From the Guardian.
The former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were deliberately poisoned with a nerve agent in a case that is now being treated as attempted murder, the police counter-terrorism chief has said.
Scotland Yard assistant chief commissioner Mark Rowley said the police officer who was first to the spot where Skripal was found in Salisbury on Sunday afternoon was “seriously ill” in hospital. His condition had deteriorated, Rowley said, adding: “Wiltshire police are providing full support to his family.”
Describing the poisoning as a major incident, Rowley said scientists had identified the substance used. He refused to reveal what the specific poison was.
All three were suffering from “exposure to a nerve agent”. Detectives now believed that Sergei and Yulia Skripal were specifically targeted, he added, in a deliberate act. They remain critically ill in hospital.
The initial reports stated that this poisoning was unexplained and motives unknown, and then the Telegraph shared this tidbit.
A security consultant who has worked for the company that compiled the controversial dossier on Donald Trump was close to the Russian double agent poisoned last weekend, it has been claimed.
The consultant, who The Telegraph is declining to identify, lived close to Col Skripal and is understood to have known him for some time.
Col Skripal, who is in intensive care and fighting for his life after an assassination attempt on Sunday, was recruited by MI6 when he worked for the British embassy in Estonia, according to the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency.
I wouldn’t say this is cast in stone, but it just might be either that Col. Skripal was a source for Chris Steele — or someone thinks that he was a source for Chris Steele because this isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened to someone in Putin’s cross hairs.
So who is Sergei Skripal?
A former colonel in the Russian military intelligence service, Sergei Skripal was accused of “high treason” in 2006 for selling information to Britain and sentenced to 13 years in prison.
In 2010, he benefited from a spy swap between Moscow on the one side and London and Washington on the other.
In a highly unusual move, Russia agreed to release a double agent arrested in its territory, but received 10 Russian spies released by Washington in exchange.
His new life
The former agent settled in the small city of Salisbury, south-west of London, best known for its medieval cathedral.
Here he lived an apparently unremarkable existence, setting up home in a modest red-brick suburban housing estate.
A surveillance video of Skripal captured days before the attack showed him buying milk and bacon at his local shop, where he would come “a couple of times a week” to buy scratchcards, shop owner Ebru Ozturk told the Mirror.
But another Russian exile, Valery Morozov, told British media that he had not stopped his espionage activities and was working in cyber-security.
The attack on Col. Skripal and his daughter who was visiting from Russia occured just one day before the release of a new report by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer who among other things wrote that Steel himself didn’t travel to Russia for his report meaning that he was able to access his sources from a distance or through intermediaries — which just might include Skripal.
Some of the other key revelations of Mayer’s story include:
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Christopher Steele told the New Yorker that he noticed corruption involving Trump and Russia back in 2011 when he found that the Kremlin had bribed FIFA Officials to have the world cup held in Russia. One of those officials Chuck Blazer rented a $1,800 per month suite at Trump Tower.
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He came across Trump Tower again in 2013 when the FBI hired him to investigate an international money laundering and gambling ring led by Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, who also rented property in the Tower. That year over a dozen of Tokhtakhounov’s associates were arrested and prosecuted by Preet Bharara, Tokhtakhounov was out of the country at the time, and later that year was seen on the red carpet as Trump’s Moscow Miss Universe Pageant.
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Steele also told the New Yorker that his contacts in the Russian Foreign ministry have heard that the Kremlin influenced Trump not to hire Mitt Romney as Secretary of State and instead choose Rex Tillerson.
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He had never been informed by Fusion GPS that the DNC and Clinton campaign had been their clients, and the Clinton campaign was never informed that Steele had gone to the FBI with what he’d found.
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Mueller appears to be investigating the death of “Oleg Erovinkin, a former F.S.B. officer and top aide to Igor Sechin, the Rosneft president. On December 26, 2016, Erovinkin was found dead in his car. No official cause of death has been cited” and these is not yet any proof that Erovinkin was a source for Steele who may have been silenced by the Russians in retaliation.
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Steele had investigated the murder of former FSB Officer Alexander Litvinenko who was poisoned using Polonium after defecting to England, and had identified the FSB, and thereby Putin, as being responsible.
Steele’s already dim view of the Kremlin darkened in November, 2006, when Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian K.G.B. officer and a Putin critic who had been recruited by M.I.6, suffered an agonizing death in a London hospital, after drinking a cup of tea poisoned with radioactive polonium-210. Moscow had evidently sanctioned a brazen murder in his own country. Steele was put in charge of M.I.6’s investigation. Authorities initially planned to indict one suspect in the murder, but Steele’s investigative work persuaded them to indict a second suspect as well. Nine years later, the U.K.’s official inquiry report was finally released, and it confirmed Steele’s view: the murder was an operation by the F.S.B., and it was “probably approved” by Vladimir Putin.
Steele has never commented on the case, or on any other aspect of his intelligence work, but Richard Dearlove, who led M.I.6 from 1999 to 2004, has described his reputation as “superb.” A former senior officer recalls him as “a Russia-area expert whose knowledge I and others respected—he was very careful, and very savvy.” Another former M.I.6 officer described him as having a “Marmite” personality—a reference to the salty British spread, which people either love or hate. He suggested that Steele didn’t appear to be “going places in the service,” noting that, after the Cold War, Russia had become a backwater at M.I.6. But he acknowledged that Steele “knew Russia well,” and that running the Russia desk was “a proper job that you don’t give to an idiot.”
The last point, about the murder of Litvinenko is particular salient because a) he was also poisoned and b) Christopher Steele was his case officer with MI-6 when he defected back in 2000.
Ya wanna know who else was poisoned TWICE — most likely by FSB care of Putin? Putin Opposition journalist Vladamir Kara-Murza.
And there’s’ the fact that bright blue chemical dye has been repeatedly sprayed in the face of Putin opposition leader Aleksie Navalny.
And of course Kara-Murza and Navalny’s friend Boris Nemtsov was murdered, shot down in the shadow of the Kremlin by a man who uncannily managed to avoid being spotted on about 20 different surveillance cameras that were in the area.
Now I admit I may be jumping to bit of a conclusion, but I do think I detect a bit of a pattern in these events. And if I had to guess just who might be behind the poisoning of Col. Skripal and his daughter, even if it had nothing to do with Steele per say, I think I my just say — Putin.