Putin's Assassin: The Truth Behind The Salisbury Poison Attack

By Graham Yuill

When double spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found dying after a nerve agent attack in Salisbury in March 2018, Graham Yuill a former SAS trained bodyguard immediately suspected Russian involvement and a cover-up by the police. As he follows media reports on the Skripal attack, he finds the

• Language: English
• Publisher: G6 Publications
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9785664323924

Book preview

Prologue

Graham Yuill is a former Royal Military Police corporal trained in Close Protection by the SAS, Army Marksman and six times Army and Combined Services Chess Champion. Known by the codename G6, his main task in Northern Ireland had been to act as personal bodyguard of Brigadier General David Miller, then head of the Ulster Defence Regiment. When the Commander went on compassionate leave in July 1979, he was ‘hand-picked,’ to lead a three-man ghost squad designated ‘Operation Toothpick’ and took place over three days from 29 to 31 July 1979. It was coded top secret because MI6 had determined that IRA informants had infiltrated the Irish Police, the Garda, who were providing details on Mountbatten’s modus operandi. ‘Operation Toothpick’ was to assess Mountbatten’s security at his summer home in the Republic of Ireland - that is Earl Louis Mountbatten of Burma, Admiral of the Fleet, last Viceroy of India, and second cousin to the Queen. His recommendations go unheeded and his report lost. Three weeks later a 50-pound bomb planted on his boat by the Provisional IRA killed Mountbatten. The security failing is covered up. He signs the Official Secrets Act and is posted to Hong Kong.

Two years later he is relocated at NATO HQ in Belgium, as head of security for recently promoted Major General Miller he becomes acquainted with seven Russian translators on an exchange programme. He was aware, as is Major General Miller, that the seven young Russians on an exchange programme at the NATO base are not merely translators, but spies testing their wings on their first mission. He passes intelligence to MI6 on Russian translators in Belgium and becomes the lover of a suspected Russian agent posing as a linguist who carries a revolver concealed in her underwear. While she plays him to extract intelligence, he plays her a dangerous game of cat and mouse that remains a haunting presence still in his mind to this day.

When double spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found dying after a nerve agent attack in Salisbury in March 2018, he immediately suspected Russian involvement and a cover-up by the police. As he follows media reports on the Skripal attack, he finds the same level of cover up and contradiction that obstructed the inquest into the murder of Mountbatten. He kept my mouth shut for thirty years after the IRA bombing. Not this time. With his sceptical girlfriend Lizzie, a nursing sister, he sets off for Salisbury to begin his own investigation. With archived material compiled from across the world, combined with evidence obtained through the Freedom of Information Act the story of Colonel Skripal unfolds layer by layer like a mystery thriller to provide a more credible account of what really happened that spring day when Salisbury was visited by Putin’s assassin.

If the powers of the state covered up system failures that killed the Queen’s second cousin, what did that tell us about the slow confused drip of information about the attempted murder of Colonel Skripal and his daughter Yulia on 4 March 2018 in the streets of Salisbury?

Time to find out.

Introduction

There is no such thing as a former KGB man.

Vladimir Putin

Colonel Sergei Viktorovich Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a deadly nerve agent in March 2018 on the streets of Salisbury. Beyond that, we know surprisingly little. The investigation by Counter Terrorism Command has been incompetent and inconclusive. A great deal of evidence has been held back. Much that has been released is untrue or inaccurate. Media reports have been speculative, imprecise and often absurd. The British government announced that the highest echelons of the Russian leadership were involved, highly likely sanctioned by president Vladimir Putin. This accusation caused outrage in Russia, as their people did not accept as true, the British government’s version of the incident, voicing that their intelligence service would never use such a gruesome method of killing someone. Twenty-four hours after the attack, the Government D-notice preventing press coverage from naming Skripals’ former 'handler,' MI6 agent Pablo Miller, was quickly broken. The official account describes the assault as the action of two Russian operatives with the cover story that they were visiting Salisbury to see the cathedral.

Putin’s Assassin is a story about disinformation and spycraft. It is also a story about how Moscow assassins brought chemical terror to Salisbury, a cathedral city in Wiltshire, England. I will show that it was carried out by a minimum of four agents, as many as twenty, according to one expert source.¹ To ensure operational success the attack would have taken weeks and even months of planning. I will provide a more credible interpretation of the attack, as well as an insight into the cold-blooded methods of the Kremlin. The use of a rare toxin as a murder weapon is Vladimir Putin’s calling card. The hapless agents caught on CCTV footage were decoys. The duplicity and confusion are home grown, typically British. Putin denied allegations that Russia was involved in the crime, but went on to describe Skripal as a ‘scumbag’ and ‘traitor.’²Another time, Putin said: ‘Traitors will kick the bucket, believe me. Whatever they get in exchange for the 30 pieces of silver, they will choke on them.’³ The book discloses hard-lived personal experience and rare insights into the world of military and counter-intelligence. It shows that the Cold War has transformed into a Cyber War that is more diverse, confusing, cynical and a danger to Western democracy. Putin sent his favourite executioner to Salisbury as a warning to those who betray the Motherland.

I will name in these pages the would be assassin and show evidence of exactly how the hit was planned and carried out. Putin’s Assassin is the work of Graham Yuill, an expert in counter-intelligence. The author’s name is not a pseudonym. When truths need be told the writer must sign his name to the document.

