Revealed: Ian Fleming’s Orders To D-Day Spies

Jack Blackburn at The Times in London offer a piece that reveals the orders issued to the WWII British intelligence group 30 Assault Unit for the D- Day invasion by Royal Navy Commander Ian Fleming, the future creator of James Bond (seen in the above photo at Royal Naval Intelligence HQ). 

You can read the piece via the below link or the below text:

Revealed: Ian Fleming’s orders to D-Day spies (thetimes.com) 

When troops landed on D-Day, some had an ulterior mission. Most were aimed at liberating nearby settlements but GCHQ has uncovered orders issued by the creator of 007 to a covert commando.

The listening service’s historians have found and released the orders that Ian Fleming — who would go on to write the James Bond thrillers — signed and issued to 30 Assault Unit, the covert unit he established to conduct intelligence operations during the Second World War.

In a highly detailed briefing, Fleming directed the men to go to various locations in France and elsewhere to find “items of immediate operational importance in the prosecution of the war against Germany”. These items included material relating to the Enigma code.

There was also a note about “new weapons or devices” that the Germans might have been developing. The desired intelligence items are listed as sufficiently important that they justified special operations and casualties.

The documents are testament to the thoroughness of British intelligence-gathering. At some points, the men are directed to individual rooms or even objects where the sensitive material was expected to be found.

For instance, one document tells the men: “It is reported that the secret books are kept in a light metal chest in an office in the [U-boat] pens: the door is marked only with the name ‘Oberschreibersmaat Fritz Frank’ without reference to his employment.”

In the Second World War, the role of 30AU (or Number 30 Commando) was to go ahead of the Allied forces and then behind enemy lines. Throughout the conflict, they performed vital work in different theatres of war in securing Nazi codebooks, ciphers and battle orders.

On D-Day, they landed on Juno and Utah beaches and proceeded inland; five were killed and 20 were wounded near Sainte-Mère-Église. It had been known that one of their targets was a radar station at Douvres-la-Délivrande, which held out for 11 days. The commandos were also charged with examining suspected V1 rocket sites. However, it now appears that they may have had many more targets.

The documents, marked “Top Secret” and “Bigot” (British invasion of German occupied territories), say that the men are to gather “All code books, cyphers and documents relating to signals, radar and communications: the ‘spools’ [wheels], junction boxes and indications of settings used in connection with the German ‘ENIGMA’ cyphering machines.”

The targets are listed in numerous French sea and river ports, such as Nantes, Bordeaux, Boulogne and Dunkirk, as well as targets in other countries along the north European coast.  How far they got with this list is not clear. It is known that they took part in the liberation of Cherbourg in June before racing toward the ports at Rennes and Brest in August. They then executed a series of operations in Le Havre and Dieppe. All those places appear on the list, and perhaps yielded vital intelligence for later in the war.

Whether the intelligence was as pinpoint accurate as it appeared remains to be seen, and it seems that Fleming and his colleagues had their doubts. They said the intelligence should be graded no higher than C, making it fairly reliable. The report is dated April 15, 1944, but there was a hope that corroboration would occur during the invasion

“Interrogation of prisoners in the field and up-to-date aerial photographs will probably be the only reliable cross-checks,” it said. 

Note: You can also read my Counterterrorism magazine piece on Ian Fleming and the 30 Assault Unit via the below link: 

Paul Davis On Crime: My Piece On The 30 Assault Unit, The British WWII Commando Group Created By Ian Fleming, The Creator Of James Bond

And you can read my Washington Times On Crime column on the new Ian Fleming biography via the below link:

Paul Davis On Crime: Ian Fleming: The Complete Man: My Washington Times 'On Crime' Column On Nicholas Shakespeare, The Author Of The New Biography Of The Creator Of James Bond 

KGB Punch: With Every Murdered Enemy, Putin’s Grip On His Terrified People Grows Tighter

Ben Macintyre (seen in the below photo), the author of The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, and other fine books on spies and espionage, wrote a good column for the London Times on Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s use of assassination.

The column also appeared in the Australian.

In Russian spy jargon, an assassination hit squad is known as a “Mercader”, after Ramon Mercader, the Spanish communist agent who buried an ice pick in Leon Trotsky’s head as he sat in his study in Mexico City. Mercader was declared a “Hero of the Soviet Union” on his release from prison 20 years later.

