Will the mass expulsion of diplomats affect Russia’s spy capabilities?

Relations between Russia and much of the West reached a new low on Monday, with the expulsion of over 100 Russian diplomats from two dozen countries around the world. The unprecedented expulsions were publicized on Monday with a series of coordinated announcements issued from nearly every European capital, as well as from Washington, Ottawa and Canberra. By the early hours of Tuesday, the number of Russian diplomatic expulsions had reached 118 —not counting the 23 Russian so-called “undeclared intelligence officers” that were expelled from Britain last week. Further expulsions of Russian diplomats are expected in the coming days.

It is indeed difficult to overstate the significance of this development in the diplomatic and intelligence spheres. Monday’s announcements signified the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence personnel (intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover) in history, and is remarkable even by Cold War standards. In the United States, the administration of President Donald Trump expelled no fewer than 60 Russian diplomats and shut down the Russian consulate in Seattle. Such a move would have been viewed as aggressive even for Mr. Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is known for her hardline anti-Russian stance. In Europe, the move to expel dozens of Russian envoys from 23 different countries —most of them European Union members— was a rare act of unity that surprised European observers as much as it did the Russians.

RUSSIA’S ESPIONAGE CAPABILITY

However, in considering the unprecedented number of diplomatic expulsions from an intelligence point of view, the question that arises is, how will these developments affect Russia’s espionage capabilities abroad? If the Kremlin did indeed authorize the attempted assassination of the Russian defector Sergei Skripal, it must be assumed that it expected some kind of reaction from London, possibly in the form of limited diplomatic expulsions. The resulting worldwide wave of expulsions must have caught Russian intelligence planners by surprise. There is little question, therefore, that these are difficult hours for the GRU, Russia’s military-run Main Intelligence Directorate, and the SVR, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. These agencies will be losing as much as two thirds of their official-cover officers in Europe and North America. The last time this happened on such a massive scale was during World War II, as Soviet embassies across Europe were unceremoniously shut down by the advancing Nazi forces.

WHO NEEDS AN EMBASSY?

Nevertheless, as the Russian embassy in London tweeted on March 13, in response to rumors of pending diplomatic expulsions of Russians by Britain, “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. This will prove to be the case in the coming days, as Moscow will proceed to expel dozens —probably even hundreds— of Western diplomats from its soil. Russia has traditionally stationed more intelligence officers in its Western embassies than Western countries have inside Russia. This means that the Russian response to Monday’s diplomatic expulsions will virtually decimate entire stations of several European intelligence agencies on Russian soil, and will even cut into the foreign diplomatic community in several Russian cities. On balance, these tit-for-tat expulsions will hurt the West more than Russia, because it is more difficult for the West to run espionage operations inside Russia than it is for Russia to spy in the West. Western societies are relatively open and are characterized by limited and unobtrusive governments. This allows countries like Russia to run spy operations with little resistance, even in the absence of embassy personnel operating in relative safety under diplomatic immunity. The same cannot be said about intelligence operations carried out by Western agencies inside Russia, where the role of diplomatic personnel is usually central. Russia is a relatively closed society, where working as an intelligence officer without diplomatic immunity is at best perilous. Consequently, diplomatic cover is far more useful for Western intelligence services working inside Russia, than for Russian intelligence services working in the West.

WILL RUSSIA’S COVERT OPERATIONS BE AFFECTED?

Undoubtedly, the expulsions of Russian diplomats —presumably most of them undeclared intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover— will send a strong political message to Moscow and will disrupt the Kremlin’s intelligence activities in the West. But they will have a limited effect on covert operations of the kind that was witnessed in England on March 4, when Sergei Skripal and his daughter were nearly poisoned to death. These operations, which are extremely complex and meticulously planned, are rarely conducted by embassy personnel. The latter may provide a marginal supporting role, but the bulk of these activities are carried out by large teams of specialists who are dispatched directly from Russia and are not associated with the diplomatic community. It follows that the latest expulsions of diplomats will have little —if any— effect on Russia’s ability to conduct covert operations against dissidents, known double agents, or other targets abroad.

Last but not least, Russia’s most damaging intelligence operations against Western targets in recent years have been carried out in the online environment. The meddling by Russian intelligence services in the 2016 US presidential election has undeniably wreaked havoc in the American political life and has dangerously deepened pre-existing divisions in the country. In this operation —arguably Russia’s most effective against its American arch-rival in the post-Cold War era— the role of spies was distinctly marginal. Much of it was designed, organized and implemented from windowless computer labs in drab government buildings in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Impressive as they may be, the latest diplomatic expulsions of Russian diplomats will do little to stop such damaging and potentially lethal intelligence operations taking place remotely.

