As a Russian double agent working for the British, he'd been code-named “Forthwith”—quickly—but this afternoon the poison in Sergei Skripal's system went unhurried, making its way around his body over a period of hours. Skripal was 66, comfortably heavy in retirement, an ex-colonel who'd been cast out of the intelligence services in Russia and now lived in exile in the English city of Salisbury. Neighbors knew the place as “Smalls-bury” and said that nothing too dramatic ever happened here, which would stay true for another couple of hours yet.
This was March 4, 2018, a Sunday of sun-backed clouds, the air crisp and glad the way it gets in southwest England after the lifting of snow. A day earlier Yulia Skripal, Sergei's 33-year-old daughter, who visited Salisbury regularly, had flown in from Moscow. The poison had gotten into Yulia that morning, too, but father and daughter were still unwitting and felt well enough early on Sunday afternoon to plan an outing. Sergei owned a cherry red BMW and they drove into town for a drink in a riverside pub. Maybe they would have a meal together. An ancient cathedral, south of the city center, chimed the half hour: 1:30 P.M. This poison wanted two hours more.
Salisbury is a city of spires and rusted weather vanes, a place that is particular about time, the dates of things stamped on buildings and everywhere clocks, clocks, on belfries and over bookshops. Across the water from where the Skripals parked their car, a sundial had been engraved with the adage: Time speeds up until it is nothing, therefore use it before it is gone. At the pub, Sergei and Yulia had a quick drink. When father and daughter were together, they sometimes posed for pictures, raising toasts. The pub was a converted mill that had a display of photographs on the wall, one of these a close-up of a pocket watch, its crystal broken, hands frozen at what appeared to be 1:35 P.M.
Next they went to an Italian restaurant to eat. An hour passed. Finally, walking back to their car at around 3:30 P.M., the Skripals began to feel truly unwell and had to put themselves down on a bench, where they drifted in and out of consciousness, slumped over and gesturing strangely. Passersby assumed they were high. At a quarter to four, the cathedral clock sounded again. The Skripals' pupils had shrunk, and they were sweating. They were foaming at the mouth. An off-duty nurse was the first to attend them, and a small crowd gathered. At 4:15 P.M., an ambulance was called, come quickly, forthwith.
Doctors at Salisbury District Hospital guessed that this was opioids, that the Skripals had overdosed. They were taken to the intensive-care ward and put on breathing support. Shortly before sunrise on March 5, doctors received new information from London: that Sergei Skripal was not just any patient; he was an old, blown spy. Police arrived at the hospital to watch over the critical pair.
Even in those early hours of what would become a worldwide crisis, “the gravity of this,” in the words of a senior source in the British government I spoke with, had dawned quickly. By March 6, national counter-terrorism police formally took over the investigation, an initial guardedness about what exactly might have overwhelmed the Skripals (“an unknown substance”) quickly giving way to a blunter charge: “attempted murder by the administration of a nerve agent.” Speaking in Parliament two days later, the home secretary said that any such attack would be “a brazen and reckless act [and] people are right to want to know who to hold to account.” But she asked that her peers restrain themselves from speculating about the culprits—restraint that lasted a few minutes before a backbench minister stood up and said that this was surely an act by the Russian state: “Who else?”
According to a report released by the Russian embassy, foreign secretary Boris Johnson summoned Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador to the UK, on March 12. Staff at the Russian Embassy later revealed what Johnson had told Yakovenko, “that according to the UK assessment, it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for the attack.” (The Kremlin has denied involvement in the “tragic situation.”) A senior source in the British government outlined for me the thinking in London that first week: “When you look around the world, there are very few countries that could technically do this. Iran. China. North Korea, conceivably? But they don't necessarily have the means or the motives, and we've never had the intel they've even tried.”
