Counting the cost of Putin’s war against ‘traitors’

Russia has often eliminated ‘traitors’ abroad but no leader since the 1960s has shown such interest in killing, says Christopher Andrew, the intelligence services historian

The main responsibility for the 21st-century revival of the KGB tradition of trying to assassinate Russian defectors belongs to President Vladimir Putin. He first applied to the KGB at the age of 14, was asked to wait until he was older, joined immediately after graduation and has been an intelligence hardliner ever since.

In 1998, at the age of 45, he became head of the FSB, the post-Soviet successor to the domestic arm of the KGB, whose multiple responsibilities nowadays include poisonings and assassinations on foreign soil. Putin is the only current world leader, and only the second leader in Russian history, to be a former intelligence chief.

He made public his personal loathing for defectors after being humiliated by the arrest in the US in 2010 of 10 “illegal” Soviet intelligence personnel, most of whom had successfully posed for some years as American citizens — in one case deceiving even their own children.

Putin blamed this intelligence disaster on “traitors”. “Traitors,” he said menacingly, “always end in a bad way.” Though Putin did not mention him by name, the traitor at the top of his list in 2010 was Colonel Alexander Poteyev, deputy head of SVR (Russian foreign intelligence) illegal operations, who was believed to have betrayed the 10 illegals to the Americans.

Shortly before their arrest, Poteyev defected to the US. “We know who he is and where he is,” a Kremlin official told Kommersant newspaper at the time. “A Mercader has already been sent after him.” The reference to Ramon Mercader, the most famous assassin in Soviet history, shows that the Kremlin sees its own assassination plots in the context of a KGB tradition that includes the killing of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Mercader had become the lover of the American Trotskyist Sylvia Ageloff, who had access to Trotsky’s villa.

As Trotsky sat reading at his study desk, Mercader took an icepick from his pocket and brought it down with all the force he could muster on the back of Trotsky’s skull. Trotsky died in hospital next day. When Mercader, after 20 years in a Mexican prison, returned to Moscow in 1960, he was personally welcomed by Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, and made Hero of the Soviet Union. Liquidation of “enemies of the people” abroad remained part of KGB foreign operations.

Leon Trotsky was killed in Mexico in 1940ALAMY

If, as a Kremlin official claimed in 2010, another Mercader was sent to track down Poteyev, he failed. Poteyev is believed to have died two years ago in America. With his death, Sergei Skripal, a former military intelligence (GRU) officer jailed in Russia for spying for Britain and one of four Russians exchanged for the illegals arrested in 2010, moved up the FSB rank order of traitorous defectors.

Like Trotsky’s family, Yulia Skripal was regarded as fair game by those who targeted her father.

Putin takes a greater interest in “targeted killings” abroad than any Russian leader since Khrushchev. During the Khrushchev era, the chief targets of KGB assassination operations were the leaders in exile of Ukrainian independence movements. The operations, however, had a mixed record of success.

In 1954 a highly trained KGB assassin, Nikolai Khokhlov, knocked on the door in Frankfurt of the Ukrainian Social Democratic leader, Georgi Okolovich, and announced: “The central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has ordered your assassination.” Khokhlov then informed the startled Okolovich that he had decided not to murder him.

Instead, he defected to the CIA and gave an extraordinary press conference at which he displayed the murder weapon: an electrically operated gun concealed inside a cigarette packet that fired cyanide-tipped bullets.

Despite the humiliation for the KGB of Khokhlov’s defection, its killing of Ukrainian émigré leaders continued. There was also an almost successful attempt to poison Khokhlov with thallium. He later received a formal pardon from President Boris Yeltsin.

Even more embarrassing to the Soviet leadership and the KGB than the Khokhlov case was the defection in 1961 of another KGB assassin, Bogdan Stashinsky, who had been awarded the Order of the Red Banner for killing two Ukrainian émigré leaders with a spray gun that fired poison gas from a crushed cyanide capsule and caused cardiac arrest.

Fearful of attracting more of the worldwide publicity generated by Khokhlov’s defection and Stashinsky’s trial for murder in 1962, the politburo abandoned assassination as a normal instrument of policy outside the Soviet bloc.

Putin is nowadays less concerned by international condemnation than most of his Cold War predecessors in the Kremlin. Neither Khrushchev nor his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, would have been willing to continue foreign assassinations after the kind of bad publicity received by Putin after the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.

Twenty years ago, while working with the former KGB senior archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin, who, with help from MI6, had smuggled a huge archive of top secret material from KGB files to Britain, I was struck by the sometimes detailed plans to assassinate Soviet intelligence personnel who had defected to the West. In almost every case, however, the reputational risks of going ahead were considered too great.

If Litvinenko had defected during the Brezhnev era, for example, there would doubtless have been a contingency plan, possibly involving the use of poison, to murder him. But the plan would not have been approved by the Kremlin.

On two occasions towards the end of the Brezhnev era, however, the KGB did go ahead with poison operations, confident that it could cover its tracks. In 1979, in an operation not so far mentioned in public discussion of the Skripal case, the KGB attempted to poison President Hafizullah Amin of Afghanistan, whom it suspected (probably wrongly) of plotting with America.

