Angry Planet - The Taboo Against Chemical Weapons Is Eroding

Episode Date: July 26, 2018

Bashar Al Assad has gassed his own people. An assassin used VX to murder Kim Jong Un’s half-brother. Now, Russia has allegedly used an obscure Cold War era chemical weapon to assassinate an old spy on British soil. The taboo against chemical weapons has eroded and, for those willing to use them, they’re an effective weapon of war.This week on War College, The Daily Beast reporter Adam Rawnsley walks us through the lastest on the chemical weapon attacks in Britain and what these eroding norms might mean for the future.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollege.co. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. There's a really great photograph from Getty, which shows the factory where they made it. And it's just, I mean, it looks like a giant Rube Goldberg, Willy Wonka and the Poison Death Factory machine. I mean, it just pipes all over the place. It is a very complicated undertaking. And even then when they had that very expensive, very large, very elaborate facility, the sarin that they produced was not of a high caliber.

You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello, and welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. My co-host, Jason Fields, is at a birthday party for the war in Afghanistan, which turned 17 years old. today and won't be joining us. Today, we're going to talk about the Russian scandal. No, not that Russia scandal.

The other one. In March, Sergei Scrapal and his daughter collapsed on a park bench in Salisbury, England. Authority soon realized the pair had been poisoned by a Cold War-era nerve agent. On June 30th, two British nationals were admitted to a hospital in Amesbury, England. They had also been poisoned by the same nerve agent, and one of them subsequently died. So who is Scrapal and how did a Soviet chemical weapon end up on British soil. Here to help us answer those questions is Adam Ronsley.

Ronsley is a reporter for The Daily Beast, where he's been covering this story, and his work has also appeared in Wired, Foreign Policy, and Bellingcat. Adam, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Okay, well, let's start off with who is Sergei, and why do we think that he's the target? Well, Mr. Scree-Powl is a former GRU officer who was recruited by British intelligence, convicted of spying for the Brits by a Russian court sent to prison and later swapped for a cell of

sleeper agents, Russian sleeper agents here in the United States, along with some other folks, and sent back to the UK, where he was living, by all accounts, a fairly standard former defector life, or actually current defectors life, pretty quiet in retirement, until one day he woke up and was poisoned by a top secret nerve agent. And the reason why we believe he was the target was because, according to the British press, the nerve agent in question, which is known as Novichok, translates to approximately newcomer in English, was smeared all over his door handle. And the British authorities have also said that Mr. Scripow's daughter had her emails hacked,

So I think it's fairly well established that whoever did this was aiming to kill Mr. Scrib Powell and maybe his dog. How long had he been in England? He was swapped around 2011. And he was, I mean, he's from the reporting. And if you, you know, ask around, he was, you know, he kept his contacts up with intelligence agencies. I believe it's been reported that he had some meetings with Baltic intelligence agencies. may or may not have had meetings with U.S. intelligence agencies. But that's, you know, that's fairly standard.

If you remember the case of another defector who is not traded, but who is actually busted out of the Soviet Union by British intelligence, Oleg Gordievsky, Mr. Gordievsky has, apparently, if you read his autobiography, which is a very fascinating read, when he finally made it back to the U.K. after he'd been arrested and sort of under house arrest, you know, he did the circuit. He met with various other intelligence agencies. They like to get to know you, you know, just various profiling sort of information, what's it like to work in the GRU, that kind of thing. But, you know, he'd been in prison for a real long time. He'd been in prison for, I believe he was first arrested in 2003, around about then, and convicted. And he'd been in jail for a few years

by the time he was sprung out. So it's not like he was very current or that he could have all for, you know, obviously the flavor of the month is the GRU because of the DNC hacking. But, you know, Scree Powell is in his 60s. He, uh, there's no sign that he had any sort of hacking, uh, knowledge or skills, the rise of the internet and nation state cyber espionage sort of happened while he was in prison. Um, so it's unlikely that he would have been a really super great source, uh, on that kind of stuff. But, you know, he kept one foot in, did a little bit of consulting.

