Viktor Suvorov was at home when he heard the news. A former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, had been found poisoned on a park bench in Salisbury, England.
Skripal and his daughter were in a critical condition in hospital; it was unclear if they would live.
Suvorov said he heard what happened to the Skripals via “other channels,” not just the BBC news.
Illustration: Mountain People
A puckish figure of 71, speaking to me in the London offices of his literary agent, a room stacked with dozens of books, he was a little coy about who he might mean, but there seemed little doubt he was talking about British intelligence.
“I would not like to discuss that,” he said with a good-humored grin.
Suvorov spent eight years working for Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, Skripal’s old service. During the Cold War, he was considered to be a brilliant officer, destined for great things inside this shadowy world. He spent four years undercover in Switzerland, where it was his job to seek out foreign agents on behalf of the GRU. He was very good at it. Then, one day in June 1978, he made a cryptic phone call to the British consulate in Geneva.
Suvorov met with a Russian-speaking British spook in a forest. He had brought with him his wife — also a GRU officer — and their two small children. Within hours, British intelligence magicked the Suvorovs out of the country. He found himself in the UK, a place he knew only from Ian Fleming thrillers and whose language he did not speak.
In communist times, there were regular defections from the KGB; it faced inward — its purpose was to crush internal threats and dissent. Meanwhile, the GRU, Moscow’s most powerful and secretive spy agency, looked for external enemies and was perpetually in the shadows.
Defections from the GRU were extremely rare. There are believed to be just two living examples: Suvorov and Skripal.
Skripal is unlikely to be giving interviews any time soon; his whereabouts since leaving hospital remain unknown, at least outside the intelligence services.
Unlike Suvorov, Skripal was not a defector, as such: He never meant to end up in Britain. In 2004, he was arrested in Russia for spying for MI6 and convicted of treason; he appears to have betrayed the GRU for money.
Six years later, he left a Russian jail for Salisbury, after a US-brokered spy swap.
A recent book by the BBC journalist Mark Urban portrays him as an unashamed Russian nationalist, who cheered on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea from the comfort of his MI6-purchased semi.
Suvorov, by contrast, abandoned the Soviet Union for ideological reasons; he became a passionate anti-communist. He does not regard his defection as treachery: As he points out, he left the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) first — but every other Soviet citizen followed when it ceased to exist. For the past 40 years, he has lived under sentence of death.
“I have two death sentences [from the GRU and the Soviet supreme court],” he said.
“You can’t imagine how relaxing this can be. You don’t worry about money or headaches or getting ill. You think to yourself: ‘It doesn’t matter! I’m dead,’” he said.
Fear can be worse than the thing itself, like a patient waiting for a cancer diagnosis who feels better when they receive the bad news, he said.
“Suddenly there is a bloody shark coming towards you. When it’s unknown, it’s very frightening. When you get close, you suspect it’s made of rubber,” he added.
The first evening after arriving in Britain he began to write, he said. He was determined not to live off the state and to earn his money independently—- if necessary, by cleaning toilets in Paddington station, he said.
However, he became an astonishingly successful writer, the author of 19 books in Russian, including several about the history of World War II, which together have sold more than 10 million copies.
He is famous in Russia — although he has not been back since he defected — and known in all the countries of former eastern Europe.
His work has appeared in English, but mostly in editions long out of print.
The UK is home to a small group of Soviet and Russian defectors. The most prominent, Oleg Gordievsky, did immeasurable damage to Soviet intelligence, spending 11 years inside the KGB as a British double agent. Now 80, Gordievsky lives somewhere in the home counties. Suvorov hints that, since Skripal, his own security has increased.
In his books, Suvorov has made public sensitive details about the GRU, its secret structure and its foreign residencies around the world.
His novel Aquarium is a thrilling account of the GRU’s brutal ethos and unforgiving methods. It opens with new recruits being shown footage of a man being fed, still alive, into a fiery crematorium. This, they are told, is what will befall them if they betray the service; an old hand remarks that the only way out of the agency is via the GRU chimney.
(This gruesome death was apparently inspired by real events. It has been suggested that the victim was Oleg Penkovsky, executed for treason in 1963, although Suvorov says not.)
Suvorov said the agency never forgives anyone who leaves it. That includes Skripal, who exited Russia clutching an official pardon signed by Putin.
“The state may forgive. The GRU never will,” Suvorov said.
In exile, Skripal had such a low profile that Suvorov said he had not heard of him, but when he learned of Skripal’s fate, poisoned by a supertoxin, he had no doubt who was behind it.
“Of course, the GRU,” he said, matter-of-factly.
The British government has laid out a convincing account of how two Moscow assassins brought chemical horror to provincial Wiltshire. Both are career GRU men, identified by the investigative Web site Bellingcat as Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin. Mishkin is a medical doctor, Chepiga a special forces officer; both were decorated as heroes of Russia in 2014, possibly for undercover work in Ukraine.
