Politics

A quick recap. Sergei Skripal was a Russian agent and then a double agent working for the British in the 1990s. Then On 4 March 2018, he and his daughter Yulia, a Russian citizen who was visiting him from Moscow, were poisoned at their home in Salisbury. As it transpired, the poison was spread on the handle of their front door. The allegation is that the poison was developed by the Russians and that the assassination attempt was ordered by President Putin.

Various scenarios were imagined at the time, and I had this idea that Mr Skripal wasn’t a retired spy at all, but an active agent. It came to me as a possibility in trying to make sense of what had happened in Salisbury.

I thought maybe his handlers had decided to end the relationship by killing him, perhaps by leaving a message for him and lacing it with poison. The reason I thought this was a credible scenario was that whatever the container that the poison was stored in, it had not been found. My line of reasoning was that Mr Skripal purposely hid the container after he looked at the message addressed to him.

Then Charlie Rowley, a local, resident, found the container and thinking it was perfume gave it to his partner Dawn Sturgess, and the two of them were poisoned.

Could it really be that the police would be unable to find the container? After all, Mr. Rowley found it. The police would surely have found it, wouldn’t they? They had dozens, perhaps hundreds, of officers out searching. Perhaps they didn’t find it because it was really well hidden? Except now Charlie Rowley says that what he and his girlfriend were exposed to was in a glass bottle with a plastic dispenser in a cardboard box with a plastic moulding.

And the police couldn’t find it?

Be that as it may, that container doesn’t seem like the perfect object within which to place a message. But then, maybe it is exactly the right kind of container.

I don’t think this detail is an invention put out by Mr. Rowley at the coaching of the Security Services. If that were the case, how could they control what he might say in the future?

But if it is true that the poison was in a bottle of what seemed like it was perfume, then are we to believe that the poisoners just dumped the bottle somewhere it could be found? Or hid it well enough that a search party of policemen couldn’t find it but Mr Rowley did? Are we to believe they dumped it under a bush, or somewhere that only an ex junkie would go looking? If he found it, then anyone could have. The police could have – they devoted enough time to looking for it. How inept would the poisoner with this sophisticated poison have to be to leave it were it could be found? 

Still, the question remains as to who wanted to kill Mr. Skripal and for what reason.

Note

The possibilities I dreamed up about Mr. Skripal are a product of my imagination. They live in – a what if universe.

They are not intended to cast any aspersions on, raise doubts or questions about, or be in any way related to the real facts about any person living or dead. The people I am talking about are just corralled in my thoughts.

If I write any more of these imaginings, the same will apply. I might, for example, imagine that Michael Gove is working for the Russians and that Boris Johnson is an agent of the Turkish Government working for the eventual restoration of the Ottoman Empire.

Update 12 July 2020

Apparently the perfume bottle was thrown into a skip and that’s where Mr Rowley found it. He was a recovering addict and poor enough that he had to look in skips for cast off things that he might use. That still doesn’t establish who threw the bottle into the skip.

In the TV dramatisation of the Salisbury poisoning, there is a scene that follows after the scientists aiding the police and public health authorities have examined the perfume bottle. A scientist (I think it was Professor Tim Atkins) says to the main character, Wiltshire’s Director of Public Health, that the bottle contained enough poison to kill thousands.

That amount of poison would have made Salisbury uninhabitable for 50 years.

Let’s suppose for a moment that the assassins had broken the bottle accidentally and the poison was released. Or let’s imagine the very real probability that the bottle would have been broken at or en route to a landfill. The result would have been a catastrophe of such size that it could have started a Cold War with every Western country against Russia. Would the Russian Government have sent assassins with an amount of poison that risked such an outcome? It seems barely credible.

Another possibility, of course, is that the TV dramatisation was inaccurate as to the amount of poison in the bottle.

Update February 2022

Thinking about Ukraine, I searched for more information about the amount of perfume in the bottle. According to an article of 21 September 2021 in the Independent:

Dean Haydon, the senior national coordinator for counterterrorism policing, said investigators had not established how the bottle was brought into the UK.
“The amount of novichok in that bottle was quite significant, and could have killed hundreds if not thousands of people if it had come into wider circulation in the public,” he told a press conference.

But then Charlie Rowley is reported in a 2018 article in the Guardian as saying

The British man poisoned with the nerve agent novichok has claimed the substance that killed his girlfriend and left him critically ill came in a bottle disguised as a legitimate perfume in a sealed box…. Experts from the top secret research facility at Porton Down in Wiltshire are trying to establish if the novichok was from the same batch. But if Rowley is correct about the perfume bottle being boxed and sealed, it may undermine the line of inquiry that the novichok that he and Sturgess came into contact with had been discarded by the attackers of the Skripals.

If it wasn’t the same bottle, did assassins bring more than one container into Britain? The consensus in Britain is that Russian assassins smuggled a bottle capable of killing thousands into Salisbury in 2018 on Putin’s orders. If that assessment is true, then Putin is careless with the risk of things spinning out of control. That now includes Ukraine.

Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd is a book about tourists, business people, students, and diplomats who were in Germany in the 1930s. What did they think, what did they notice? Mostly they didn’t notice much. They did little mental gymnastics to avoid characterising the rise of the Nazi state for what it was.

We all know how the black American Jesse Owens was cold-shouldered when he got Gold in the Berlin Olympics.

But a snippet about the Olympics that caught my attention was after the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games the head of the British Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, commented on the grandeur of the design, and that the stupendous cost made him thankful that Britain had relinquished its claim to the next Olympiad in favour of Japan.

In the event, the 1940 Olympic Games never happened. The Japanese pulled out in 1938 because they were otherwise engaged with the Second Sino-Japanese War that broke out in 1937.

The Games were then to go to Finland, the runners-up to the original bid. The Helsinki Games were cancelled, though, because of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union. 

The 1944 Olympic Games were due to be held in London, but were cancelled due to World War II.

The 1948 Olympic Games were held in London, and were known as the Austerity Games because Britain was nearly bankrupted by the war.

Food was still rationed in Britain, and would be until 1952. Things were so bad that the Government had to issue regulations to allow the athletes at the Olympics to be fed more than twice the UK national rationing allowance. 

Some countries didn’t attend the 1948 Games.

Germany and Japan were not permitted to send any athletes to the 1948 Olympics, and the Soviet Union didn’t send any athletes because of the deterioration in East-West relations. 

Did those who promoted the free movement of people within the European Union predict this?

Under the heading ‘Population decline’ the 18 January 2020 issue of The Week reported that the prime minister of Croatia says his country is suffering a “population loss equivalent to losing a small city every year”.

He is calling for EU-wide strategies to tackle the ‘existential’ threat in southern and eastern Europe caused by falling birth rates and mass emigration.

Last year, a study found that 230,000 Croatians left (mostly for Germany, Austria and Ireland) between 2013 and 2016.

That’s in a country with a population is just 4.2 million. The populations of ten of the EU’s 28 member states fell in 2018, with the biggest relative drops recorded in Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia and Romania.

One can imagine it as the rich countries sucking the creativity and vigour out of the poor satellite countries. Was it foreseen?

We can think back to the decades before the free movement of people was written into the laws of European Union. People emigrated to the United States, for example, because of lack of opportunity or persecution in their home countries.

Not everyone left their homes to find a new life. Some held back. It was those willing to take a chance who went. That is true whether they were running from oppression or running to something.

The result was that the United States thrived (along with other reasons of geography and natural wealth) because it was populated by people who took a chance. I don’t think it is a stretch to picture it that way.

And in that case, the depleted populations of Croatia and the other countries are also the populations that didn’t make the jump, that didn’t risk all. The risk takers have gone. What damage can that do to a country filled with those who stayed behind?

Galileo is a global navigation satellite system. Hold that piece of information because it ties into something that happened recently, which is that the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia announced a deal about atomic submarine procurement that enraged President Macron of France. How are the deal about submarine procurement and Galileo related? This letter, reported in The Week, issue 25 September 2021, page 31, suggests an answer. Under the title ‘France can’t complain’, the writer of the letter makes this point:

To The Times
One suspects the origins of this rift over submarine contracts lie in the EU decision to exclude the UK from the Galileo GPS system as part of the Brexit deal. Not only was an investment of more than £1bn lost, but the UK will need to find another GPS system for military use. France should not be surprised if the UK becomes a competitor to the EU in military matters.
Roger Downing, Whitchurch, Devon

Is there substance to what Mr Downing says? It seems there is from what I read about the Galileo project in Wikipedia. This is a extract of the relevant parts from the Wikipedia entry for Galileo

Galileo in Wikipedia

“Galileo is a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) that went live in 2016, created by the European Union through the European Space Agency (ESA), operated by the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA), headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic, with two ground operations centres in Fucino, Italy, and Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany.

In March 2018, the European Commission announced that the United Kingdom may be excluded from parts of the project (especially relating to the secured service PRS) following its exit from the European Union. As a result, Airbus will relocate work on the Ground Control Segment (GCS) from its Portsmouth premises to an EU state. British officials sought legal advice on whether they could reclaim the €1.4 billion invested by the United Kingdom, of the €10 billion spent on the project.

In a speech at the EU Institute for Security Studies conference, the EU Chief Negotiator in charge of the Brexit negotiations, Michel Barnier, stressed the EU position that the UK had decided to leave the EU and thus all EU programmes, including Galileo. In August 2018, it was reported the UK would look to create a competing satellite navigation system to Galileo post-Brexit. In December 2018, the then British Prime Minister Theresa May announced that the UK would no longer seek to reclaim the investment, and Science Minister Sam Gyimah resigned over the matter.”