Not much more than that, though. Like, apparently like tank video games, which is a, uh, Man, after my own heart. I like those too. Stuff like World of Tanks. Yes. I don't know if that was his game, but that's mine. I think it's a lot of people's game. Well, all of my friends that like tank video games love that one. But that's, but I digress. So he wasn't, okay, let me, I've got a few questions. He wasn't one of the, he wasn't the only person released as part of this, Prisoner Swap.

No, no. How are the other people faring? Yeah, you know, a handful of other folks were released. The ones, well, Igor Sityagin was one of the guys released to the UK. He got a job at the Royal United Services Institute, and he had a fairly public profile, less so these days, for probably obvious reasons. But I think what you're getting at here is the core of the question, which is, you know, why Scream Howl, which is what, if you talk to former CIA folks, people are still wondering, what was the point of this. If Vladimir Putin had wanted Sergei Skripal dead, he had ample opportunity for years while he was rotting in a prison somewhere in central Russia. And it's doubtful, you know, if he had wanted to kill him in prison, you know, we already know Mr. Magnitsky, another foe of

Vladimir Putin, was killed in prison. But for the efforts of his lawyer, that would have sort of passed unnoticed in the West. And it's, you know, you have to wonder if Sergei Skripal had been killed in prison, would we be talking about him today? Would he be the cause of celebrity is since he's been poisons? No, I don't think so. So it doesn't seem personal. Like, you know, the last poisoning that we're aware of that the Russians did was Alexander Lipvinenko, who was a former FSB officer, who was a very strident critic of Vladimir Putin, defected to the UK became an MI6 officer, or excuse me, became an MI6 asset, was recruited by one Christopher Steele and handled by Christopher Steele, famous for the Steele dossier. And Litvinenko

just, you know, really, really from exile, lit into Putin and was a giant thorn in his side and was criticizing him, was accusing him of complicity in, you know, the famous apartment bombings. So it's fairly easy to divine a personal motive in the Litvinenko case where he was poisoned with polonium. Scripal, when he was arrested by all accounts, by Russian media accounts, confessed immediately and assisted in, at least according to the Russians, the British government has obviously not confirmed this. But Scripal, according to the Russians, assisted Russian intelligence services in identifying his handler, Pablo Miller, who we know was a diplomat for Her Majesty's Foreign Service, and whom the Russians accused of recruiting Scripal. So, you know, he was a very pliant prisoner, did not resist, cooperated in the investigation, served his time, and left, you know, and when he was finally exile, did not become a huge. you know, dissident bomb thrower accusing Vladimir Putin of things, which leaves us with the question, why? There's a lot of speculation. You have to stipulate from the beginning that no one knows,

but, you know, one of the speculations I've heard from folks who are a little bit more informed is that, you know, if you want people to shut up, if you are worried about foreign intelligence penetrations of your own service, what CIA folks will tell you is that even within the norms of espionage where certain types of bad behaviors are expected, this was shocking. The idea that you would go after someone who had been traded, even for the Russians, was shocking to some intelligence folks. And if you look at the way the Scrip Howls were living both him and his daughter, they were not taking precautions as though they felt that they were in danger. Yulia Scrip Howe had a Facebook account. She was working at a Russian company. She was living in Russia. She was visiting her father. It would

not have been very hard at all for the Russian intelligence officials to follow her trail of, you know, digital evidence to her father, you know, from all accounts, while he wasn't living out loud, he wasn't exactly living, you know, underground under heavy duties of protection or something like that. So one theory, keeping in mind of just speculation, is that he just happened to be low-hanging fruit, that he was not, you know, it's evident in the lack of security surrounding him in the relatively open way that his daughter was living and visiting him, that there was a belief that he was not targeted and that he did not feel particularly under threat. And if you talk to CIA people again, they will tell you that this is one of the interesting

challenges of spy work in modern life is that, you know, you have to resettle if you have a defector, if you have someone who comes over, you don't just have to resettle them. if you manage to get their kids or their family out, you've got to resettle them. And what's the first thing that every kid does? You know, you give them a fake passport, you give them a name. What's the first thing that every kid will do,

sign up for a Facebook account? Which is a huge, huge threat if you're trying to keep someone, you know, what happens if they friend someone they used to know? What happens if you're able to discover them from a pattern of likes or some other sort of information they're hemorrhaging out onto social media? But yeah, we have no idea what the operational point of this operation was. Well, and the nerve agent used as such a, it's such a strange choice.