According to media reports, Mishkin’s grandmother showed neighbors a framed portrait of her son shaking hands with Putin.
The pair have admitted to having been in Salisbury — they were caught on CCTV — but said they were mere tourists.
Suvorov believed that this was not their first assassination and that they belong to a “small club” of Russian state killers.
He was scathing about their professionalism and competence.
“In my time, this would not have been possible. Such idiots,” he said.
He described the operation as a clue-leaving “chain of stupidity”: flying in from Moscow, staying in a hotel and going to Salisbury twice.
He had no doubt that Russia’s president would have personally approved their mission.
“The chief of GRU would say: ‘Knock, knock, Mr Putin. We think it’s now time [to kill Skripal]. Is that OK with you, sir?’ There is an international dimension. Nobody would take such a risk without Putin’s signoff. It isn’t possible,” he said.
In recent years Skripal often traveled abroad. This has led to speculation that he might still have been active operationally — and that this sealed his fate. In Suvorov’s view, Skripal was poisoned pour decourager les autres: to remind GRU employees that the penalty for cooperating with enemy intelligence is a painful and terrifying death.
He suggested that Kremlin murders function on a spectrum. There are the operations where the victim dies without any fuss, perhaps from a “heart attack” — and then there are the more exotic killings, deliberately crafted to create noise and scandal — the ice pick murder of Leon Trotsky being a classic example.
The Skripal operation was meant to be closer to the former, Suvorov said, although everyone in the GRU would get the message.
Of course, it did not quite work like that. The Skripals survived and the bungling plot was uncovered. Last month, the Kremlin announced that the man in charge of the GRU, Igor Korobov, had died after a “long illness.”
Does Suvorov think this is true?
“I don’t know, but my spy instinct tells me that Korobov was murdered,” he said. “Everyone sitting inside GRU would understand this, 125 percent.”
He would have been killed to rub out a witness who might prove a liability were he to skip over to next-door Estonia using a false GRU passport, Suvorov added.
One intriguing question is whether the Russian embassy in London knew of the Salisbury operation. Would it have known about novichok, the poison left on Skripal’s front door, or would Moscow have kept it in the dark?
Suvorov believed the embassy might have given logistical support, without being fully informed. Those in the know would have formed a small circle, he said. It would have included the killers, a technical expert and a handful of top Kremlin officials.
As a fast-track spy in 1970s Switzerland, Suvorov was sometimes asked to help “illegals” — deep-cover agents living abroad. He knew nothing of their activities. He was ordered to check for a red lipstick mark on a monument in Geneva’s Mon Repos park, close to his family apartment.
Every day, his wife walked past with their children, his daughter and baby son in a pram. The lipstick meant an illegal wanted to make contact.
Suvorov is a figure of medium-small height, dressed in a tweed jacket and purple tie, which he put on to pose for photographs. We talked in English and Russian; he looked more like an emeritus professor than the GRU recruit who once made parachute drops alongside military intelligence platoons and who traversed countless kilometers of snow on frozen nights.
Skripal — a “big, sporty guy” — as Suvorov described him — better resembles the typical GRU officer. A former paratrooper, he served undercover in Afghanistan and China before being posted as a “diplomat” to Malta and Spain.
Suvorov, meanwhile, worked closely with the Spetsnaz — Soviet elite special forces — searching out escape routes for military intelligence units and recruiting informants.
Skripal and Suvorov have never met, and it seems unlikely that they ever will. British intelligence discourages its Moscow assets from fraternizing with each other, Suvorov said, a rule that came about following the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko after he met former KGB agents and drank radioactive tea.
Suvorov said he was a “good, good friend” of Litvinenko’s and spoke to him after he was taken to hospital. Initially, he did not believe Litvinenko had been poisoned, but during one call, Litvinenko’s voice faltered “like a gramophone,” he said, and the mobile tumbled from his grasp.
“Such a nice guy. Suddenly he was killed. A terrible death,” Suvorov said.
I first met Suvorov in 2015. At the time, a public inquiry was under way into Litvinenko’s murder. It concluded that Putin “probably” approved the operation, together with the head of the Federal Security Service, the agency that succeeded the KGB.
The men identified by the inquiry as the killers, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, were lousy assassins: They left a ghostly trail of polonium across London and tipped the murder weapon down a bathroom sink.
In 2016, a decade after the Litvinenko murder, a team of GRU officers hacked into the servers of the US Democratic party, according to US Special Counsel Robert Mueller who is investigating allegations of collusion between then-US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russia.
The release of these stolen e-mails by WikiLeaks hurt US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton and helped her opponent, who is now in the White House.
The operation might be marked down as a great Kremlin victory, but it was hardly clandestine. In July last year, Mueller laid bare the GRU plot in a forensic indictment, embarrassing both Putin and Trump.
Are Moscow’s spy agencies losing their touch?