In figuring out where to cast blame, many found the who-else rationale attractive. Sergei Skripal had once been a member of the GRU, the Russian military-intelligence unit now best known for hacking into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, before he was caught selling secrets to the British, in 2004, and imprisoned. But two obvious points argued against Russia's involvement: First, Skripal had been pardoned by Moscow for his crimes, part of the swap deal that got him out of a wintry prison and over to Salisbury to begin with. And, second, there was an internationally adhered-to rule of espionage that forbade the murder of re-settled spies. Kill them, after all, and it risked future swaps.
After assembling intelligence reports they believed put culpability for the Skripal hit beyond reasonable doubt, the British went busily around Europe and America, persuading allies to join them in sanctioning Russia. President Trump was so convinced by what he learned that he somehow overcame his curious reluctance to find fault in the Kremlin's actions—even the most senior members of the British government were surprised by this, I was told. The president signed off on the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats, after which Russia expelled 60 Americans in reply. London and Moscow swap-expelled 46 of their people. Diplomatic staffs thinned everywhere: at NATO headquarters, around Scandinavia, in Australia.
Blood samples from the Skripals were sent to the UK's main chemical-weapons research facility, a campus not far from Salisbury known as Porton Down. Chemists detected the presence of one of a family of Soviet-born nerve agents, first developed in the 1980s and known informally in Russian as novichoks—“the new kids on the block.” These novichoks, which could be deployed in liquid form and absorbed through the skin, work their ruin on a body by stopping the normal transmission of messages between the nerves and the muscles. Light-headedness turns to grogginess, to strained breathing and collapse.
Up until March, there'd been few documented human exposures to novichoks, but back in the 1980s, Andrei Zheleznyakov, a lab engineer in Moscow whose job it was to test the toxicity of this nascent weapon for the Soviet military, inadvertently breathed some in. He later said that straight away he felt his brain had emptied. Colors swam. Before Zheleznyakov lost consciousness, he was taken for a walk out in Moscow, where he experienced a hallucination in which a nearby cathedral began to glow and crumble apart. The military-research program that Zheleznyakov was a part of was so secretive that when he was eventually taken to the hospital, doctors were told nothing of the novichok, only that he'd had a bad meal.
The firm conclusion of Porton Down's scientists, that it was a novichok deployed in Salisbury, was later ratified by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a 193-state group run out of The Hague, after it sent out samples of its own to be checked in the labs of neutral countries. The evidence was there in its chemical structure: This was a novichok—the new kid in middle age.
On March 14, the U.N. Security Council held a special meeting to discuss the attack, and it was there that the Russian ambassador asked the lingering question: But why? What motive should the Russian state have to eliminate a retired, redundant spy, “who after his prosecution, sentencing, prison term, pardon, and handover to the British authorities no longer posed any kind of threat to my country?” Everybody in the West seemed to have a theory. That the Skripal hit was meant to sow confusion and panic abroad or, no, at home in Russia. That this was really about geopolitics, some sort of coded message about the use of chemical weapons in Syria. That it was about domestic politics, closely timed and meant to rouse support for the incumbent regime ahead of Russia's elections that month.
Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Russia, told me that “guessing, I would say they would have expected this to be a relatively swift assassination, quickly forgotten, but that the method used would stick in the mind of people back home.... Persuading other Russians, in other systems, to be careful? That's a valuable aim.” A well-informed source affiliated with the OPCW, not British or Russian, told me they felt the incident must be about the novichok itself—a lid-lifting on this still mysterious weapon, something like a product unveiling after its 30-some years in development.
What connected these theories was the idea that Sergei Skripal was secondary—collateral damage in his own attempted murder. After all, the reasoning went, he was a spy out to pasture, living obscurely in old England. What could he have done to bring assassins to Salisbury?
They called it Pryzhki S Vyshki—the tower jump—and when Sergei Skripal was a recruit into the airborne division of the Soviet army, it was the most dreaded part of basic training. He was in his early 20s, an engineering graduate who'd grown up on the western tip of the Soviet Union, near the Baltic Sea. He was squarely handsome, boxer-nosed, necessarily gutsy. When it was your turn to tower-jump, you strapped on an open parachute and went to the edge of a platform, 80 feet up. You were taught to ignore every last nerve-ending warning, that this was insane, like readying to step off the roof of a building. Then you stepped off. One airborne recruit told me that no subsequent leap from a plane, no later reckless life risk, ever felt as chancy as that first fucking tower jump.