Today, Russia’s “Mercaders” are off the leash across the world: from the “Polar Wolf” gulag in the Russian Arctic, where the opposition leader Alexei Navalny was murdered last week, to the underground garage near Benidorm where the bullet-riddled body of the Russian defector Maxim Kuzminov was found a few days earlier.

The weapons deployed for traditional Russian “wet work” (mokroye delo) have changed over time: the ice pick that killed Trotsky and the poisoned umbrella tip that saw off the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov have given way to polonium (Alexander Litvinenko), novichok nerve agent (Sergei Skripal), the plunge from the balcony that ends the lives of so many of Vladimir Putin’s critics and enemies, or the spectacular air explosion that immolated the Wagner mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Navalny may have been killed by the notorious “KGB punch”, a lethal blow to the heart administered to a person already enfeebled by cold. 

But the idea remains the same: a theatrical symbolic act of state-sponsored homicide, to send a warning to other would-be opponets, cow the Russian populace and stun the world with its brazen brutality, all suffused with just enough mystery for a shrugging Kremlin denial.

Stalin saw assassination as integral to his foreign policy, the external expression of the Great Terror: dissidents, defectors, spies, ideological heretics, all were potential targets. In 1942 the military intelligence section of the Red Army established a specialised unit to liquidate “anti-Soviet elements”.

Stalin named it Smersh, merging the Russian words smert meaning death and shpionam meaning spies: “death to spies”. As a wartime intelligence officer, Ian Fleming learnt of Smersh, and incorporated it into his James Bond novels.

Putin has gone still further in performative, staged acts of murder. The killings are now preceded by a statement of the assassin’s philosophy, the promise of revenge.

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

Putin’s reign of terror: With every murdered enemy, his grip on his brutalised people grows tighter | The Australian

Note: I quoted Ben Macintyre in my Washington Times review of From Russia With Blood:

“If the idea of a ruthless spy-killing unit sounds like the stuff of fiction, that’s because it became precisely that,” Ben Macintyre wrote in his Times column. “In the James Bond novels, Ian Fleming portrayed Smersh (director of operations: Rosa Klebb) as a massive counterintelligence network that more closely resembled the KGB.”

Ben Macintyre wrote that the real SMERSH was effective in not only murdering Soviet traitors (some of whom were undoubtedly innocent, he noted), but SMERSH also instilled terror among potential enemies and enforced obedience in Soviet citizens.

“And now it is back, with a new name and a new remit but essentially the same purpose: to put the fear of God, and assassination, into Russia’s enemies, traitors and deserters,” Mr. Macintyre wrote. “According to intelligence sources, Unit 29155 is an elite sub-unit of GRU assassins that operated out of the Haute-Savoie in the French Alps, conducting a variety of wet jobs across Europe: notably the attempted poisoning in Salisbury of GRU officer-turned-MI6 spy Sergei Skripal, and the attempt to kill a Bulgarian arms dealer in 2015.”

In Ian Fleming’s classic 1957 thriller "From Russia With Love,” James Bond was the target of a SMERSH plot to assassinate him and discredit British intelligence in a scandal. SMERSH sent out from Russia a psychopath assassin named Red Grant to kill Bond. Ian Fleming admitted that his plots were fantastic, but he also said they often lifted the tip of the veil to reveal the real world of espionage. 

Heidi Blake’s “From Russia With Blood” (a clever take on Ian Fleming’s “From Russia With Love” title), lifts the veil off a series of murders in the United Kingdom and places blame squarely on Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:  

Paul Davis On Crime: My Washington Times Review Of 'From Russia With Blood: The Kremlin's Ruthless Assassination Program And Vladimir Putin's Secret War On The West'

My Washington Times 'On Crime' Column On Ben Macintyre On Ian Fleming And James Bond

The Washington Times published my weekly On Crime column on Ben Macintyre’s take on the late, great thriller writer Ian Fleming and his iconic character James Bond.

With the release of latest James Bond film “No Time to Die” postponed from April to November due to the COVID-19 outbreak, millions of Bond fans around the world will have to be content to watch the older Bond films, or perhaps they should go back to the original source — Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.

They could also read some of the many books written about the popular character and his creator, such as two fine biographies of the late Ian Fleming, John Pearson’s “The Life of Ian Fleming” and Andrew Lycett’s “Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond.”