I do not mean to suggest that the massive wave of diplomatic expulsions is insignificant or harmless for Russian interests. Moscow never expected that its decision to kill Skripal would cause it to lose nearly 150 official-cover intelligence officers from some of the world’s most important geographical collection targets. But Russia has a long tradition of espionage that dates from Tsarist times, and has suffered far deeper wounds in its history. It will recover and will continue its secret work, as always with a mixed record of failure and success. In responding to the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal, the West has shown rare unity and resolve. But if it is to prevail in this prolonged, unpredictable conflict, it will need to remain united and continue to act collectively. The coming weeks will show whether that is a realistic hope.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis

https://intelnews.org/2018/03/27/01-2296/

Russian double agent Sergei Skripal wrote to Putin seeking to return, says friend

Sergei Skripal, the Russian double agent who was poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in England earlier this month, wrote to the Kremlin asking to return to Russia, according to one of his old school friends. Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, remain in critical condition in hospital, three weeks after being poisoned with a nerve agent that British scientists say belongs to Russia’s Cold-War-era chemical stockpiles. Moscow has angrily rejected claims that Skripal, who spied for Britain in the early 2000s, was on a Kremlin-approved hit-list of defectors. On March 17, the Kremlin expelled 23 British diplomats from Moscow in response to London’s earlier expulsion of 23 Russians, which the British government said were “undeclared intelligence officers”.

On Saturday, the BBC said it contacted one of Skripal’s friends from his school days, who said that he was contacted by the double spy in 2012. Vladimir Timoshkov told the BBC that he was a childhood friend of Skripal when the two were in school together, but lost contact later in life. In 2006, when he learned through the media that Skripal had been convicted of espionage, Timoshkov said he managed to contact Skripal’s daughter, Yulia, after finding her on a social media platform. He remained in contact with her, and in 2012 he received a telephone call from Skripal himself. By that time, the double spy was living in England, having relocated there after the Kremlin swapped him and three others for 10 Russian spies who had been caught in the United States.

Timoshkov said that he and Skripal spoke for half an hour, during which Skripal told him he was “not a traitor” to the Soviet Union, the country that he had initially promised to protect. According to Timoshkov, Skripal also said that he had “regretted being a double agent” because his life had “become all messed up”. He also said that he felt isolated from his old classmates and friends, who shunned him following his arrest and conviction for espionage. During the telephone conversation, Skripal allegedly told Timoshkov that he had written a personal letter to the Russian President Vladimir Putin, asking for a full pardon. He did so because he missed his mother, brother, and other relatives who were living in Russia, and he wanted to visit them. In the letter to President Putin, Skripal denied that he betrayed his country and asked for “complete forgiveness” from the Russian leader, said Timoshkov.

But on Sunday, the Russian government denied that a letter from Skripal had been received by the Kremlin. The BBC report was also denied by the Russian embassy in London. In a tweet quoting the Kremlin, the embassy said: “There was no letter from Sergei Skripal to President Putin to allow him to come back to Russia.”

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis 

https://intelnews.org/2018/03/26/01-2295/

Gendarme who swapped place with hostages hailed a hero in France

Lt Col Arnaud Beltrame who was killed after swapping himself for a hostage in a siege in the town of Trebes, southwestern France, on 23 March.

Even by the high standards of duty and self-sacrifice expected of professional soldiers and police officers the world over, the courage of Lt Col Arnaud Beltrame was extraordinary.

By offering to swap places with hostages held by a terrorist gunman who had already killed three people and had declared his allegiance to Islamic State (Isis), the decorated officer would have known he was almost certainly walking to his death.

In the last three years attackers with Islamist sympathies have attacked – and in certain cases killed – French police, gendarmes and soldiers on more than 10 occasions. Armed with nothing but this knowledge, Beltrame strode across the car park of the SuperU store in Trèbes, a small town near Carcassonne, to confront Radouane Lakdim, a self-described “soldier of the caliphate”.

The Frenchman of Moroccan origin had carried out three separate attacks that day, culminating in a three-hour siege at the supermarket, where he killed a member of staff and a customer and took several hostages. Beltrame left his mobile telephone line open, enabling police and special forces outside the supermarket to hear what was going on. When they heard shots, they stormed the store, killing Lakdim and finding Beltrame gravely injured after being shot and stabbed.

After the gendarme was helicoptered to a hospital, France held its breath and hoped for a happy ending. At around 6am on Saturday morning, that hope was shattered.

A brief statement from the interior minister, Gérard Collomb, announced that Beltrame had made the ultimate sacrifice. Tributes poured in for the 45-year-old officer who, it was revealed, had been preparing to marry on 9 June. He had already married his wife, Mariele, under civil law, and the couple were planning a church ceremony. Instead, the priest who would have officiated at the wedding was called to Beltrame’s bedside, where Marielle was keeping vigil on Friday evening to give him the last rites.

