What we have here, it seems to me, is an attempt by the
UK to limit the damage to its own reputation – damage perhaps it never
envisaged, because it assumed everyone would “buy” the “wicked Russia”
story. - Mary Dejevsky in The Independent, 24 May
The murky
world of secret operations by State intelligence units is one that we seldom
get much of a look into – well, if we did, it wouldn’t be ‘secret’ anymore,
would it? – but enough transpires to give us considerable insight into its
workings.
When it
comes to awarding first prize for clandestine operations aimed at liquidating
individuals they don’t like, the Russian secret service would have to be the front-runner.
For the past three quarters of a century, these furtive characters have built
up a reputation for slick, targeted assassinations outside their own territory.
One that comes to mind is the ‘umbrella assassination’ of 1978 when a Bulgarian dissident called Markov, while walking on London Bridge, had injected into his thigh through the tip of an umbrella a small perforated platinum sphere containing the deadly poison ricin. A more recent one was the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, again in the UK, by means of radioactive plutonium slipped into his drink. It is rare indeed for the perpetrators to be caught. These folks are professionals.
One that comes to mind is the ‘umbrella assassination’ of 1978 when a Bulgarian dissident called Markov, while walking on London Bridge, had injected into his thigh through the tip of an umbrella a small perforated platinum sphere containing the deadly poison ricin. A more recent one was the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, again in the UK, by means of radioactive plutonium slipped into his drink. It is rare indeed for the perpetrators to be caught. These folks are professionals.
Stealth and
target specificity have long been hallmarks of the dirty tricks department of
the Russian security intelligence services. How does the Novichok attack on
Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Britain earlier this year square with that image?
Simple
answer: it doesn’t. The narrative that we have been presented with runs as
follows: two bods claimed by British intelligence to be GRU operatives shot in
and out of the country to execute this mission. They stayed in the same hotel room
(where ‘traces’ of the poison were reportedly detected) and are seen together on
numerous CCTV images in London and Salisbury. They smeared Novichok from a fake
Nina Ricci perfume bottle onto Sergei Skripal’s door handle, apparently
spilling some on the doormat and elsewhere. They then made off across a park
where they simply biffed the container, still containing a significant quantity
of the toxin, away.
These blokes obviously
did not read the secret service assassins’ handbook about moving around separately
and staying out of sight
Upshot:
Sergei and Julia Skripal were in a critical state in hospital; a policeman was also
affected. A couple of days later, a British couple, Dawn Sturgess and Charlie
Rowley, stumbled across the perfume bottle by accident; they handled it and ended
up in hospital too, the former dying.
I find all
this difficult to buy. Routine procedure for any hit-squad acting on foreign
soil is to separate and keep out of sight. They stay under cover as long as
they can and take measures to evade the prying eyes of surveillance equipment and
to avoid recognition when they do have to venture out. These two jokers, on the
other hand, might as well have advertised their movements in The Times.
Slapping a
lethal organophosphate onto various objects such as door handles does not
require a great deal of skill, but it does require steady nerves. There are
indications that the operator was jittery – the apparent spillage, and then
chucking the container away in the park, as though anxious to get the noxious stuff
away from him as soon as he could.
Such
slovenly actions invite undesirable consequences in the form of unintended
casualties. A true professional assassin does not take bystanders’ lives if he
can avoid it – especially not citizens of foreign countries on their home soil,
which creates major problems for his bosses at home.
The
kneejerk reaction of the British authorities when Sturgess and Rowley came to
grief was to assume that they too had been targeted. A couple of days later,
that part of the narrative had to be modified when it was realised that pure
chance had brought them into contact with that perfume bottle.
Speaking of
targeting, what about Yulia Skripal? She divided her time between London and
Moscow, where she has a flat. There is no indication that the Kremlin had any
bone to pick with Yulia; had they had one, a much tidier way of going about
things would have been a motor ‘accident’ in Moscow. I don’t think she was
‘targeted’ any more than were the British couple.
Yulia Skripal. Note the
tracheotomy scar. A hit-and-run motor ‘accident’ back in Moscow, where she
spent much of her time, would have been a neater and more sure way of getting rid
of her – assuming anyone in the Kremlin wanted to get rid of her.
What it all
adds up to is a shambolic job carried out by some bungling amateur(s),
certainly not a ‘professional’ secret service operation. If you were to tell an
old KGB hit-man that this was the work of Russian State assassins, he would fly
into an indignant rage at such a grievous insult to his and his colleagues’
professionalism and thump you, and rightly so.
