The tentacles of Putin

It was almost inevitable, that as soon as Skripal was found slumped on a bench in Salisbury, that fingers would point at Vladimir Putin. It was after all the Russian President who in 2006 passed a new law giving agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor organisation to the KGB, a licence to kill enemies of the Russian state on foreign soil.

Broadly speaking, there are three main agencies within Russia’s intelligence community. The most powerful is still the FSB, whose domestic security remit has increasingly extended to certain external activities, including assassination.

Outside of Russia, intelligence gathering is primarily the domain of the foreign intelligence service (SVR) and the military intelligence service (GRU).

Both operate a mix of human intelligence officers under diplomatic cover, inside embassies but outside the diplomatic chain of command, and covert officers or “illegals”.

According to Mark Galeotti, coordinator of the Centre for European Security at the Institute of International Relations in Prague, there are crucial distinctions in the missions and organisational cultures of the SVR and GRU.

He describes the SVR as “quite traditional,” not least in its penchant for long-term, deep-cover spy rings, inherited from the Soviet-era KGB.

On the other hand the GRU of which Sergei Skripal was an officer, is seen to have an “aggressive and risk-taking culture that reflects its military background”.

Under President Putin, who previously had a brief stint as FSB director, Russia’s security services have flourished and been given much greater prominence. Today there are more SVR/FSB personnel per capita in Russia than during the Soviet Union at its height.

In such an environment the Kremlin has long reserved particular fury for former spies like Skripal who switched loyalty. In 2010, after the arrest and extradition of 10 suspected Russian agents from America, an unnamed Russian official told a respected Moscow newspaper a contract killer had been sent to assassinate the defector who betrayed them.

“A Mercader has been sent after him,” the official was quoted as saying about the unnamed defector, an apparent reference to Spanish communist Ramon Mercader, sent by Stalin to kill his former political ally Leon Trotsky in Mexico with an ice pick in 1940.

There is a long list of those who have run afoul of what in Russian spy service slang is known as “wet work” or a killing. Many of the men and women who were targeted for assassination were subjected to poison.

Speaking recently to the respected US based magazine Foreign Policy, Steve Hall who up until his retirement in 2015 ran Russia operations for the CIA, said such a tactic sends a clear message to those thinking of defection or dissent.

“It’s a terrible way to die, it sends a particularly strong message: we’ll find you.” Hall explained

Among those best known to have been ‘found’ and targeted directly or with the help of the Russian security services is, of course, the dissident Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who was killed in the UK in 2006 when he ingested polonium-210, a highly radioactive substance, that had been slipped into his tea.

There have been others too like Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza who remarkably survived two attempted assassinations by poison. Then there was the Saudi-born fighter and prominent Chechen rebel leader Samir Saleh Abdullah, better known as Khattab. It was he who in 2002 opened a letter delivered by a Dagestani messenger hired by the Russian FSB that contained what is believed to have been a lethal dose of the nerve agent Sarin or one of its derivatives. Shortly after his death, the FSB announced that Khattab, had been killed in a “special operation”.

Two years later in a 2004, the Russian political journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya, described the moment she woke up in the hospital to a nurse leaning over her. “My dear, they tried to poison you,” the nurse said.

Politkovskaya, who was known for her opposition to the Chechen conflict and was a staunch critic of Vladimir Putin, was subsequently shot dead in the lift of her apartment block in 2006 in what was believed to have been a contract killing, though direct links to the Russian security services were never proven.

Last year a BuzzFeed news investigation entitled From Russia with Blood, identified 14 deaths of Russians or Russian-linked individuals in Britain and quoted US intelligence officials as saying they appeared to be assassinations.

According to BuzzFeed, the deaths “illuminate one of the most disturbing geopolitical trends of our time, the use of assassinations by Russia’s secret services and powerful mafia groups to wipe out opponents around the globe.”

In its in-depth investigation BuzzFeed, quotes former Scotland Yard counter-terror commander, Richard Walton, as saying that Russian assassins are often extremely adept at “disguising murder”.

Other former counter-terror officers cited, said they Russian intelligence is expert at staging suicides by planting evidence to make victims appear to have been depressed or even using drugs and psychological tactics to drive them into taking their own lives.

A former top-ranking MI6 official also told the investigations team that in the case of state assassinations, Putin’s government had amassed “a suite of chemical and biological agents that were developed for targeted assassinations” so killers could do their work without leaving a trace.