Ben Macintyre, a columnist for the London Times and the author of “The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War,” (which I reviewed in these pages) “A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal” and “Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love and Betrayal,” also wrote an interesting book called “For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond.”

He wrote the book in 2008 as a companion to the Imperial War Museum exhibition that was held to celebrate the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth. The exhibition examined the late thriller writer and his fictional character in historical context. The exhibition also looked at Ian Fleming’s experiences as a naval intelligence officer in World War II and how they informed his plots and characters.

Ben Macintyre was chosen to write the companion book because of his nonfiction books on espionage and his many columns on Ian Fleming and James Bond, including one column that revealed that there was a Nazi plot to rob the Bank of England, which perhaps inspired Ian Fleming to use a similar plot to rob Fort Knox in his great thriller “Goldfinger.”

Ian Fleming admitted his plots in the novels were fantastic (the films much more so), but he also said they were often based on the real world of intelligence.  

I recall Ben Macintyre telling me that his book on Fleming and Bond was a personal investigation of two lives, one real and one fictional.     

You can read the rest of the column below or via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/mar/18/ben-macintyre-on-ian-fleming-and-james-bond/ 

Note: The below photos are of Ben Macintyre, Ian Fleming. Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr. No, and Ian Fleming as a WWII naval intelligence officer:

Ben Macintyre: World Of The Digital Footprint Leaves Spies With Nowhere To Run

Ben Macintyre (seen in the below photo), author The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, and A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, as well as other fine books on espionage, writes about how the spy game has changed in today’s digital world in his London Times column.

The essence of espionage is concealment: since classical times spies have relied on being able to hide their identities and thus slip from one jurisdiction to another using a different identity, fake papers, a false history. The spy has no name, and many names.

Not any more. In the digital world of continual interconnected surveillance, facial recognition and ubiquitous CCTV, where every computer keystroke leaves a digital fingerprint and our lives are recorded online, it is becoming ever harder to hide an identity. This is a problem for terrorists and criminals but also for spies.

The two principal branches of intelligence-gathering are signals intelligence (Sigint), intercepting exchanges of information via technology ranging from wartime wireless messages to modern day texts and emails; and human intelligence (Humint), information gathered from, and by, individuals. The flood of Sigint in the modern age is a direct threat to Humint, and changing the very nature of espionage.

Intelligence officers have traditionally been sent abroad to operate under diplomatic cover. In 2014 the computers of the US Office of Personnel Management were penetrated by hackers believed to be working for China, and the employment data of 22 million former and serving civil servants, including intelligence officers, were stolen. At a stroke the hackers had exposed the identities of CIA personnel around the world and details of their lives, postings, pensions and pay rises.

Undercover intelligence officers (“legals”) are only one species of spy. Far more numerous are those operating under non-official cover (known as NOCs, or illegals), undercover agents posing as private citizens, businessmen, journalists, extremists, criminals and others, gathering information on the ground. These are also increasingly exposed, since digital sleuthing offers extensive opportunities to check when an identity is real. An absence of online footprints is likely to arouse suspicion.

… In December the US military sent out a memo advising all personnel to avoid using consumer DNA kits, since these might leave permanent digital identifiers. James Bond never bothered about the DNA he left around on his martini glasses: today that DNA could be compared to a signature in a commercial DNA database, or that of a relative, immediately proving that 007 is not who he claims to be.

Even though signals intelligence has expanded hugely (GCHQ, the signals branch, is now the biggest spy agency in Britain), human intelligence remains vitally important. Digital information can be falsified, obscured, deleted and encrypted. The most valuable espionage asset is still a spy on the ground, with direct access to, and the skills to assess the value of, secret information.

One of the best recent examples of the importance, and liability, of human intelligence was the case of Oleg Smolenkov (seen in the above photo), a CIA asset inside the Russian government who supplied high-grade intelligence from within the Kremlin. Smolenkov was exfiltrated in 2017 but he was swiftly found by reporters in the US, who tracked his digital trace. In the same way, the name and address of Sergei Skripal, the MI6 double agent targeted by Russian assassins in 2018, appeared on the Salisbury electoral roll.

