Putin's Poison Squads: Why Putin's assassins struggled to kill his opponents

Naval actually took an he undertook an investigation himself and pretended to be an official in the Russian government and spoke to one of the people who played a role in the poisoning who um was called kadriev and he essentially got him to confess to the poisoning so yeah I think it's the the almost shock factor of it um and I guess the fact with navali that they'd done it once before and they've done it seemingly again there's a kind of sort of um I guess stubborn stubborn nature to him using that tactic it's sort of reinforcing the fear of the way he governs I'm sure this won't be the last I think it is absolutely devastating a Val is not with us because he has a lot had and I'm sure still has a lot of support in Russia and the only chance of getting rid of Putin whatever comes might be worse than Putin but it will be worse in Russia hello and welcome to front line for times radio I'm James Hansen and today we're talking about Vladimir Putin's use of poison squads to assassinate his political enemies joining me is Times news reporter lty Hayton who's written on a variety of topics including Russia's use of novich lty welcome thank you and also delighted to be joined by chemical weapons experts and former Tang Commander heish to Breton Gordon heish welcome back to Frontline thanks for having me just wanted to start with you heish and and obviously we're talking in the wake of Alexi nal's death there's a lot of speculation and to the as to the exact circumstances of his death what is your reading of what probably happened to him well without wanting to be too speculative I'm pretty certain that he was murdered you know he first of all the Russians claimed that he had something called sudden cardiac death syndrome it's a syndrome that I have I might say if you know you've got it it's very very treatable but he didn't look like somebody the day before is somebody who would have had that syndrome so I think we can probably discount that um the other the other two hypothesis first of all he was killed by what people are calling a a killer punch which to me is sort of little bit out of the sort of James bond7 world of of super fiction novels um I know a few people in this sort of Arena and when you talk to them about this and the plausibility about killing somebody with a single punch below the solar plexus to the heart you know it's it's certainly not a sure way of doing it and somebody like naly who's you know he looked reasonably fit it it strikes me as being you know that that that is very unlikely when it comes on to the actual poisoning now um he he his his wife and also his mother have claimed that it was some sort and they do mention novichok now novichok is synonymous with the Russians and as we'll discuss um the Russian Secret Service which of course is born out of Putin that is his background he's not a soldier he was a spy um it is a favored method of getting rid of people you know that they don't want to oppose them and the fact that naly had already been poisoned with novichok before um some might say well it didn't kill him the first time so why use it a second time well I think the Russians are pretty hacked off it didn't kill him the first time it certainly should have done but a lot of um various things happened that perhaps shouldn't have done which they didn't envisage which meant that first of all he got injected with atropine which is a way of stalling the the march of of a nerve agent like novichok and eventually he he got to um he he got to Berlin where he's properly treated so he shouldn't have died um he probably wouldn't have had any residue in his system and you know he might still have had some issues from the noock but but how he died and the fact that s of talk about bruising on his body it strikes me as had they dropped a drop of noock on his tongue for instance and held him down that would have killed him very very quickly and lots of people say what about the people who are doing the poisoning it's the same with the Salsbury thing the the the Russian agents who took the novachuk to Salsbury didn't have any protective equipment mainly because novachuk is nonvolatile doesn't really give anything off you know if you swallow it or touch it it's absolutely deadly but it's it's fairly little um damage or threat to people around it so I think on the balance of evidence sadly it looks like we are not going to see a PO postmortem certainly not a postmortem in a in a proper forensic laboratory that we're ever going to find out exactly how how he died so on the balance of proit of possibilities you know I I think novichok or a similar poison is probably the way he went and I'm pretty certain the Russians killed him you mention novichok and its use of course in the salery poisoning That's How most people in the UK will will think of it we'll come on to that in due course Lotty I just want to ask you a bit more about the first time that Alexi naly was poisoned and we know for certain in that case it was novichok Ju Just talk us through what happened in that in that instance yeah so novali was exposed to novachuk after boarding a flight to Moscow um from the Siberian city of tomsk um and he very quickly became unwell the pilot made an un authorized detour and he received some life saving treatment in Germany um later on navali actually took an he undertook an investigation himself and pretended to be an official in the Russian government and spoke to one of the people who played a role in the