In the year prior to the Novichok attack, you had a number of meetings with the intended victim, former Russian intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal. How did that moment change your understanding of the story you were reporting?
News of the poisoning came as a body blow to me because I had met Skripal a few times during the summer of 2017, several months before the attempt on his life. I did some research interviews with him for a book I was planning. I knew that he had lost his wife to cancer and his son to alcoholism, and the knowledge that he and his daughter Yulia were in intensive care, fighting for their lives, made me think that the very survival of his family was at stake. Fortunately, the staff at Salisbury Hospital were able to save them.
How unusual was this attack in the context of modern intelligence gathering and covert operations?
In the Cold War intelligence business, there was a general feeling that assassination of one another’s assets was not acceptable. So, for example, Oleg Gordievsky, one of Britain’s great agents inside the KGB, was smuggled out of Moscow in 1985. Although the Soviet authorities sentenced him to death in absentia and he lived under an assumed name in Britain, he was regarded as quite safe. But under Vladimir Putin things changed. Given his hatred of those who betrayed Russia, old assumptions fell away. In 2007, a former Russian intelligence officer, Alexander Litvinenko, was assassinated in London with a radioactive poison that could only have come from a Russian government lab. This was a warning that should have been heeded more seriously in Skripal’s case. But right up until that fateful day in March 2018, both British intelligence and, it must be said, Skripal himself underestimated the danger.
In a case like the one in Salisbury, how important is responsible journalism to public understanding without compromising security concerns?
Of course, it was important for the case to be covered dispassionately and in detail. After all, as soon as it began, Russian sources started to muddy the waters by spreading all kinds of conspiracy theories. They operated under the principle pioneered by Russian spin doctors that "everything is possible and nothing is true”. It was very important for the Western governments to craft their message in the opposite fashion — sticking to a narrow narrative version of events, only revealing new facts slowly and when they felt it was to their advantage. Actually, both approaches — Russian and British — caused frustration among us journalists at the time, struggling to piece together an accurate narrative. But probably the greatest irony of it, in my view, was that it was the appearance of the two Russian prime suspects on one of their own TV stations, trying to deny everything, that probably did more to convince many Westerners of their guilt than things the British government was saying.
For viewers discovering this story now, why do the Salisbury Poisonings still matter today?
I think this story matters because it was a turning point in our understanding of Putin and the Western relationship with him. It exposed his willingness to use a banned chemical weapon on the streets of our country in order to settle his own scores. After the Litvinenko poisoning, there were still people in our government and business community who were keen to get back to business as usual. But after Skripal, the invasion of Ukraine and the poisoning of opposition politician Alexei Navalny, that’s just not on the agenda.
Comments
Post a Comment