It is the unicorn of chemical weapons. You know, if you'd asked people just a month before all this happened, what a Novichok was, the only people who would answer you are a handful of chemical weapons history dorks. But Novichok's are descended from VX, which is another nerve agent, and the gist of their history is that in the latter years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union wanted to develop a more powerful chemical weapon in secret, and they gathered a handful of scientists, and they worked in secret at a top secret lab while, coincidentally, the Soviet foreign ministry was in the process of negotiating what would become the Chemical Weapons Convention. And the oft-stated factoid about it is

that it's supposed to be 10 times more powerful than VX. I think an important thing to keep in mind when we're revisiting the history of Novotrox is that these were not designed as intelligence assassin weapons, right? These were designed for use on the battlefield. So this was not them making small, tiny little bits of research quantity kind of stuff with the hopes of one day using them in an assassination. The goal of the Novotrach development in the latter 1980s was to develop a battlefield weapon. And the reason why we the public know about them, as opposed to them, the intelligence community, is a guy named Vilmirsianov, who was a scientist who worked on the Novotrach program in secret. And towards the late 1980s, the whole era of Glasnose, Parastroika, that kind of thing, was starting to sort of catch on among a lot of Soviets. And he found the concept of chemical weapons morally repugnant.

And he did not like what he was doing. And as the Soviet Union fell apart and eventually died, he became more and more public about what he had done. He wrote an article and worked with a reporter from the Baltimore Sun to reveal what had gone on. He did a short stint in jail in Russia. And then eventually he came to the United States. He now lives in Princeton, New Jersey, lives, I was able to find him. He lives openly. If you ask him whether he's afraid for his own security, he doesn't basically tell you he does not give a crap.

And he's happy to talk, basically to whomever, he'll talk to guys in a phone booth about what he did. He published a book in 2008. What I can tell you is that his book was very controversial, and the U.S. intelligence community disapproved of it quite a bit, because the book he released in 2008 contains formulas for the Novotalks. And that was particularly controversial. The FBI, CIA, intelligence community specifically asked him, as I've been told, not to include those. He's as folks of a certain age tend to be, he's very stubborn. And what he'll say is this isn't the Soviet Union.

This isn't your information. This is my information. He's a scientist. And, you know, scientists are very, very big on opening. information sometimes. And so he said, this is my information to publish, and so he published them. And that was very controversial because one of the things that you'll notice is that the word Novichok or any of the various permutations of it, there's different sort of versions of it, does not appear in the Chemical Weapons Convention. And that was, if you go back to some of the congressional

debates over it, even Mr. Misjanov, or I guess I should say Dr. Mizianov himself briefly issued some sort of concerns about it. It is not included in the Chemical Weapons Convention. on the only schedule of prescribed weapons. And there's a variety of reasons. There's a variety of reasons people will tell you. One which I tend to hear the most, which I find the most convincing, is that, and this has come up at the OPCW in subsequent technical meetings, is that the U.S. did not want to basically, you know, the old chemical weapons,

sarin, VX, those kinds of things. The recipes for those and the formulas had been made. known for a long time. The genie was out of the bottle. And so there is no real proliferation risks to listing the chemicals on a public schedule as part of a international treaty to say these are forbidden. Novotach's formulas at that time, it was not until 2008, were not to public. And the argument is that the U.S. government did not want other people to have access to that formula in the event that nations do you have to remember in the 1990s, the Soviet Union had fell. And so the big threats that people worried about were terrorists and WMD, not terribly different from

today, but very similar. The belief was that let's just not mention this because we don't want Iran or Syria or North Korea or whoever to figure out how to make these things. And then we've got a new basket of proliferation problems on our hands. Another argument, which is not necessarily intention with the proliferation argument, is that it was essentially a matter of diplomatic expediency, is that putting them on the schedule would require Russia in some way to be candid about them, certainly for the United States to be candid about what it knew before Mr. Mirziano's book was published, which is an interesting story, which has only sort of been reported on all. They did not essentially want to throw the baby out with the bathwalk.

