© Rex Features
"Handle with Scare"
Russia spied on former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia for five years and tested poison on door handles,
Downing Street has claimed in a letter to NATO.
In a newly-released British intelligence dossier, it is claimed that
cyber specialists from the GRU - Moscow's Main Intelligence Directorate - have been hacking the pair's emails since 2013, and possibly even before that.
The claims are made in a letter from Sir Mark Sedwill, the UK's national security adviser, to the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg. The letter also claims to know that
Russian agents tested the effectiveness of the Novichok nerve agent by smearing it on door handles as part of Foliant, an alleged secret chemical weapons program.
"We have information indicating Russian intelligence service interest in the Skripals, dating back at least as far as 2013, when e-mail accounts belonging to Yulia Skripal were targeted by GRU cyber specialists," Sedwill wrote.
Police investigating the Salisbury poisoning said the highest concentration of the nerve agent had been found on Sergei Skripal's front door.
Comment: Do the Brits realize, at this point in time, how stupid this sounds? The nerve agent Novichok was already known to be a deadly nerve agent. The test lab of choice would be someone's door handle? And, the nerve agent (which is in multiple facilities in the UK and elsewhere) was shipped all the way from Shikhany near Volgograd from a State institute - not even some secret Russian spy lab. This is a really bad and late attempt at damage control.
The letter is full of iffys:
'likely', 'highly likely', 'highly unlikely', 'no plausible alternative explanation', 'no identification of country or lab of origin', 'open-source reporting and intel', 'would still be capable', 'failed to report', 'cases suggest', 'strong probability', 'probably approved', 'may have been involved', 'may have sponsored attacks', 'numerous suspected'...leading to the grand conclusion: 'Only Russia has the technical means, operational experience and the motive'.
Comment: Do the Brits realize, at this point in time, how stupid this sounds? The nerve agent Novichok was already known to be a deadly nerve agent. The test lab of choice would be someone's door handle? And, the nerve agent (which is in multiple facilities in the UK and elsewhere) was shipped all the way from Shikhany near Volgograd from a State institute - not even some secret Russian spy lab. This is a really bad and late attempt at damage control.
The letter is full of iffys: