The inquiry into the death of Dawn Sturgess as an innocent victim of the attempt to murder Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal in 2018 has begun, a mere six years after the event. The question is, what can it tell us that we don’t already know?
Britain’s love affair with lengthy, expensive and tardy inquiries continues with, in this case, a brief to ‘ascertain… who the deceased was; how; when and where she came by her death’, to identify ‘where responsibility for the death lies’ and to ‘make such recommendations as may seem appropriate’.
On one level, all the inquiry can offer is a snapshot of what happened in what seems like another world
While no doubt of great comfort to the Sturgess family, on one level this seems a rather pointless exercise. We surely know who she was, and how she died, having sprayed on her wrist what turned out not to be perfume, but the nerve agent Novichok hidden in a discarded bottle. The two Russians who travelled to Salisbury to carry out Skripal’s murder went by the names ‘Alexander Petrov’ and ‘Ruslan Boshirov’, but have since been unmasked as GU (Russian military intelligence) officers Lt. Col. Dr Alexander Mishkin and Col. Anatoly Chepiga. We can be pretty confident that they were operating under orders. Whether or not Vladimir Putin personally gave those orders or not we can’t really know, but that hardly matters in that it was his state that was responsible.
Really, though, the meat of the inquiry, beyond hashing out the obvious, will be on recommendations – and, alas, recriminations. The trouble with such inquiries is that often they run the risk of being consumed by identifying mistakes made – with the glorious advantage of hindsight. Already, it has been told that Skripal was ‘alarmingly accessible,’ living under his own name and without being ringed with CCTV. These facts, however, do raise one of the remaining potential mysteries that the inquiry may indeed be able to address, as it will have greater access to evidence from the intelligence and security agencies than a previous, more limited inquest held several years ago.
Sergei Skripal, an officer of the GRU (later renamed the GU) had been recruited by MI6 around 1995. He was arrested in 2004 and sentenced to 13 years in a high-security prison. In 2010, though, he was pardoned and released as part of a wider spy swap.
The spook etiquette, for want of a better word, is that a swapped agent is safe from further retribution, not least to avoid jeopardising further exchanges. Indeed, this is likely why Skripal himself refused the offer of a new identity. However, part of the unspoken deal is that he or she is now out of the business: a thorough debriefing is expected, of course, and maybe some lectures to trainee spies, but essentially they are no longer active.
However, it seems he was not simply tending his garden. Reports have since emerged that Skripal was actively and regularly meeting with intelligence and security officers from countries including the Czech Republic, Colombia, Estonia and Spain. He could not have been doing this without the approval – or at the instigation of – his handlers in the UK.
We know that Putin has a murderous bee in his bonnet about traitors (you could just ask the defecting helicopter pilot Maxim Kuzminov, were it not that he was gunned down in Spain this February) and also reacts badly when he feels the West is trying to cheat him. In these circumstances, one would have thought or hoped that it would have been realised that Skripal was at rather more risk than a regular former spy. Was he not offered extra security, or did he decline it? These are questions the inquiry may be able to resolve.
Six years have passed and, of course, on one level all the inquiry can offer is a snapshot of what happened in what seems almost like another world. The police and the intelligence community have presumably not been sitting on their hands in the interim; it remains to be seen whether the inquiry can offer recommendations that have not already emerged and been applied through years of internal discussions about the lessons learned.
The depressing truth is that security can never be guaranteed or absolute: no one can ever promise that something like this cannot happen again. However, this inquest can have value in identifying whether there are still loopholes that need to be closed or procedures to be updated. With MI5 director-general Ken McCallum recently warning that Moscow threatened ‘mayhem’ on Britain’s streets, this needs to be a priority. Many of the vulnerabilities, though, are down to overstretch in the security agencies. Not every lead can be followed, not every potential target covered, not every suspected agent watched.
At a time when the military and its friends are lobbying about the need to increase defence spending, it is a useful, albeit tragic reminder of the equal importance of Britain’s invisible defences. The prospects of Russian aircraft darkening our skies or its naval infantry swarming our beaches are vanishingly small – but its agents, increasingly now replaced or supplemented by proxies recruited from the ranks of gangsters or radicals, have already brought death and destruction to our streets.
Put this in context: the Single Intelligence Account (SIA) – the budget for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ together – was £3.6 billion in the financial year 2022/23. That’s about as much as it cost to build the new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, albeit not to buy its planes. The lion’s share of the SIA goes to GCHQ anyway. Maybe one of the lessons of the inquiry ought not to be that MI5 and MI6 made mistakes so much as that, in the new security environment, they need enough resources to do the job.
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