Suvorov said there has been a major falling off since the glory days of the GRU, in the 1930s and 40s, when its agents stole US atomic secrets. This decay is part of a general debasement affecting everything in post-communist Russia, from rocket-building to journalism, he said.
The country is “slowly crumbing; those who can are moving abroad,” he said.
Viktor Suvorov is a literary pen-name: He was born Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun in Soviet Ukraine; his father a military officer, his mother a nurse. (His Ukrainian roots are another reason the Kremlin might have it in for him, sources in Moscow told me.)
His father was a confirmed Bolshevik who believed the USSR could flourish were it not for the “bad guys at the top” and Suvorov grew up a “fanatical communist.”
He attended military school, joined the Red Army and took part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. An outstanding officer, he trained tactical reconnaissance sergeants and served in the intelligence division of the Volga military district headquarters — an experience he describes in Aquarium.
In 1970, he was recruited by the GRU. He was now part of an elite organization that was a bitter rival of the KGB. He said that his disillusionment with the Soviet system began only when he got to Geneva, where he was attached to the UN mission.
Suvorov said he was summoned to the airport one day to watch the arrival of an Ilyushin-76 transport plane from Moscow. When its ramp was lowered, gold bars were taken out of the cargo bay — to buy food from the US.
“We couldn’t feed ourselves,” he said.
Further disillusion came when he and his “wonderful spy wife” Tatiana went on holiday. They took the train from Basel, Switzerland, and traveled across west Germany to east Berlin, passing the wall.
“It was the same people, same history, same bloody Germans. [But] it’s a Mercedes here and it’s a Trabant there,” he said.
He read George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
“At first I thought: ‘These aren’t Russian pigs, they’re pigs from Berkshire.’ Then I realized it was about the people in the Kremlin. They had banned the book inside the Soviet Union because they recognized themselves,” he said.
He read Nineteen Eighty-Four.
“Orwell was never a communist, but was close to them. He understood the totalitarian state has to be like that,” he said.
“He never visited the USSR, but he realized everything better than anybody could imagine,” he said.
He said his wife — the daughter of an intelligence officer — agreed to defect with him. They have been married for 47 years.
“It’s an achievement,” he said.
From his new home in the UK, Suvorov wrote one of the most influential books of the perestroika era, Icebreaker. When it was published in 1988, his argument was heretical: that Stalin had been secretly plotting an offensive against Hitler’s Germany and would have invaded in September 1941, or at the latest by 1942. Stalin, he wrote, wanted Hitler to destroy democracy in Europe, in the manner of an icebreaker, thereby clearing the way for world communism. The book undermined the idea that the USSR was an innocent party, dragged into World War II. Russian liberals supported Suvorov’s thesis; it now has broad acceptance among historians.
Altogether, Suvorov’s books have appeared in 27 languages. His first, Liberators, was a vivid personal account of life in the Soviet army and his primers on Soviet military intelligence have become mainstream texts.
Post-Skripal, he has written a new book about the GRU, currently being translated from Russian into English and scheduled for publication next year.
He said that his trainers at the GRU academy in Moscow never explicitly mentioned novichok to him; the USSR developed the powerful nerve agent in the 1970s and it appears to be one of many lethal substances at the GRU’s disposal.
However, his instructors did make clear that, “from time to time,” the GRU has to eliminate its enemies.
He was told: “When you have such an operation, an expert will meet you. He will personally explain how to do it.”
The GRU has its own dedicated chemicals directorate, he said.
As well as attempted murder in Salisbury, did the Kremlin interfere in British politics by assisting the Brexit vote?
Suvorov said he has no inside information here but, based on his knowledge of Moscow’s methods, he thought that it was an opportunity.
“If there is any kind of internal problem in the camp of your enemy, you try to exploit that,” he said.
Despite the current political turmoil, he remains an admirer of Britain, describing it as a place of great “creative imagination.”
What about its spies?
He declined to say much about MI6, the organization that spirited him away to a new life, other than that it is full of “clever” and “professional” people.
I have met many Russians living in exile. They include KGB defectors wanting assistance with their memoirs, oligarchs who quarreled with Putin and political opponents of the regime in Moscow. Some adjust to exile; others do not.
Suvorov is undoubtedly the happiest I have encountered. He is still lovingly married. His grown-up children are clever and successful and he has two grandchildren, he said.
There is still every possibility the GRU will try to kill him, he said.
This despite the fact that his books have — to some degree — flattered the GRU and served as an advertisement for its subterranean activities.
“Will they forgive me? No. It’s not a question of whether they like me or dislike me. It’s an example for everyone else,” he said.
“Yes, you can escape. Yes, they like your books, but they will remember you, always,” he added.
I asked Suvorov one final, delicate question. I do not want to reveal his home address — I do not know it — but where should I say that he lives?
Suvorov laughed again.
“Say England. Or perhaps Wales. Or maybe Great Britain,” he said.
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