Sergei Skripal

Based on Wikipedia: Sergei Skripal

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, Then Nearly Died on a Park Bench

On a quiet Sunday afternoon in March 2018, a doctor and nurse walking past a shopping center in the English cathedral city of Salisbury noticed an older man and a younger woman slumped on a public bench. They were slipping in and out of consciousness, their bodies failing in ways that made no immediate sense.

The man was Sergei Skripal, a sixty-six-year-old former colonel in Russian military intelligence. The woman was his daughter Yulia, visiting from Moscow. Someone had poisoned them with Novichok, one of the deadliest nerve agents ever created by human beings.

What followed would become the most serious diplomatic crisis between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War. But to understand how Sergei Skripal ended up dying slowly on that bench—and remarkably, surviving—you have to understand who he was, what he did, and why the Russian state apparently decided, more than a decade after he'd stopped being useful to anyone, that he still needed to die.

A Soviet Soldier Becomes a Spy

Sergei Skripal was born in 1951 in Kaliningrad, a small Russian exclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea. It's an odd little territory—formerly the German city of Königsberg, home of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, seized by the Soviet Union after World War II and ethnically cleansed of its German population. Growing up there in the 1950s and 1960s meant growing up in a place with ghosts.

His parents were ordinary Soviet citizens. His father worked for a land improvement contractor; his mother worked for the local government. Nothing about his childhood suggested he would become one of the most valuable assets British intelligence ever recruited from inside Russia.

Skripal followed a conventional path for a young Soviet man with ambition: military school, then the prestigious Moscow Military Engineering Academy, then service in the Soviet Airborne Troops. These were elite forces, the kind of units that got sent to the most dangerous assignments. Skripal served in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s, that brutal decade-long conflict that killed fifteen thousand Soviet soldiers and over a million Afghans, and which contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

He served under Boris Gromov, the general who would later become famous as the last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan, walking across the Friendship Bridge into Uzbekistan in February 1989 as the empire retreated.

Inside the GRU

At some point during his military career, Skripal caught the attention of the GRU—the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet (later Russian) Armed Forces. The GRU is less famous than the KGB and its successor agencies, but in many ways it's more dangerous. While the KGB focused on political intelligence and internal security, the GRU specialized in military intelligence: stealing secrets about weapons, troop movements, and defense capabilities.

The GRU recruited Skripal from the Airborne Troops. By the early 1990s, he was a GRU officer posted to the Soviet embassy in Malta, that tiny island nation in the Mediterranean that had been a crossroads of espionage for centuries.

In 1994, he moved up: a position in the military attaché's office in Madrid, Spain. On paper, a military attaché handles liaison between armies, attends ceremonies, and does diplomatic busywork. In practice, every country's military attaché office is also an intelligence station. Skripal was now officially a spy, operating under diplomatic cover in a NATO country.

This is where his story takes its turn.

The Approach

Intelligence recruitment rarely happens the way movies portray it. There's no dramatic confrontation, no sudden revelation. Instead, there's a long, patient process of assessment and development. Someone identifies a potential target—a person with access to secrets who might, for whatever reason, be willing to share them. Then comes months or years of cultivation: building a relationship, understanding motivations, testing loyalty.

In Skripal's case, Spanish intelligence apparently spotted him first. They identified him as a potential asset—someone who might be turned. But rather than recruiting him themselves, they passed the opportunity to their British allies.

Around July 1995, a British intelligence officer named Pablo Miller approached Skripal. Miller was operating under a cover identity, posing as a businessman named Antonio Alvarez de Hidalgo. The British gave Skripal the codename "Forthwith."

Why did Skripal say yes?

The usual reasons, probably. Money—the British eventually paid him around one hundred thousand dollars for his information. Disillusionment with the chaotic, corrupt Russia of the 1990s. Perhaps a sense of adventure, or ego, or the thrill of playing a dangerous game. Spies rarely have simple motivations.

What He Gave Away

According to Russian prosecutors, Skripal began passing state secrets to MI6—the British Secret Intelligence Service—starting in 1995. The crown jewels of any intelligence service are its people: the identities of officers and agents operating around the world. Skripal allegedly gave up three hundred of them.

Three hundred Russian agents, their covers blown, their careers ended, their lives potentially at risk. Some were undoubtedly reassigned or retired. Others may have faced worse fates. In the world of espionage, there is perhaps no greater betrayal than giving up names.

