Poisoned ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal reveals how he used invisible ink to leak secrets to Britain after being turned by MI6
FORMER Russian spy Sergei Skripal passed secrets to MI6 using invisible ink after being flipped by British intelligence after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The informant’s decision to turn his back on the Kremlin led to the botched nerve agent attack in Salisbury in March, an explosive new book claims.
The Skripal Files, written by BBC journalist Mark Urban, details how he became disillusioned with his country’s GRU spy agency.
In 1996, Sergei was recruited by UK intelligence towards the end of his three-year stint working in Spain.
He had previously worked at the Russian embassy in Malta – where the sunny weather, luscious seafood and friendly locals had helped foster his disenchantment with Moscow.
Skripal told Urban that he had tried to resign from the GRU a year before arriving in Madrid after feeling betrayed by leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The book tells of how the Russian family man was turned by a young MI6 agent who is referred to by his alias Richard Bagnall.
Under his agreement with British intelligence, he agreed to trade secrets for cash as long as he had an escape plan – in the form of documents and a passport.
He was MI6’s first agent inside the Kremlin in 30 years and was given the codename Forthwith.
In an extract of the book, published by the , Skripal soon returned to Moscow as a double agent assigned to running the GRU’s personnel department.
But he had to devise a plan to feed his country’s secrets back to London – as meeting any MI6 agents in Russia would be too risky.
And what happened was straight out of a Ian Fleming novel.
In 1997, a year after he was flipped, his wife Liudmila and daughter Yulia holidayed in Alicante were they managed to hand a Russian book to Sergei’s MI6 handler.
But while the novel looked like a regular work of fiction, its pages contained classified information written in invisible ink.
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The following year, Liudmila visited Malaga on Spain’s southern coast and handed a second load of secrets to British intelligence.
Skripal left the GRU in 1999 and continued working for MI6 before being arrested in Moscow in 2004.
However, he was later released in a spy swap and moved back to the UK in 2010 where he settled in leafy town of Salisbury in Wiltshire.
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