French investigators are trying to discover how Lakdim, who had been flagged up by the country’s intelligence services as a security risk, was able to obtain a weapon and go on a killing spree, gunning down four people. The Trèbes attack is the first since Emmanuel Macron was elected last May and the first since France’s state of emergency was ended last November. While other European countries, Britain, Spain, Belgium among others, have been hit by terrorism, France has been especially targeted.

Apart from possible social and economic reasons that may drive disillusioned youngsters to extremism and France’s hard line on religious symbols like the burqa as well as the French military’s involvement in the US-led bombing of Syria, one reason France is targeted is that Isis specifically decided to target it. Islamic State’s chief spokesman, Mohammad al-Adnani, singled out the “spiteful French” for attack in September 2014.

Lakdim, who lived in Carcassonne, was known to police as a petty criminal and small-time drug dealer, and since 2014 he had been on France’s Fiche S list, meaning he was considered a potential threat. He had also been under surveillance, though intelligence officers reportedly decided he was not a serious risk.

Although French police knew he had consulted pro-Islamic State websites, French prosecutor François Molins said there had been no evidence he was planning a terrorist act.

Collomb agreed, saying Lakdim had shown “no sign of radicalisation”. He described his actions as that of “a loner who suddenly decided to act”. Islamic State claimed responsiblity for the attacks without giving any evidence. The claim is being investigated.

A second unnamed person, a male aged 17, was taken into police custody for questioning, and Lakdim’s girlfriend, 18, was brought in for police questioning on Friday evening.

Meanwhile, Beltrame’s family have been paying tribute to the courage of the officer. His brother Cédric said the gendarme would have walked into the supermarket knowing he would probably die.

“He certainly would have known that he had practically no chance. He was very conscious of that … he didn’t hesitate a second,” Cédric Beltrame told RTL radio, adding that it was “perfectly appropriate” to describe his brother as a hero. “He gave his life for someone else, a stranger, not even for someone in his family,” he said.

Beltrame’s mother also spoke to RTL on Friday before he died. “He used to say to me, ‘I’m doing my job, maman, that’s all.’ That’s just the way he is,” she said.

Florence Nicolic, Beltrame’s cousin, said that the gendarme had been passionate about the military all his life. “Since he was a little boy, Arnaud has always talked about the army and being a soldier. That has been a passion in his life since he was a baby,” Nicolic told the BBC. “He used to play with tin soldiers all the time. His grandfather was in the army and was an idol and he wanted to do it.”

She added: “What he did was so wonderful and so brave, we were very surprised and shocked. But when we heard what had happened, we were not surprised in a sense, because that’s the thing he would do without hesitation. He wouldn’t think about the consequences.”

Beltrame, of the Aude Gendarmerie, grew up in Brittany and had a distinguished career, earning commendations and military honours, including a military cross. He graduated from France’s elite military college, Saint-Cyr, in 1999 with the rank of major and a commendation for his “resolutely offensive spirit when faced with  adversity”.

His superior officers noted that he was prepared to “fight to the end and never give up”.

From Saint-Cyr, Beltrame underwent training for the gendarmerie, including for the special intervention unit, the elite GIGN (Groupe d’intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale), whose missions include counter-terrorism and hostage rescue. He was given military honours in 2007 following a two-year posting to Iraq and later spent four years as part of the Garde républicaine at the Elysée Palace, before becoming a special adviser to the secretary-general of France’s environment ministry. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in 2016.

“Lieutenant-colonel Arnaud Beltrame died serving the country to which he had already given so much. In giving his life to bring to an end the murderous actions of a jihadist terrorist, he has fallen a hero,” President Emmanuel Macron said.

As a former member of the elite anti-terrorist police, Beltrame had trained for such a situation. As deputy commander of the Aude Gendarmerie, he had organised an exercise simulating a terrorist attack and mass killing in a supermarket only last December. Even as they trained, Beltrame and his gendarmes must have thought such a scenario unlikely in a sleepy town like Trèbes. It now seems tragically prescient.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/24/gendarme-arnaud-beltrame-hostages-hailed-hero-france-trebes

Theresa May has embarrassed Vladimir Putin at his own political game, Russia expert says

 

• Theresa May has "outsmarted" Vladimir Putin over the attempted murder of ex-Kremlin spy Sergei Skripal, according to a Russia expert.
• Professor Anthony Glees said May has shown that it is a "probability that borders on certainty" that Russia was behind the nerve agent attack.
• Rallying support from the US, France, and Germany was a major victory, which has made Russia look isolated.
• May's handling of the Skripal case has impressed voters in Britain.

Theresa May has "outsmarted" Vladimir Putin with her response to the attempted murder of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Britain last week, a Russia expert has told Business Insider.

