By Mark Urban
Reviewed by Cipher Brief Expert and Former Senior Member of the British Foreign Office,
The Skripal Files, Henry Holt & Company, 2018
When Sergei Skripal arrived in the UK in 2010 as part of a prisoner swap, he must have assumed that the dramatic, even turbulent, phase of his life was finally over and he could look forward to some long years of peaceful retirement. He settled in a small, quiet English city and seems to have devoted much of his time to jigsaw puzzles and guinea pigs. After his wife passed away, he made regular trips to her grave.
Mark Urban takes us through the dramatic events of 2018 that suddenly turned a peaceful retirement on its head. The outline of these events is well known, but Mr. Urban shows us how close Mr. Skripal and his daughter Yulia were to death in the hours, and then days, after the 4 March attack on them. And we should not forget that the same chemical, Novichok, that almost killed the Skripals, did kill an innocent British woman four months later. So, this is really a story not just about attempted murder, but murder as well.
Perhaps the most breathtaking parts of the book are those that document the Russian state’s efforts to lie its way out of the hole that they had been dumped in by the incompetence of the GRU operation (Russian military intelligence). Aged former Sovietologists will recognise the combination of knockabout humour, moral indignation and brazen dishonesty that characterised the Russian response from the comments of Sergei Lavrov five days after the attack, (“this is pure propaganda”) onwards.
Mr. Urban persuasively describes the Russian information method after the attack as “releasing as many counter-theories as possible”. It did not matter if these theories were contradictory or simply impossible: just chuck them in the pool and muddy the waters and that would be success enough. Mr. Urban points out that an innocent or genuinely aggrieved country would have ordered something like an urgent, thorough review into whether any nerve agent had somehow been stolen from a Russian facility. Of course, Vladimir Putin ordered no such thing. Instead, Russian officials proposed an Anglo-Russian investigation and asked for consular access to the Skripals. No one took this seriously, but the Russian government must have thought that it was scoring some points. And the Russians even used a cousin of Yulia Skripal, and the aged mother of Sergei, to help them fight their information wars.
Whether or not the Russians were expecting a firm western response, that is what they got. The U.S. and other allies supported the UK and more than 150 Russian intelligence officers were kicked out of countries around the world. Incidentally, most of those were probably SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service), not GRU and one suspects that the SVR would have been as furious as anyone over the consequences of what the GRU did in Salisbury.
Mr. Urban’s book is very readable and well-researched; he is generally convincing in his judgments and, one should add, far from blind to the errors he thinks were made on the British side. But the book is “instant history” and of course, history did not stand still when Mr. Urban handed his final draft over to his publishers. Thus, there is no account of the hilarious interview of the two Russian “tourists” on Russian state TV on September 13. Apart from teaching every Russian schoolchild the height of the Salisbury cathedral spire, this hapless exercise, followed by the calamitous identification of the “tourists” as GRU operatives, made the GRU look not just amoral, but idiotic. You can put up with being thought evil, cynical and ruthless; but not with being a global laughing stock.
Fishwick gives The Skripal Files a solid three out of four trench coats.
Also read Cipher Brief Expert and former Chief of Station, CIA 's review of The Skripal Files
Nick Fishwick, CMG retired in 2012, after nearly thirty years in the British Foreign Service. He did postings in Lagos, Istanbul and Kabul. His responsibilities in London included director of security and, after returning from Afghanistan in 2007, director for counter-terrorism. His final role was as director general for international operations. Nick Fishwick also spent three years on a secondment to UK Customs, specialising in international drug enforcement and tax evasion issues.
