Kremlin ‘trying to set up new spy network’ after Skripal fiasco

Kremlin’s spying operations in the UK. A House of Commons briefing paper on Russian intelligence services published at the end of October suggested that more than 100 SVR agents had been operating in the US “after a significant ramping up of espionage operations”.

It also repeated a claim that the SVR could have been behind the death of Gareth Williams, 32, a GCHQ and MI6 spy who was found dead inside a holdall locked from the outside at a flat in central London. The reports claimed Williams “had been killed by SVR agents because he knew the identity of a Russian mole in GCHQ,” stated the parliamentary briefing paper.

The SVR is engaged in “political intelligence, scientific and technical intelligence (industrial espionage) and illegal intelligence,” according to the parliamentary report.

Anna Chapman, a Russian-born spy who married a British man and lived in London, was part of an SVR espionage cell unmasked in the US in 2010. Ms Chapman was involved in the swap

that included Sergei Skripal, a colonel in the GRU who sold secrets to MI6.

Col Skripal moved to Salisbury in the 2010 spy swap to be closer to his MI6 handler but is thought to have been targeted on the orders of Vladimir Putin amid claims he had carried on working for foreign intelligence agencies.

Col Skripal and his daughter Yulia survived the assassination attempt in Salisbury but a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, 44, died after inadvertently spraying herself with the nerve agent, which had been disguised in a perfume bottle and discarded by the GRU assassins after the attempt to kill Col Skripal.