MI6, British intelligence began threatening the physical safety of dozens of Russian deserters residing in Britain a week after the attempted murder of former KGB Colonel Sergei Skripal in southern England.
The double spy of 66 years and his daughter, Yulia, were found in a catatonic state in the city of Salisbury on 4 last March.
It was later determined that they had been attacked with a nerve agent. Russian officials vehemently denied that the Kremlin had any involvement with the attempt to kill Skripal. But according to the Times, the British intelligence community concluded that Skripal and his daughter were attacked under orders from Moscow, most likely by the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency, where Skripal worked until his arrest for espionage for the Great Britain in 2004.
Citing an unnamed source in Whitehall, the administrative seat of the British government, the Times said the initial assessments of Skripal's poisoning were detrimental to the British intelligence community. They raised questions, the source said, about the ability of Britain's two primary spy agencies, the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), to provide security for their assets. The source told The Times that it was "impossible to reduce to zero" the risk of serious bodily harm against individuals such as Skripal, and before him Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB officer who was poisoned to death in London in 2006. But the The attack on Skripal is considered an intelligence failure, the source said, and part of the response to it involves a thorough review of the risks to Russian double spies and British-based deserters from "unconventional threats." The latter includes chemical and radiological weapons attacks, The Times said.
The report came as another British-based Russian defector, Boris Karpichkov, told The Daily Mirror that the Kremlin had attempted to poison him three times since 2006. Karpichkov, 59, joined the KGB in 1984, but became an on-site defector for Latvian intelligence in 1991 when the Soviet Union disintegrated. He claims to have also spied on Russia for French and American intelligence. In 1998, with two suitcases full of top-secret Russian government documents and the use of fake passports, he arrived in England with his family. In 2006, while living in the UK, Karpichkov says he was warned by MI5 to leave the country because his life could be in danger. He temporarily moved to New Zealand, where he claims he was attacked by an unidentified chemical agent. He also said he lost nearly half of his weight over the following weeks but survived due to good medical care. However, he was attacked again, he said, four months later while still living in New Zealand.
Karpichkov told The Mirror that he had been warned that his name was on a list of eight people the Kremlin wanted to kill. He also claimed that he had been told by a source to keep an eye on people carrying e-cigarettes, because Russian intelligence had developed chemical weapons that were disguised as e-cigarette devices.