U.K. Poisoning Inquiry Turns to Russian Agency in Mueller Indictments - New York Times

U.K. Poisoning Inquiry Turns to Russian Agency in Mueller Indictments

Investigators in Salisbury, England, inspecting a shopping district in April near where the former Russian spy Sergei V. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found critically ill the previous month. Suspicions have turned toward current or former agents of a Russian military intelligence service.
By Ellen Barry, Michael Schwirtz and Eric Schmitt
July 15, 2018

LONDON — The same Russian military intelligence service now accused of disrupting the 2016 presidential election in America may also be responsible for the nerve agent attack in Britain against a former Russian spy — an audacious poisoning that led to a geopolitical confrontation this spring between Moscow and the West.

British investigators believe the March 4 attack on the former  spy, Sergei V. Skripal, and his daughter, Yulia, was most probably carried out by current or former agents of the service, known as the G.R.U., who were sent to his home in southern England, according to one British official, one American official and one former American official familiar with the inquiry, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence.

British officials are now closing in on identifying the individuals they believe carried out the operation, said the former American official. At the same time, investigators have not ruled out the possibility that another Russian intelligence agency, or a privatized spinoff, could be responsible.

President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia are to hold a much-scrutinized meeting on Monday in Helsinki, Finland. For months, Mr. Trump has angrily belittled the special counsel investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. But on Friday, the Justice Department announced a bombshell indictment of 12 G.R.U. officers in the hacking of internal communications of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton presidential campaign.

The indictment by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, detailed a sophisticated operation, intended to disrupt America’s democratic process, carried out by a Russian military intelligence service few Americans know about. But analysts and government officials say the G.R.U., now known as the Main Directorate of the General Staff, serves as an undercover strike force for the Kremlin in conflicts around the world.

The agency has been linked to Russia’s hybrid war in Ukraine, as well as the annexation of Crimea in 2014. It has been involved in the seizing of Syrian cities on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad. In more peaceful regions, the G.R.U. is accused of creating political turmoil, mobilizing Slavic nationalists in Montenegro and funding protests to try to prevent Macedonia’s recent name change.

The poisoning of Mr. Skripal and his daughter with a military grade nerve agent is a different type of operation, one that falls into the tradition of Russian and Soviet intelligence practices toward traitors. Mr. Skripal served in the G.R.U. for about 15 years but also worked as an informant for MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service — a rare betrayal among G.R.U. officers, and one that most likely required laborious effort to mitigate damage to the agency’s networks.

Russian officials have denied their country’s involvement in the poisoning of the Skripals, even as their British counterparts have accused the Kremlin of ordering the attack.

Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, left, and his deputy Edward O’Callaghan at a news conference to announce indictments against 12 Russian military officers who are accused of conspiring to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.CreditT.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times
On Sunday, Dmitri S. Peskov, a spokesman for Mr. Putin, dismissed the involvement of the G.R.U. “Russia is in no way involved in this episode,” he said. “We consider this whole thing a major provocation.”

The British investigation seems to be progressing steadily, said Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian intelligence services at the Institute of International Relations Prague.

“They have a pretty good sense of when these people traveled, they’re going to be doing the full thing of checking the face of everyone on the plane, given that this is the land of CCTV,” Mr. Galeotti said, referring to Britain. “At the very least, they have grainy photographs from CCTV of the people they assume were involved.”

He added that the conclusions of the inquiry would have little impact on the military intelligence service.

“From the G.R.U. point of view, what really matters is the opinion of one man,” he said, “and he already knows what they did or didn’t do.”

Relations between Britain and Russia are now deeply strained. In April, Britain and many of its allies, including the United States, expelled more than 150 Russian diplomats — many of them officers with the G.R.U. — as a protest against the poisoning. Russia retaliated with its own expulsions.

Before ordering the expulsions, Britain privately presented its case against Russia to other governments, including evidence that G.R.U. cyberspecialists had hacked the email accounts of Mr. Skripal’s daughter in 2013. Both Mr. Skripal and his daughter were under surveillance before the attack, and her phone was possibly infected with malware to track her whereabouts, the BBC reported this month.

Mr. Skripal’s final post with the G.R.U. was as a high-level personnel administrator, providing him with extensive knowledge of operations and individual agents. He was arrested in Russia in 2004 and later pleaded guilty to espionage, serving six years of a 13-year sentence before he was released in 2010 as part of a spy swap with the United States.

Mr. Skripal was living in Salisbury, England, before the poisoning attack. He and his daughter, who was visiting him from Russia at the time, have since recovered and are living in hiding. The crime’s repercussions continued last week with the death of a 44-year-old British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, who, the police say, most likely accidentally touched residue of the nerve agent used in the attack.