It emboldened you. And they liked you to be bold if you were to ultimately graduate, as Skripal did, into the GRU. Vladimir Rezun, a defector from this secretive agency, later described in a book of memoirs what initiates were told on arrival at boot camp: that it was not compulsory to join; it was only compulsory to stay, the one way out “through the chimney of the crematorium.” After which, for good measure, Rezun was shown a film of a bound and writhing GRU traitor being fed feetfirst into a furnace.
In 1985, after five years of GRU training, Skripal was posted to the island of Malta. He had with him his wife, Liudmila, and their two young children, Alexander and Yulia. Notionally, Skripal had a role to play at the embassy in Malta, “cultural and sports attaché,” which many years later made another former GRU trainee chuckle appreciatively. “That would be the cover,” said Boris Volodarsky, a Russian-intelligence historian who many years ago relocated to the West after completing his own GRU training. He had since become a leading expert on prominent exiled Russians and their habit of dying in unusual ways on foreign soil.
Upon graduation, Volodarsky explained to me, trained-up GRU agents were often given an international posting under diplomatic cover, or they became “illegals,” not officially recognized by the Russian government, who could do murkier work abroad. Skripal had diplomatic cover, and he rose in this capacity to become the director of the department of personnel. “Skripal was an H.R. guy within the GRU. And knowing the names of operatives? That's seen as the crown jewels,” a senior source in the British government told me. Skripal was posted in Spain when, in 1995, he started working with British intelligence. He was offered cash in return for state secrets, later testifying to a Moscow court that “every time I met with members of British intelligence, they paid me a fee in hard currency,” about $100,000 in total. Skripal stayed in contact with his British handlers for nine years, through his return to Moscow and his elevation to colonel, before he was exposed and arrested.
His name had allegedly been passed on by another spy in the system. Tried in 2006, at age 55, Skripal was stripped of his rank and sentenced to 13 years, a relatively short term that, the judge said, took into account Skripal's cooperation with investigators. Most of his term would be served in Mordovia, in a miserable network of barbed-wire compounds in the flatlands southeast of Moscow. Thirty-below temperatures. Guards with Alsatians. Even so, this wasn't a furnace, and to Skripal's old colleagues in the GRU, those 13 years might have looked light.
He was out early, too, in 2010—a fluky beneficiary of the discovery of the so-called Illegals Program, an operation that had placed several Russians undercover on the East Coast of the United States. A spy swap was arranged between Russia and the West, mostly managed by the CIA. I was told by Robert Hannigan, who until last year was head of the UK intelligence hub GCHQ, that the British decided to pluck out Skripal not for intel (after several years in prison, he didn't have much to offer) but instead out of a sense of obligation: “A duty of care to people who've risked an awful lot and paid a high price.”
When, in the summer of 2010, Skripal was flown to Vienna for the exchange, Boris Volodarsky, the intelligence historian, was there at the airport to watch a stage-managed swap for the media. “Quite a crowd,” Volodarsky recalled, “to watch a group of poorly dressed people switch planes.” Skripal was put on the same Boeing that the East Coast illegals had just left, which then took off and flew west. Quickly he was out of the public eye, living in Salisbury with Liudmila. The British government managed their security and gave Skripal a pension. In 2011 he bought a semidetached home—No. 47—on a drowsy cul-de-sac called Christie Miller Road. A real estate agent who oversaw the deal showed me the sales brochure: power shower, heated towel rail, all of it a long way from Mordovia and the weekly wash in a communal hut.
