MOSCOW BLOG: Five key questions at the centre of the Skripal spy assassination case

MOSCOW BLOG: Five key questions at the centre of the Skripal spy assassination case
Sergei Skripal was arrested in Russia for spying for MI6. / PA
By Ben Aris in Berlin March 12, 2018

The Russian double agent Sergei Skripal is lying in a British hospital fighting for his life after someone tried to kill him last week with a deadly and high-tech nerve agent.

The attempted assassination has set off a full blown media frenzy with the finger immediately pointed at the Kremlin. However, a week on still next to nothing is known for sure. While it looks like a Russian hit – and probably is a Russian hit – the story is still about a list of difficult questions, many of which are not being addressed. The knee-jerk reaction is “Putin did it” as tabloid editors milk the story for maximum effect. And who can blame them? The story is too “James Bond” not to go big on it.

So far the Russian angle rests entirely on the fact that Skripal was a Russian spy (the Russian embassy in the UK pedantically pointed out last week on Twitter that he was actually a British spy) and the similarities with the killing of Alexander Litvinenko are so striking that the linkage to Russia and the Kremlin are legitimate. It has not been suggested yet, but it is entirely possible that whoever was behind Litvinenko’s death is responsible for this attack as well. 

But that doesn't mean the Kremlin ordered it or that Russia was involved in any way. The only real evidence to emerge that could link Russia to the attack is the sophisticated nature of the weapon: nerve agents are hard to come by and next to impossible to make in a home-lab, which means a government’s resources were almost certainly involved. The list of governments with these resources is topped by Russia, but includes China and North Korea amongst others. However, unlike China or North Korea, Russia also has the motive of taking revenge on a traitor, which the others lack.

But the use of a nerve gas also raises as many questions as it seems to answer. Why not use a gun or fake a suicide? Choosing a high-tech nerve gas was guaranteed to cause a media storm and to implicate Russia. Moreover, following Litvinenko’s death this was blindingly obvious. So whoever did this was also clearly sending a message. Just what that message is supposed to be and to whom it was directed remain unclear and will probably remain so.

The facts and obvious inferences

Despite the wall-to-wall media coverage of the Skripal story very little is actually known for sure. These are the hard facts:

We know Skripal was a spy. We know that he was swapped in 2010. We know that he was living openly in the UK for years and apparently had no fear of being killed. We know that he was attacked with a yet to be named sophisticated nerve agent. We know these nerve agents are hard to come by and can’t be easily made.

In addition to these hard facts, in the last day it has been reported that a British policeman who is now also in hospital was the first on the scene at Skripal’s house and subsequently also fell ill. That strongly suggests Skripal and his daughter were poisoned at home. This is corroborated by interviews from the pizza restaurant where Skripal went for dinner with his daughter: other guests all reported that it is very unlikely that the couple’s food was tampered with in the restaurant, which is open plan.

We know that Skripal was still in contact with MI6 in a monthly meeting but it is unclear if he was still providing intelligence or actively working with the British secret service.

The press have gone beyond these facts and leapt on the narrative in “Putin’s Russia” only one man is behind everything. The orders to assassinate Skripal must have come from President Vladimir Putin as he is in charge of everything. It is taken as read that the Russians were behind the attack.

The British government have been a little more restrained, but not much: Foreign Minister Boris Johnson has stopped short of blaming the Kremlin, but did say that: “If it’s as bad as it looks, it is another crime in the litany of crimes that we can lay at Russia’s door.”

Why now?

Skripal had been living in the UK for 10 years since the 2007 spy swap. So why wait until now to try to kill him?

With presidential elections slated to happen in two weeks time, BBC reporter John Simpson tweeted that the attempt to slay Skripal was designed to show Russia is tough and that in some fashion this would help get the vote out on March 18 – an idea that has been widely ridiculed as events in London are unlikely to affect the mood of a granny in Siberia.

