From Russia with Blood. Heidi Blake
his daughter. Soon after, two more police officers were admitted with itchy eyes and respiratory difficulties. Then came the three children who had taken handfuls of bread from Sergei Skripal to feed the ducks and an off-duty doctor and nurse who had rushed to administer mouth-to-mouth to the Skripals in advance of the paramedics arriving. Before long, twenty-one people had presented with signs of nerve poisoning.
It looked abundantly clear that a deadly chemical had been used to attack the Skripals—indiscriminately endangering the lives of potentially hundreds of British citizens. The medics in Salisbury District Hospital braced themselves for an all-consuming public health crisis while counterterrorism officers from Scotland Yard swept in to take over the investigation from the local police and 180 military personnel were deployed alongside specialist investigators in white protective suits to comb the streets for traces of a nerve agent. But without identifying the exact chemical that had been used in the attack, it was impossible to know where it had come from—or how its awful effects could be treated.
To the northeast of Salisbury, encircled by barbed wire and set in seven thousand acres of open land, is a sprawling complex of windowless labs and bunkers that harbors some of Britain’s most closely guarded secrets. The Skripals had been poisoned just a few miles from Porton Down, home to the British government’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, one of the world’s foremost centers for research into chemical and biological weapons. As soon as medics spotted the signs of possible nerve-agent poisoning, samples were taken from the Skripals and rushed to the top-secret laboratory for testing.
It did not take long for the government scientists to identify the poison. This was a pure strain of Novichok—a chemical weapon as deadly as it is conspicuously Russian—and researchers at Porton Down had been studying nerve agents like it for years. The toxin was developed in the 1970s and 1980s under a Soviet program code-named Foliant at the Shikhany military research base, in southwest Russia. The existence of the Novichok stockpile was exposed by two Russian state chemists in 1992, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union and just as the country was signing on to the Chemical Weapons Convention outlawing the development and retention of chemical and biological weapons—and MI6 had been gathering intelligence about its adaptation for use in targeted assassinations ever since. The discovery that the Skripals had been poleaxed by this distinctly Soviet poison was met with stark astonishment. This wasn’t just a covert attempt to liquidate a traitor and settle a score: it was also a deliberately overt act of aggression. The poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal was a message, and the return address was clear. The Kremlin.
The prime minister needed to be briefed. Theresa May called her intelligence chiefs to a meeting, where she heard evidence that Putin had sent state agents to exterminate the Skripals on British soil. MI6 had compelling intelligence that the Russian president had personally overseen a program to repurpose an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, including Novichok, for use in targeted assassinations over the past decade. Specialist hit squads had been trained in the use of nerve agents to target individual enemies of the Russian state—and they had been specifically taught to smear the chemicals on door handles, where the highest concentrations of Novichok were identified in samples taken from Sergei Skripal’s home. Russian spies had been showing an interest in the Skripals as far back as 2013, when the country’s military intelligence unit had hacked multiple email accounts owned by Yulia. More alarmingly still, Sergei’s wife and son had both died suddenly in the years since the family relocated to the UK, and there were suspicions that they, too, may have been poisoned.
The British government had no option but to act. On March 12, eight days after the Skripals collapsed, the prime minister announced on the floor of the House of Commons that it was “highly likely” that Vladimir Putin was responsible. “Either this was a direct act by the Russian state against our country, or the Russian government lost control of this potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent,” she said, demanding an explanation from the Kremlin by midnight the following day. Russian officials hit back immediately, calling the remarks a provocation and describing the prime minister’s statement as a “circus show in the British parliament,” but no explanation was forthcoming. Two days later, May announced the expulsion of twenty-three Russian spies operating under diplomatic cover in London. Russia quickly followed suit, ejecting twenty-three British diplomats from Moscow.
The accusation that Russia had carried out a chemical weapons attack in Britain sparked an unprecedented international reaction, leading to the expulsion of more than 150 Russian diplomats from twenty-eight Western countries. The leaders of the United States, Britain, France, and Germany issued a joint statement condemning Russia for “the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War,” describing the attack as “an assault on UK sovereignty” and a breach of international law that “threatens the security of us all.” The fallout plunged relations between Russia and the West to the kind of subzero temperatures not seen since the end of the Cold War. For a Britain increasingly isolated by its decision to leave the European Union, the attack on the Skripals had occasioned a heartening show of international solidarity. And, at least ostensibly, it enabled a prime minister beleaguered by bruising failures in the Brexit negotiations to reposition herself as a redoubtable global stateswoman. But back in Moscow, Putin was looking on with scarcely disguised glee.
The West’s response to the attempted assassination of the Skripals could not have been more of a gift to the man in the Kremlin. The Russian presidential elections fell on March 18—a fortnight after the attack—and Putin needed to mobilize his electorate. True, he did not have much competition. The opposition figurehead, Alexei Navalny, had been repeatedly attacked and imprisoned during his campaign before ultimately being banned from running, and Putin’s previous leading opponent, Boris Nemtsov, had been gunned down on a bridge outside the Kremlin three years earlier. The election result was a foregone conclusion. But Putin wanted a resounding victory as he closed his grip on another six years in power, and that meant getting a strong turnout at the polls. To achieve his goal, he needed to rouse the Russian people into a state of patriotic fervor and distract them from the dire state of Russia’s sanctions-stricken economy, rampant corruption, crumbling infrastructure, chronically underfunded health service, and failing education system. What better way to do that than to invoke the looming menace of Russia’s enemies in the West, from whom only he could be trusted to defend the motherland?
That had been the principal objective of the state of the nation address Putin delivered three days before the attack on the Skripals, in which he announced that Russia had developed a new arsenal of nuclear missiles capable of penetrating US air defenses. Squaring up to the podium in a sharp-shouldered black suit and deep-red tie, he declared: “I would like to tell those who have been trying to escalate the arms race for the past fifteen years, to gain unilateral advantages over Russia, and to impose restrictions and sanctions…The attempt at curbing Russia has failed.” Behind him, two vast screens lit up with footage of snow-covered rocket launchers blasting gigantic missiles into a glowering sky, followed by animations charting a ballistic trajectory encircling the entire globe.
Putin’s warmongering state of the nation was the first turn in his well-practiced pre-election performance as a global strongman, and the attack on the Skripals made the perfect sequel. After Britain pointed a finger at the Kremlin and the countries in the United States–led NATO alliance followed suit, all the mechanisms of the Russian state went into overdrive to whip up national hysteria about the iniquity of its Western enemies. Even by the prodigious standards of the Russian propaganda machine, rarely had such a dazzling variety of alternative conspiracy theories been spewed out by the state’s multiplicity of troll factories, fake-news farms, and organs of agitprop. Britain had deliberately put the Skripals into a coma and fabricated evidence to frame Russia—or to detract attention from its difficulties in the Brexit negotiations, or to smear Putin ahead of the presidential election or to destroy Russia’s reputation as a “peacemaker” in Syria, or out of sour grapes over having lost the right to host the 2018 World Cup. MI6 had poisoned Skripal out of fears he would flip and start selling British secrets back to Moscow. The pro-Western government of Ukraine was behind the attack. Sweden, Slovakia, or the Czech Republic was responsible. A mafia group had taken out a contract on the Skripals. The Novichok had originated from the lab at Porton Down, or the United States had made its own version of the nerve agent