Sergei Skripal

Sergei Skripal   (spook, double agent, triple agent?)
Born	Sergei Viktorovich Skripal 1951-06-23 Kaliningrad, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Nationality	Russian, British
Children	• Alexandr Skripal • Yulia Skripal
Spouse	Lyudmila Skripal
Victim of	Chemical weapon
The Russian double agent at the heart of the Skripal affair. Possibly being held at an unknown location by UK authorities

Sergei Skripal is a former Russian military intelligence officer who from the mid 1990s to 2004 secretly worked for British MI6 as a spy. In December 2004, he was arrested by Russia and sentenced to 13 years in prison for high treason. He was part of a spy swap with the US and Britain in 2010, and kept working for British intelligence.

On 4 March 2018, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found "slipping in and out of consciousness on a public bench in Salisbury". The British government immediately accused Russia of having sent two or more operatives over to poison him, the much publicised Skripal Affair.

Full article: Skripal Affair

Education, military intelligence

Sergei Skripal was born and grew up in Kaliningrad (Russia). In 1972, Skripal completed the military engineering school in Kaliningrad, with the qualification of a sapper-paratrooper. He then studied at the Moscow Military Engineering Academy. He then served in the Soviet Airborne Troops and was deployed to Afghanistan during the Soviet–Afghan War under the command of Boris Gromov.

From the Airborne Troops, Skripal moved to military intelligence (GRU) In the early 1990s, he was posted as a GRU officer at the embassy in Malta. In 1994, he obtained a position in the military attaché′s office in Madrid, Spain. According to the FSB and other sources, in 1995, in Spain, he was recruited to British intelligence by British intelligence agent Pablo Miller.

According to intelligence sources cited by The Times in March 2018, Skripal was first spotted for potential development as an asset by Spanish intelligence but was approached by the British recruiter around July 1995. According to the FSB, Pablo Miller was also involved in efforts to recruit other Russians as British spies, and was in contact with Alexander Litvinenko.

In 1996, due to his diabetes, Skripal was sent back to Moscow, where he went on to work in the GRU headquarters and for a while was acting director of the GRU personnel department, still while being a British spy. Skripal held the rank of colonel when he retired, due to his inadequate health condition, in 1999. He continued to make trips to Spain, where he had a house near Málaga at his disposal, provided by his British handlers.

According to Russian prosecutors, he began working for the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in 1995 and passed on state secrets, such as the identities of Russian intelligence agents. After his retirement, he worked in the Household Department of the Russian foreign ministry, while continuing to work for MI6. He was alleged to have blown the cover of 300 Russian agents.

From 2001, Skripal worked in the Ministry of Municipalities of the Government of Moscow Oblast.

Arrest and conviction

In December 2004, Skripal was arrested in Moscow, shortly after returning from Britain. In August 2006, he was convicted under Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code (high treason in the form of espionage) by the Moscow Regional Military Court in a trial conducted behind closed doors. The prosecution, which was represented personally by Chief Military Prosecutor Sergei Fridinsky, argued for a 15-year sentence – instead of the 20-year maximum under Article 275 – in recognition of mitigating circumstances such as his cooperation with investigators. Skripal was sentenced to 13 years in a high-security detention facility; he was also stripped of his military rank and decorations. The affair was not revealed to the public until after he was sentenced in August 2006.

Prisoner Exchange and life in UK

On 9 July 2010, Skripal, along with three other Russian nationals imprisoned for espionage, was freed as part of a spy swap for the ten Russian agents arrested in the United States. The UK government insisted on Skripal being included in the swap.

Skripal moved to Salisbury, Wiltshire, where he purchased a house in 2011. He kept being actively involved with British intelligence services, possibly through his handler Pablo Miller, until 2018.

Skripal's wife died in 2012 of cancer. His daughter, Yulia, followed him to Britain, but returned to Moscow in 2014. His son died aged 43 in March 2017, in unknown circumstances, on a visit to Saint Petersburg. Skripal's older brother died within the two years before the poisoning. Both Skripal's wife and his son are buried in a cemetery local to Salisbury, implying enough financial security to arrange for this.

