Podcast Episode #36 – Assassination by Poisoning: Russia and the Soviet Union with Justin Black
Retired Russian FSB agent Sergei Skripal was arrested at an airport in Russia in 2006. Skripal worked for British intelligence for approximately ten years beginning in the mid-1990s, when he was recruited while working in Spain. Skripal was sentenced to 13 years in prison but only served four years of his term before he was exchanged to the West in 2010, along with three other imprisoned Russians. Skripal and the others were traded back for the famed Russian Ten, a ring of illegal agents operating on the US east coast which included Ana Chapman.
Skripal settled into life in Salisbury, England for the next few years, sometimes acting as a paid consultant for British intelligence. But despite the agreed-upon exchange, Skripal wasn’t safe from the Russian government’s vengeance. In 2018 he and his daughter Yulia were found unresponsive and nearly dead on a park bench near their home. A police officer who approached their home also collapsed after touching their front door handle.
The subsequent investigation revealed that two men had sprayed a nerve agent known as Novichok on Skripal’s door handle the night before. When they left the house the following morning they closed the door behind them, nearly sealing their fate.
Skripal’s poisoning was just one of many carried out over the past 100 years by Soviet and Russian agents. Their actual body count will probably never be known, but there are many confirmed poisonings, dozens of suspected poisonings, and possibly hundreds more that never came to light.
For episode 36 of the Spycraft 101 podcast I discuss some of the most famous poisonings including the deaths of Georgi Markov in 1978, of Alexander Litvenenko in 2006, and others. I also cover the history of Russia’s experimentation with poison and the new frontiers of research that they constantly investigate.
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