Novichok still kills.
The world's slowest acting nerve agent, sprayed on a front door handle in a dead-end street in Salisbury, England, in the early afternoon of March 4, 2018, has just resulted in the career termination of Sir Alex Younger (lead image, right), chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). The announcement was
issued on Wednesday afternoon by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in London.
Younger has been replaced at MI6 by Richard Moore, currently a third-ranking official of the Foreign Office, an ex-Ambassador to Turkey; an ex-MI6 agent; and a Harvard graduate.
That March day in Salisbury, when Sir Mark Sedwill (lead image, left) was in charge at the Cabinet Office and the National Security Advisor's post, and Younger running MI6,
was the greatest day for their faction of British policy towards Russia, Enemy Number One. It might have been their greatest humiliation when
Sergei Skripal, one of their double agent recruits from Russian military intelligence, tried to do a runner for Moscow in a GRU exfiltration operation. Had that succeeded,
Skripal would have been exposed as a triple agent, escaping with a treasure trove of secrets of British chemical warfare preparations at Porton Down, plus fresh MI6 identities and operations. Instead, Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripal, were paralysed by a
British nerve agent, and then confined, first in hospital and at a secret location ever since.
It was, as the Duke of Wellington once said of his last battle with Napoleon at Waterloo, "a damned nice thing — the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life."
Comment: What a statement. Over the last few years we have seen many cases of arson and destruction of churches in Europe, a Western-led schism induced within the Orthodox Church, and most recently, Sultan Erdogan's conversion of one of Christendom's most revered and visited places, the Hagia Sophia. The idea of building a replica of it by Syria and Russia would seem to be saying to the world: "no more!!"
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