In May 2018, the New York Times reported that Skripal, though retired, was "still in the game." While living in Britain he had travelled to other countries, meeting with intelligence officials of the Czech Republic, Estonia and Colombia, most likely as part of the renewed Western intelligence offensive against Russia. In June 2016 he travelled to Estonia to meet local spies. Russia exile Valery Morozov told Channel 4 News Sergei Skripal was still working and in regular contact with military intelligence officers at the Russian Embassy.

On 28 September 2018, the news magazine Focus reported, referring to a statement of a senior official from NATO's Allied Command Counter-Intelligence Unit (ACCI) in Mons, that until 2017 Skripal worked for four intelligence agencies of NATO countries.

Skripal worked, presumably as a consultant, for several NATO intelligence services, claiming expertise that according to them made them able to identify undercover Russian assets. He not only traveled, accompanied by MI6 officials to Prague, where he contributed information about the active Russian spy network, allegedly with some agents Skripal knew from his active service - which is surprising he didn't already provide to his handlers when he was active before 2004.

Russiagate

Skripal was a close confidant of Christopher Steele, the British ex-spy who compiled the (soon heavily discredited by alternative media) Trump–Russia dossier. British intelligence later disputed this connection through their traditional mouthpiece The Telegraph where they claimed the evidence linking Skripal to Steele was fabricated by Russian Intelligence.

Skripal was probably "Steele's primary sub-source" for the Dirty dossier on Trump. In a FBI quality control process of the Dirty dossier in January 2017, the source disavowed key allegations in the dossier, and told the FBI that Steele had "misstated or exaggerated” information he conveyed to him in multiple sections of the dossier. This admission was then brushed under the carpet by the FBI experts.

Full article: Dirty dossier

Skripal Affair

On 4 March 2018, Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia, who was visiting from Moscow, were found "slipping in and out of consciousness on a public bench", the start of what soon became the "Skripal Affair". Public perceptions of this incident were a matter of great interest to the Integrity Initiative, at least one leaked document of which included the name of his handler, Pablo Miller.

Full article: Skripal Affair

Disappearance

Sergei Skripal was not seen in public or heard from after being released from hospital after the incident. Given this, some analysts have mentioned the possibility that they are being held against their will by Britain’s authorities: "In short, hostages of the British state."

On 16 February 2019, the Sunday Times reported, without identified sources, that Sergei Skripal "has suffered a deterioration in his health and was being treated by doctors".

On 6 June 2020, The New York Post reported, also without identified sources, that Sergei and his daughter had been settled in New Zealand under new identities.

On 26 October 2024, the Russian Embassy posted on X:

Ambassador Andrei Kelin: We will continue to demand from the British authorities credible information regarding the fate of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

If the Skripals do not wish to receive any assistance or attention from our state, they should be allowed to say so themselves.

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Orbis Business Intelligence	“The @Telegraph story claiming a link between Sergei #Skripal and Christopher Steele's company Orbis is wrong, I understand. Skripal had nothing to do with Trump dossier. Skripal had nothing to do with Trump dossier.”	Luke Harding	2018
Skripal Affair	“Austria officially confirmed this week that the British Government’s allegation that Novichok, a Russian chemical warfare agent, was used in England by GRU, the Russian military intelligence service, in March 2018, was a British invention. Investigations in Vienna by four Austrian government ministries, the BVT intelligence agency, and by Austrian prosecutors have revealed that secret OPCW reports on the blood testing of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, copies of which were transferred to the Austrian government, did not reveal a Russian-made nerve agent.”		July 2020

