Kremlin’s spies in crisis over Skripal

GRU at odds with rival services after operatives identified in wake of operation in Salisbury

THE Russian secret services are in crisis over the fallout from the “botched” chemical weapons attack in Salisbury, British intelligence officers believe.

The GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, is being accused by rival agencies of “crossing the line” over the way the attempted killing of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia was carried out, senior Whitehall sources claimed last night.

British officials told The Sunday Tele

graph they believe the two suspects accused by Scotland Yard of the attack were wheeled out on Russian statesponsored television as punishment for leaving a trail of evidence during the operation to target Col Skripal.

This included numerous sightings of them on CCTV walking around Salisbury in broad daylight, using public transport and carelessly discarding the bottle containing Novichok in a park, leading to the death of Dawn Sturgess, a 44-year-old Salisbury woman, in July.

A Whitehall source said that one theory under review was that the men “are being thrown under the bus by another agency because they’ve messed up”.

The source said: “It’s a line of inquiry – that there’s an internal Russian [dispute] that ‘that agency has crossed the line, let’s throw the guys under the bus’. We’re waiting with interest to see what they come out with.”

The claims come as this newspaper separately reveals that a new suite of sanctions against corrupt Russian officials is to be shelved for up to two years.

Last night Conservative MPs warned Theresa May that the Government must “get its act together” over the measures. British agencies believe that one indication of the growing tension between different branches of the Russian secret services is the faltering propaganda coming out of Moscow.

A deluge of disinformation being pumped out by Russian bots following the poisoning in March fell away earlier this month after the two alleged GRU operatives were named by the Metropolitan Police, according to analysis by cyber security experts.

Instead, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov gave an implausible account of their actions on RT television, claiming they had travelled to the city as tourists to visit the “beautiful” cathedral and its ancient clock.

That suggests the painstaking police investigation, coupled with a firm diplomatic response by the British Government and its allies, may have put the Russian state on the back foot.

The Whitehall source said: “We’ve been proactive in calling out what the Russians are doing. We’ve got a lot better at countering Russian comms activity. Previously they could get away with plausible deniability, in this case

Patrick Sawer, Roland Oliphant

Hannah Boland

RUSSIA’S GRU – blamed by Scotland Yard for the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal – is known as that country’s most shadowy intelligence agency, with a reputation for operations that are both aggressive and risky.

But the fallout from the Salisbury attack – which saw its agents captured on CCTV sauntering around Salisbury and at one stage even window shopping outside an antique stamp and coin seller – is now understood to have led to tension between the organisation and its rival intelligence agencies in Moscow.

The fractured nature of Russia’s intelligence services also increases the chances of turf wars breaking out between them over operations such as the Novichok poisoning, especially if they are seen by some in Moscow as having backfired.

The GRU, or main intelligence directorate, was always under the Soviet and then Russian defence ministry, in con- trast to the FSB and SVR, the civilian agencies that emerged from the breakup of the KGB.

It runs Russia’s “spetsnaz” brigades, and its bat and globe emblem embodies an ethos for secretive “kinetic” operations rather than the patient intelligence-gathering favoured by its rivals.

Colonel Skripal was himself recruited into the

GRU after serving as a Soviet paratrooper in the Seventies and Eighties.

He betrayed the intelligence agency when he was recruited to be a British double agent in the Nineties – and allegedly handed the UK the names of many key agents.

Mark Galeotti, a senior fellow at the Institute of International Relations in Prague and an expert on Russian intelligence agencies, has said: “The GRU essentially thinks of itself as a warfighting agency, and it combines covert intelligence work with a special forces mindset.

“That makes it more of a risk-taking organisation than its counterparts – it is more important for them to take a chance than worry about the risks.”

It is that kind of attitude that may have led to tensions with its rival intelligence organisations following the identification by British police of those thought to be responsible for the chemical weapon attack on the Skripals.

The FSB is mainly responsible for internal security of the Russian state, counter-intelligence, and the fight against organised crime and terrorism.

Overseas espionage is primarily the responsibility of the Foreign Intelligence Service, known as the SVR, the successor to the KGB’s First Chief Di- rectorate, as well as the GRU. Adding to the potential for turf wars is the fact that another section of the FSB, called FAPSI, conducts electronic surveillance abroad. The SVR, which was spun off from the KGB’s elite first chief directorate, is believed to have inherited that department’s speciality for “wet jobs” – slang for overseas assassinations.

But the GRU’s headlinegrabbing antics in recent years have gained it a special level of notoriety.

In July, US officials named and charged 12 GRU officers with hacking into Democrat computers in an effort to sabotage the 2016 US presidential election – a bold operation, but well beyond its usual purview of defence intelligence.

Its agents were also accused of a failed attempt to mount a coup in Montenegro in 2016.

There is also the role of Kremlin controlled cyber bots and trolls to take into account when assessing Russian operations overseas.

These are social media accounts directed by the Russian state to spread disinformation about attacks, including the Salisbury poisoning, amplifying messages put out by the Kremlin to blur and distort the truth. In the weeks immediately following the Salisbury poisoning, online activity by automated Russian bots spiked by 4,000 per cent, according to analysis prepared for the UK government.

The accounts, described as “Kremlin inspired” in the report, had been part of a campaign of disinformation, spreading propaganda which is thought to have reached 62million people.

Recent estimates have suggested there could be as many as 150,000 accounts operated by Russians that specifically look to interfere in British politics and culture.

Official government bodies are thought to believe the Russian state is behind such accounts, due to the fact they often are spreading official Kremlin statements.

Bots can work in a variety of ways, from monitoring key words and replying to posts with automated content, to retweeting content automatically.

Russia has claimed these accounts are run by private citizens.

Their activity has fallen away since Scotland Yard laid specific claims against the two

GRU agents, it believes, were responsible for the Salisbury attack, forcing them to concoct an implausible account of their movements around the cathedral city last March.

‘The GRU thinks of itself as a war-fighting agency, and combines intelligence work with a special forces mindset’