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/world-of-the-digital-footprint-leaves-spies-with-nowhere-to-run-3bd89l7qz 

Smersh Spy-Killers Are Back In Business: The Russian Counterintelligence Unit That Inspired Ian Fleming Is Operating In Europe Under A New Name

In Ian Fleming’s 1957 classic spy novel, From Russia With Love, the Soviet agency SMERSH -
Smert Shpionam, or "Death to Spies" - sends a psychopathic killer named Donovan “Red” Grant to murder British intelligence officer James Bond and embarrass the British government. 

The plot is devised by SMERSH’s head of the planning department, chess master Colonel Kronsteen, known as “the Wizard of Ice,” and carried out by the head of SMERSH’s execution department, Colonel Rosa Klebb. (From Russia With Love is my favorite Ian Fleming novel and the best Bond film, although the 1963 film replaced SMERSH with the fictional international crime organization SPECTRE). 

SMERSH was a very real organization that assassinated enemies of the Soviet State.  

Ben Macintyre, seen in the above photo), the author of The Spy and the Traitor, A Spy Among Friends, Operation Mincemeat, and other fine nonfiction books on espionage, offers his take on a SMERSH-like Russian assassination group in his column at the London Times.

The Russian counterintelligence unit that inspired Ian Fleming is operating in Europe under a new name. 

In 1942, the military intelligence section of the Red Army set up a new unit to investigate traitors and deserters, liquidate enemy agents and enforce ideological conformity by destroying “anti-Soviet elements”.

The structure of the wartime espionage unit was deliberately opaque. It is still unclear quite how it was organised and how many officers it deployed. But the purpose was only too apparent in its name, coined by Stalin himself, which merged the Russian words smert meaning death and shpionam meaning spies: hence “Death to Spies”, or Smersh.

Around the same time Stalin changed the name of the military intelligence branch to the Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU — the name by which it is still known today. Smersh was the hit squad of the new GRU.

If the idea of a ruthless spy-killing unit sounds like the stuff of fiction, that’s because it became precisely that. In the James Bond novels, Ian Fleming portrayed Smersh (director of operations: Rosa Klebb) as a massive counterintelligence network that more closely resembled the KGB. In the films, Smersh gave way to Spectre, an imaginary global terror organisation.

The real Smersh was remarkably effective, not just at wiping out anti-Soviet traitors (some of whom were undoubtedly innocent) but simultaneously instilling terror among potential enemies and enforcing obedience in the general population. Its mandate was to eliminate subversives and turncoats, initially inside the Soviet military but eventually anywhere in the world, including any of its own agents suspected of disloyalty, sabotage or desertion. 

It specialised in assassinations, known as “wetwork” (mokroye delo). Smersh was disbanded in 1946, by which time it had become semi-mythical: the brutal, inescapable enforcers and spy-hunters of the Red Army.

And now it is back, with a new name and a new remit but essentially the same purpose: to put the fear of God, and assassination, into Russia’s enemies, traitors and deserters.

According to intelligence sources, Unit 29155 is an elite sub-unit of GRU assassins that operated out of the Haute-Savoie in the French Alps, conducting a variety of wet jobs across Europe: notably the attempted poisoning in Salisbury of GRU officer-turned-MI6 spy Sergei Skripal, and the attempt to kill a Bulgarian arms dealer in 2015. German intelligence officials also believe the Kremlin is implicated in the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, the Georgian-born Chechen fighter shot dead in a Berlin park last August, which has caused a diplomatic face-off between Russia and Germany.

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/smersh-spy-killers-are-back-in-business-3m25kwtmn

You can also read my Washington Times piece on Russian assassins via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2018/04/from-russia-with-love-my-washington.html

And you can read Joseph Goulden’s Washington Times review of a book on the history of SMERSH via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/03/smersh-stalins-secret-weapon.html 

And you can read my Q&A with Ben Macintyre about his book on Ian Fleming and James Bond via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/12/crime-beat-column-q-with-ben-macintye.html

Note: The top photo is of actor Sean Connery as James Bond and Robert Shaw as Red Grant in the best fight scene in cinematic history in the film From Russia With Love. The below photos are from the film From Russia With Love:

Ben Macintyre: The Toxic Cloud Of Lies Over Chernobyl

I’m watching the HBO series Chernobyl, a well-made dramatization of the horrific Soviet nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.   

The Australian published Ben Macintyre’s London Times column on the Soviet lies and cover-up of the Chernobyl disaster.