The Skripals hung a lucky horseshoe on their front door, though if this was a time of good fortune for them, it did not last. Liudmila died of cancer in 2012. Their son, Alexander, who'd grown to be a bearish and amiable man like his father, died young in 2017. Both were interred at a cemetery in Salisbury. Now in his 60s, Skripal cared for his cat, which he told people took instruction in Russian, and joined a social club where by unbendable house rule the rear-room TV always showed the horse races. Yulia spent most of her time in Moscow but traveled frequently to England to visit her father. No great care was taken to hide the location of the Skripal family home, and obviously MI5's assessment of the threat to Sergei in his retirement was low, because for $4 the website of the Land Registry would reveal his name and address. “Frankly,” Robert Hannigan told me, “you're not going to hide much from Russian intelligence if they're keen to find someone, particularly if that person's still in touch with family back home.”
Security-camera footage of Yulia Skripal's movements through the Moscow airport on March 3, a day before the poisoning, showed a slender woman with an erect bearing, shuffling through check-in with other travelers. A fold of auburn hair fell over her pale face. That morning Yulia shared a video on social media, a gyrating dog alongside the caption: Dance like no one is watching. According to discoveries by British intelligence, later made public in a submission to NATO, “cyber specialists” working for the GRU had been snooping in Yulia's e-mails as far back as 2013. Furthermore, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation, Sergei's e-mails were also under surveillance during that period. “They would have known Yulia was coming,” a senior government source told me.
Like Ink, liquid novichok can transfer by contact from surface to surface, fainter each time; it is colorless, odorless, and deteriorates slowly. Shortly after the Skripals arrived at the hospital, a local cop, Nick Bailey, came into contact with the poison and had to be admitted for treatment as well. Later I would learn that this particular novichok had most likely never been tested on humans. It all meant that in Salisbury, authorities were now trying to cope with an invisible, spreadable, untraceable poison that might be smeared anywhere the Skripals had been on March 4.
When I first arrived in the city, I visited the riverside pub where the Skripals had had a drink before their collapse, pressing my face to its plate-glass door as investigators slow-motioned around inside wearing hazmat suits. Three hours later, a public-health bulletin went out, advising anyone who'd been to the pub to disinfect their phones, wash their clothes, and so on.
The bench where the Skripals had been overcome was enclosed by ribbons of don't-cross tape. Brightly colored forensic tents popped up like spring flowers. Reporters skulked, and the spook-watchers among them noticed the movements of unmarked cars known to be favored by British intelligence.
Over on Christie Miller Road, Skripal's property had been cordoned off, so that neighbors had to wave a special pass at police to come and go. I walked a perimeter around No. 47, as close as possible, in the company of Boris Volodarsky, the intelligence historian and former GRU man, who was spending the day with me in Salisbury. A suited and cardiganed 63-year-old, his face partially obscured by a brushy mustache and aviator sunglasses, Volodarsky was about the most conspicuous man in town that afternoon. But he had no reason to steal around in the shadows, not anymore, and instead he turned an operational eye on the scene, trying to identify the shadows that might've been useful to others.
This operation would've called for a large team, Volodarsky said—Russian illegals, he thought, arriving in the country over the course of weeks to study the local minutiae: “When lights were switched on and off, did neighbors look out their windows?” Crucial to any such plan, Volodarsky said, would be settling on a where—someplace they could be certain Sergei Skripal would be—and a when. The application of this poison would have been skilled work, technically complex. “[The nerve agent] will burn through normal hazmat suits,” a senior source from the UK government told me. “You need time and you need cover.”
From Christie Miller Road, we drove two miles to a cemetery in Salisbury, a wooded place home to wild ring-necked pheasant, deer that liked to eat the graveside roses, and for the time being several police cars. Investigators believed that on the morning of their poisoning, Sergei and Yulia had come to this cemetery to visit the graves of Liudmila and Alexander. Police, still guarding the site, took our names and let us through, and when Volodarsky was close enough to Alexander Skripal's headstone, he read the inscribed dates. He pointed out that March 1 would have been Alexander's 44th birthday.