poisoning who um was called kadriev and he essentially got him to confess to the poisoning um so he he essentially he found out that they had put the no talk in his underwear um and that's on putting it on he then got onto the plane and then became ill I mean given that how remarkable was it that navali managed to survive that assassination attempt yeah it was really surprising and he actually asked kri have St on the call and he said that it was due to that flight um and they it was very likely that they expected him to die um and it was just because of the the action that that pilot took it's also notable as well as as you mentioned lty that it was Alexi naly himself and the research he undertook afterwards that has brought to light some of the facts we now know about Putin's use of these poison squads yeah absolutely so it's it I guess it's sort of two parts there him and bellan cat has undertaken a really extensive investigation um and sort of revealed the the length of time for which these things have been going on they suspect the first incidence was in 1995 um but obviously there is a longer history of sort of Soviet use of use of poison um but yeah yeah he he found out a lot himself and his family is continuing to do that in some of the new stories you'll see coming out they're very committed to finding out more hey Mish why does Putin and why do the FSB use novichok so much as a nerve agent if it fa fail to kill naal in 2020 if it didn't end up killing the scripp in Salsbury why do they use it so much well that that's a really good question I think first of all just investigate why why it didn't work with Sergey scrippal and with naal now I mentioned it's a nonvolatile chemical um both with um Naval and scripal basically the nerve agent was on their skin and it's what call what we call a dermal um ingest gestion in other words the chemical has to work through your skin and your skin is really good at keeping things out so it took about four hours for the novichok to get into scripal and his daughter ulia's system before it started having an effect similarly with with um naali you know he had the stuff in his underpants and it took a few hours to to work um we know that you know the basic treatment for nerve agent bit nov chock bit sarin be it VX is atropine we know that the Medics who attended him on that plight flight that was diverted and the pilot was told do not land you know he he dis where that pilot is now I you know I assume he's digging salt in the Ural somewhere so he broke the rules a medic injected um Nal with Atri pin the reason that scripal survived because he probably had a bigger dosage he was injected with atrian at Salsbury Hospital by coincidence and I think this is in the public domain there was an Army Doctor Who was on who was running A&E at Salsbury at the time who was an expert in in this sort of stuff so they injected scrippa with about 30 injections of atropine now when we go into battle we take atropine with us in case we we get infected with nervation and it very clearly says only two of these things three an extremists so the fact that they injected scrio with 30 and he survived is amazing so I think that that that's why both of them surviv they shouldn't have done which is why I said if if you put a drop on somebody's tongue they're going to die almost taneously now why why do the Russians use it I I think it is part of the whole Terror Network that Putin and the FSB and the guu have developed you know they they want to terrify anybody who opposes them which is why there are so many of these cases of people being poisoned um you know lipenko with 210 I mean even going back to Georgie marov on Water Bridge here in 1976 with ryson which is a which is a biological toxin but the same sort of group of of of poisons um so it's that Terror thing you know and also it is um sort of traceability or deniability now when they use novichok against Sergey stripple we officially didn't really know about it and of course we actually did know because one of the people who designed um novichok back in the 80s and '90s actually defected to this country and worked at Port and down for a while so we we had a pretty good idea of what novop was all about but it was one of those things you know there was no um no public demonstration of that uh because you know quite often you don't want your enemy to know what you know um and the fact that that Porton down and others really knew how to treat scripal was because of a lot of the work presumably they had done before and the reason aaly survived as well is because when he got to Berlin um they were obviously strutting the phone to the UK or the UK the other way around saying right this is what you need to do to make them survive so I think going back to your original question it's all about the terror thing you know you oppose us and we're going to get rid of you now we're not going to shoot you in the head which will be easy and painless for you we are going to make you suffer and uh anybody who opposes um Putin and and his goons is is always concerned you know what what am I touching you know what is it that that might might kill me and I think what we've learned really since Salsbury and since Naval is an awful lot about novichok I mean novichok was supposed to be supposed to be defunct in the '90s now in September 2017 a year before or six months before the scripp attack Putin has gone on the public stage saying we've got rid of all our chemical weapons you Americans you haven't and a few others you know aren't you terrible