Is that we don't want to make the perfect enemy of the good. Let's worry about these chemical weapons, which are known, which are widely included in a bunch of different arsenals. let's not blow the whole thing up over a super duper mystery chemical weapon that exists as far as we know only in one country stockpiles. How did they figure out that that's what it was? That is a good question. So, and I may box some of the technical aspects of this, but I've talked to OPCW scientists and chemical weapons folks. It is reported, and I have reason to believe that the reporting is actually. that the CIA covertly acquired a sample of Novotok sometime after the fall of beginning.

Mr. Mirzianov published his formulas in 2008. I don't know how accurate those formulas are, how accurate his memory is. So you can synthesize based on a sort of a spectral footprint, I guess, is the term. Again, I'm not a scientist, so chemist, please feel free to correct me on my terminology. But essentially, based on what's known and what I've been told by OPCW, former OPCW people, I should say, is that the Russians will try and use this as some sort of dark, sinister conspiracy. But it's my understanding that a lot of countries would have tried to synthesize Novichok based on public information, maybe perhaps based on private information, because that is essentially prudent chemical defense. is when you hear of a possible threat that could be used, you try and figure out what it is, and you try and come up with a chemical footprint for it,

so that in the event it turns up, you can be able to identify it, you can be able to mitigate it and whatnot, and that a number of countries who invest heavily in chemical defense, case in point in the United States, the United Kingdom, would have tried to synthesize this in research quantities in order to figure out how to defend against it,

which is not, you know, anything sinister, is that, you know, this is the problem with WMD. This is a problem. You see this a lot in biological weapons is, yes, there's a chemical weapons convention. Yes, there is a biological weapons. Yes, the United States has sworn off using chemical and biological weapons. But in the case of biological weapons, you know, we had small research quantities of anthrax that we used. You may remember them because if you at least buy the FBI's version of the story, somebody stole them from Fort Ditrick and used them after the 9-11 attacks and pull you. and a few people, killed a few people.

That is not against the treaty because you are, you're allowed to have small research quantities for defense. In the case of the U.S., we were trying to make an anthrax vaccine. And we were using eraslyzed anthrax and, you know, putting it on lab rats and whatnot, trying to figure out, you know, what the best way to make a vaccine is. So when the Brits were able to come out and say this was a Novichok, that was likely based on chemical defense research that they had done prior to that. that, whether, you know, whether they had called that from open sources, whether they had called

that from some covert acquisition. That's a very good story, which no one has fully been able to report out, although there have been, I believe, I think it was Spiegel, there was German newspaper that did report that CIA had been able to acquire a sample of Novichok from Russia. But, yeah, it's, it's, the fun thing is trying, someone tweeted this, you know, that's actually true. Try and get a public official. to say Novichok. It's very difficult probably because the understanding, and at least my rudimentary understanding is, is that the classification levels on that kind of stuff. You can see it said, I think there's a State Department briefing where they say Nobuchar, but anybody further down the

line than that, people are very hesitant to say the Novichok word. I think a lot of what we know and how we know it is still sort of shrouded in mystery because even though, you know, the Russians were not coming clean on that. They still haven't come. They do not admit having it. That leads me to my next question, and we'll go down briefly a conspiratorial path here. Britain seems very confident that Russia did this. Yes. Do we have any idea how they know that or why they suspect that?