It felt a fair assumption that this was why Yulia had arranged to visit that particular weekend. (A when.) And if Yulia was due, Sergei would surely be in Salisbury to bring her back to his home. (A where.) According to the UK's national-security adviser, the highest concentration of novichok was detected on the handle of No. 47's front door. A senior government source later confirmed for me that it was the outward-facing handle, and that Sergei and Yulia had each taken in the poison through the palms of their hands. Alistair Hay, a chemical-weapons expert, explained that because of the thickness of the epidermis layer here, “uptake through the palm is some 20 to 25 times less efficient [i.e., slower] than, say, application on the cheek.” Time—hours, potentially—for any assassins to flee or melt away.
At the cemetery, Volodarsky was looming over Alexander's headstone when a young policeman approached and said uncertainly, “Obviously you know not to touch it?” Volodarsky thanked him—but yeah, he knew not to touch.
Volodarsky had left the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, after which he re-settled in Austria and began writing spy exposés for Western publications. Alex Goldfarb, a well-known Russian dissident, once described Volodarsky as the only ex-agency man “with whom it is certainly safe to drink tea”—a macabre reference to their mutual acquaintance, Alexander Litvinenko, a journalist and sometime consultant for British intelligence who was murdered in London after drinking from a teacup laced with radioactive poison. Volodarsky attended Litvinenko's funeral in the winter of 2006.
Many well-connected people I spoke with about Skripal mentioned, unbidden, Litvinenko's ghost—a lingering guilt, inside and outside the British establishment, that his murder had not been properly faced up to. Few in power doubted that Litvinenko's was a state-sponsored killing, but the diplomatic response from the British government was insubstantial. Oligarch money was splashing through London at the time. Surface relations with the Kremlin were okay. Shrug.
And no wonder, people said, that the strange deaths continued. Since 2006, at least a dozen UK residents with strong links to Russia had died abruptly (heart attack, fall, inexplicable collapse), after which their deaths were unimaginatively written off by coroners as unsuspicious (suicide, weak heart). Volodarsky knew many of the deceased, including Boris Berezovsky, found hanged in 2013; and Badri Patarkatsishvili, discovered collapsed in 2008. In the weeks following March 4, another acquaintance, Nikolai Glushkov, had been found dead at his home in South London, the cause of death given as compression to the neck.
On the road out of Salisbury, there were more wild pheasant, like in the cemetery, only these had roamed in front of powerful cars and been flattened. Volodarsky and I drove back to London, talking all the way of the men he had known and the means of their sudden ends. “Russia is orientated to eliminate enemies,” he said. “And not foreigners, primarily, by the way. It's Russians who've left.” He said he believed he'd once been targeted himself—a contact he didn't fully trust, some substance slipped into his coffee. His wife told me he was “white as paper” when he came home that day, and had curled up on her lap like an animal.
Volodarsky said there was a part of him, the GRU-trained part, that felt disgust at his carelessness in drinking that coffee. Then a sort of fatalism came down. “You think to yourself, it's either a well-done job or a badly done job. If it's one, you'll die. If it's the other, you'll survive.”
At the hospital, Sergei and Yulia were fed drugs intended to help their systems re-create the enzymes disrupted by novichok. At first the doctors treating them had little sincere hope for their survival. Then, after seeing signs of slow improvement, they began to scale the Skripals' sedation back.
After 20 days, Yulia awoke. It was a different world, “disorientating,” she would call it. During the weeks she was unconscious, the Kremlin had continued its efforts to sow doubts about the investigation. At the U.N., a Russian envoy speculated that doctors in Salisbury were manipulating the health of the Skripals, and may even have injected this rare poison themselves. For one 24-hour cycle, attention was deflected toward Sergei Skripal's pets, a house cat and two guinea pigs, unaccounted for since March 4. A Russian statement was typical in its strange, sidelong emphases: “To learn the fate of the animals is important not only from the point of view of Mr Skripal's property rights, but also as a matter of animal welfare....” In fact the pets had been left uncared for inside the quarantined No. 47. The guinea pigs were eventually found dead, and the cat had to be put down, distressed beyond rescue. It was an extraordinary oversight by authorities at the scene.