and then 6 months later we then discover well actually and what bellingcat have said in other studies that they've done is that you know Russia has an extent chemical weapons program based around noock which um which we weren't supposed to know anything about and you know some of the attributes of novichok it's undetectable you know what one of the the issues with doing a post postmortem on Nel is um there is no detect well there are probably detectors now but certainly when scrio was poison that would actually pick this stuff up again without want to over sta because it's non volatile to detect something you need something that you can sniff and smell and you don't get that with novichok but it absolutely has the template of a place called shikani where it's made outside Moscow which interesting enough six weeks after the Salsbury attack this massive base that developed noock with about 40,000 people on it was flattened was raised to the ground you know I I I gave this information to some journalists who actually went out there and saw it and it was nothing to be seen um so that had moved away so I think it it's that it's that Terror thing it's that this is this is us and the fact it's undetectable then then you get into this deniability which is why the Russians are going oh well no was it's probably MI6 who did it or the CIA um but without any evidence without any forensic um examination of nal's body nobody will be able to say for certain we should probably just take a moment actually lossie just to explain exactly what happened in Solsbury because in the UK we are very very familiar with the circumstances but just for viewers and listeners overseas just talk us through what did happen yeah um so the sols poisonings or scrippal poisonings were in March 2018 um and it was a botched assassination of Sergey stripple and uh his daughter Julia um and uh in other cases it's been identified and linked to the FSB um who is r Russia's Security Agency but in this case it was they think Gru agents who are another body um within the Russian intelligence system um and from what we've found by looking at CCTV identifying various elements they think that the guu agents and as you said there there's a lot of danger to them so they sort of have to go up it's it's unlikely that they'll get a situation where they can sort of give someone tea or ingest it um orally so the agents found the location of the scri all's house um and they went there and they think that they had a fake Nina Richie bottle of perfume um and sprayed the door handle so when scell and his daughter left to go for lunch they touched the door handle um and it went onto their skin that way um and then they went to lunch they went to cz's um and they it left lunch had lunch um went for a walk in the park and at that point began to start feeling ill um and scripp sort collapsed his daughter was seeming unwell and passes by noticed um and called contacted the ambulance services so it was because passes by found them that they were taken to hospital and then subsequently and and truly tragically a British citizen died d Sturgis who came into contact with the novachuk yeah so the the circumstan around that are still not completely clear but they think that um someone she knew Charlie roelly found a perfume bottle gave it to her and she then sprayed it on her skin um and yeah she a British citizen died later died um but it's it's believed the incident was linked because of the circumstances of how that was disposed of but it's it it seems as if that wasn't an intentional Target hey M this may be a slightly Grim question but were I to be exposed to noock now what would I feel what would what would the effects the immediate effects be on me or anyone else who was exposed to it well there are two scenarios here first of all the scenario that that lot has described what happened in in Salsbury where you get it on your skin and then it takes a while to work through the body um there's the other scenario that I'm suggesting might be what happened in a valy where somebody drops a drop on their tongue and then it straight into your system B basically all nerve agents destroy your nerves they they they attack an enzyme called colon estras which basically stops your nerves working if your nerves don't work your heart stops your lungs stop so you very quickly sort of suffocate and you know die a horrible way which is why atropine so important because it reverses the the blocking of colon estras um as it were so but no chock itself is at the extreme end of nerve agents I I usually say you know chlorine which is something that you know I've investigated so often in Syria been used against civilians and it's tremendously effective but if you think chlorine is toxicity one the first nerve agent developed by the Nazis 1939 something called sarin would be toxicity 5000 you then look at VX which was made famous when uh the North Koreans um murdered Kim Jong which was a brother of the president in quala lumper airport that would be toxicity 10,000 you then look at novachuk and we're looking at toxicity 100,000 so it is incredibly toxic and that that's it but basically they work in the same way they destroy your nerves and and if you get a dose and and the terrible thing about Dawn sturge she had the biggest dose of anybody in all this be it Naval NE be sery scripp or you scripp ly said she we think she sprayed the perfume alleged perfume bottle on her on herself got a big dose and she was that that was her unfortunately going back to Salsbury we are talking