The known tally of Russia-originated assassinations and murder attempts on British soil is just the ‘tip of the iceberg’, a respected intelligence author has said.
Nigel West cited the case of a hitman who was in the country for a matter of hours as among those which have gone unsolved over a period decades dating back to the Cold War.
He also pinpointed the Skripal nerve agent attack in Salisbury as a ‘terrible mistake’ that resulted in a new blanket of secrecy being thrown over Russian defectors in the UK.
The intelligence author and historian spoke in a week marking the 18th anniversary of the murder of former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer Alexander Litvinenko in London.
He stressed that Vladimir Putin and the shadowy arms of the Russian state are not behind all of the violent acts in the UK, with organised crime groups from the highly corrupt federation also exporting murder.
A pattern of prominent or high value Russians meeting untimely endings has included hits on British soil, with 14 such incidences cited in an in-depth BuzzFeed investigation.
One of the fatal cases which has been firmly linked to the Kremlin is that of Litvinenko, who died after being poisoned with radioactive polonium. However it was the attack targeting retired Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal which had a profound chilling effect on Russian defectors, Mr West said.
Alexander Litvinenko at University College Hospital in 2006 after being poisoned with polonium 210 (Picture: PA)He told Metro: ‘The lesson from history is that Skripal’s determination to stay at large and not take an alias was a terrible mistake which should never have happened.
The security and intelligence services had a duty of care but Skripal was very insistent that he wanted to be in touch with his mother, brother and one of his daughters in Russia, and was on Skype every week.
As a consequence, all the defectors in the UK and USA have disappeared and been given alternative identities.’
MI5 director general Ken McCallum has warned that ‘Putin’s henchmen’ are targeting the West, with Russia’s GRU military intelligence seeking to ‘generate mayhem’ on British and European streets.
Bad old days of Cold War
With a clampdown on Moscows spies operating under diplomatic cover, the intelligence chief revealed that the Kremlin has begun using proxies to try and harm its targets abroad.
Mr West said: ‘Ken McCallum has said that it’s back to the bad old days of the Cold War. He was referring to a Soviet agent named Oleg Lyalin who defected to the UK in 1971.
‘Lyalin revealed, among other things, that beaches had been surveyed and the London underground would be sabotaged in preparation for Russian troops landing in Yorkshire.
‘This was at the worst point in the Cold War and the implications of what the spy chief is saying for today are shocking.’
Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov was assassinated in London using a poison-loaded umbrella (Picture: PA)Russia-sponsored murder can be traced back to infamous cases including the 1978 killing of Georgi Markov by an unknown assassin who jabbed the Bulgarian defector with a poison-tipped umbrella on Waterloo Bridge.
‘While there is a Russian background to many assassinations and assassination attempts on UK soil, each case is different,’ Mr West said.
‘If we take the Skripals, Sasha Litvinenko and Georgi Markov, these cases were clearly state-sponsored.
Prisoner swap humiliated Putin
The instruments of attack were demonstrably instruments of state; namely novichok, polonium 210 and ricin respectively.
‘The Skripal case is unique, different and important.
It is a GRU case, and there would have been 300 volunteers willing to kill Skripal because he compromised so many of his GRU contemporaries and colleagues. The hit itself was in retribution for the Kremlin being deliberately misled by the CIA over a prisoner swap in 2010.
‘The swap was humiliating for Putin because it was the first time in history that Russian nationals, including the former GRU intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, were swapped out of Russia.
Yulia Skripal gave an interview to thank the people in Salisbury who helped her and her father when they fell unconscious (Picture: Reuters)Markov, a Bulgarian dissident and BBC broadcaster, was fatally jabbed with the umbrella while waiting for a London bus.
‘The Markov case is unique because we know from Oleg Kalugin, who participated in the murder and supplied the weapon, that this was simply the Kremlin doing a favour for the Bulgarian Communist leader Todor Zhivkov, Mr West said. As has been well documented, the Litvinenko assassination was an internal FSB affair.
This being so, there is no “murder inc” in London, it just ain’t so.’
Mr West, author of Soviet and Nazi Defectors, Counter-Intelligence in WW2 and the Cold War, cited one example of Russian organised crime groups using a hitman to carry out a murder on British soil.
‘There are plenty of murders connected to organised crime and some which have not been made public,’ he said.
‘In one, a hitman was hired by a Russian organised crime group and they followed the general MO — arrive on a flight, go to kill the target and they are on the next plane out of the UK.
‘They are here for a matter of hours. These organised criminals are absolutely ruthless.
Trail of murder within Russia
The focus of suspicions around Kremlin-orchestrated foul play has switched to Russia since Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. At least 13 high-profile Russians have died in incidents which have not been fully explained.
One of the latest cases is that of veteran diplomat Alexander Nikolayev who reportedly died on July 6 last year in Moscow, three weeks after being brutally beaten near his country house in the Tver region. The 72-year-old was ‘covered in blood, hematomas and bruises’, and unable to breathe without a ventilator after the violent attack, his family said. His death followed that of Kristina Baikova, the vice president of Russia’s Loko-Bank, who reportedly fell to her death from her Moscow apartment.