Even so, the British pushed and condemned, demanding state-size confessions of guilt that were never likely to come. Anybody who recalled the shrinking reaction to Litvinenko's murder might have identified overcompensation. Certainly there was an irony in Theresa May, the prime minister, and Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, leading this Kremlin censure. In their previous jobs as home secretary and mayor of London, respectively, they'd done as much as anyone to create a sense that powerful Russians had a high threshold for misbehavior; that scores might be settled and fortunes laundered in the UK without too close a scrutiny, as long as the rubles kept filtering through domestic banks and the property market.
But this time a policeman had been struck down. The target's daughter, too. Cost to the local police was heading toward $10 million, and great chunks of an ancient English city were behind quarantine lines. As nobody could be certain where the poison had spread, the people of Salisbury kept on playing a frightening game of touch-and-see. That lamppost? That trash can?
Midsummer, a 45-year-old British man named Charlie Rowley found what appeared to be an unopened box of perfume and brought it home. A few days later, he gave the perfume to his partner, Dawn Sturgess, a 44-year-old mother of three who was staying in a homeless shelter in town. Sturgess sprayed her wrists with some of the bottle's contents, which came out “oily,” Rowley recalled afterward, and did not smell like perfume. He quickly washed his hands. Sturgess had to lie down. Rowley was later found frothing at the mouth, and the couple were taken to the same hospital as the Skripals. Samples sent to Porton Down confirmed it was a novichok—the scavenged bottle, it seems, may have been a vessel for the poison carried by attackers back in March. Guards returned to the ward; more cordons went up. After a week, Sturgess died in the hospital. Rowley recovered and was discharged back out into Salisbury, where locals were being warned, firmly now, not to pick up anything they hadn't themselves put down.
As a backdrop to all this, a vigorous information war had broken out between London and Moscow, and their row was coming to represent something larger and more sinister, too—a feud between the Russian Federation and the NATO-anchored West. In April, when the Assad regime bombed a rebel-held Syrian city with what were widely accepted to be chemical weapons, Russia stood by Assad. Afterward, in speeches making the case for Western retaliation, Theresa May directly and repeatedly invoked the Skripals—as if Yulia and her father, who last they knew were out for pizza, were now endorsing air strikes.
In the hospital, Yulia's health improved, delighting those who treated her and—they would admit—perplexing them. “To see the recovery happen and at such a pace,” one of Yulia's clinicians later told the BBC, “that I can't easily explain.” The details of the Skripals' medical treatment remain confidential, though one source told me there was a member of staff at Salisbury District Hospital who also worked at Porton Down, which helped doctors identify the symptoms of nerve-agent exposure relatively quickly.
Anxious about overwhelming her, Yulia's doctors were not sure how much to tell her about what was happening outside the hospital walls. Her recovery, her headlong progress toward discharge, only made the diplomatic situation knottier. Here was a Russian citizen, in a British hospital, under the protection of British police. If there were plans afoot to secretly re-settle the Skripals upon their release from the hospital, the Russian embassy stated, this would be seen “as an abduction.” Meanwhile a relative of Yulia's back home, a cousin, had given interviews to the Russian and British media, pointing out she'd been denied a UK visa to visit her relatives and making a disarming suggestion that echoed right back through the years. What if all that ailed Sergei and Yulia was a bad meal—food poisoning?
From London the Russian embassy pushed for consular access to the Skripals, a request that would later be repeated by Vladimir Putin himself. In a brief statement, Yulia politely, very carefully, declined.
Few outside Moscow knew the world of Kremlin intrigue—and what happened when you found yourself on the wrong side of it—as well as Valery Morozov, a Russian businessman in his 60s now living in the London commuter town of Guildford, where he keeps up a colorful blog about Russian politics. Morozov and his wife, Irina, were now in their sixth year of restless exile in the UK, Valery having once risen fast and high in construction back in Moscow before he made “too many enemies” and had to flee. It was from reading Morozov's blog posts after the attack that I'd learned of a chance encounter he'd had a few months before—with Sergei Skripal.