The prime minister has been praised for gripping the issue and corralling support from the UK's most powerful allies, as the West looks to face down what May described as Russia's "brazen" assassination bid on Skripal.

"She played this very well," said Professor Anthony Glees, the director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham.

Glees, who is anti-Brexit and often openly critical of May, said the prime minister's ultimatum to Russia this week - to provide evidence that it had no involvement in the Skripal poisoning or face retaliation - helped flush out Putin.

"She outsmarted him - he didn't say no and he didn't say yes, all he did was treat her with the words she used: sarcasm, contempt, and defiance," he told Business Insider. "That allowed her to say that there was no other alternative to Putin, other than the Russian state was culpable."

© Provided by Business Insider Inc Sergei skripal salisbury military masks

The word "culpable" was in itself carefully chosen, Glees said, because it could mean one of the two things: That Putin did not take proper care of his military-grade Novichok nerve agent and it fell into the wrong hands, or that he wilfully weaponised it on foreign soil.

"In the world of secret activity, there is never going to be certainty. If we don't get into the archives of the Russian state, there's never going to be. There can only be a probability that borders on certainty - and that's exactly what Theresa May has said. It's a probability that borders on certainty that Russia was behind this," Glees said.

May's other big victory this week was to galvanize the support of the US, France, and Germany. The leaders of all three nations signed a joint statement, which said there was "no plausible alternative explanation" for the Skripal poisoning other than a Kremlin hit-job.

Putin's seeds of division have not taken root

Sir Christopher Meyer, a former British ambassador to the US, tweeted: "Joint statement on Skripal attack a major diplomatic success for May. Never thought Berlin and Paris would agree. Our evidence must have been compelling."

If one of Putin's aims was to test how isolated Britain is following Brexit, then this joint statement suggests that the UK is far from marooned. Putin's seeds of division have not taken root, and it is Russia that looks increasingly adrift in a week of strained diplomatic tensions.

May's handling of the Skripal case appears to have played well in Britain as well. A snap Sky News poll asked how the prime minister is handling the incident: 61% said she is doing a "good" job, while 29% disagreed. Only 18% of those questioned said Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is handling the matter well.

Similarly, a YouGov poll for The Times found that 53% of people thing Theresa May has responded "well" to the attempted assassination of the former Russian spy.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/theresa-may-has-embarrassed-vladimir-putin-at-his-own-political-game-russia-expert-says/ar-BBKli2x?ocid=sl

French consular employee caught smuggling guns to Gaza using diplomatic car

An employee of France’s consulate in Jerusalem is under arrest for allegedly smuggling weapons from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank, according to French media reports, which have been confirmed by Israel. The consular employee has been identified by the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, as Romain Franck, 23. He reportedly worked as a driver at the consulate, a job he managed to secure through a prestigious “international volunteer” program sponsored by the French government. The elite program allows recent French college graduates to gain work experience in various countries around the world. Although he had a relatively junior post at the French consulate, Franck carried a diplomatic passport, which allowed him to move through international borders without being searched, due to his diplomatic immunity privileges.

But, according to French newspaper Liberation, Franck was detained by Shin Bet officers on February 19 of this year, as he was trying to enter Israel from the Gaza Strip at the Erez border crossing. He was driving a car that bears French diplomatic license plates and belongs to the French consulate in Jerusalem. Inside the car, the Shin Bet officers reportedly found pistols and assault rifles. According to Liberation, Franck’s arrest has been kept secret. The Shin Bet admitted that the newspaper’s story was true on Tuesday afternoon. Franck reportedly told his Israeli captors that he had received the weapons from a Palestinian who worked at the French Cultural Center in Gaza. He then transported them over several trips to the West Bank, where other Palestinians picked them up, paid him, and sold them on to others.

Israel has reportedly arrested eight more people in connection with the gun running, all of whom are Palestinians. They include a Palestinian security guard at the French consulate. According to the Shin Bet, Franck was not ideologically or politically allied with Hamas, Fatah, or any other Palestinian group. Instead, he participated in the gun smuggling for financial gain. A spokesman at France’s embassy in Tel Aviv said that Paris was closely monitoring the incident and was “in close contact with the Israeli authorities on the matter”.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis |https://intelnews.org/2018/03/20/01-2290/

Analysis: Decoding Britain’s response to the poisoning of Sergei Skripal

 

As expected, Moscow snubbed the British government’s demand for information into how a Russian-produced military-grade nerve agent ended up being used in the streets of Salisbury, England. As British Prime Minister Theresa May addressed the House of Commons on Wednesday afternoon, Sergei Skripal continued to fight for his life in a hospital in southern England. His daughter, Yulia, was also comatose, having been poisoned with the same Cold-War-era nerve agent as her father. This blog has followed the case of Sergei Skripal since 2010, when he arrived with his family in the United Kingdom after he was released from a Russian prison, having served the majority of a 13-year sentence for spying for Britain.