Investigators removing the bench around which the Skripals were found in Salisbury, England, in March.CreditWill Oliver/EPA, via Shutterstock
From the earliest days of the Skripal investigation, the G.R.U. was a suspect, in part because harsh punishment for traitors is part of the agency’s doctrine.

Viktor B. Suvorov, a G.R.U. officer who defected to Britain in 1978, wrote in a memoir that inductees were shown a gruesome film of a defector, strapped to a stretcher, being slowly rolled into a furnace and burned alive. Though his account was disputed by some of his countrymen, it is beyond doubt that G.R.U. defections were rare.

“Once you’re a member of an elite military force like the G.R.U., there is no leaving it,” said Nigel West, a British intelligence historian who has chronicled the lives of many defectors. “They do not defect. G.R.U. are a military, disciplined elite. They know the consequences.”

During the Soviet era, intelligence services had a protocol around assassinations of agents who betrayed their services. It began with a trial, and the sentencing of the traitor to death in absentia. Then the decision would be distributed to counterintelligence officers stationed at Soviet embassies.

A declassified C.I.A. document from 1964 describes K.G.B. assassination teams known as “combat groups,” which consisted of local agents or undercover “illegal staff” stationed all over the world in preparation for killings, known as “wet jobs.” Rather than carrying out the assassination, agents would often use the sentence as leverage to persuade the individual to become a double agent.

In recent years, the Kremlin has steered clear of direct involvement in criminal acts, preferring hybrid operations that cannot be traced to the government, sometimes carried out by retired operatives like the Russian “volunteers” fighting in Ukraine and Syria, who are often veterans of the G.R.U. special forces.

“Our country has come to the understanding that the government should not be committing crimes,” said Dmitri A. Muratov, director of the editorial board at Novaya Gazeta, an independent newspaper that reports on the security services. Hybrid formations, he said, “are close to the government but not of the government.”

He added, “These formations have infiltrated the political life of the country.”

Russian authorities have never disclosed the extent of the damage Mr. Skripal caused the G.R.U., but there are indications it was significant. In “The Devil’s Counterintelligence Dozen,” a book about Mr. Skripal’s years as a British spy, a Russian espionage expert, Nikolai Luzan, writes that the agent might have compromised as many as 300 Russian intelligence officers.

“When a mole is uncovered in any service, you have a massive operation to nail down everything he had access to,” said Mr. Galeotti, the author of “Spetsnaz,” a book about G.R.U. special forces, adding that many colleagues who worked closely with Mr. Skripal would most likely have had their careers ended as part of the sweep.

People leaving the Russian Embassy in London in March after Britain announced the expulsion of Russian diplomats over the use of a nerve agent on British soil.CreditDaniel Leal-Olivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“If people defected earlier in their career, you might find an entire graduating class benched,” he said.

Even after the swap, he was able to damage the G.R.U.’s infrastructure. In 2012, he visited intelligence officers in the Czech Republic who had long felt vulnerable in the face of Russia’s unusually large intelligence presence in the country. Mr. Skripal, who stayed for a long, boozy lunch, was able to help, said a European official.

“In fact, Skripal was able to describe what types of operations they had, how they cover up their people, how they build their teams,” the official said. “He didn’t have to be concrete, to give up concrete names. It contributed to improving our work.”

Over the months that followed, a number of Russian diplomats were expelled from the Czech Republic on suspicion of spying. Mr. Skripal “may have contributed some part of the puzzle” that led to the expulsions, the official said. “Whether he caused them, nobody can tell you.”

In interviews, several former Russian intelligence agents were skeptical that the G.R.U. was behind the attack on the Skripals, in part because of its audacity.

In Soviet times, their more cosmopolitan K.G.B. colleagues referred to G.R.U. officers as “sapogi,” or boots, suggesting that they were tough and rugged but not sophisticated in their methods, said Yuri B. Shvets, a former K.G.B. agent posted to Washington in the 1980s.

“The G.R.U. took its officers from the trenches,” he said, unlike the K.G.B., which recruited from top universities.

Irek Murtazin, who worked closely with the G.R.U. and now covers military affairs for Novaya Gazeta, said that the agency’s assassinations tended to be unshowy affairs.

“He would have died from a heart attack or a stroke, a car would have run him over or a bum would have beat him up,” Mr. Murtazin said. “There wouldn’t have been any Novichok.”

Assassinations, nonetheless, have long been part of Russian and Soviet intelligence practice, Mr. Galeotti said. “That the G.R.U. kills people abroad has been amply demonstrated in a variety of other cases,” he said. “The G.R.U. tends to be more of a kinetic agency — more a bullet in the head rather than an exotic poison. The ultimate point is, from the G.R.U. point of view, it’s the outcomes that matter.”

Follow Ellen Barry, Michael Schwirtz and Eric Schmitt on Twitter: @EllenBarryNYT, @mschwirtz and @EricSchmittNYT.

Ellen Barry reported from London, Michael Schwirtz from Moscow, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.