The small cathedral city of Salisbury feels like an unlikely place for an attempted assassination of a former Russian spy, but last Sunday the city found itself at the centre of an attempted murder involving a very rare and potentially deadly nerve agent.
Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found on Sunday, March 4, unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury. They are now both in hospital in a stable but critical condition while around 180 troops have been sent to the city to remove potentially contaminated objects and vehicles. Skripal, a 66-year-old retired Russian military intelligence officer had previously been imprisoned in Russia for treason before moving to the UK after being released as part of a US-Russian prisoner exchange.
But we don’t know who was behind the attack, or why they did it. Initial speculation has centred on Russia, since Skripal had betrayed his home country, revealing the identity of dozens of Russian agents to British intelligence before his arrest in Moscow in 2004. Russia was also found by a public inquiry to be behind the 2006 assassination of the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned by a cup of tea laced with radioactive polonium-210, although Moscow has repeatedly denied any involvement. In a long-awaited report published in 2016, author Robert Owen said the murder was "probably" approved by president Vladimir Putin.
In the Salisbury case, the choice of poison may hold some clues. Nerve agents are notoriously dangerous to make and handle, so it is thought that most of their production is done by nation states who can afford to invest in highly secure biochemical weapon production facilities. Many nerve agents are colourless, tasteless and odourless, making detecting any leaks extremely difficult. “If you have the tiniest of leaks you can kill yourself,” says Richard Guthrie, an independent security consultant and expert on chemical weapons.
There are many different types of nerve agent, but most work by disabling molecular ‘off switches’ in the nervous system. Without these off switches, normal bodily functions go into overdrive which can lead to paralysis and suffocation. In high doses, nerve agents can kill in minutes.
“Any state with an advanced chemical weapons industry could, if it chose to, develop nerve agents fairly easily,” says Susan Martin, a lecturer at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. It seems probable that nerve agents used in assassinations are produced alongside other chemical weapons rather than developed independently. “It’s hard for me to see why you would develop nerve agents just as an assassination weapon,” she says.
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Although it is very difficult to definitively trace a substance back to its source, Guthrie says that the choice of a nerve agent itself might indicate the source of the attack. “It’s high profile – it says that we’re going to bump off this person in a way that shows that everyone knows they’ve been bumped off.” The attack, then, could be a clear warning to other would-be turncoat spies, but one subtle enough to mask the true identity of whoever ordered it in the first place.
Most nerve agent use is closely linked to nation states. The Iraqi army used nerve agents against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, and the Syrian government has been frequently accused of using the nerve agent sarin against civilians during its ongoing civil war. And while it is possible to trace nerve agents with at least some certainty in the case of chemical weapons, doing the same when it comes to assassinations is very tricky. Most nations, after all, aren't particularly keen to admit that they're developing and stockpiling some of the most deadly substances on the planet in order to bump off political rivals.
Although rare, there have been a handful of prior examples of nerve agents being used as a weapon of assassination. In 1989, the anti-apartheid activist Frank Chikane was poisoned by South African agents who sprayed his underwear with a nerve agent while he was travelling through an airport. Chikane survived and the former South African police minister and his police chief were both convicted of the attempted murder. In February 2017, the half-brother of King Jong-Un was killed in Kuala Lumpar by two attackers using the nerve agent VX. North Korea is thought to be behind that attack.
But not every use of nerve agents has involved nation states, showing it is possible for others to develop the technologies needed to create the agents. In 1995, Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas onto the Tokyo underground, killing 12 people and injuring thousands. The plant the group used to produce the nerve agent cost an estimated $30 million.
“They were exceptionally well funded, they were attracting university-level students and they still had tonnes and tonnes of problems in developing their chemicals,” says Martin.
This does open the door to a final, somewhat unlikely, theory. It could be the case that some non-state actor has used a nerve agent precisely to draw suspicion towards Russia. “If you were some kind of troublemaker who wanted to make Russia look bad, this would be a way of doing it,” Guthrie says.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