There are other problems to in establishing clear links to the Russian security services. During the Cold War, Soviet spying was a nationalised monopoly. Today along with much of Russian industry, it is now partly privatised and has links to organised crime and Russian mafias.

Intelligence watchers and analysts say that these days it is often difficult to determine where the state begins and ends and likewise with the security services and the mafia. This has led to speculation that perhaps Sergei Skripal was targeted because of involvement in underground activity that fell within this overlapping and murky arena.

In the case of the UK, analysts point to the fact that the arrival in Britain of a wave of Russian oligarchs, coincided with the diversion of almost all Britain's national security resources into the fight against terrorism after the September 11 attacks in the US in 2001.

Greg MacKay-Lear, a former Scotland Yard counter-terror officer, says that the government had made a “tactical and strategic blunder” by taking its eye off Russian operations in London at a critical time. In effect it allowed London to become a hub of Russian intelligence and mafia activity. This in turn has also changed what some identify as the “rules” of the spy trade.

“During the cold war, there was an understanding about what was and what was not acceptable,” Mark Galeotti, coordinator of the Centre for European Security said.

Not everyone agrees with Galeotti however on the so-called etiquette of the past. Oleg Kalugin, a former major general who served 32 years in the KGB recalls how he was in the room at the agency’s headquarters in Moscow in 1978 when the decision was taken to provide poison to Bulgaria’s secret service for the assassination of the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov.

It was in September of that same year that Markov was waiting for a bus near London’s Waterloo Bridge when a man jabbed him in the leg with an umbrella. He immediately fell ill and was rushed to the hospital. It was later established that the umbrella was tipped with a pellet filled with ricin, a deadly toxin, and he had been murdered by an agent codenamed “Piccadilly” with the help of the KGB.

Today former KGB man Kalugin who was responsible for dealing with overseas spies, says he is “not familiar with any such (spy) etiquette,” of the Cold War type suggested by some intelligence watchers.

For him there was only one rule: to win, and that as far as he knows the KGB poison laboratories and assassinations that existed back in the Cold War still do today. That observation does chime with Mark Galeotti’s view of an FSB today that acts as political policemen used to operating without rules.

“The FSB works with impunity. They do not know the rules, and if they did, they do not care about them,” says Galeotti.

“We have seen Chechens gunned down in Turkey and Austria. We have seen an Estonian security officer kidnapped from his own country by FSB commandos. We have seen hacks, smears, blackmail and gangsterism. And the ghost of Litvinenko still rightly haunts Anglo-Russian relations,” Galeotti observed in the wake of the attempted murder of Skripal.

It is well known that Russian security politics are fiercely competitive, and in the current climate none of the others services like the SVR or GRU want to appear hesitant or risk averse when compared with the FSB.

All of this has created a greater willingness to accept risk and be more brazen in operational approach abroad say analysts. It’s known too that the agencies are firmly subordinated to the Kremlin.

As a result, they are at once “coddled, competitive and corrupt”, says a recent analysis in the Nato Review.

They are coddled in that throughout the Putin years they have seen their budgets and powers steadily increase. Furthermore, their very status within the political process has increased. Since around 2014, if not before, the indications are that ambassadors and indeed the Russian foreign minister have much less authority to block operations or even be informed of them in advance than before.

“Russia’s intelligence services are the front-line soldiers in Moscow’s non-kinetic political war on the West. As such, no wonder Putin continues to hold them in such regard”, observed Mark Galeotti.

“Yet for all that, they may also prove to be his Achilles heel. Their aggressive interference in the West has not gone unnoticed and has generated a political backlash in Europe and North America.”

The attempted murder of Sergei Skripal could have come from the pages of a novel by former spy and master espionage writer John le Carre.

In the history of Kremlin-ordered assassinations of Russian defectors on UK soil, none are perhaps as well known as that fictional one of General Vladimir in the early pages of le Carre’s classic book “Smiley’s People”.

The Russian general who is passing information to British intelligence becomes the victim of assassins on Hampstead Heath, killed under what MI6 officer George Smiley and his colleagues calls “Moscow Rules.”

While we don’t know for certain yet who was responsible for Sergei Skripal’s attempted murder, we do know that in many places both in Russia and overseas, Moscow Rules are now very much the order of the day.