Amateurs
can be useful at times – recall the two women in Malaysia conned into smearing
the nerve agent VX onto the face of Kim Jong-nam last year. Could the Novichok
incident have been perpetrated by some London petty criminal for a fistful of
bucks? – just a thought.
When you’re dealing with
slapdash operators, you just don’t know where you’ll find the stuff
But wait,
you say, this was a toxin of Russian origin, so there has to be a Russian
connection.
Well,
maybe. The Novichok project ran for 20 years, ending in 1993. It produced not
one but a number of agents all of which are well known to Western intelligence
and can be recognised by their molecular signatures. Thus when the hospital to
which the Skripals were taken contacted the Ministry of Defence about a
suspected nerve agent attack, they were put onto the Porton Down laboratory
which engages in chemical weapons research and holds a lot of classified
information pertaining thereto.
As for its
source, let me quote Mary Dejevsky again:
At least one of the UK’s opening assertions – that Russia
was the only country to have manufactured the nerve agent in question – was
challenged early, by the head of the government’s own defence research
establishment at Porton Down. Since then, it has been shown that the formula was
in the public domain from the mid-1990s and that both the Czechs and the
Germans had access to the substance and shared the expertise with their Western
allies. So the presumption of Russian provenance, let alone Kremlin guilt, was
always flawed.
The key
word here is ‘presumption’. Indeed my problem with this whole narrative has
been the preponderance of assumptions arising not from firm evidence but from
growing Western distrust – paranoia, even – of Moscow.
Those two
fellows on the CCTV images were followed up by some secretive group of internet
sleuths who claimed they had made positive identifications with a bit of help
from Russian military inside sources (hm………). One of them is supposedly a
high-ranking GRU operative who was awarded Russia’s highest medal for his work
in Chechnya. A BBC team went to the village he was born and raised in, where
some people claimed to recognise him from the photo they were shown and others
said they did not. The family didn’t want to be contacted.
Can you
blame me for being just a trifle sceptical?
I would
have left the questions surrounding the Novichok affair completely open had it
not been for a word-choice made by the British Foreign Secretary days after the
death of Dawn Sturgess when he said that he laid the blame on “the Russian State”. Why the inclusion of this word?
Three weeks later, Theresa May reinforced my suspicions when she told
Parliament that the incident had been the work of the Russian State and “not a rogue operation”.
Russian
politics at the top are highly factionalised, and some of the factions are not
at all on friendly terms with one another. The ruling clique in the Kremlin
needs to have the support of key elements in the military and intelligence
services (what a coincidence that Putin is an ex-KGB man). But that does not
preclude opposing powerful factions having access to Novichok, albeit without
their own means of effecting a delivery – something that would have to be left
to non-secret service operators, either local or home-grown. Were the British
Foreign Secretary and PM telling Putin and his inner circle, “We don’t
necessarily think you ordered this, but the buck stops with you”?
“The factions inside the Kremlin – is Putin still in full control?” was
the subject of a BBC Newsnight feature in April
It’s a
tempting hypothesis that whoever was behind this fiasco (for that is what it was)
was a maverick faction in Moscow, but in the absence of hard evidence we should
keep our minds open to alternatives. The trouble is that hard evidence is hard
to come by given that fabrication and misinformation are part and parcel of the
‘intelligence’ game. Take nothing at face value.
The
narrative thus far has been one tailor-made from Day 1 to the mindset of the
old Cold War in which the USSR was the principal antagonist. The return of that
mentality does not augur well for future Russian/Western relations and that is
not good news given Russia’s return to the geopolitical arena as a major world
power.
If the
intention of the malefactors, whether a group of Russian conspirators or a
third party intent on stirring up a hornets’ nest, was to deepen the rift
between Putin’s Russia and the West, the mission was definitely a success, with
the death of a British citizen thrown in as a bonus. All the precipitous
jumping to rash conclusions that this affair has seen may well be playing into
the hands of some devious, hitherto unidentified actor.
Barend Vlaardingerbroek BA, BSc, BEdSt,
PGDipLaws, MAppSc, PhD is an associate professor of education at the American
University of Beirut and is a regular commentator on social and political
issues. Feedback welcome at bv00@aub.edu.lb
2 comments:
For those wishing to read succinct analysis , please refer to the web site Veterans Today and Michael Shrimpton's blog.If I wish to know the facts I refer to his blog. He is only interested in the Truth.
From Wikipedia:
"Michael Shrimpton (born 9 March 1957) is a former British barrister, former immigration judge, and politician noted for his conspiracy theories and hoaxes."
He was in fact barred from his profession and spent a year in jail for one of those hoaxes.
Not a good start, is it?
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