Another slightly less inane suggestion is that the attempt comes a week after Putin gave his state of the nation speech on March 1 where he explicitly threatened the US with a new generation of space age missiles. The slaying of a spy with a sophisticated poison in another country fits into the same “we can get you anywhere” theme.

But the most likely reason is that the killing was designed to send a message to someone. The who, why and what of this message remain obscure and the reason for the timing is still not explained.

Why Skripal?

Several commentators have pointed out that former spies that have been swapped are usually safe from retribution as part of the etiquette of spying. To murder a swapped spy is a shocking break with this etiquette.

So why was Skripal targeted at all? He is a relatively unimportant figure. He exposed some 300 Russian spies to MI6 and was a major mole. In the grand scheme of things moles and exposures are routine even if they are infrequent. And there are a lot bigger and better targets in London.

Andrei Borodin was the former chairman of Bank of Moscow and allegedly stole some $9bn from the bank, which cost the state $15bn when it was finally rescued by VTB – until recently the biggest bailout in Russian history and more money than was lent to the entire banking sector during the worst of the 2008 financial crisis. He now lives openly in Kingston-on-Thames in one of the most expensive houses in the UK and has flouted his wealth in puffy spreads in the Daily Telegraph amongst other publications. The Kremlin must be livid as it regards this as one of the most egregious examples of the looting of a Russian state-owned bank on record. Killing him would send a clear message to all the former oligarchs living in London already, as well as any corrupt businessmen still in Russia thinking about making a dash for a London bolt hole.

Then there is Akhmed Zakayev, the former prime minister of the unrecognized Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, who fled to London in 2002 during the second Chechen war. Zakayev stirred up real trouble (together with supporter and friend actress Vanessa Redgrave) and lobbied the UK government to crack down on Putin at a time when he was still liked by the West.

And top of the list of people the Kremlin would like to see dead is probably the UK-based Bill Browder, an activist investor turned Kremlin foe after he was thrown out of Russia and his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died under suspicious circumstances while in a Russian jail facing trumped up corruption charges.

Browder has been a real thorn in the Kremlin’s side. He actively lobbied for sanctions on Russia and sponsored the Magnitsky bill in the US that can be used to punish corrupt officials, which is now being adopted by more and more states. Browder has been convicted in absentia by a Russian court and the Russia has issued a number of red notices to Interpol, which the international police force has ignored, calling them politically motivated. The argument that Russia would not kill a foreign national because of the scandal it would cause is dubious, because it is hard to imagine a bigger scandal than the one following the attempt on Skripal’s life.

Indeed, London has become a haven for the worst of Russia’s crooked businessmen and the UK authorities have made themselves look venal by offering “political” asylum to anyone with a few billion dollars in their pocket. By contrast there are few genuine political exiles in London, of which the most famous is probably Mikhail Khodorkovsky, but even he is tainted by a dodgy business reputation as a former oil tycoon.

Why nerve gas?

The most telling question to ask is: why use a nerve gas?

If the goal were simply to kill Skripal then anything would have done – a gun, a car accident, a faked suicide. The use of a high-tech nerve gas is guaranteed to cause the finger to be pointed at Russia. Moreover, the extremely sophisticated nature of the agent means that it also has to be someone with very good connections to the security services.

That can only mean someone was sending a message. Given Skripal’s background, if he were killed it is guaranteed the police would launch a large and thorough investigation. It is guaranteed that the use of a nerve gas would be discovered. And given the very public nature of Skripal and his daughter’s collapse plus Russia’s “James Bond legacy” means it is guaranteed the press would go big on the story.

The fact that the nerve agent caused them to collapse in a public place suggests it was timed for maximum show. It would be child’s play for an organisation like the FSB or its military sister the GRU to kill Skripal in a lot less public way. However, as the agent seems to have been released in Skripal’s home it is possible this part of the plan went wrong.

Still, an assassination can be done a lot more quietly and has been before.

