And as Levy batted back yet another remark about what his eldest daughter was doing, he began mentally composing another, and much more specific, final paragraph that he would add to the report.
When Henry lapsed into silence, Levy leaned forward, consciously mirroring what Henry had done earlier.
‘Thank you, my friend,’ he said. ‘I will ensure that your advice reaches the appropriate people in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. And thank you for whatever action you felt it necessary to take to identify this contaminant.’
Henry smiled, reached across the table and shook Levy’s hand.
‘I’m glad we understand each other, my friend. Now, let me get the check. I’m sure we both have important work that we should be doing.’
* * *
London
Two weeks later, Friday
What they definitely didn’t want was a slow news day. They needed an enticing celebrity scandal, hopefully involving a failed super-injunction and lots of pictures of an embarrassed man, preferably looking remarkably stupid with his mouth hanging open, who hadn’t seen anything wrong with inserting his penis where it really wasn’t wanted or shouldn’t have been, with perhaps a sidebar featuring his even more embarrassed wife and her heroic statement that she would, of course, forgive her husband and stand by him. Or, better, a statement from her telling the world that if somebody would only hand her a sharp knife and give her five minutes alone with him, she’d be able to solve the problem of his wandering member on a permanent basis. The usual fare of the tabloids, in fact.
The Friday editions didn’t feature anything quite as helpful as that, but because the government was lurching from one political crisis to another somewhat in the manner of a tennis ball being batted around at Wimbledon, they did have whole crop of astoundingly fatuous and self-serving statements emanating from the House of Commons to pick apart. And, as usual, the comments and soundbites made by MPs and various government spokesmen all proved beyond any doubt how utterly out of touch they were with the people of the country they were supposed to be governing. Voters, they called them. And things that week hadn’t been helped by a poll that suggested most people in Britain thought the two most common adjectives used to precede the word ‘politician’ were either ‘corrupt’ or ‘stupid.’
So the three items made the news, but tucked away in the relatively safe obscurity of the pages in the middle of the newspapers. The first, and the biggest, was still only a brief story headed ‘Government U-turn on GWS – at last.’ The other two stories were just short paragraphs, one about a new government appointment and the other covering the death of a scientist.
For years, Gulf War Syndrome had been treated almost as a kind of excuse for anti-social behaviour, as a condition that some people didn’t believe was real. Not like a proper illness. But in the future, the first news item stated, it would be recognised as a genuine condition, and the sufferers would receive all possible medical assistance and treatment. The definition of GWS was also being expanded to include soldiers who had no neurological conditions but who had suffered any physical ill-effects after combat tours, even if they had not been wounded by enemy action. Families of men who had already succumbed to the ailment or to conditions related to it would receive substantial compensation payments.
It was also announced that because black soldiers with African ancestry appeared to be especially susceptible to the condition, separate and much more generous compensation arrangements were being made for them and their families. No explanation was provided as to how or why they were particularly affected.
In an apparently unrelated story, the Ministry of Defence announced the appointment of a new Chief Executive at the Dstl, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down in Wiltshire following the death of the previous incumbent, William Poulson, in what was described as a freak industrial accident.
And the last news item was a short description of the suicide of a distinguished scientist formerly employed at Porton Down, a Professor Gregory Quine, and gave brief details of the funeral arrangements.
Author’s note
Russian assassination of dissidents
The Skripal incident
It took a long time before any substantive details emerged about how Sergei and Yulia Skripal came into contact with Novichok, and even now it’s not entirely clear precisely how they were exposed to the agent. However, the subsequent death of Dawn Sturgess and the recovery of her partner Charlie Rowley from the effects of the nerve agent did serve to clarify both the possible method of attack used by the Russians and also the means they had used to get the Novichok into the United Kingdom.
Charlie Rowley found what he believed to be a sealed Nina Ricci perfume bottle, though he told the police he couldn’t remember exactly where he had discovered it, and then gave it to Dawn Sturgess. She obviously sprayed herself with it, and later died from the effects of the nerve agent, but this was some three months after the Skripals fell ill. Of even more concern was that the ‘perfume’ was in a sealed box, presumably discarded by the Russian assassination team once the attack on the Skripals had taken place, meaning that it could not have been the source of the agent administered to the two Russian targets.
That also raises the possibility that the original container of the nerve agent is still out there somewhere in Wiltshire, having been dumped following the first attack, and that there may well also be other discarded bottles or objects containing Novichok. The advice given to residents by the police – to only pick up something if they know they dropped it – is very sensible.
The obvious presumption is that the Russian hit team – or possibly teams – managed to smuggle the Novichok into Britain by concealing it in apparently sealed bottles of perfume. This would not arouse suspicion at an airport’s security check, especially if the bottle was in a bag from a duty-free shop, and it could be carried by a man or a woman, either as a ‘present’ – if by a man – or by a woman for her own use.