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:British Skripal Narrative Fails the Occam's Razor Every Step of the Way	blog post	26 September 2018	Rob Slane	Occam’s Verdict: Where is Sergei? He’s either dead, or he can’t be prevailed upon to make a statement backing up the official narrative, because he knows it isn’t true.
Document:FCO Skripal twitter sample 23.3.18	Twitter roundup	23 March 2018	Chris Hernon	A Twitter roundup from II. The contents are fairly standard fare, but which users II chose to follow is very interesting, and some are indeed "other users in our field"
Document:FCO Skripal twitter sample 24.3.18	Twitter roundup	24 March 2018	Chris Hernon	A Twitter roundup from II. The contents are fairly standard fare, but which users II chose to follow is very interesting, and some are "other users in our field".
Document:Killing Diplomacy	Article	15 March 2018	Paul Craig Roberts Dmitry Orlov	Sane people will choose politics over war, and sane – that is, competently governed – nations will choose diplomacy over belligerence and confrontation. If we look around in search of such incompetently governed nations, two examples readily present themselves: the United States and the United Kingdom.
Document:Muellergate and the Discreet Lies of the Bourgeoisie	Blog post	1 April 2019	Craig Murray	The capacity of the mainstream media repeatedly to promote the myth that Russia caused Clinton’s defeat, while never mentioning what the information was that had been so damaging to Hillary, should be alarming to anybody under the illusion that we have a working “free media”.
Document:Probable Western Responsibility for Skripal Poisoning	blog post	28 April 2018	Craig Murray Clive Ponting	Those of us who have been in the belly of the beast and have worked closely with the intelligence services, really do know what they and the British government are capable of. They are not “white knights”.
Document:Reactions to the “Skripal case” in Greek newspapers	press monitoring	28 November 2018	Paschalidis Panagiotis	Analysis of headlines in Greek media about the Skripal-affair
Document:Russia Claims US Deploys Warships For Imminent Attack On Syria, Trains Militants For False Flag Attack	blog post	17 March 2018	'Tyler Durden'	United States-led coalition to "retaliate" for another false flag chemical attack done by the White Helmets in Syria
Document:Sergei Skripal - "I wanted a life outside Russia"	Article	28 September 2018	Mark Urban	Adapted from "The Skripal Files, The Life and Near Death of a Russian Spy" by Mark Urban, to be published by Macmillan on 4 October 2018 at £20
Document:Skripal Case Italy	report	25 June 2018	Fabrizio Luciolli	Conclusion: "To counter this Italian trend it’s important to properly address the key political leaders, their new populist parties, and key editorialists, by an effective, discrete and articulated information campaign and narrative and not to be exclusively focused on trolls and fake news."
Document:Skripal Case Study Discernment IFS2018	Twitter roundup	13 December 2018	Chris Hernon	A Twitter roundup from II. The contents are fairly standard fare, but which users II chose to follow is very interesting, and some are "other users in our field".
Document:The CIA/MI6 Skripal Conspiracy Exposed?	Wikispooks Page	16 November 2024	Kit Klarenberg	A longstanding Russia hawk who cut her Agency teeth recruiting spies in the Soviet Union in the years before its collapse, Gina Haspel twice served as the CIA’s London station chief - from 2008 to 2011, and 2014 to 2017. Sergei Skripal arrived in Britain in July 2010 via a grand spy swap during her first tenure, which was negotiated by Haspel’s longtime collaborator Daniel Hoffman, then-CIA Moscow station chief.
Document:The Salisbury Festival of Russophobia Opens Today	Wikispooks Page	14 October 2024	Craig Murray	"The Public Inquiry into the death of Dawn Sturgess, like the Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly, is designed entirely to conceal the truth and further the official narrative."
Document:The Salisbury Poisoning One Year On - An Open Letter to the Metropolitan Police	open letter		Rob Slane
Document:The Strange Case of the Russian Spy Poisoning: Sergei Skripal	blog post	17 March 2018	Ludwig De Braeckeleer James O'Neill	In any major criminal inquiry one of the basic questions the investigation asks is: who had the means, the motive and the opportunity? Framed in that light, the Russians come a distant fourth behind the other prime suspects: the U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies themselves, and those elements of the deep state opposed to Donald Trump.

Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.