the assassination attempt on Col Skripal more than a year later. Flight records show one of the assassins, Alexander Mishkin, using the false name Alexander Petrov, flew to the UK at least twice before the Salisbury attack, in late 2016 and again in March 2017.
Sources have pointed out that if Col Skripal’s handler – a senior officer in MI6 – had worked for Orbis, he would never have been described as a “senior analyst”. The source said: “That’s a title that is used by 20-somethings just starting out in this kind of work. The agent who recruited Col Skripal would never be described as a senior analyst because he is much more experienced than that.
“The chronology is really important because this Linkedin reference appears a long time before the attempt on Col Skripal but at a time when Christopher Steele is under scrutiny over the dossier. It’s possible the
‘It adds to the confusion and acts as a wedge between the White House and Downing Street. It is the kind of operation the Russians would order to sow confusion’
Russians were already laying a trail on Col Skripal. They were putting a wedge between Washington and London.”
In the months before Theresa May categorically accused the GRU of carrying out the attack in a Commons’ statement, there had been speculation, much of it from the Kremlin, that MI6 had killed Col Skripal.
There were a lot of takers for such a theory, at least in the months before the assassins were finally unmasked as Mishkin and Anatoliy Chepiga. They were identified following a lengthy investigation that included studying hours of CCTV in Salisbury, crosschecking with flight manifests, and forensic evidence left at a hotel room.
By then, however, the conspiracy theory had been seized upon, fuelled by the Linkedin claim that Col Skripal’s handler was working for Orbis.
Craig Murray, Britain’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan who quit in protest at the West’s support for the country’s brutal dictator, was one of those leading the charge.
In his own blog post in April, our former man in Tashkent wrote: “We still have no idea of who attacked Sergei Skripal and why. But the fact that, right from the start, the government blocked the media from mentioning [the MI6 handler], and put out denials that this has anything to do with Christopher Steele and Orbis, including lying that [the handler] had never been connected to Orbis, convinces me that this is the most promising direction in which to look.”
Mr Murray added last night that he accepted he had never found evidence of the Linkedin page, but thought it unlikely Russians would have planted the link more than a year before trying to kill Skripal. He said he now accepted that two Russian men were involved, but was uncertain they were GRU agents. Col Skripal, he said he believed, was still a likely source for Mr Steele’s Trump dossier.
It was a grand theory. Except, according to The Telegraph’s sources, it was based on a Linkedin post that not only doesn’t appear to exist, but was put there by the Russian intelligence unit that carried out the attack in the first place.