When the call reached the duty officer at MI6 headquarters on the night of March 4, 2018, it was greeted with surprise and alarm. One of his agents lay in a hospital bed, apparently poisoned.
The realization that Sergei Skripal had been attacked in the UK sent shockwaves through the British spy world and raised important but difficult questions.
Some of these questions have been answered by this latest report, which found Russian President Vladimir Putin “morally responsible” for the death of Dawn Sturgess.
He unknowingly sprayed himself with the same nerve agent, hidden in a perfume bottle and discarded by the alleged Russian agents who poisoned Skripal.
So have all the lessons been learned?
One question was whether more could have been done to protect Skripal. Skripal had been recruited to spy by MI6 in the 1990s, but was later captured by the Russians before being traded as part of a spy swap in 2010.
At the time he arrived in the UK, the current risk assessment for him was relatively low. After all, he had been forgiven. Top spies later admitted that this was an erroneous assumption. As a “settled deserter”, he also had his own opinion about what kind of security he wanted and was clear that he did not want a new identity or a new life. Perhaps that was the only thing that could have prevented the attack.
The report says there may be nothing to indicate a dramatic nerve agent attack could have occurred, but it does say there were no regular, up-to-date assessments of the risks he faced.
In 2014, the relationship with Russia was darkening thanks to the first crisis over Ukraine. Skripal was also speaking to European intelligence services, which may have raised his risk profile. And Putin, a former spy who frequently speaks of his hatred of traitors, was not a man to forget betrayal. Neither was the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency of which Skripal had been a member.
The report suggests that the use of the Novichok nerve agent was a show of power by the Russian state. But many within the intelligence world believe that what it was really intended to be was a message to others: if they betrayed Russian secrets to Western intelligence, they too would be hunted down even if it took years and even if their family was at risk.
This lesson was quickly learned by the British intelligence and security services, who immediately after the poisoning applied greater protection to defectors and other people at risk in the United Kingdom.
The report says there is no doubt that a GRU unit was responsible for the poisoning. They arrived in the country on a short-lived mission and were able to deliver the poison and then leave, abandoning the perfume bottle full of Novichok that would kill Dawn Sturgess.
The agents involved were named within months and the wider GRU unit has seen many of its operations and some of the fake identities it uses exposed, most notably by the investigative site Bellingcat. But could they do it again?
Russian intelligence operations in the UK and Europe have come under pressure. Following Salisbury and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there has been a mass expulsion of Russian diplomats across Europe to make their operations more difficult. More information is also shared to try to detect agent travel.
But Russia has also adapted. In recent years, knowing that it is more difficult to get Russian agents into the UK, it has turned to proxies to carry out its work. For example, a group of Bulgarians based in the United Kingdom were hired from Moscow to monitor Moscow targets in exchange for money. They were convicted earlier this year.
They followed people on planes and talked about kidnappings. They were amateurs but still dangerous. “Of course, they will fail 99% of the time. But the problem is that if you have 100 groups like this, one of those 100 will succeed,” Roman Dobrokhotov, a Russian journalist exiled in the United Kingdom and a target of the Bulgarians, told me. “And they don’t care about the 99 groups that will be arrested.”
This is a different model for Russian intelligence: using disposable agents for hire. They have also paid low-level British criminals to carry out arson attacks. This requires a different type of surveillance to detect activities, compared to the old ways of detecting spies. Counter-Terrorism Police say their work to tackle threats from hostile states has increased five-fold since Salisbury.
Today, Russia, its spies and its proxies are involved in a low-level conflict with the United Kingdom and other European countries that involves carrying out acts of surveillance and sabotage. Their ability to re-poison a deserter with a nerve agent is almost certainly diminished by better awareness and stronger defenses. But that does not mean that other types of danger do not exist.
