From Russia with Blood. Heidi Blake
the new UK team, I got a call out of the blue summoning me to a mysterious meeting at an apartment in a smart part of London. When I arrived, I found myself face-to-face with the ex-wife of the very tycoon who had died in that fatal fall. Her ex-husband had been murdered, she said, and by coincidence she wanted my new team to investigate. More serendipitously still, she was sitting on a large trove of documents detailing the activities of her ex-husband and his associates in the years before their untimely deaths.
I was soon joined by an extraordinary group of colleagues in the quest to get to the bottom of the story. Tom Warren, Jane Bradley, and Richard Holmes came aboard the new investigations unit in London, and we teamed up with our American colleagues Jason Leopold and Alex Campbell to chase leads across the Atlantic. Over the next two years, under Mark’s inspired oversight, our team connected the property mogul’s fatal fall to a web of fourteen deaths in the UK—and one in the United States—all of which had glaring links to Russia. Astonishingly, not one of those cases had been deemed suspicious by the authorities. But we obtained hundreds of boxes of documents, hours of surveillance footage and audio recordings, a huge cache of digital files from forensically restored mobile phones and computers, and bags of discarded police evidence that blew a hole in the official story.
We fed all our exclusive material into a huge custom-built database, supplementing it with thousands of pages of public records, and ran advanced searches across the entire cache to piece together a sprawling international story of money, betrayal, and murder. Then we tracked down and interviewed more than two hundred people connected to the fifteen dead men, while also gathering information from more than forty current and former intelligence and law enforcement sources on both sides of the Atlantic. And we obtained readouts of multiple secret US intelligence files—including a classified report sent to Congress by America’s top intelligence official detailing Vladimir Putin’s campaign of targeted killing in the West.
Every single reporter was pivotal to the project. Richard personally scanned hundreds of thousands of documents by hand so we could digitize and search them, and he contributed vital law enforcement source-work. Tom set up our gargantuan evidence database and applied his forensic genius to fathoming the dizzyingly complex financial maneuvers at the heart of the story. Jane deployed her unparalleled skills at tracking people down and persuading them to talk against all the odds, and Alex wore out his shoe leather running down leads across America. Jason—the sort of rock ’n’ roll reporter who’ll stop to get a new tattoo in between meetings with spies—blew the story wide open by getting a multiplicity of US intelligence sources to spill details of secret files linking every single one of the deaths in Britain to Russia.
Reporting this story was, at times, a dicey ride. A man in a black car appeared every night for months outside one reporter’s house, another reporter came home to find personal items had been moved around in his bedroom, and it appeared one team member was being followed. We used trackers, panic buttons, intruder alarms, encryption, and countersurveillance techniques to stay safe—and in the final phase of the project, some reporters were moved to discreet locations for their security.
Our initial investigation was published by BuzzFeed News in June 2017. The shock waves it sent are detailed in the pages that follow. Since then, we have carried on investigating and gathering fresh evidence that places the fifteen suspected assassinations we initially uncovered at the center of a much wider campaign of Kremlin-sanctioned killing around the world.
This book is based on that body of work. Details of the events described are taken from our vast repository of documentary and digital evidence, as well as interviews with people who were present, and the dialogue recounted here is based on the best recollections of those who heard it. What follows is a story that more than one government wanted to keep secret—and it would have lain buried forever without the tireless work of my incomparable colleagues at BuzzFeed News.
Heidi Blake
Salisbury, England—March 4, 2018
The fog that enveloped the city overnight had cleared by lunchtime, revealing the cloud-tipped spire of Salisbury Cathedral to the smattering of Sunday diners ambling up Castle Street. The afternoon was cold and quiet, and a light rain was fizzling on the medieval rooftops as two figures emerged from a columned restaurant door. The couple—a smart, plump, snowy-haired man with a blonde some decades his junior—would have gone unnoticed among the lunch crowd at Zizzi, where they had been washing down risotto with white wine, had it not been for his outburst midway through their meal. The pair left the restaurant suddenly after he flew into a loud temper, ducking down an alley and hurrying away from the marketplace, but their pace slackened once they emerged and crossed the bridge over the swollen river. Across the Avon lies a small tree-fringed playground where children were feeding ducks in the drizzle, and the man paused to press some bread he’d saved from lunch into their hands before the pair strolled on toward the edge of the green. It was here that they came to a sudden halt. Within minutes, passersby would stop to stare at a bizarre scene.
The man and woman were slumped together on a bench—she unconscious, he making strange hand gestures and apparently transfixed by the sky. As onlookers cautiously approached, the man seemed to freeze. Then the woman began convulsing, her eyes white and mouth foaming.
The Sunday shoppers who rushed to help were unaware of the seismic global significance of what was unfolding before them. This was the latest salvo in a secret war being waged on the West by a hostile foreign superpower, and their peaceful Wiltshire city had become a battleground: the site of the first chemical weapons attack unleashed on European soil since the Second World War. Still more alarming, the good samaritans themselves were being exposed to a lethal poison even as they stood on the green sheltering the stricken pair under umbrellas while they waited for paramedics.
The couple on the bench were Sergei Skripal—a former Russian spy turned double agent for MI6—and his thirty-three-year-old daughter, Yulia. Skripal, then sixty-six, had arrived in the United Kingdom eight years earlier, after being freed from a Russian prison where he was serving time for high treason. The onetime senior military intelligence officer had been convicted of selling secrets to Britain and blowing the cover of some three hundred Russian agents in 2006. He was released four years later, along with three other men convicted of spying for the West, in exchange for the return to Moscow of ten Russian spies caught living under deep cover in suburban America. The agents were traded on the tarmac of the Vienna airport in the biggest East-West spy swap since the Cold War—but no sooner had the Russian returnees stepped safely onto home soil than Vladimir Putin made his intentions toward the men he had released clear.
“Traitors will kick the bucket,” he announced on state television. “Trust me. These people betrayed their friends, their brothers in arms. Whatever they got in exchange for it, those thirty pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them.”
The events unfolding on the green in Salisbury proved the Russian president true to his word. Sergei and Yulia Skripal lay choking on the bench as their airways were shut down by a deadly chemical that had been smeared on the door handle of his suburban home hours before.
By the time they were admitted to the intensive care unit at Salisbury District Hospital, the Skripals were both suffering convulsions as their lungs filled with fluid and their hearts slowed to a near stop. Doctors were initially perplexed, but when police informed them that the man in their care was a Russian turncoat living under British government protection, the symptoms began to make terrible sense. The Skripals were showing all the signs of having been exposed to a nerve agent—a military-grade chemical that attacks the central nervous system and causes the collapse of all vital bodily functions. These poison gases, fluids, and vapors are so indiscriminately deadly that the world had banned their development or stockpiling some two decades before. In the unthinkable event that the pair had been attacked with a chemical weapon on the streets of Salisbury, wouldn’t there be other casualties?
Those fears were compounded with the arrival of a new patient in intensive care. Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey was a decorated officer of the Wiltshire Police who had been deployed to search