I mean, obviously it's a, you know, it's a Soviet-era chemical that came from them. But, like, as you said, you look at these anthrax attacks. research chemicals do get out and are used improperly by the people that were researching on them. How do we know that something like that didn't occur here because of the target? Can you speak to that? So the Brits have come out and said, you know, well, this is definitely Novichok. I think their public case is attribution based on the exquisite covert origins of the Novichok. and you know there's there's some reporting that the five eyes have had signals intelligence coverage on one of the labs involved in it I think that's probably a very good bet but publicly what they will say is this was the Russians and it was the Russians because of the nature of the target and because Noba Chalk is essentially you know this has never surfaced probably before.

and you get some of this conspiracy stuff from the serious side, which I'm pretty familiar with, is that the shorthand for it is kitchen sarin. And there's this mythical belief that it is possible to brew up sarin in your kitchen, which is insane, essentially. The only non-governmental organization that we know of in history that has produced a nerve agent is the Om Shunrikio cult in Japan. And I don't know, there's a really great photograph from Getty, which

shows the factory where they made it. And it's just, I mean, it looks like a giant Rube Goldberg, Willy Wonka and the Poison Death Factory machine. I mean, it just pipes all over the place. It is a very complicated undertaking. And even then when they had that very expensive, very large,

very elaborate facility, the siren that they produced was not of a high caliber. And the British official, say that, you know, the purity and the quality of the Nobatroc involved in that case was, as I said, exquisite. These are not, you know, these are not things that are easily brewed up on all by your lonesome. All right. Let's flash forward to the recent poisoning. What's going on here? This is in Amesbury. How far away is this from where the first poisoning happened?

the people involved visited Amesbury. The two people poisoned. So what happened was two people show up. This is a couple weeks ago. And like the Scree Pau poisonings, when the Scripals were first found, the initial reporting was fentanyl poisoning. They thought it was some sort of opioid thing. And here again, when Charlie Raleigh and Don Sturgis were discovered, again,

Again, they suspect fentanyl poisoning. Mr. Rowley is a former heroin addict. Ms. Sturge, I guess I should say the late, Ms. Sturgis is a former alcoholic, and that's not to shame them in any way. But that is merely to explain why. That was the initial sort of suspicion. Ms. Sturgis had been living in a homeless shelter,

and Mr. Rowley was her boyfriend. And then it emerged that the British authorities said they had been poisoned with Novichok. And the question was, how are, you know, this completely innocent couple, one of whom is homeless living in a homeless shelter. How are they mixed up in this? They had visited the public health authorities released a list of five places they had been. The shelter where Ms. Raleigh, or excuse me, Ms. Sturgis was living, was not very far from the town square where the Scripals were found. You know, it's just a few

blocks. I've mapped it. They went to a church picnic, I think. They went to a friend's place in Amesbury, which is just a couple miles up the road from Salisbury. And when, I think it was believe, the second or third day, but it would have been July 5th, the Metropolitan Police came out and said that they believed that the couple were not deliberately targeted, not deliberately targeted, excuse me. And everything, you know, everything that was coming out of the British government at that point was radiating. We do not think this is a new incident. And what started to trickle out was that fellow residents of the homeless shelter where Mr. just lived, suspected that it might have been a cigarette butt that she'd picked up.

The British media was reporting Mr. Rowley was a skip diver, skip to like the little trash bins. And then he often salvaged stuff from the trash. And we didn't know what it was, but at a certain point, it started to become obvious because, you know, the chemical that Nobatrochs are derived from VX, it's what, again, these were designed for battlefield use, and VX is non-prosistent. And what that means is you use it on the battlefield against enemy troops. They die a horrible, horrible death. And then not terribly long after it is possible to walk through that area. and live to tell the tale. And this is what you see in Syria where, you know, and again, this gets into the conspiracy

stop is like, oh, how are these, you know, Syrian chemical weapons victims able to be picked up by first responders? Well, because in the case of Syria, Sarin is a non-persistent chemical weapon. You know, but it makes battlefield sense that if you want to claim that territory, if you want to move through that territory, it would be nice if you could do that and live to tell the tail. And so VX is non-persistent. And so the question was, is, you know, if this is, you know, if you mapped where