The fact that the first attack was carried out and that a second sealed bottle was found weeks later suggests that the Russians probably arranged for at least two, and possibly more, containers to be smuggled into the United Kingdom, perhaps by different couriers to provide redundancy in case one of the people were to be stopped. Once the Skripals had been attacked and moved beyond the reach of the hit team, the assassins would have had no further use for the Novichok and simply dumped the containers. But, tragically for Dawn Sturgess, her boyfriend Charlie Rowley found one of them and gave it to her.
The suggestion that the Novichok didn’t come from Russia is laughable, despite completely unsubstantiated claims that it was the result of a leak from Porton Down or had been concocted in some shed in Wiltshire by persons unknown for reasons of their own. Manufacturing such an agent requires government or state direction, sophisticated and secure laboratory facilities and a high degree of expertise. If Sergei Skripal had offended somebody in Britain so grievously that they wished him dead, a knife or a hammer or a shotgun or some other weapon would have done the job. The only entity capable of producing Novichok and then administering it to one specific target is the Russian government, or more accurately one of its intelligence organs acting on instructions from the Russian government.
When looking at any murder or an attempted murder, the identity of the victim often provides a clear indication of the likely identity of the killer. In this case, the victim was a former Russian spy and dissident, the weapon used was a Russian-designed nerve agent known to be manufactured in Russia, and the only entity known to want to harm the victim was the Russian government. So how likely, really, is it that somebody else was responsible?
The most probable units are the G.U., the Glavnoye upravleniye, the foreign military intelligence arm of the Russian armed forces, the SVR, the Sluzhba vneshney razvedki Rossiyskoy Federatsii or Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation, or a Spetsnaz – Russian Special Forces – team working for the FSB, the Federal’naya sluzhba b
ezopasnosti, the Federal Security Service.
G.U. or GRU
To give it its full name, the G.U. or Glavnoye upravleniye is the Гла́вное управле́ние Генера́льного шта́ба ённых Сил Росси́йской Федера́ции which translates as the Main Directorate of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Until 2010 it was known as the GRU, the Glavnoye razvedyvatel’noye upravleniye, the title meaning the Main Intelligence Directorate, and this abbreviation is still in common usage, despite the word ‘intelligence’ being dropped. It can be argued that it wasn’t just the word intelligence that was dropped, as it’s now been established that the putative assassins of the Skripals were a couple of GU agents.
Russian state-sponsored assassinations
All of this raises the obvious question: if the Russian government wanted Sergei Skripal dead, why didn’t they just arrange for somebody to shoot him? The answer is also fairly obvious. People perceived by the Russian government as being undesirable tend to end up dead in one of two ways. If they are living outside Russia, they face long and lingering deaths, often as a result of innovative and unusual triggering mechanisms, or die in a way that a dimmer than usual coroner or police officer could perhaps be persuaded was accidental. But if they are still based in the Confederation of Independent States, as it is now known, they tend to just be shot. What follows mentions just a few of the more obvious examples, because the long and lethal reach of Moscow into Western nations takes place far more often than most people think:
Georgi Markov, Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal
In 1978 the Bulgarian dissident writer and broadcaster Georgi Markov was assassinated by a hitman using an air weapon disguised as an umbrella that shot a tiny metal ball filled with ricin into his leg on Waterloo Bridge. The weapon was supplied by the KGB, the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, the Russian Committee for State Security, and the man wielding it has been identified as Francesco Gullino, a Danish man of Italian extraction, who was working for the Komitet za dǎržavna sigurnost, the Bulgarian Committee for State Security.
On 23 November 2006 Alexander Litvinenko died from polonium poisoning, the radioactive substance most probably administered by a former KGB agent named Dmitry Kovtun – who left identifiable traces of polonium in a house and car he had used in Hamburg – or Andrei Lugovoy, also a former KGB man. Litvinenko had met Kovtun and Lugovoy on 1 November, and fell ill later that day.
In the latest attack, the Russians wanted Sergei Skripal – his daughter Yulia was just collateral damage, of no consequence whatsoever – to die a long and lingering, and very public, death, so that he suffered for as long as possible. And that would have been intended as just one more clear message to any other Russian dissidents who fell out of favour with Moscow: wherever you go, and no matter how well you hide, we can and will always find you. And when we do, you will die a prolonged and painful death.
Kamera
What is not generally known is that the Russians have a government facility commonly known as Kamera, which translates as ‘The Cell,’ specifically responsible for the development of poisons and chemicals intended for covert operations in the West. Created in 1921 and then known as the ‘Special Office,’ its name changed to ‘Laboratory 1’ in 1939, and to ‘Laboratory 12’ in 1953. In 1978 it became a part of the First Chief Directorate (FCD) of the KGB as the ‘Central Investigation Institute for Special Technology,’ with an unchanged remit. Since 1991 it has expanded to occupy several laboratories and is now a part of the SVR, the lineal successor of the KGB’s FCD.
