Sergei Skripal's link with Orbis: possible motive for murderIn the first few days after the poisoning there were media reports that Sergei Skripal had been in
regular contact with his MI6 handler, whose Linked-In profile had stated that he was a consultant for Orbis Business Intelligence. It appears that this profile was
deleted by March 7, and a
Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice was issued to caution journalists against disclosing the identity of this consultant.However at Skripal's trial in 2007 his MI6 handler had been
identified as Pablo Miller, and the link between Skripal and Miller had been
described in detail by Russian opposition media on 6 March.
This link between Skripal and Orbis may be relevant to the dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, the founder of Orbis, containing derogatory information on Donald Trump's alleged ties to Russia. This dossier had been
used by the FBI to apply for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court order authorizing surveillance of Trump's campaign. By early 2018 the unravelling of this story was creating serious difficulties for Steele and for those he had worked with. These difficulties included a
referral for criminal investigation by two US Senators, a libel case in the US against the publisher of the dossier which had led to a
court ruling that Steele should be questioned in an English court, and a
libel case in England against Orbis and Steele. It is not difficult to postulate a situation in which the potential for damage to US-UK relations could have provided a motive for actors on both sides of the Atlantic to ensure that Sergei Skripal would not be available to give evidence.
The UK government's positionThis was summarized in a
letter from the National Security Adviser, Sir Mark Sedwill to the NATO Secretary-General on 13 April 2018.Sedwill's letter made several assertions that were substantiated only by "intelligence":
- By 1993, when Russia signed the Chemical Weapons Convention, it is likely that some Novichoks had passed acceptance testing, allowing their use by the Russian military
- Russia further developed some Novichoks after ratifying the convention
- During the 2000s, Russia commenced a programme to test means of delivering chemical warfare agents and to train personnel from special units in the use of these weapons. This programme subsequently included investigation of ways of delivering nerve agents, including by application to door handles.
- In the mid-2000s, President Putin was closely involved in the Russian chemical weapons programme
- Within the last decade Russia has produced and stockpiled small quantities of Novichoks
Appearing before the House of Commons Defence Committee on 1 May, Sedwill
(11:39) extolled the government's reaction to the Salisbury incident as "an example of the Fusion Doctrine in practice".The
Fusion Doctrine brings other government departments under the National Security Council with "the introduction of senior officials as senior responsible owners to deliver each of the NSC's priorities".
Sedwill's involvement in the preparation of the
now widely discredited dossier "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction" released in September 2002, calls into question his credibility in making these uncorroborated assertions. The UK government's case as set out by Sedwill is based on asserting that "only Russia has the technical means, operational experience and motive for the attack on the Skripals".Each of these points is open to serious criticism:-
- Technical means: it is not seriously disputed that A-234 can be produced at bench scale in any organic chemistry lab.
- Operational experience: it is alleged that Russia has a track record of state-sponsored assassination, but this does not support the assertion that only Russia has the operational experience for such an assassination. On the contrary, the failure of the assassination attempt, against two unprotected individuals, suggests that the perpetrators lacked the operational experience and competence that one would expect of state-directed assassins.
- Motive: no other attempted assassinations of defectors from Russian intelligence services have been recorded. If the Russian state had decided to begin assassinating these defectors, it is unlikely that they would have chosen to start in March 2018, just before the presidential election and three months before the FIFA World Cup. However, as noted above, it is possible to identify motives for other actors to silence Sergei Skripal at this time.