public health authorities said the couple were versus the last day of the poisoning of Mr. Screepal and his daughter, there was proximity, but there was no direct overlap. And the area where, you know, the only area where we saw an incidental poisoning was at the house. There was a policeman who was second on the occasion when Mr. Screepal and his daughter were poisoned. He was poisoned at the house. The largest concentration of Novichok was found on the doorknob. It's believed that they smeared it on the doorknob. And so, you know, the agent is non-persistent. You know, how on earth, if it had come from the scree pals,

if it was a tissue, it was a handkerchief, it was something. It just didn't make sense that they could have been poisoned by something that came from the scree pales. So right away, I think just about every reporter on this, the spidey sense was tingling and saying, eh, this is not, whatever this is from came from the attack. And subsequently, we have very recently figured out that that is most likely the case. Matthew Rowley, who is the brother of Charlie Rowley, has come out and said that his brother, and this is another one of the intriguing things, is that Ms. Sturgis became sick before Mr.

Rowley. It was about a four-hour gap. He saw her off in an ambulance, was taking a shower, and that's when he became symptomatic. But his brother said the reporting difference. whether or not his recollection is perfect, whether or not it was a perfume bottle or a cologne bottle. But that is, and the metropolitan police will only say a quote unquote small bottle. So it sounds as though they were, you know, they just had a string of rotten luck. And that in the course of looking around something or another, they found a bottle which had been used to carry Novichok, which would explain the larger quantity why they could be, you know, and it was apparently contained, you know, in a bottle it would have a cap.

You know, that would explain how they came to be poisoned. It was mostly, and this is, it's fascinating because, you know, we, the public thus far have no trace of who the attackers are other than the Novotok sprayed on the door handle. This would be the first evidence that we've seen aside from that door handle from the attackers. The unfortunate part, you know, if you talk to chemists, they say, you know, you're unlikely to recover fingerprints. Because if you found fingerprints, you'd find a body not terribly far. It would have made sense for them to carry that in gloves. But unfortunately, Mr. Just passed away. I believe Mr. Rowley is expected to make a recovery.

It's a hard fight. And that's, you know, one of the things that I try to ram home to people is that we know of one person besides this group house, besides this couple, we know only one person who has been poisoned by Anobitok, and that was a scientist who worked with Vilmerzianov and he's poisoned accidentally. And there's a leak, and he lived for an agonizing five years. Now, granted, this was Soviet medical care. This was 1980s medical care. But it's consistent with, we know, you know, there are chemical weapons survivors. A lot of them are in Iran because of the Iran-Iraq war. They They were poisoned by Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons.

A lot of them are formerly from Syria. And it's a hard slog. And they've done studies that show people who have been poisoned by nerve agents, the rates of post-traumatic stress. It is, you know, living is just the beginning of the journal. Or beginning of the journey is that they are in for a long, hard road to recovery, which is what makes this so particularly brutal and heinous. All right.

Let's circle back around to Pablo Miller. What can you tell me about him? So Pablo Miller is accused, and I emphasize accused because there is no independent confirmation of this, accused by the Russian intelligence services of not being a diplomat for Her Majesty's Foreign Service, but being an undercover MI6 officer. And initially, I think the Daily Beast is one of three news outlets I'm aware of that has actually seen. He had a LinkedIn profile that was deleted very quickly afterwards because once Mr. Scriapal's name came out, out very quickly, if you start flipping through the news, you see he is connected to a British diplomat by the name of Pablo Miller in the Russian press. So the, you know, I'll tell you what, I'll begin with the story of recruitment.

