Sergei Skripal, the Russian double agent who was poisoned with a military-born nerve agent in England earlier this year, also worked for Spanish intelligence.
Skripal, a former military intelligence officer who worked as a spy for Britain in the early 2000s, had kept a low profile while living in the English city of Salisbury. In 2010 he was resettled by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) after being released from a Russian prison. Later he and his daughter Yulia were poisoned by a powerful nerve agent which nearly killed them. The Russian government was widely accused of the attack and has always denied the allegations.
The attempt to kill Skripal surprised some intelligence observers due to the fact that the Russian government officially pardoned the double agent before exchanging him for Russian spies who had been captured in the West. Skripal, instead of retiring after his defection to the UK, traveled extensively to Eastern Europe, where he advised local intelligence agencies on how to defend against Russian espionage. The double agent participated in MI6-sponsored events where he briefed intelligence professionals in at least two countries, Estonia and the Czech Republic. These activities may have convinced the Kremlin that Skripal had broken the unwritten conditions of his release, namely that he should not have participated in any intelligence activities against Russia.
Now the New York Times has claimed that, in addition to consulting Czech and Estonian spies, Skripal also visited Spain, where he met with officials from the country's National Intelligence Center (CNI). Citing an unnamed former Spanish police commander and Fernando Rueda, a Spanish espionage expert, The Times said that Skripal advised the CNI on how to deal with Russian organized crime in Spain, also informing about the alleged connections between the Russian mobsters and the Kremlin. . When he traveled to Spain under the protection of MI6, the newspaper said Skripal was actually returning to the place where it was originally recruited to spy for the British. Skripal spent several years in Spain, The Times reported, as a military attaché at the Russian embassy in Madrid. It was there that he began working secretly for MI6.