a tiny amount of agent you know less than half an egg cup and and one of the challenges was it took us 18 months to clean up Salsbury because because you had no way of detecting it what you say you got Nova chock in this room you would have to sample every square millimeter meter to see if there was noock there and if there was you'd clean it up and then have to do it again if you do that if you have to do that we know that that um the scripal went to about five or six different places on that Sunday the 4th of March 1990 uh 2018 basically we had to go to every place cordin it off and Sample it down to the last blade of grass and and if if there was any um confusion of whether anything was there it was destroyed I mean the amount of I think it was 37 vehicles are buried somewhere because they thought to have noich and but we couldn't prove it the thousands of tons of material taken from Salsbury the same sort of way so yeah a very rambling answer to your question but but nov is really the the top end of of nerve agents um but they're all horrendous they're all illegal under the chemical weapons convention which Russia has signed but we know that most things that Russia said a 8 180° diametrically opposed to the truth and this is another one of them and I suppose what you can see here is the pattern between nalni between what happened in Salsbury even going back to Alexander litvinenko who was poisoned and killed back in 2006 of Vladimir Putin using poison to Target his political opponents just on L venka now that wasn't novichok but just talk us through what happened there lossi yeah so he died in 2006 after drinking a tea which was laced with a radioactive is called ponum 210 um and he had fled to the UK um he was a former officer of the Russian of the F FSB um and he specialized in tackling organized crime but he then became a very outspoken critic of the Putin regime um he said he'd been looking into the assassination of a Russian journalist who'd received death threats and was shot in her Moscow apartment in the previous month um he was due to fly to Spain he was investigating uh Spanish links to Russia um and two people that he was working with he had tea with them in a London hotel and from there became very quickly ill um he so he didn't die that fast he was in hospital for a while um and he was from hospital he accused Putin very directly of of orchestrating his killing um and it was found that so Dimitri kton and Andre Lugo were the two people that he was working with and they are the main suspects in his mother hey M you think we learned the right lesson from what happened to Lin Yenko I'm I'm not sure what you did but polonium is is a really interesting isotope and it absolutely firmly points at the Russians it's it's a very rare isotope it's an accelerant in making nuclear weapons it costs they reckon you know $5 million a drop almost so it's not it's not something it's not like uranium or something that you could buy on the dark web if you wanted to you know it's highly refined only people who have nuclear weapons would have it and to get a hold of it um it also has the quality of a very short halflife in other words it doesn't hang around for very long and if you want to poison some somebody with something um there is that too which makes it difficult although you know the Millennium Hotel which is not a million miles away from here I think there's still a room in the hotel that's unusable because it's still contaminated with ponum 210 the converse to that is that radiological stopes are really relatively easy to identify um because they give off a signature so on the one hand um one could work out where it came from and I think I think all the research that was done track you know the ba jet that flew from Moscow to London um with it on was you know they could trace that because there still traces there they could trace it around London but then in theory after a few days it would have disappeared anyway but what what we learn well whether we learned things or or not it's um I I think people in the security service Community have always been well aware of this sort of stuff and you know when we look back to Georgie marov in 76 it is it is very much sort of James Bond Bond type stuff and that is not really generally what security agents do you know in this country and elsewhere you know it's only the Russians and you know the other sort of axis of Evil who actually go out and assassinate people I mean it's not you know whatever we see in the Lakers James Bond film you know I can assure you that people you know in voxhall and elsewhere are not going out murdering opponents of this country every day you know that doesn't happen but it does happen in Russia it does happen in Iran it does happen in North Korea um and uh it should be no surprise I think it is shocking to people in this country that we've got agents of a country like Russia walking around so my hometown um you know claiming they're there for the beautiful Spar and all the rest of it all the while carrying the most deadly man-made chemical ever and murdering somebody who who you know admittedly who was a double agent but you know he had retired his daughter was I mean she at the time was in her early 30s now you know K what you know what what a life she's got to look forward to we haven't seen them in public for nearly six years now so you know who knows what sort of life she's having so I think it's no surprise generally to people who work in that environment it's a hell of a shock to the population this