Kamera is known to have tested numerous lethal substances, including curare, cyanide, digitoxin, mustard gas and ricin and, in the interests of thoroughness, in the days of the gulags they tested these various concoctions on ‘enemies of the people’ – various human subjects – noting down the physical effects and the time taken for each person to die. What Kamera was trying to do was perfect an odourless and tasteless chemical combination that would kill efficiently and that would not be detectable at an autopsy. Eventually the unit produced a combination known as C2 or K2 – carbylamine choline chloride – that seemed to fit the bill. People who ingested it died within about fifteen minutes, and after taking it became weaker, calm and silent. Again in the interests of being thorough, male and female victims with different builds and physical characteristics and of different ages were fed the concoction and the results clinically recorded.
The ricin that killed Georgi Markov was prepared in this laboratory, and the Bulgarians were even given a choice of weapons to be used against the dissident: either a poisonous gelatin that would somehow have to be smeared onto his skin, or the ricin pellet fired by the modified umbrella. As we know, the Bulgarians picked the umbrella, probably because the concealed air weapon would be an easier device to use in the attack. It has not been conclusively proved, but the polonium used to fatally poison Alexander Litvinenko was most likely prepared in one of Kamera’s laboratories. Kamera is also the most probable source of the Novichok employed against the Skripals.
Assassinations within Russia – Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya
The other side of the coin is the fate of people who are perceived as domestic undesirables by the Russian government. People who ask the wrong questions, or who persist in trying to open doors that the powers that be have decided will remain closed. People like Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya.
She was a writer, journalist and a prominent activist for human rights with a particular interest in Chechnya. Her very public criticism of the Russian government and Vladimir Putin in particular made her known nationally and internationally, and resulted in her frequent intimidation, death threats, being threatened with rape, her arrest in Chechnya where she was beaten and suffered a mock execution, and her poisoning on an Aeroflot aircraft when flying to Chechnya.
This latter event was certainly not accidental: she was given a cup of tea by an Aeroflot stewardess and almost immediately began to suffer the effects of whatever poison had been used. Nobody else on the aircraft was affected, and she was lucky to recover. The substance that nearly killed her almost certainly came from a Kamera laboratory and it was probably administered on an aircraft precisely because only basic first aid – if that – would be available to treat her.
But her life would end very differently, and much more violently.
Possibly the last straw for the Russian government was when she published her book Putin’s Russia in 2004. In that volume, written primarily for a Western audience, she showed that Russia still has many of the characteristics of a police state, run by a corrupt coterie of oligarchs and politicians, and is not that dissimilar to the state of the country in the days of Josef Stalin.
On 7 October 2006, Putin’s birthday – which may not have been a coincidence – she was shot to death in the lift in her apartment building in central Moscow. Her killer fired four shots into her at point-blank range: two in the chest, one in her shoulder and one in her head, an obviously professional, and probably a contract, killing. Five men were convicted of her murder almost a decade later in June 2014 after an earlier trial ended in acquittals. One of them may have been the man who pulled the trigger, but it is still unclear who actually ordered her assassination, probably because they have covered their tracks too well.
She wasn’t the only one. A lawyer named Stanislav Markelov who had been involved in the investigation of several of the abuses unearthed by Politkovskaya was shot to death on the streets of Moscow on 19 January 2009, along with the journalist Anastasia Baburova. And in July of the same year Natalia Estemirova, one of Politkovskaya’s principal sources and an important informant, was grabbed off the streets in Grozny. Her body was found a few hours later.
Speaking the truth in Russia is still a dangerous and potentially fatal thing to do.
The DCRI/DGSI, Pierre-sur-Haute and Wikipedia
In March 2013 the DCRI, the Direction centrale du renseignement intérieur, the original name of w
hat is now the DGSI, the Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure, France’s principal counter-espionage and counter-terrorism organisation, demanded that an article be removed from the Wikipedia website. The French-language article was entitled Station hertzienne militaire de Pierre-sur-Haute and discussed a seventy-four acre French military radio station located in the Rhône-Alpes region of France.
The Wikimedia Foundation, quite reasonably, asked why, on the basis that virtually all of the information published was already in the public domain, having been broadcast in a 2004 documentary by the French television channel Télévision Loire 7, a programme that had been made with the cooperation of the French Air Force and was readily available online to anyone who wanted to watch it. The Foundation asked what specific parts of the article had generated the demand from the DCRI for it to be deleted. The DCRI refused to respond, and simply ordered that it had to be removed. The Wikimedia Foundation refused to comply.
On 4 April 2013 a man named Rémi Mathis, a French resident, a volunteer administrator of the French-language version of Wikipedia and the President of Wikimedia France, was ordered to report to the DCRI offices. In the building, he was instructed to delete the article in question immediately, in front of DCRI officials. If he refused, he was told that he would be arrested, held in custody and then prosecuted on unspecified charges. In retrospect, it’s difficult to see what charges could actually have been levelled at Mathis, because he had never edited the article in question, or read it, or probably even knew that it existed, and even in France it should be obvious that you cannot prosecute a person for something done by somebody else. But no doubt the DCRI would have concocted some kind of offence to charge him with.
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