The deaths of businessman Boris Berezovsky in 2013 and his business partner Badri Patarkatsishvili in 2008 were both nominally uncontroversial. Both were key figures in the Yeltsin era and both made billions from raping the system. And both were hated by the Putin team, fleeing into exile to London shortly after Putin took over in 2000. Officially Berezovsky committed suicide, hanging himself in the bathroom, and Patarkatsishvili died of a heart attack. But questions have been raised in both cases and both could have been murdered.  

Who is to blame?

The use of nerve gas very strongly suggests that the attempt on Skripal’s life was organised by someone from inside or closely connected to Russia’s security services – although there is still no evidence for this whatsoever.

Does that mean that Putin ordered what was an official hit? Not only is there no evidence for that, it is also unlikely. Now we are in the realms of pure speculation, but as bne IntelliNews columnist and expert on Russia’s security services Mark Galeotti so convincingly argued recently, Russia’s elite is a hydra riven by fractions and cliques that have their own agendas, but who can tap the state’s resources.

“Operations are conceived and generally carried out by a bewildering array of “political entrepreneurs” hoping that their success will win them the Kremlin’s favor,” wrote Galeotti in a recent op-ed.

On balance it makes more sense that some rogue element inside the security services was taking revenge on a former brother in arms turned traitor than that the Kremlin ordered a hit to scare the West.

There is little obvious upside for the Kremlin from killing Skripal in such a spectacular way. Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have been working hard to undermine America’s legitimacy in forums such as the UN over issues like Syria and counter the US claims of aggression in the Ukraine. bne IntelliNews sources say that the Kremlin is fixated on lifting, or at least softening, the financial sanctions which are a major inconvenience. And Russia is interested in building up its ties with other emerging markets such as China, Brazil and India. Poking a stick in the West's eye by murdering spies in cold blood using extremely obvious techniques will further none of these causes. Indeed they could bring down even more painful sanctions and threaten now to cause a boycott of this summer’s World Cup in Russia into which Russia has invested billions of dollars, which is supposed to bolster Russia’s international prestige. A scandalous spy murder on the eve of both the presidential elections and the World Cup can only harm that prestige.

Did Putin order the assassination?

There is a knee-jerk reaction to lay all the killings at Putin’s feet: the assassination of political opposition leader Boris Nemtsov three years ago last month, anti-corruption investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, US reporter Paul Klebnikov in 2004 and more have all been blamed on Putin. However, in many of these cases there is evidence to blame them on others (the first two on Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov and the last on Berezovsky).

As Galeotti argued the Kremlin is not fully in control of the system. First Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich admitted in an interview with bne IntelliNews that the federal government is not in control of the regional governments, despite the formal chain of command in the constitution, because of there are simply too many regions spread over too large a territory employing too many people. As Putin’s “power vertical” depends on personalities and not institutions, the relatively small brain at the end of the dinosaur’s neck means the Kremlin can only directly interfere in a very limited number of issues and doesn't really control the tail.

Russians are well aware of the autonomous nature of the organs of the state as they have to deal with them everyday to get permissions to put in a skylight, or pass a fire inspection, or get a propiska residence permit if they move cities, paying the bribes and dealing with the mindless bureaucracy that comes with each.

Moreover, the corruption that pervades the entire system means every government service has built up internal autonomous, insulated and well-oiled channels of command. As bne IntelliNews has argued many times, corruption is the system. The traffic cop that takes a RUB1000 bribe has to pay half to his boss at the station, who passes on half of that to the regional commander and so on all they way up to the top. These channels are kept secret to guard against the periodic anti-corruption purges but can easily be used for purposes other than collecting money, like getting the vote out in the March 18 election, or organising a hit in London.

Bottom line is we are unlikely to ever get to the bottom of who was behind the assassination attempt on Skripal. But even if Putin did not order the hit personally or even if he had no knowledge of it he has to take responsibility for it because of his failure to put in place the rule of law that would prevent something such as this from happening. 

 

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