In 1996, Skripal returned to Moscow, officially because of health problems—he had diabetes. But he didn't leave the intelligence world. He worked at GRU headquarters and for a time served as acting director of the GRU personnel department. Think about that: a man secretly working for British intelligence, helping to manage the careers of Russian spies.

He retired in 1999 at the rank of colonel, but he kept traveling to Spain, where his British handlers had provided him with a house near Málaga on the Costa del Sol. He kept passing information even after retirement, working for the Russian foreign ministry's Household Department—a job that presumably gave him continued access to interesting people and conversations.

The Arrest

Every spy lives with the knowledge that it might end badly. The knock on the door. The men in suits. The interrogation room.

For Skripal, that moment came in December 2004. He was arrested outside his house in Moscow's Krylatskoye District, shortly after returning from Britain. The FSB—the Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB—had caught up with him at last.

His trial was held behind closed doors in August 2006. The Moscow Regional Military Court convicted him under Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code: high treason in the form of espionage. The maximum sentence was twenty years. Prosecutors asked for fifteen, citing his cooperation with investigators. He got thirteen.

He was stripped of his military rank and decorations. Everything he had earned in his career—erased. He was sent to a high-security detention facility to serve out his sentence.

The affair wasn't made public until after his conviction. Russia doesn't like to advertise when foreign services penetrate its intelligence agencies.

The Spy Swap

Here is where Skripal's story connects to one of the most dramatic espionage operations of the twenty-first century.

In June 2010, the FBI arrested ten Russian agents who had been living in the United States as "illegals"—deep-cover operatives posing as ordinary American residents, some of them for decades. They weren't stealing nuclear secrets or hacking government computers. They were building relationships, cultivating sources, positioning themselves for the long game that Russian intelligence plays so patiently.

The most famous of them was Anna Chapman, a young, photogenic redhead who became a media sensation. Less famous but more interesting were couples like Donald Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley—not their real names—who had lived as Canadians and then Americans for over twenty years, raising children who didn't know their parents were Russian spies.

The Illegals Program, as the FBI called it, was a stunning intelligence failure for Russia and a major counterintelligence success for the United States. But rather than prosecuting the ten agents, the U.S. government chose to swap them.

In July 2010, on the tarmac of Vienna airport, the ten Russian illegals were exchanged for four Russians who had been imprisoned for spying for the West. Sergei Skripal was one of them.

The British government had insisted on his inclusion in the deal. He was their asset, and they wanted him back.

A Quiet Life in Salisbury

Skripal moved to Salisbury, a small city in Wiltshire about eighty miles southwest of London. It's the kind of place where nothing much happens—an ancient cathedral, some nice restaurants, a population of about forty thousand. A good place to disappear.

He bought a house in 2011. He seemed to settle into retirement.

But he hadn't entirely left the game. According to British security officials, Skripal continued to provide information to British and other Western intelligence agencies for some time after 2010. A 2018 investigation found that he had traveled to other countries—the Czech Republic, Estonia, Colombia—to meet with intelligence officials, most likely discussing Russian spying techniques.

He met with Estonian spies in Tallinn in June 2016. He provided information that helped them identify three active Russian undercover operatives. He worked with Spanish intelligence on Russian organized crime on the Costa del Sol. He contributed information about Russian spy networks to the Czechs in Prague, helping them identify agents that Skripal had known during his active service.

All these trips were organized and approved by MI6. He was still in the game.

A Russian exile named Valery Morozov told journalists that Skripal was in regular contact with military intelligence officers at the Russian Embassy. Whether this was true, and what it meant if it was, remains unclear.

Meanwhile, his personal life was marked by tragedy. His wife died in 2012 of cancer. His son died in March 2017, at age forty-three, during a visit to Saint Petersburg—the circumstances remain unknown. His older brother also died within two years before the poisoning. His daughter Yulia had returned to Moscow in 2014, where she worked in sales.

Novichok

The name means "newcomer" in Russian, which is darkly ironic for a class of nerve agents developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Novichok agents were designed to be undetectable by NATO chemical weapons detection equipment, to defeat protective gear, and to be more lethal than any nerve agent that had come before.

They work by inhibiting an enzyme called acetylcholinesterase, which breaks down a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. Without this enzyme working properly, nerve signals fire uncontrollably. Muscles spasm and seize. Breathing becomes impossible. The heart stops. In sufficient doses, death comes within minutes.

Only a handful of countries have ever produced Novichok agents. Russia is believed to have manufactured them at a facility called the State Scientific Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology. Their existence was first revealed to the world by a Russian scientist named Vil Mirzayanov, who went public in 1992 and was promptly arrested for treason. He eventually fled to the United States.