The 28-year-old executive is said to have died instantly after plunging from the 11th floor of the building.
Former GRU special forces captain Boris Volodarsky told Metro in August 2023 that the truth of such cases is likely to stay buried under Russian spin and propaganda.
‘The case dates back 10 years and the hitman has not been caught.
‘Many of the other cases in Russia and abroad, including the defenestrations, which often involve wealthy business people, and the hit-and-runs, have no link to Russian intelligence.
‘What we see is the tip of the iceberg, and while many of these cases are not publicly known, we can look at the evidence we do have and extrapolate from that.’
In 2018, a nerve agent attack by Russian operatives was carried out on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury.
Although the pair survived, Dawn Sturgess died after spraying herself with novichok contained in a discarded perfume bottle.
Dark arts stretch back decades
Three suspects working for the GRU have been identified by UK counter-terror police but the evidence points to the involvement of a wider network.
‘In the Skripal hit, you can see from cell phone records connected to the two GRU officers who were clearly involved that there was a third person implicated who left on the same day,’ Mr West said.
‘Then, you have to consider the nerve agent, the novichok, which almost certainly came into the UK through a diplomatic pouch.
Although the photograph of the two officers ambling away from Salisbury railway station is the focal point of the case, it is guaranteed that there were many people involved. You can go back much further still to see the origins of these cases.
Sergei Skripal with his daughter Yulia hours before they were poisoned (Picture: East2West)
Police in protective coveralls with breathing equipment work on the grounds of a cement plant near Salisbury (Picture: Ben Stansall/AFP)Another fatal case on British soil which has been linked to the Kremlin is that of Litvinenko, who died on November 23, 2006 after drinking tea laced with polonium by two Russian agents.
The former FSB officer had predicted before his death in November 2006 that Ukraine would suffer at the hands of ‘hooligan’ Putin.
The case is part of a longstanding Russian tradition of murder and lethal tradecraft dating back to Soviet times, according to Mr West.
‘When the head of the Romanian intelligence service, Ion Pacepa, defected in 1979, he revealed that the Romanians had been employed as surrogates by the KGB to kill people in Munich who were journalists at Radio Free Europe,’ he said.
‘Agents from his service had broken in and put plutonium dust into the drawers of the desks of the journalists. Within six months they had terrible lung cancers.
Skripal nerve agent attack suspects Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov in Salisbury on March 4, 2018 (Picture: Metropolitan Police/PA)They all smoked and when this was revealed by Pacepa it emerged that no one had even thought of foul play.
They were heavy smokers, and it had gone unnoticed.’
Russian intelligence assets in the UK can broadly be defined as those with diplomatic cover and those with non-official cover, known as NOCs.
‘There are more NOCs in custody and awaiting trial now than at any time in UK history,’ Mr West said.
‘In these cases, money is the most likely motivator. That is if those who say they are from a country other than Russia are telling the truth.
With biometrics it has become much more difficult to lie about this.’
Vladimir Putin probably gave his approval to the murder of Alexander Litvinenko according to a UK public inquiry in 2016 (Photo by Contributor/Getty Images)Ksenia Maximova, director of the London-based Russian Democratic Society, told Metro that Moscow’s attempt at chilling dissent overseas would not stop the group’s protests and other visible activities.
‘We obviously have to be careful about safety and security, not just our own but when we are communicating with people in Russia,’ she said.
‘As a Russian citizen, advocating for Ukraine gives you terrorist status in your home country, so we have to protect those we come into contact with. In my view, Putin is trying to keep us out of the country and to build a wall between us and the ordinary citizens.
The Russian Democratic Society continues to speak out and be visible because Russians abroad don’t have a legitimate government and we need to provide an international platform where we can support human rights, democracy and Ukraine’s fight for freedom.
Otherwise Putin will succeed in portraying the illusion that everyone is supporting him and his war in Ukraine.’
MI5 director-general Ken McCallum outlines the threats ranged against the UK in a speech at the Counter Terrorism Operations Centre in London (Picture: Yui Mok/PA Wire)Mr McCallum last month revealed some of the work taking place behind the scenes to degrade Russia’s ability to ‘cause damage’ to the West.
He said: ‘While the Russian military grinds away on the battlefield, at horrendous human cost, we’re also seeing Putin’s henchmen seeking to strike elsewhere, in the misguided hope of weakening Western resolve.
‘Over 750 Russian diplomats have been expelled from Europe since Putin invaded, the great majority of them spies.
‘This goes well beyond all historical precedent – and has put a big dent in the Russian intelligence services’ ability to cause damage in the West.
‘With allies, we’re keeping up that pressure by denying diplomatic visa applications from Russian spies. It’s not flashy, but it works.
‘Kick them out, keep them out.’
Do you have a story you would like to share? Contact josh.layton@metro.co.uk
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