So what we know from the Russian, or at least what the Russians have revealed is that Mr. Scripal was working for the GRU and was recruited in 1995 by British intelligence. The most detailed information about his recruitment report comes from a report in the Times, the British newspaper, that says he was recruited as part of a joint U.S. Spanish, or excuse me, he was recruited as part of a joint U.S. Spanish, or excuse me, joint U.K. Spanish operation is that he was posted to the embassy in Madrid. The Spanish ID him and a unnamed in the Times, British intelligence officer, began to court him. under the pretext of setting up a joint wine export business. He is believed to have been betrayed sometime between 2000-2003 by a former Spanish intelligence officer who was convicted of espionage, Roberto Flores Garcia, and he worked for Spain's Center for National Intelligence. He was convicted, I believe, in 2010. He is accused of having passed information to a Russian intelligence officer at the embassy in Madrid between 2000-2003.

and in the process of doing that, he is believed to have betrayed Mr. Scree-Powell, which lines up with when Mr. Screepal was arrested. The first time we hear Pablo Miller connected with espionage in the press is 2000. And in that case, it's in Estonia, which is a known hotbed of Russian espionage and U.S. counterintelligence and U.K. counterintelligence work against Russians. Mr. Miller, if you go back through a Russian. British government records had been in the British Army. He was a member of the fourth Royal Tank Regiment. I believe he was also a member of the Royal Green Jackets. And around about 1990, he joins the Foreign Service.

He was posted initially to Nigeria. Abuja was one of his first postings. In 1995, when Mr. Scree-Powell was alleged to have been recruited, British government records show Mr. Miller was posted to the Foreign Commonwealth Office in London. shortly there after, I believe his next posting was to tell in Estonia. And around about 2000, shortly before, Mr. Putin loves his timing, shortly before a meeting between then Prime Minister Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin, the Russians announced the arrest of a former FSB officer by the name of Valerie Ojamme.

I'm probably butchering that name, I'll just say. And they claim that he had been recruited by a Mr. Pablo Miller, who they said, quote, unquote, was the head of British intelligence in Tallinn. They accused him of being jointly, again, it was another case where the Russians were saying. He was jointly run by British intelligence and the domestic spy service of the Estonians. He's accused of having passed to British intelligence information about Russian signals intelligence. and actually they name the quaint little bed and breakfast. It's still there. If you want to go there, you can go see where a former Russian FSB officer was allegedly recruited

and had meetings with his handlers. So he surfaces in that, and it sort of spoils the atmosphere for the meeting between Putin and Tony Blair. I believe it happened either shortly before or shortly after my memory is a little bit fuzzy. But it was a controversial meeting because Blair was the first big Western leader to meet with Putin. This was after he had just sort of taken over for Boris Yeltsin. And, you know, he's trying to reach out and, you know, be his sort of entree to the Western world. And this is how he gets repaid.

His name in connection with Sergei Scree-Pal doesn't surface until years later during the arrest of, I'm going to butcher the name again. but I think it's Vachislav Zarko. He's a Russian tax inspector. And he gets arrested. It's 2007 that Zarko is arrested. And he, in the course of reporting on him, Russian media says that Mr. Pablo Miller had also been identified by Sergei Svi Pal as his handler when he was, you know, running him as an agent. And then he sort of goes to ground.

and we don't hear from him. He gets put up. The queen was kind enough to say that, or she put him in the birthday honors list for service to British foreign policy. He gets a, I think it's an OBE he got, or to the British Empire. So, you know, there he goes quiet. And since then, you know, after the Scree-Pow poisoning, and the, you know, the interesting thing is that at least if you look at the they didn't give an address, but they gave a town where Mr. Miller was living. He lived not very far from Sergei Skripal at the time of Scree Pal's poisoning.

And so, you know, he lives a very quiet life up until that point. I believe he had a posting in Colombia and a posting in Poland after Estonia, after all the late unpleasantness, unpleasantness with the Russian intelligence accusations. He had a LinkedIn, I believe it was the day after the Scree Pal poisoning that LinkedIn disappears. and we have not heard hide or hair of him since. Part of that is what I can say, because I've been told by several people, is that there's a, it's, they used to be called a D-Notice, Defense Notice. I believe it's called a DSMA notice now.