Just hours after the attack on the Skripals, British defense and intelligence experts concluded that it had been authorized by the Kremlin. On Wednesday, Prime Minister May laid out a series of measures that the British government will be taking in response to what London claims was a Russian-sponsored criminal assault on British soil. Some of the measures announced by May, such as asking the home secretary whether additional counter-espionage measures are needed to combat hostile activities by foreign agents in the UK, are speculative. The British prime minister also said that the state would develop new proposals for legislative powers to “harden our defenses against all forms of hostile state activity”. But she did not specify what these proposals will be, and it may be months —even years— before such measures are implemented.

The primary direct measure taken by Britain in response to the attack against Skripal centers on the immediate expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats from Britain. They have reportedly been given a week to leave the country, along with their families. When they do so, they will become part of the largest expulsion of foreign diplomats from British soil since 1985, when London expelled 31 Soviet diplomats in response to revelations of espionage against Britain made by Soviet intelligence defector Oleg Gordievsky. Although impressive in size, the latest expulsions are dwarfed by the dramatic expulsion in 1971 of no fewer than 105 Soviet diplomats from Britain, following yet another defection of a Soviet intelligence officer, who remained anonymous.

It is important to note, however, that in 1971 there were more than 500 Soviet diplomats stationed in Britain. Today there are fewer than 60. This means that nearly 40 percent of the Russian diplomatic presence in the UK will expelled from the country by next week. What is more, the 23 diplomats selected for expulsion are, according to Mrs. May, “undeclared intelligence officers”. In other words, according to the British government, they are essentially masquerading as diplomats, when in fact they are intelligence officers, whose job is to facilitate espionage on British soil. It appears that these 23 so-called intelligence officers make up almost the entirety of Russia’s “official-cover” network on British soil. This means that the UK Foreign Office has decided to expel from Britain nearly every Russian diplomat that it believes is an intelligence officer.

It is indeed difficult to underestimate the size of this diplomatic expulsion in the post-Cold War context. It suffices to recall that, in 2006, London expelled just four Russian undeclared intelligence officers in response to the murder of another defector to Britain, former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko. But how damaging will the latest expulsions be to the Russian intelligence presence in the British Isles? Theresa May saidon Wednesday that the expulsions “will fundamentally degrade Russian intelligence capability in the UK for years to come. And if they [the Russians] seek to rebuild it, we will prevent them from doing so”. Her statement is questionable on many levels.

There is no doubt that Russian intelligence operations on British soil will suffer a setback as a result of the impending expulsions. But the extent of that setback will depend on the size of Russia’s non-official-cover intelligence presence in Britain. Non-official-cover operatives include all Russian intelligence officers who are embedded abroad under deep-cover, without links to Russian embassies, or even to Russia itself. In 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation caught 10 such Russian agents in the United States, most of whom were masquerading as citizens of third countries, including Canada, Britain and Peru. Two more were captured in Germany in 2011, and were found to be using Austrian passports. No-one knows how many more such deep-cover agents the Russians have working in the West. Some believe that undeclared intelligence officers, of the type that Britain will be expelling in response to the attack on Skripal, are merely decoys, who preoccupy Western counterintelligence services while the real espionage is conducted by deep-cover spies, known as “illegals”. It is indeed almost certain that the attack on the Skripals was not perpetrated by staff at the Russian embassy, who are closely monitored by Britain’s Security Service (MI5), but by illegals. If that theory is true, then the latest wave of expulsions announced by London will make minimal difference to Russian intelligence operations on British soil.

Additionally, one needs to consider the inevitable response from Moscow to the announced expulsions. On Tuesday, the Russian embassy in the UK tweeted that “any threat to take ‘punitive’ measures against Russia will meet [sic] with a response. The British side should be aware of that”. The Kremlin will have inevitably compiled its own lists of British undeclared intelligence officers masquerading as diplomats in Moscow, and will undoubtedly be reviewing them in the wake yesterday’s events. In all probability, that will lead to a tit-for-tat expulsion of undeclared intelligence officers between Britain and Russia. If that were to happen, it is difficult to know which side’s intelligence operations will suffer most.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Mrs. May’s speech came at the end, when she mentioned that her government would “deploy a range of tools from across the full breadth of our national security apparatus in order to counter the threats of hostile state activity”. Most of these measures, she added, “cannot be shared publicly, for reasons of national security”. This statement means that Britain’s response to Skripal’s poisoning will be multi-level, and will include diplomatic, political, economic, andintelligence components. It is the latter that Mrs. May did not disclose during her speech on Wednesday, and which could potentially be the most harmful to Russian interests. One theory is that the British prime minister may have hinted at the revival of a host of intelligence operations against Russia, which the British government abandoned at the end of the Cold War. But if that is the case, it will be years before these long-abandoned programs will begin to bear fruit. Another theory is that Britain’s intelligence establishment may be preparing for a sustained low-level confrontation against Russia. But in that case, why take out the element of surprise —so central in the realm of intelligence— by announcing publicly that an espionage war is now underway?

