A former Soviet KGB officer, now living in the UK, is to be questioned by British police after claiming there is a link between the recent poisoning of Sergei Skripal and the mysterious death of a British intelligence officer in 2010. The coverage media coverage was extended in the last month of Sergei Skripal's poisoning to a former Russian military intelligence officer who spied for Britain in the early 2000s and has lived in England since 2010. Almost all European countries, as well as Canada, Australia and the United States expelled Russian diplomats in response to the attack on the former Russian spy.
But eight years ago, another mysterious attack on a spy in Britain attracted the attention of media around the world. Gareth Williams, a mathematician in the British intelligence service GCHQ, had been seconded by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), the British external intelligence agency, to help automate intelligence gathering. He had also worked with United States agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. But his career ended abruptly in August 2010, when he was found dead inside a padlocked sports bag at his home in Pimlico, London. It remains unknown whether his death was caused by a chemical attack.
Last weekend, however, Boris Karpichkov, a former Soviet KGB intelligence officer and his post-Soviet successor, the FSB, said Williams was killed by the Russian state. Karpichkov, 59, joined the KGB in 1984 but became a 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 and his family arrived in Britain, where he has always lived. In an interview with the British tabloid newspaper The Sunday People, Karpichkov said Williams was killed by Russian intelligence agents with an untraceable poisonous substance because he discovered the identity of a Russian agent within his agency. , the GCHQ. According to Karpichkov, Williams had befriended the mole, codenamed ORION of the Russians, and realized he was working for the Russians. The mole then reported to his Russian handler, an unofficial cover officer with an Eastern European passport, codenamed LUKAS, that Williams had become suspicious.
Eventually, the Russians attempted to recruit Williams, allegedly threatening to reveal his secret disguised lifestyle to his supervisors at GCHQ. But, according to Karpichkov, Williams rejected the Russian advances and told the Russians in no uncertain terms that he would report the attempt to recruit him to British intelligence. At that point, Karpichkov said, "the SVR had no alternative but to kill [Williams] to protect their agent within GCHQ." In the last meeting between the two men at Williams' apartment in London's Pimlico, LUKAS allegedly offered the mathematician GCHQ a glass of wine that contained "a mixture of amyl nitrate, Viagra and the drug Sildenafil". After Williams passed out, Karpichkov said that the SVR sent a special operations team known as "the cleaners," whose members killed the British intelligence officer. They did this, Karpichkov said, by injecting his ear with "a plant poison made from aconite and black henbane mixed with other chemicals," which was designed to escape the attention of forensic medical examiners.
Karpichkov told The Sunday People that, unbeknownst to him, he has lived a long time with Williams. He had become suspicious, he said, because he had noticed many Russian diplomatic cars in the area in the month before Williams' death. The former KGB spy said he was worried that the Russians were planning to kill him. When he saw media reports of Williams' murder, he realized that the Russian diplomatic cars were there for the GCHQ employee and not for him, he said. “I had never seen those cars before and have never seen them again,” said Karpichkov. He added that "the Russian security services are the connection" between the Skripal and Williams cases.