Graham Yuill – Glasgow, 13 December 2020

CHAPTER 1

The Spy With the Louis Vuitton Bag

In one of those quirks of the British climate, after three days of snow, Sunday 4 March 2018 turned out to be a bright sunny day, a pleasant 12 degrees with blue skies and light winds. Police Sergeant Tracy Holloway was looking forward to a more relaxed shift when she came on duty at 15.00 hours at Bourne Hill police station. The last few days she had worked around the clock on minor collisions, blocked roads, people slipping on the ice.

She grabbed a coffee from the machine and was catching up on the usual mountain of paperwork when she received an emergency call described as a ‘medical tasking.’ It was 16.15. A man and a woman had been found semi-conscious outside the Maltings, a modern red-bricked shopping mall in the centre of Salisbury beside a children’s play park. Holloway responded with Police Constable Alex Collins. He drove on ‘lights and sirens,’ a journey of a few minutes through the crowds in the pedestrian area.

They found a woman on the ground beside a distinctive red designer bag. She was ghostly white, her eyes wide open and frothing at the mouth. Another woman, who identified herself as a doctor, had placed her in the recovery position. To keep her airway open, she had tilted her head at an angle and moved her tongue away from the back of her throat. A teenage girl was helping her. The man sat stiffly on a bench. He had a vacant stare, violent tremors and was vomiting and groaning. When the doctor had made the woman on the ground comfortable, she applied CPR, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, on the man.

Collins’ first job had been to put a cordon in place. Holloway recalled that there were a lot of children around. ‘We didn’t know what we had. It was an open area. We pushed people well back.’⁴

As they were performing these duties, a minute or so since their arrival, Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey edged his way through the crowd. He informed the uniformed officers that he just happened to be passing.

PC Collins, a trained police medic, put on Latex gloves to help his sergeant search through the pockets of the man on the bench. The officers found a mobile phone with Russian script, keys and a wallet with papers identifying the man as Sergei Viktorovich Skripal. The woman was his daughter, Yulia Skripal.

‘The name wasn’t familiar. It was strange. It didn’t feel right. It wasn’t quite normal,’ Sergeant Holloway stated. She called the police station and reported in to the duty inspector. Two CID officers arrived 15 minutes later. Salisbury District Hospital is one-and-a-half miles from the Maltings, a 6-minute drive, but they had to wait 45 minutes before the ambulance passed through the cordon. The police helped the paramedics lift Skripal into the back. Skripal was still rigidly in the seated position when he was transferred into the ambulance. The door was latched. Yulia was on a stretcher and flown by helicopter to Salisbury District Hospital. The shoppers returned to their tasks and the siren wailed as the green and yellow vehicle made its way back along the Odstock Road to the hospital. Collins said: ‘If the doctor hadn’t been there, they would have died.’ The CID officers saw no evidence of a crime and left, the emergency over. But Tracy Holloway had an uneasy feeling. She is a well-respected, diligent officer. She had learned to trust her own instincts. As she glanced back over the scene, she noticed a heap of vomit below the bench and everything she had learned about toxins on a safety course came flooding back into her mind. She considered the victims too well dressed to be drug addicts, but thought they may have suffered from an overdose of a prescription drug, perhaps the opioid fentanyl, used as a pain medication, as well as recreationally.

She called control. ‘This may sound weird, but I’m not happy about the vomit being left,’ she recounted. ‘We don’t know what could have been in it to make those people ill.’

Sergeant Holloway now contacted the Fire Brigade and a fire truck was soon nosing its way through the pedestrian zone. The fire fighters dressed like spacemen in Hazmat suits (hazardous material suits). They bagged up the vomit and cleaned the area before Holloway returned to Bourne Hill to write up her report.

When PC Collins finished his shift, he went home, stripped from his clothes and left them in the garage. ‘I was intending to have a shower but I was so knackered I just climbed into bed and fell asleep,’ he recalled. ‘I’ve got little kids and they were climbing all over me the next day, so the misses wasn’t particularly happy when it all came out.’⁵

What came out was the directive the next day for police to set up cordons at various spots in Salisbury including the hospital A&E, Zizzi’s restaurant and the Mill pub. Holloway and Collins were told to take everything they had been wearing the previous day into the police station, ‘wallet, watch, mobile, everything.’

When the officers got round to Google the name Sergei Viktorovich Skripal, they were shocked to discover that the dapper middle-aged man they had found half dead on a public bench was a famous Russian double agent residing unknown to them on their patch in Salisbury. ‘It was at that point that we got the link to the Russian side of things,’ said Holloway. ‘And we thought this could be something bigger than what we’d believed was a drug overdose.’⁶

The medical team at Salisbury District Hospital A&E had come to the same conclusion. Samples of the Skripals’ blood, urine and stomach contents were rushed immediately to the research laboratory at Porton Down, conveniently less than ten miles away a twenty-minute drive along the A30. Porton Down is the ‘Ministry of Defence Chemical Defence Establishment,’ as the sign says at the main gate. It comprises a complex of austere one and two-storey buildings behind a barbed wire fence in 7,000 acres of Wiltshire countryside. Set up in 1916 to test chemical weapons during the First World War, it