Undoubtedly, the level of intensity generated by the Skripal case lacks the high tension of the Cold War. At the same time, the political drama currently unfolding in London is substantial, and is giving the millennial generation in both East and West a small taste of what the Cold War was like. History never repeats itself. However, future historians may point to the Litvinenko and Skripal cases as transitional moments that helped shape a new era of confrontation between Russia and the West.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis |https://intelnews.org/2018/03/15/01-2288/

Russian spy may have been poisoned by nerve agent smeared on car’s door handle

The nerve agent that poisoned a Russian double spy in England last week may have been smeared on his car’s door handle, according to sources. Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, are in critical condition after being poisoned on March 4 by unknown assailants in the English town of Salisbury. Skripal, a Russian former military intelligence officer, has been living there since 2010, when he was released from a Russian prison after serving half of a 13-year sentence for spying for Britain. The British government said on Monday that it believes Skripal and his daughter were poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent, thought to have been built in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Britain’s counterterrorism experts continue to compile evidence on the case. Moscow denies any involvement.

On Tuesday, Neil Basu, spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Service, which houses Britain’s counterterrorism force, said that the investigation into the Skripals’ poisoning was complex and painstaking. Speaking to reporters in London, Basu said that hundreds of witnesses had been contacted and nearly 400 items had been collected from various crime scenes that related to the March 4 attack on the two Russians. He added that investigators were still looking into the whereabouts of the Skripals during a 40-minute period when they were driving in Mr. Skripal’s car. According to British newspaper The Daily Mail, Mr. Skripal’s dark red BMW is now “at the center of the investigation” into his poisoning. There are claims, said the paper, that the former spy and his daughter came in physical contact with the nerve agent by touching the door handles of the BMW as they entered the car on the evening of March 4. Some investigators appear to believe that the nerve agent may have been smeared on the car’s door handles.

The Metropolitan Police are now appealing for witnesses who may have seen the Skripals driving around downtown Salisbury in the red BMW, or arriving at the car park of Sainsbury’s, part of a British nationwide supermarket chain, on the early afternoon of March 4. Basu said that it was not known whether the pair met anyone during those 40 minutes. The police spokesman said that the Skripals were still fighting for their lives at a local hospital. He added that the inquiry into their poisoning would “take many weeks”.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis 

https://intelnews.org/2018/03/14/01-2287/

UK blames Russia, says it will not invoke NATO Article 5 in attack on ex-spy

The British prime minister said on Monday that it was “highly likely” the nerve agent used to attack a Russian defector in England last week was developed by Russia. But sources in London told the BBC that the British government would not invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which states that an attack on one member of the alliance is an attack on all. Theresa May was referring to an assassination attempt carried out on March 4 by unknown assailants against former KGB Colonel Sergei Skripal. The 66-year-old former spy and his daughter were found in a catatonic state in the town of Salisbury. It was later determined that they were attacked with a nerve agent.

Speaking in the British House of Commons, Mrs. May said that “world-leading experts” in chemical weapons had concluded Mr. Skripal had been attacked with a “military-grade nerve agent”. It was, she added, part of a group of nerve agents developed by the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s, known collectively as novichok (newcomers). The existence of these nerve agents took place in secret, but was later revealed by Russian government agents who defected to the West. British officials also disclosed yesterday that the British Foreign Office summoned the Russian Ambassador to London, Alexander Yakovenko, to seek an explanation about the attack. Additionally, London has called on Moscow to provide a “full and complete disclosure” of its novichok nerve agent program to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an intergovernmental agency based in the Netherlands, which oversees the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention.

Meanwhile NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters on Monday that the alliance viewed the use of a military-grade nerve agent on British soil as “horrendous and completely unacceptable” and that it was in contact with British officials about the matter. But British government officials told the BBC that London had no intention of invoking Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which requires all member-states to rally to the defense of a member under attack. The only time that Article 5 has been invoked by a member was by the United States, in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks. In Washington, White House Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Monday that the United States was “monitoring the incident closely” and took it “very seriously”. Mrs. Sanders described the attack on Mr. Skripal as “reckless, indiscriminative and irresponsible”, and extended the American government’s “support […] to our closest ally”, the United Kingdom. But she refused to respond to questions about whether the Russian government was behind the attack, saying that British experts were “still working through […] some of the details” of the case.