A few days after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, The Washington Post received a sensational leak from an unknown source: a letter from the US Information Agency to a Republican senator, advising him to exaggerate the number of casualties from the explosion at the nuclear plant in Ukraine.

The Information Agency had been established by Eisenhower to influence public opinion abroad. The senator, David Durenberger, was chairman of the select committee on intelligence. The leaked letter proved that the US was attempting, in the words of its author, to “make the Chernobyl disaster into an effective propaganda campaign” by falsely asserting the accident had already claimed up to 3,000 victims. It was a shocking attempt to embarrass the Soviet Union, mislead the public and make political mileage out of terrible human tragedy.

Except the letter was a KGB forgery. This was a calculated attempt by Moscow to plant fake news and make western anxiety over the nuclear disaster appear artificially inflated as part of a cynical Cold War ploy on the part of America. “Service A” of the KGB, the Soviet intelligence unit specializing in the deception technique known as desinformatsiya (disinformation), had obtained the letterhead of the USIA and then written a fake text underneath with a bogus signature. The Post spotted the ruse and killed the story before it could run.

The forged letter was just one element in the vast toxic cloud of falsehood, half-truths and censorship that spread from the Soviet Union in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster. The gripping HBO-Sky series Chernobyl follows the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe, reflecting the best and worst of human nature, but its central theme is the official degradation of truth and what happens when the state deliberately and systematically deceives its citizens. Soviet Russia responded to the horror of Chernobyl by trying to contain the story inside a concrete casing of lies.

Chernobyl helped to destroy the Soviet Union but the techniques of desinformatsiya have been inherited and refined by the modern Russian state, while fake news, and false allegations of fake news, have poisoned modern politics.

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/the-times/the-toxic-cloud-of-lies-over-chernobyl/news-story/849470db363b8053badfa144fefd7082 

Ben Macintyre: Hollywood Rewards Killer's Quest For Fame

The Australian offers Ben Macintyre’ London Times column on Charles Manson, who will once again be dramatized in a film by Quentin Tarantino.   

Soon after he was charged with murder in 1969, Charles Manson achieved his ambition. He appeared on the cover of Life magazine, looking bug-eyed and bonkers, beneath the headline “The Love and Terror Cult”. He had become a celebrity.

The Manson story was about sex, drugs and the manipulation of vulnerable people into committing acts of terrible violence. In the sweep of American cultural history he came to symbolise the moment the hippie Age of Aquarius turned nasty, the end of the counterculture.


But for Manson himself it was always about fame, something he almost attained legally and cultivated assiduously — a process that started before the murders and continued during the trial, in prison and even following his death in 2017 at the age of 83.

Manson wanted to be famous and he succeeded because this semi-literate, racist, profoundly evil man was a brilliant self-publicist. He did not want to be admired, he just wanted to be talked about. He took the American Dream — the myth that everyone can achieve fame and success — and turned it into a nightmare.

No fewer than three new films have now taken on the Manson story: The Haunting of Sharon Tate, starring Hilary Duff; Mary Harron’s Charlie Says, which explores the lives of three of Manson’s murderous followers after their convictions; and, most eye-catchingly, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s brilliantly bloody treatment starring Brad Pitt, Leonardo Di­Caprio and Margot Robbie.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/the-times/hollywood-rewards-killers-quest-for-fame/news-story/87b829445daa74f6442a7f592c1a5a82 

You can also read my Washington Times review of Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson via the below link:


 www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2017/11/a-look-back-at-evil-life-of-charles.html 

A Monster Unmasked: Ben Macintyre's Look Back At Kim Philby's 'My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy'

Ben Macintyre, the London Times columnist and author of Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love and Betrayal, and A Spy Among Us: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, offers a look back at British traitor Kim Philby's My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy on the 50th anniversary of the book's original publication.  

For many years after the publication of My Silent War, it was rumoured that the autobiography of Kim Philby had been ghostwritten by the KGB, and that the last published words of Britain’s most notorious spy were not his at all. The rumour was not true. No one but an upper-class, public school-educated, waspish and embittered English spook could have achieved the level of eloquent vitriol packed into the pages of this delightful book.