country and others to think that's going on but you know without being too um Blas or cynical about it I mean these things happen and I think we should be reassured that we have a fantastic security service and and others counterterrorist Police Special Forces who are trying to make sure that this happens as infrequently as possible and I'm sure an awful lot of stuff is interdicted stopped happening that we never hear about but you know this is this is the way the Russians do business and some of their like you mentioned Solsbury is your hometown and for those who haven't been it's a beautiful cathedral city in the west of England very famous in its way what was it like in the aftermath of that I mean there must have been ordinary people who've lived in Salsbury all their lives terrified to go out oh it it it was in funny enough I was giving a talk in Abu Dhabi at the time um on uh on my life in Syria looking for evidence of of Assad's chemical attacks and I I came off stage and I had and I'm I'm rather repeating that that's in my Memoir which is still available in all good bookshops um I might say but I had about 60 text messages and and emails and others saying what's happening now a lot of them were from residents of Salsbury and and I I got back pretty soon after that but but yeah there I mean a lot of journalists actually live in Salsbury as well so who who got involved in this and and and people who you know who who were very experienced sort of journalists in the defense and security world were sort of going hey is it safe to go into Salsbury and and of course the impact that it has had on Salsbury we have Stonehenge which you know a a world famous heritage site sort of 5 miles north of Salsbury 3 and a half million Americans come and visit it every year suddenly that stopped so from an economic impact it it was massive but also the fact that I think you know one of the Challen and I I wasn't you know I was involved and people know I was involved advising the government and and and talking to the press a lot as well trying to articulate what what was happening but one of the things I found politicians found it really difficult to understand you know they understand bombs and bullets that's straightforward but when in my world what we call bugs and smells trying to explain to the prime minister or somebody else you know what a nve agent is what does it mean does that mean everybody in sorcery is going to die no no no we've got a you know got a tiny bit of this stuff but potentially and there was some unhelpful comments as well I think I think somebody in Authority had said yeah there's enough novage shot there to kill half a million people so as you can imagine then people are going Cy you know what can we do and and and I I was explaining well there are there are half a million molecules and one molecule is enough to kill one person but you know it's the likelihood of that happening is is is not at all but because of that hysteria is probably the wrong way because of the the the fear that it put into people particularly in sorcery that's why the cleanup took so very long whereas you know for somebody like myself I would have said yeah I think it's fine you know if there's any no Chu left there might be a bit in the in the in the perfume bottle that was found but the chance there's going to be any others um but you know very unlike although you know without wanting to go on about this the other thing at the time was some of the paranoia um as Lotty explains they they were in the park just outside the Mings when they they were ill there was um there was a little boy who was seen um pick um Julia and uh sery apparently have been chucking bread around and Ducks were picking it up and a little boy had picked them up there suddenly you know if you find a dead duck within five miles of Salsbury get it to Porton down straight away because it might be poison nov trying to find this little boy who had touched this stuff and then um apparently the when they parked the Ming's carpot they put two pound coins into the machine there was then a massive police search to try and track down these pound coins that without going to the details are eventually found in Folkston I think but it was that par but and of course they had no noock on them no ducks died of noock poisoning etc etc which you know I could have happily said I'm 99% sure that's the case but if you're the prime minister or the MP in SS whatever else you you they couldn't take that risk um so yeah again you know answer to your question it was very surreal and of course with troops all over Salsbury I mean people in Salsbury were quite used to seeing the military because we're on the edge of Salsbury play the big training area and actually had that there are I mean lot the Russians say it must have been MI6 and us who did it cuz it was right next to port and down there was all the military there it it was too too smooth had it been in almost any other Town had it been in the north of England or Wales or Scotland the outcome could have been very different because we managed to flood the air with lots of troops who had protective equipment knew how to operate in a contaminated environment and of course we had Porton down just down the road with all the science capacity that has and Salsbury hospital that um every hospital in the country is designed to deal with you know uh people who are contaminated or might have some sort of dreadful disease but Salsbury is also designed to treat anybody if there's an accident of Pon down and I think that