On Monday, during an official visit to the southern region of Krasnodar, Russian President Vladimir Putin was asked by a BBC reporter to comment on the attack on Skripal. He respondedto the British reporter saying that the government in London would first have to “sort this out for yourselves first, then come talk to us”. He then walked away. Commenting from Moscow on Mrs. May’s allegations, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that her statement in the British Parliament had been “a circus show”.

https://intelnews.org/2018/03/13/01-2286/

British intelligence to tighten security protection for Russian defectors

The British secret services have begun tightening the physical security of dozens of Russian defectors living in Britain, a week after the attempted murder of former KGB Colonel Sergei Skripal in southern England. The 66-year-old double spy and his daughter, Yulia, were found in a catatonic state in the town of Salisbury on March 4. It was later determined that they had been attacked with a nerve agent. Russian officials have vehemently denied that the Kremlin had any involvement with the brazen attempt to kill Skripal. But, according to The Times, the British intelligence community has concluded that Skripal and his daughter were attacked on Moscow’s orders —most likely the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, where Skripal worked until his arrest for spying for Britain in 2004.

Citing an unnamed source from Whitehall, the administrative headquarters of the British government, The Times said that initial assessments of Skripal’s poisoning were damning for Britain’s intelligence community. They raised questions, said the source, about the ability of Britain’s two primary spy agencies, the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), to provide security to their assets. The source told The Times that it was “impossible to reduce […] to zero” the risk of serious physical harm against individuals like Skripal, and before him Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB officer who was poisoned to death in London in 2006. But the attack on Skripal is being viewed as an intelligence failure, said the source, and part of the response to it involves a comprehensive review of risk to British-based Russian double spies and defectors from “unconventional threats”. The latter include attacks with chemical and radiological weapons, said The Times.

The report came as another British-based Russian defector, Boris Karpichkov, told The Daily Mirror newspaper that the Kremlin has tried to poison him three times since 2006. Karpichkov, 59, joined the KGB in 1984, but became a defector-in-place for Latvian intelligence in 1991, when the Soviet Union disintegrated. He claims to have also spied on Russia for French and American intelligence. In 1998, carrying two suitcases filled with top-secret Russian government documents, and using forged passports, he arrived in Britain with his family. In 2006, while living in the UK, Karpichkov says he was warned by MI5 to leave the country because his life may be in danger. He temporarily relocated to New Zealand, where he says he was attacked with an unidentified nerve agent. He told The Mirror that he lost nearly half his weight during the following weeks, but survived due to good medical care. However, he was attacked again, he said, four months later, while still living in New Zealand.
Karpichkov told The Mirror he had been warned that his name was on a shortlist of eight individuals that the Kremlin wanted to kill. He also claimed that he was told by a source to watch out for people carrying electronic cigarettes, because Russian intelligence had developed nerve-agent weapons that were disguised as e-cigarette devices.

https://intelnews.org/2018/03/12/01-2285/

Analysis: All evidence points to professionals behind Skripal poisoning

Most state-sponsored assassinations tend to be covert operations, which means that the sponsoring party cannot be conclusively identified, even if it is suspected. Because of their covert nature, assassinations tend to be extremely complex intelligence-led operations, which are designed to provide plausible deniability to their sponsors. Consequently, the planning and implementation of these operations usually involves a large number of people, each with a narrow set of unique skills. But —and herein lies an interesting contradiction— their execution is invariably simple, both in style and method. The attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal last Sunday in England fits the profile of a state-sponsored covert operation in almost every way.

Some have expressed surprise that Skripal, a Russian intelligence officer who was jailed in 2004 for selling Moscow’s secrets to British spies, would have been targeted by the Russian state. Before being allowed to resettle in the British countryside in 2010, Skripal was officially pardoned by the Kremlin. He was then released from prison along with four other Russian double agents, in exchange for 10 Russian deep-cover spies who had been caught in the United States earlier that year. According to this argument, “a swap has been a guarantee of peaceful retirement” in the past. Thus killing a pardoned spy who has been swapped with some of your own violates the tacit rules of espionage, which exist even between bitter rivals like Russia and the United States.

This assumption, however, is baseless. There are no rules in espionage, and swapped spies are no safer than defectors, especially if they are judged to have caused significant damage to their employers. It is also generally assumed that pardoned spies who are allowed to resettle abroad will fade into retirement, not continue to work for their foreign handlers, as was the case with Skripal, who continued to provide his services to British intelligence as a consultant while living in the idyllic surroundings of Wiltshire. Like the late Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London of radioactive poisoning in 2006, Skripal entrusted his personal safety to the British state. But in a country that today hosts nearly half a million Russians of all backgrounds and political persuasions, such a decision is exceedingly risky.