It's essentially a British government official censorship request saying, please do not report him, Mr. Miller. I wouldn't read necessarily too much into that. They might just, that is not to be taken as, you know, de facto confirmation of his status And as an MI6 officer, it could just be that, you know, they don't want anybody else reporting on this guy. And, you know, he's connected to a guy who's already been poisoned, so they're concerned for his safety. But for what it's worth, there is a official censorship request related to Mr. Miller, but that does not apply to Americans. But yeah, so, and there's also, you know, the Telegraph had a, I'll just come out and say the Telegraph had a bad story.

and they came out and said that Pablo Miller had worked for Orbis which is Christopher Steele's firm and that he had some connection to the steel dossier. I can't say whether or not he had any connection to the steel dossier but I can say I'm one of, like I said,

I'm one of, you know, we're one of three outlets that had screenshots and actually viewed his It's, you know, Daily Beast, CNN, I believe, Medusa. There's nothing, no mention of Orbis in that whatsoever. I believe, I have to double check me on this, but I believe the Telegraph claim that, you know, he had mentioned that he worked for Orpice. There is no mention of Orpiz in his LinkedIn whatsoever. And a lot of people have come out since that report and said, no, no, no, no, no, that is not correct.

I see absolutely no evidence, which, you know, it would have been nice for us reporters because it would have given us a logical motive for that. the poisoning. But at least as far as the evidence I have seen, you know, that's, I can't say, I can't prove a negative, but there's no evidence I've seen and I've probably done a lot more reporting on problematic than a lot of people that he has any connection whatsoever to the steel dossier. There's no public evidence of that whatsoever yet. So how's the Kremlin reacting to all of this? You know, obviously they've denied it, but I also see that people in Russia are selling t-shirts and beer that's been that's been branded with the nerve agent yeah i mean you know

they're they're they're doing their usual trolley stuff um which is you know they spread conspiracies and oh the british did it no anybody they they link it together with the syria chemical weapon stuff um because they're they're always trying to sort of cape for the assad regime and its use of chemical weapons. And the OPCW, which has been invited by the British government to, you know, verify and investigate their findings is sort of a bugbear for the Russians because the OPCW keeps finding out and proving that their clients, the Assad regime, gas, civilians. So they're not terribly pleased about that.

But, you know, it's the usual mixture of conspiracy, fear, uncertainty, doubt, you know, that kind of thing. I think, you know, one thing on the connection between, you know, Syria and this, one thing that I see a lot of people in the nonproliferation world and somewhat in the dot-gov world really concerned about is, you know, just take a look back 10 years ago. You know, the only time we were talking about chemical weapons was about how they weren't in Iraq. and now we've had multiple chemical weapons uses in Syria. We've had the poisoning in Salisbury in the sort of secondary poisoning in Amesbury. And we've had VX used against Kim Jong-un's half-brother. People are legitimately worried that the norm against chemical weapons use is starting to erode.

And that's what makes this more than just a normal sort of assassination, is that it used to be, you know, we had these treaties. it just does not seem as though people, the taboo is eroding, if only slightly, and I think that's very worrisome. Well, only slightly when it comes to chemical weapons, that's a big deal. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But, you know, I say that only because, you know, I don't expect the Russian army to start kitten up with mopsuits and using it again. But, you know, we've spent years building up, you know, people talk about eroding norms. We spent years investing diplomacy.

We've spent years investing a lot trying to make these a taboo weapon. And they're no longer taboo. And, you know, the worst part is that there's a really good piece on War on the Rocks, is that they work. If you're evil enough to use them against civilians, you know, Assad has shown that, you know, if you don't care about humanity or basic norms of human behavior, you can make these things work to your own ends. And that is not a great example to be setting for future insurgencies and for future counterinsurgencies.

I think there's a real concern that this may be the beginning of something rather than the end of it. Adam Ronsley, I think that is a prophetic and terrifying place to end the discussion, which is like how we like to do here on War College. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people follow your work? I am at the Daily Beast.com. Thanks. That's it for this week.

Thank you as always for listening. War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Jason, Jason Fields. You can follow the show on Twitter at War underscore College or check out our website at Warcollegepodcast.com where those long-oided transcripts are finally starting to show up. If you like the show, please leave us a review on iTunes. It helps other people find the show. And if we like it, Jason just may read it on the air.

We'll see you next week.