They had run into each other in December, Morozov recalled when I met him at his home. Both of them were waiting for trains out of London, and they'd stopped in at a grocery store, not far from Waterloo Station, that specializes in delicacies imported from Russia. Shrink-wrapped sausages the width of biceps. Colorful roe in jars. A certain kind of chocolate made from “bird's milk.” By which was meant (the store owner snickered when recounting this to me later) bird shit.
Morozov was stocking up on this chocolate when he found Skripal in the shop, a pink-faced deda, or grandfather, with a telltale gait. “He looked like military intelligence,” Morozov said. “You behave in a certain way, your posture.” Irina was there in the shop that day, too, and the three exiles fell into conversation, discussing family, cats, the best jarred herring on the surrounding shelves—and also work. Valery had his blog, rich and gossipy and stoked by old contacts back home who kept him v teme—in-the-know—about Kremlin intrigue. Irina took jobs as an interior designer. Skripal (the couple recalled) said something that day about his own line of employment that would only later seem significant.
I spent hours in the company of Valery Morozov this April, when the reverberations from Skripal's poisoning were wildest. I found his bracing, fiercely un-Western way of looking at the world a useful counterweight to all the easy anti-Russian rhetoric in the daily press. Despite his exile, he remained a Kremlin nostalgist to his core; he'd drunk vodka, once, with Vladimir Putin. When I asked him the same questions I asked everybody about the Skripal hit—why? and why now?—Morozov was withering about certain British assumptions. Whenever the poisoning was described as being ordered by Putin, he said, it showed an awful naivety. “Everyone thinks that Putin controls everything. No! He's controlling only what he controls.” To the Russian mind, the Western impulse to have everything be distinctly this or that—if not the truth, a lie—read as idiotically simplistic.
He flung up his hands in frustration when I asked, the Skripal hit in mind, how one might draw the Kremlin's permission structure. A triangle, I asked, with Putin at the top? Morozov was appalled. “A triangle!” He searched for a less facile description, something that would properly conjure the mass of interconnecting interests: the politicians, mafia, businesspeople, generals, spies, all cross-assisting or at cross-purposes. “It's not a triangle. It's the Internet.” He told me he believed that Skripal had been punished for interfering, maybe inadvertently, in the financial interests of a self-contained criminal group. Morozov speculated that Skripal had passed the wrong intel to the wrong people, probably during the course of “his analytical work for some intelligence companies, if I understood what he was saying...”
I asked Morozov to repeat this. Yes, during their December encounter in the shop, Morozov said, Skripal claimed to be doing consulting work in “cyber-security, intelligence, some analytical work.”
This was a surprise. It made me recall a conversation I'd had with a Salisbury taxi driver, Mehmet Beykanoglu, who said that over a period of about seven years, he'd taken Skripal home from the train station to Christie Miller Road “maybe 40, 50 times”—so often that Beykanoglu knew his address by heart. Beykanoglu's cab queued with others at the station, taking random fares, which suggested a much larger number of such journeys undertaken by Skripal over the same period. Beykanoglu believed his fare, wearing a suit on most occasions, was returning from employment in London: “I asked, once, and he said he worked for the government. I wish I'd asked which government.”
Perhaps Skripal was a why in his own assassination attempt after all. A well-informed source told me that Skripal had given at least one lecture at a British military institution, in which he discussed his GRU background. Had he been trading on his knowledge and his past in other quarters, too? The owner of the Waterloo shop, Mohsen Najim, said Skripal would sometimes drop by after traveling abroad. “He said, ‘Oh, I'm working for a company; they send me everywhere. They need my experience.’ ” In May, responding to reports that Skripal had traveled to the Czech Republic to help instruct intelligence agents there, the Czech foreign minister, choosing his words, said such a visit would certainly have been useful—“logical.” When I consulted Robert Hannigan about all this, he said it didn't sound so unusual. Once spies re-settle, “they're free individuals. They can do what they want. And bear the risks, too.”