Using Novichok to poison someone isn't just murder. It's a message. It says: we know what we're doing, we have capabilities you cannot match, and we are not afraid to use them on foreign soil. It's a signature.

The Attack

On March 4, 2018, Yulia Skripal arrived in Salisbury to visit her father. She had flown from Moscow the day before. It was just a visit, nothing unusual—a daughter seeing her aging father.

What happened next is still not entirely clear. At some point that day, both Sergei and Yulia were exposed to a Novichok nerve agent. British investigators later determined that the poison had been applied to the front door handle of Skripal's house in a gel form.

That afternoon, they were found on a bench near the Maltings shopping center, barely conscious. Emergency services rushed them to Salisbury District Hospital, where doctors quickly realized this was not a normal medical emergency. Both patients were put into induced comas to prevent organ damage.

A police officer named Nick Bailey, who had been sent to investigate Skripal's house, also fell seriously ill—he had been contaminated while searching the premises. Twenty-one other members of the emergency services and public were checked for symptoms. Some had minor effects: itchy eyes, wheezing.

The Response

Within days, the British government had identified the nerve agent as Novichok. Prime Minister Theresa May stood before Parliament and named Russia as responsible. The response was swift and coordinated: twenty-three Russian diplomats expelled from the United Kingdom, reciprocal expulsions from allies around the world, a deepening of the already-frozen relationship between Russia and the West.

Russia denied responsibility. Russian diplomats demanded access to Sergei Skripal and his daughter—who, as a Russian citizen, they argued was entitled to consular assistance. The British government delayed, citing the ongoing investigation and the patients' condition.

Yulia regained consciousness first. By March 29, she was out of critical condition, conscious and talking. Sergei followed more slowly, but by April he too was improving. On May 18, 2018, he was discharged from the hospital. The director of nursing called treating the Skripals "a huge and unprecedented challenge."

They had survived. Very few people exposed to Novichok can say that.

Collateral Damage

The story didn't end with the Skripals' recovery.

On June 30, 2018, two British citizens named Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley were hospitalized in Amesbury, a town just eight miles from Salisbury. They had been poisoned by the same Novichok nerve agent used against Skripal.

How? Rowley had found a discarded perfume bottle and given it to Sturgess as a gift. She sprayed it on her wrists. The bottle had been used to transport the nerve agent and was apparently discarded after the attack on the Skripals.

Dawn Sturgess died in the hospital on July 8, 2018. She was forty-four years old. She had nothing to do with espionage, nothing to do with Russia, nothing to do with anything except the terrible bad luck of encountering a weapon that should never have existed in the first place.

Aftermath

British investigators eventually identified two suspects: officers of the GRU traveling under the names Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. These were almost certainly aliases. Investigative journalists later identified them as Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga and Dr. Alexander Mishkin, both decorated GRU officers.

Russia has refused to extradite them. Neither has faced trial.

Sergei Skripal and his daughter disappeared into protection. In June 2020, the Sunday Times reported that they had been resettled in New Zealand under new identities, though New Zealand officials raised doubts about this claim. Wherever they are, they are presumably still hiding.

In February 2019, reports surfaced that Skripal had suffered a deterioration in his health—hardly surprising, given what Novichok does to the human body. The long-term effects of nerve agent exposure can include neurological damage, respiratory problems, and psychological trauma.

He survives, as far as anyone knows. A man who betrayed his country, was betrayed by his handlers' inability to protect him, and somehow lived to tell the tale—though he cannot tell it publicly, and probably never will.

The Long Game

Why did Russia attempt to kill Sergei Skripal in 2018?

He had been out of the intelligence game for nearly two decades. The secrets he knew were mostly historical. He had already been convicted, imprisoned, and traded away in a spy swap—the traditional end of the story.

Some analysts believe it was a message to other potential defectors: no matter how long it takes, no matter where you go, we will find you. Others suggest it was connected to his continued consulting work for Western intelligence agencies. Still others point to internal Russian politics: a demonstration of ruthlessness in an election year.

The truth is probably some combination of all these factors, plus others we don't know about. Espionage is a world of shadows and mirrors, where the real reasons for things are rarely visible from the outside.

What we do know is this: a man who spent his career in the shadows, playing the most dangerous game there is, nearly died on a park bench in a quiet English city. His daughter nearly died with him. An innocent woman did die, months later, from the careless disposal of the weapon that didn't quite finish its job.

And somewhere, the people who ordered the attack—and the people who carried it out—remain free.