Written in 1968, five years after Philby boarded a Soviet freighter in Beirut and fled to Moscow, My Silent War is a blend of fact and fiction, part history and part propaganda, at times devastatingly honest and in others wholly mendacious. It tells the story of Philby’s recruitment by Soviet intelligence in the 1930s, his meteoric rise through the ranks of MI6 and a 30-year career as a spy inside the British establishment, betraying his colleagues, friends, wives and family, and sending hundreds, perhaps thousands to their deaths.

He evinces a chilling insouciance over the anti-communist agents slaughtered in Albania as a direct consequence of his betrayal. “They knew the risk they were running. I was serving the interests of the Soviet Union . . . I have no regrets.”

… Philby began his espionage career as a true communist believer, but over time his motivations evolved: he became addicted to the adventure, the romance, the lying, the drug of infidelity; he insisted he was right because he could not bear to imagine he might have been wrong. Unlike many other British communist converts, he never admitted the brutal reality of the Stalinist state he served, even though, as a senior MI6 officer, he was uniquely placed to know the truth. He chose to ignore it. This is the credo of a fundamentalist, sublimely indifferent to the suffering and death he had caused.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-my-silent-war-the-autobiography-of-a-spy-by-kim-philby-a-monster-unmasked-ldxqqrrgf  

Drinker, Traitor, Soldier, Spy: Ben Macintyre On Former Russian Spy And Defector Who Was Poisoned In The UK

Ben Macintyre, author of SAS: Rogue Heroes, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, and Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love and Betrayal, and other fine books on special operations and espionage, offers his take on former Russian spy and defector Sergei Skripal, who was poisoned in the UK, in his London Times column.

Drinker, traitor, soldier, spy. Agent, double agent, convict, intelligence asset and assassination target. Veteran of the Russian spy service, then its sworn enemy and now, in all probability, its victim.

Barely a week ago only a small handful of people inside the intelligence community knew the real story of Sergei Skripal, the spy who lies, mortally ill from poisoning along with his daughter, in a Salisbury hospital. Yet in a few short days he has become the most famous spy in the world, a man whose multiple lives are the subject of a huge police investigation into who he is, who he was and who tried to kill him.

Sergei Viktorovich Skripal was a child of the Cold War, born in Kiev on June 23, 1951, when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union. Physically strong and intensely patriotic, he chose a military career; long after becoming an intelligence officer he retained the manners and bearing of a military officer.

… In 1979 Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. Skripal was parachuted into Afghanistan and saw some fierce fighting under the command of Boris Gromov, commander of the 40th Army. General Gromov, one of Russia’s most highly decorated officers and a close ally of Vladimir Putin, would play a key role in Skripal’s later life as a friend and patron.

A champion army boxer with a broken nose and burly physique, Skripal looked like a military bruiser, but his appearance disguised a sharp mind. While still in the airborne division, Skripal was headhunted by the GRU (Glavnoye razvedyvatel’noye upravleniye, meaning Main Intelligence Directorate), the foreign military intelligence service.

The GRU was and remains one of the most powerful institutions in Russia, deploying six times as many agents in foreign countries as the SVR, the successor to the KGB. The GRU controls more than 25,000 Spetznaz special forces troops, gathers and analyses information from Russian space satellites and answers directly to Russia’s chief of the general staff, one of three people controlling Russia’s portable nuclear control.

GRU officers are active around the world, usually operating under diplomatic cover to gather military secrets, run agents and obtain by fair means or foul anything and everything of use to the Russian military machine.

Skripal rose rapidly up the ranks and in the early 1990s was deployed to Malta as a GRU officer, where he showed himself to be “an energetic professional, capable of conducting complex recruitment of agents and extracting important information”, according to Russian media. In 1993 he was transferred to Spain, as the senior GRU officer in the office of the Russian military attaché.

His potential as a recruit to western intelligence was spotted by the CNI, the Spanish intelligence service. The Yeltsin years were lean ones for Russians serving abroad; salaries were often paid late, or not at all. Skripal was registered by the CNI as someone with “a nose for money”. He was approached by what is known in spy jargon as an “access agent”, a man calling himself “Luis” who suggested they co-operate on a business venture, selling Spanish wine. Skripal was promised large commissions in exchange for identifying possible business partners in Russia.

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/russian-spy-attack-sergei-skripal-the-life-of-a-double-agent-3z5z098xn 

You can also read my Crime Beat interview with Ben Macinytre via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/12/crime-beat-column-q-with-ben-macintye.html