On Wednesday, the Metropolitan Police Service announced that Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, had been “targeted specifically” by a nerve agent. The official announcement stopped short of specifying the nerve agent used, but experts point to sarin gas or VX. Both substances are highly toxic and compatible with the clinical symptoms reportedly displayed by the Skripals when they were found in a catatonic state by an ambulance crew and police officers last Sunday. At least one responder, reportedly a police officer, appears to have also been affected by the nerve agent. All three patients are reported to be in a coma. They are lucky to have survived at all, given that nerve agents inhaled through the respiratory system work by debilitating the body’s respiratory muscles, effectively causing the infected organism to die from suffocation.

In the past 24 hours, at least one British newspaper stated that the two Russians were “poisoned by a very rare nerve agent, which only a few laboratories in the world could have produced”. That is not quite true. It would be more accurate to say that few laboratories in the world would dareto produce sarin or VX, which is classified as a weapon of mass destruction. But no advanced mastering of chemistry or highly specialist laboratories are needed to manufacture these agents. Indeed, those with knowledge of military history will know that they were produced in massive quantities prior to and during World War I. Additionally —unlike polonium, which was used to kill Litvinenko in 2006— nerve gas could be produced in situ and would not need to be imported from abroad. It is, in other words, a simple weapon that can be dispensed using a simple method, with little risk to the assailant(s). It fits the profile of a state-sponsored covert killing: carefully planned and designed, yet simply executed, thus ensuring a high probability of success.

By Wednesday, the British security services were reportedly using “hundreds of detectives, forensic specialists, analysts and intelligence officers working around the clock” to find “a network of highly-trained assassins” who are “either present or past state-sponsored actors”. Such actors were almost certainly behind the targeted attack on the Skripals. They must have dispensed the lethal agent in liquid, aerosol or a gas form, either by coming into direct physical contact with their victims, or by using a timed device. Regardless, the method used would have been designed to give the assailants the necessary time to escape unharmed. Still, there are per capita more CCTV cameras in Britain than in any other country in the world, which gives police investigators hope that they may be able to detect the movements of the attackers. It is highly unlikely that the latter remain on British soil. But if they are, and are identified or caught, it is almost certain that they will be found to have direct links with a foreign government.

https://intelnews.org/2018/03/08/01-2283/

British intelligence already sees Kremlin behind ex-spy’s poisoning, say sources

Britain’s counterintelligence service is nearing the conclusion that a foreign government, most likely Russia, tried to kill a Russian double spy and his daughter, who are now fighting for their lives in a British hospital. Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia Skripal, 33, are said to remain in critical condition, after falling violently ill on Sunday afternoon while walking in downtown Salisbury, a picturesque cathedral city in south-central England. Skripal arrived in England in 2010 as part of a large-scale spy-swap between the United States, Britain and Russia. He was among four Russian citizens that Moscow released from prison and allowed to resettle in the West, in exchange for 10 Russian deep-cover intelligence officers, who had been arrested earlier that year by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States.

Since Skripal’s poisoning made headlines on Monday morning, the basic details of his story have been reported extensively. He is believed to have served in Soviet and Russian military intelligence for several decades, rising to the rank of colonel. But in 2004 he was arrested and eventually convicted by Russian authorities for spying on behalf of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). He had served nearly 7 years of a 13-year sentence in 2010, when he was pardoned by then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and allowed to resettle in England with his immediate family. He did so in Salisbury, where he was found in a near-fatal state last Sunday, slumped on a street bench next to his equally catatonic daughter. Inevitably, the story brought back memories of the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer in the Soviet and Russian intelligence services, who defected to Britain but was poisoned to death with a radioactive substance in 2006. His murder prompted London to expel four Russian diplomats from Britain, a move that was countered by Moscow, which also expelled four British diplomats from the country.

Despite the close parallels between Litvinenko and Skripal, the British government has not publicly blamed Russia for Sunday’s attempted killing. But according to The Times newspaper, officials at the Security Service (MI5), Britain’s counterintelligence agency, are already pointing to Russia as the culprit of the attempt on Skripal’s life. The London-based paper cited anonymous sources in Whitehall, the administrative headquarters of the British government, who said that MI5 experts were already briefing government officials about the details of the assassination attempt by Russian government agents.

Actions taken by the British government in the past 24 hours also point to Whitehall viewing the attempt on Skripal’s life as an operation sponsored by a state, most likely by Russia. The investigation of the incident is now being led by the counterterrorism branch of the Metropolitan Police Service in London. Additionally, samples of the victims’ tissue, as well as blood and other bodily fluids, have been sent for examination by toxicologists at the Ministry of Defence’s top-secret Science and Technology Laboratory in Porton Down. It also emerged last night that British Home Secretary Amber Rudd has called an emergency meeting of the British government’s Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms (COBR, also known as Cobra) group, which she chairs. The group consists of cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, and the leadership of the Metropolitan Police and the intelligence services, who meet to respond to developing emergencies of a national scale.

https://intelnews.org/2018/03/06/01-2282/