Boris Volodarsky told me if Skripal had plugged himself into Western intelligence networks, that would have made him a conspicuous point of contact for anybody wavering within the Russian system. Volodarsky recounted that when Alexander Litvinenko first hoped to contact MI6, he sought an introduction through Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB double agent living in the UK. And once Litvinenko was on MI6's books, a later defector named Vyacheslav Zharko reportedly came to him for a similar intro. Volodarsky imagined an equivalent conversation between Skripal and some old colleague: “Sergei, could we meet?” If it was difficult for Volodarsky to explain the targeting of a pardoned, pensioned-off spy, he had less difficulty in imagining why a roving defector magnet might be worth snuffing out.
In Salisbury, furtively and without fanfare, Sergei Skripal left the hospital and disappeared into protected hiding with Yulia. It was mid-May, 74 days after the initial exposure. Later that month, Yulia filmed a short statement from an undisclosed location: In it she said her immediate focus was on caring for her father, whose recovery had been slower than her own. Yulia herself appeared outwardly healthy, despite the breathing-tube scar on her throat—smiling, contented even. But doctors acknowledged that the future health of both of them was more or less unknown. Without giving details in her statement, Yulia spoke of “devastating changes thrust upon me.”
After Andrei Zheleznyakov had been saved from the initial ravages of a novichok, back in '87, he was afflicted by a miscellany of side effects, among them cirrhosis, hepatitis, and epilepsy. He died in 1992, five years after his exposure. The attack this March has killed one bystander, Dawn Sturgess. Her companion, Charlie Rowley, has reported that the novichok has affected his ability to concentrate. Nick Bailey, the cop exposed during the course of the investigation, was eventually released from the hospital but said in a statement that “normal life for me will probably never be the same.” For the Skripals, the future looks, at best, precarious. “I take one day at a time,” Yulia said in her statement. She hoped to go back to Russia eventually, she said, while repeating with delicacy her refusal of assistance from the embassy: “At the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services.”
The week of Sergei's discharge, I sat with a senior government source and asked what was next for father and daughter. “They don't know,” the source said. “I think that's the honest truth. Of course there will be offers of deep levels of cover for both of them. But there's a balance. You've got to live.” As to whether this living would finally be done in the UK, elsewhere in Europe, or even somewhere in North America, they hadn't decided. The source told me, “They're scared.”
By early July, the investigators still hadn't announced any suspects. The head of counter-terror policing, Neil Basu, sounded a note that was very like despair. “I would love to be able to say that we have identified and caught those responsible and how we are certain there are no traces of nerve agent left anywhere,” he said. “The brutal reality, however, is that I cannot.” (Later that month, the Press Association reported that investigators, finally, after scouring hundreds of hours of CCTV, had identified “several” of those who were suspected to have traveled to Salisbury to carry out the operation on Christie Miller Road. The authorities, at the time of writing, refused to confirm this.)
Around Salisbury—you couldn't call it Smalls-bury now—what choice did they have? They continued to touch foreign objects, half in mind of lethal risk while carrying out everyday tasks. Investigators' best guess was that it could take 50 years for the last of any stray novichok to deteriorate. Tourists didn't want to visit, and there were businesses behind the quarantine lines that had to shutter. In the window of a bookstore (the Skripals would have driven right by it on March 4), a history book, The End of the Cold War, was put on display. On closer inspection, you could see a new, handwritten note protruding from its pages: “Or is it?”
On Christie Miller Road, Sergei's home had its front door removed. The garden was covered by wooden planks, and steel-fence borders lined the drive. Decontamination was due to last for months; there was a rumor that No. 47 could even be razed. For the time being, the house assumed its position in the history of international espionage, and in the lore of assassinations ventured if not quite achieved. It was a place that had once had its time, its target, its horrible method. The Skripals wouldn't live here again.
Tom Lamont wrote about the Grenfell Tower fire in the December 2017 issue.
This story originally appeared in the September 2018 issue with the title "The Poison War."