you know that's no secret so they had very good drills for dealing with this and not making it worse because both Julia and sery you know still had noock on them and what I one of the key lessons I learned in Syria um from um trying to help people who involved in chemical attacks it's not the attack that's dangerous it's a follow-up action um we some of the one of the hospitals I I advise and train near near um Damascus um treated all the casualties from the massive chemical attack on the 21st of August 2013 which was actually sarin another nerve agent of the seven doctors who were treating that day um five of them died from cross contamination because they didn't know what it is and that is a history it's the the secondary effects that can be so terrible and that could have happened in Salsbury if there weren't people who KN knew what to do and and closing down but it was yeah it was horrific and and if you are if you want to have an impact um it's a bit like you know if a terrorist could claim that covid-19 was a terrorist event it would be the biggest Terror event ever in history when you look at Salsbury the fact it was front page news of the times the BBC for about 18 months you know the bang for your buck you know if Putin wanted to make a statement he almost couldn't have done anything which would have had such an impact and ly do you think that's part of the reason that puin appears to use poisoning as a means to Target his most vocal political opponents because it it sends a message yeah I think it's it's as you mentioned it's the sort of violence of the death but I think it's also the I guess the covert nature of it but the fact that especially with Salsbury it happened in the sort of heart of a relatively rural English town um it's it's so much more alarming than someone even being shot which is also quite violent and it seems especially in Europe it seem and the US it seems like such a distant thing it doesn't happen here so yeah I think it's the almost shock factor of it um and I guess the fact with Nali that they'd done it once before and they've done it seemingly again there's a kind of sort um I guess stubborn stubbor nature to him using that tactic it's sort of reinforcing the fear of the way he governs hey final thought from you I mean to what extent do you think the novichok is is a particularly Putin esque weapon being an X KGB man wanting to make a statement wanting to communicate fear to his political opponents toward what extent do you think novachuk is is really a very Putin esque weapon oh absolutely I mean he is a tyrannical autocrat he he is he has ruled for so long because you know he's the biggest dog in the fight and he is you know I think what people need to understand with Putin and his like you know they they have no Scruples they don't care about collateral damage they don't care about civilian casualties you just have to look at what they did in Syria and what they've done in in Ukraine the only thing they care about is power and holding on to power and they will do anything to do it I mean you know we we see some of the anst in Parliament just down the street here when people you know get things wrong but um you know that Russia Moscow the Kremlin is a world away and Putin and his like will do anything to say they know that they are never going to be held to book um certainly not by their own people although that one of the you know slight positives there is a bit of an undercurrent you know people you know the the Russia has tried to suppress as much um outside information as possible and their propaganda machine and their disinformation is just Torrance I mean one of the things that I was trying to um uh persuade politicians at the time was to respond quickly and positively Salsbury attack on the 24 hours after the Salsbury attack the Russians put out over 60 pieces of main media be it on Russia today or whatever basically telling rubbish and when I was speaking to people in Westminster I saying you've got to respond to this they're saying oh no no we need to make sure we get the facts right and everything else I said by the time you get the facts right you've lost this battle and that that is something we're sort of beginning to learn people down that road in Westminster don't like taking risks and don't like saying things unless they're absolutely certain but but that is exactly what Putin feeds off he will say anything do anything and if he can maintain that Advantage he will do and it's very difficult for a Democratic Society like ours to try and oppose that sort of stuff so I think um we I'm sure this won't be the last I think it is absolutely devastating that the valy is not with us because he has a lot had and I'm sure still has a lot of support in Russia and the only chance of getting rid of Putin whatever comes might be worse than Putin but it will be worse in Russia um what we need to do is try and get get get him out of the game so that his special military operation in Ukraine doesn't turn into a European war that we're all involved in you know in the next few months or years hey Mr Breton Gordon lossy haon thank you so much for joining us thank you pleasure thank you for watching Frontline for times radio for more click subscribe on our YouTube channel you can listen to times radio and you can read more about the war in Ukraine and Global Security with your times digital subscription

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Id: E3CF654sGwE

Length: 35min 7sec (2107 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2024