The same people who assured
you that Saddam Hussein had WMD’s now assure you Russian “novochok” nerve
agents are being wielded by Vladimir Putin to attack people on British soil. As
with the Iraqi WMD dossier, it is essential to comb the evidence very finely. A
vital missing word from Theresa May’s statement yesterday was “only”. She did
not state that the nerve agent used was manufactured ONLY by Russia. She rather
stated this group of nerve agents had been “developed by” Russia. Antibiotics
were first developed by a Scotsman, but that is not evidence that all
antibiotics are today administered by Scots.
The
“novochok” group of nerve agents – a very loose term simply for a collection of
new nerve agents the Soviet Union were developing fifty years ago – will almost
certainly have been analysed and reproduced by Porton Down. That is entirely
what Porton Down is there for. It used to make chemical and biological weapons
as weapons, and today it still does make them in small quantities in order to
research defences and antidotes. After the fall of the Soviet Union Russian
chemists made a lot of information available
on these nerve agents. And one country which has always manufactured very
similar persistent nerve agents is Israel. This Foreign Policy magazine
(a very establishment US publication) article on Israel‘s
chemical and biological weapon capability is very interesting indeed. I will
return to Israel later in this article.
Incidentally, novachok is not
a specific substance but a class of new nerve agents. Sources agree they were
designed to be persistent, and of an order of magnitude stronger than sarin or
VX. That is rather hard to square with the fact that thankfully nobody has died
and those possibly in contact just have to wash their clothes.
From Putin’s point of view,
to assassinate Skripal now seems to have very little motivation. If the
Russians have waited eight years to do this, they could have waited until after
their World Cup. The Russians have never killed a swapped spy before. Just as
diplomats, British and otherwise, are the most ardent upholders of the
principle of diplomatic immunity, so security service personnel everywhere are
the least likely to wish to destroy a system which can be a key aspect of their
own personal security; quite literally spy swaps are their “Get Out of Jail
Free” card. You don’t undermine that system – probably terminally – without
very good reason.
It is worth noting that the
“wicked” Russians gave Skripal a far lighter jail sentence than an American
equivalent would have received. If a member of US Military Intelligence had
sold, for cash to the Russians, the names of hundreds of US agents and officers
operating abroad, the Americans would at the very least jail the person for
life, and I strongly suspect would execute them. Skripal just received a jail
sentence of 18 years, which is hard to square with the narrative of implacable
vindictiveness against him. If the Russians had wanted to make an example, that
was the time.
It is much more probable that
the reason for this assassination attempt refers to something recent or
current, than to spying twenty years ago. Were I the British police, I would
inquire very closely into Orbis Intelligence.
There
is no doubt that Skripal was feeding secrets to MI6 at the time that
Christopher Steele was an MI6 officer in Moscow, and at the time that Pablo
Miller, another member of Orbis Intelligence, was also an MI6 officer in Russia
and directly recruiting agents. It is widely reported on the web and in US media that it
was Miller who first recruited Skripal. My own ex-MI6 sources tell me that is
not quite true as Skripal was “walk-in”, but that Miller certainly was involved
in running Skripal for a while. Sadly Pablo Miller’s LinkedIn profile has
recently been deleted, but it is again widely alleged on the web that it showed
him as a consultant for Orbis Intelligence and a consultant to the FCO and –
wait for it – with an address in Salisbury. If anyone can recover that Linkedin
entry do get in touch, though British Government agencies will have been active
in the internet scrubbing.
It
was of course Christopher Steele and Orbis Intelligence who produced for the
Clinton camp the sensationalist dossier on Trump links with Russia – including
the story of Trump paying to be urinated on by Russian prostitutes – that is a
key part of the “Russiagate” affair gripping the US political classes. The
extraordinary thing about this is that the Orbis dossier is obvious nonsense
which anybody with a professional background can completely demolish, as I did here. Steele’s motive was, like
Skripal’s in selling his secrets, cash pure and simple. Steele is a charlatan
who knocked up a series of allegations that are either wildly improbable, or
would need a high level source access he could not possibly get in today’s
Russia, or both. He told the Democrats what they wish to hear and his audience
– who had and still have no motivation to look at it critically – paid him
highly for it.
I do not know for certain
that Pablo Miller helped knock together the Steele dossier on Trump, but it
seems very probable given he also served for MI6 in Russia and was working for
Orbis. And it seems to me even more probable that Sergei Skripal contributed to
the Orbis Intelligence dossier on Trump. Steele and Miller cannot go into
Russia and run sources any more, and never would have had access as good as
their dossier claims, even in their MI6 days. The dossier was knocked up for
huge wodges of cash from whatever they could cobble together. Who better to
lend a little corroborative verisimilitude in these circumstances than their
old source Skripal?
Skripal was at hand in the
UK, and allegedly even close to Miller in Salisbury. He could add in the proper
acronym for a Russian committee here or the name of a Russian official there,
to make it seem like Steele was providing hard intelligence. Indeed, Skripal’s
outdated knowledge might explain some of the dossier’s more glaring errors.
But the problem with double
agents like Skripal, who give intelligence for money, is that they can easily
become triple agents and you never know when a better offer is going to come
along. When Steele produced his dodgy dossier, he had no idea it would ever
become so prominent and subject to so much scrutiny. Steele is fortunate in
that the US Establishment is strongly motivated not to scrutinise his work
closely as their one aim is to “get” Trump. But with the stakes very high,
having a very loose cannon as one of the dossier’s authors might be most
inconvenient both for Orbis and for the Clinton camp.
If I was the police, I would look closely at Orbis Intelligence.
To return to Israel. Israel
has the nerve agents. Israel has Mossad which is extremely skilled at foreign
assassinations. Theresa May claimed Russian propensity to assassinate abroad as
a specific reason to believe Russia did it. Well Mossad has an even greater
propensity to assassinate abroad. And while I am struggling to see a Russian
motive for damaging its own international reputation so grieviously, Israel has
a clear motivation for damaging the Russian reputation so grieviously. Russian
action in Syria has undermined the Israeli position in Syria and Lebanon in a
fundamental way, and Israel has every motive for damaging Russia’s
international position by an attack aiming to leave the blame on Russia.
Both the Orbis and Israeli theories are speculations. But they are no
more a speculation, and no more a conspiracy theory, than the idea that
Vladimir Putin secretly sent agents to Salisbury to attack Skripal with a
secret nerve agent. I can see absolutely no reason to believe that is a more
valid speculation than the others at this point.
I am alarmed by the security,
spying and armaments industries’ frenetic efforts to stoke Russophobia and heat
up the new cold war. I am especially alarmed at the stream of cold war warrior
“experts” dominating the news cycles. I write as someone who believes that
agents of the Russian state did assassinate Litvinenko, and that the Russian
security services carried out at least some of the apartment bombings that
provided the pretext for the brutal assault on Chechnya. I believe the Russian
occupation of Crimea and parts of Georgia is illegal. On the other hand, in
Syria Russia has saved the Middle East from domination by a new wave of US and
Saudi sponsored extreme jihadists.
The naive view of the world as “goodies” and “baddies”, with our own
ruling class as the good guys, is for the birds. I witnessed personally in
Uzbekistan the willingness of the UK and US security services to accept and
validate intelligence they knew to be false in order to pursue their policy
objectives. We should be extremely sceptical of their current anti-Russian
narrative. There are many possible suspects in this attack.
Reprinted
with the author’s permission.
Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist.
He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and
Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.
Copyright © 2018 Craig Murray
Copyright © 2018 Craig Murray