It succeeded in infiltrating an Azerbaijani KGB illegal, Mutalin Talybov (codenamed Sabir) into the presidential kitchen in Kabul, where he gained a job as a chef. Sabir, however, seems to have poisoned the wrong man. The president’s son-in-law and head of security, Asadullah Amin, became seriously ill with food poisoning after eating one of Talybov’s dishes and was flown to Moscow for urgent medical treatment. No chance remained of poisoning the president.

As one KGB officer in the illegals department complained: “[Hafizullah] Amin was as careful as any of the Borgias. He kept switching his food and drink as if he expected to be poisoned.” Having lost hope of poisoning the president and still convinced that Amin was plotting with the US, the KGB’s elite Alpha Squad stormed his palace later in the year and shot him dead.

The best-known KGB-assisted poisoning in Britain before that of Litvinenko was that of the Bulgarian dissident in London, Georgi Markov, who was accused of repeatedly “slandering Comrade Zhivkov”, the longest-serving leader in the Soviet bloc, during his broadcasts on the BBC World Service. Though the KGB was reluctant to take the risk of becoming involved, it concluded that refusing the Bulgarian appeal for assistance would be an unacceptable slight to Zhivkov.

The KGB nearly succeeded in covering its tracks. It provided Bulgarian intelligence with an American umbrella whose tip had been converted by its technicians into a silenced gun capable of firing a lethal pellet of the poison ricin. In 1978, while Markov was waiting at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge, he felt a sudden sting in his right thigh, apparently caused by a stranger who had dropped his umbrella and apologised.

Markov became seriously ill next day and died in hospital. By that time, however, though the remains of a small, empty pellet was discovered in his thigh, the ricin had decomposed. It was discovered that ricin had been used to murder Markov only when a full pellet was recovered in Paris after an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate another Bulgarian dissident.

As well as using poisons for assassination operations, the KGB also developed drugs to assist the interrogation of suspected traitors. While I was working on a book with Oleg Gordievsky, the former British agent in the KGB, after his dramatic escape from Moscow in 1985, he told me that at lunch in a KGB dacha, before being accused of treachery he had been given a glass of Armenian brandy.

He quickly realised the brandy had been drugged in an attempt to persuade him to confess. He began talking quickly and garrulously, conscious that one part of his mind was urging him not to lose control while another part told him the effort might be beyond him. Attempts were made later to deceive him into believing that he had made a confession.

The Soviet Union’s best-kept secret during the final decade of the Cold War was the immense biological and chemical warfare programme that developed, among other horrors, the novichok (“newcomer”) nerve agents used in the recent attack in Salisbury on Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

The first warning of the biological warfare programme had been a major anthrax outbreak in 1979 at Ekaterinburg (then renamed Sverdlovsk), where Tsar Nicholas II and most of his family had been shot and bayoneted by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Later known as “the biological Chernobyl”, at the time the Russian authorities insisted that the outbreak was due to natural causes and no independent inspections were allowed.

The West had no idea of the scale and menace of the work at the many laboratories of Biopreparat, the world’s largest and most advanced biological warfare institute, until the defection of one of its scientific directors, Vladimir Pasechnik, to MI6 in 1989.

Most of the scientific intelligence provided by Pasechnik is so dangerous that it remains classified. When I met him a few years after he went into hiding near Porton Down, he explained that, because he had not been allowed to travel abroad while at Biopreparat, it had taken him several years to plan his escape. Finally, in the summer of 1989, he was allowed to go to France to sign contracts for laboratory equipment.

While in Paris, he made contact with the MI6 station at the British embassy and was exfiltrated to England. Though I have little corroboration, I believe his claim that some of the experiments at Biopreparat were so horrific that they interfered with his sleep at night. Pasechnik’s willingness to be interviewed by me for a series I was presenting on Radio 4 at a time when he feared the FSB was trying to track him down was certainly not influenced by the modest fee he was paid by the BBC. Pasechnik simply wanted to do everything he could to try to ensure that the horrors of Biopreparat did not return in post-Soviet Russia. He died from a stroke in 2001.

A series of FSB poison operations of the Putin era — including the attempt to use novichok nerve agents to murder the Skripals — derive from biological and chemical warfare research at Biopreparat during the final two decades of the Soviet era.

When Putin became president in 2000, however, it seemed inconceivable that there would be a new wave of poison operations. I recall a memorable visit by Alexander Litvinenko to the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, which I chair. Although the FSB had already used poison in Ukraine, I fear it barely occurred to us that Litvinenko might be poisoned in London.

Because assassination by poison had fallen into disuse during the Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin eras, operational efficiency in the early Putin era was lower than in the early Cold War.

The dioxins used against Viktor Yushchenko during the Ukrainian presidential election in 2004 temporarily disfigured him but failed to kill him. The bungled initial attempts to poison Alexander Litvinenko two years later in London and the trail of radioactive polonium-210 left by the assassins were further evidence of a decline in assassination skills since their peak during the Soviet era.

As Litvinenko lay dying in University College Hospital, London, he addressed these words to Russia’s president: “You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.”

Though the “howl of protest” in Britain was slow to reverberate in 2006, the government response to this month’s attack on the Skripals — in particular the expulsion of 23 Russian intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover — has been far less feeble than in the Litvinenko case.

Putin’s personal responsibility for what Theresa May denounced on Wednesday as “a well-established pattern of Russian state aggression across Europe and beyond” has been publicly exposed.

Christopher Andrew’s forthcoming book, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence, will be published by Allen Lane on June 28