The Skripal Files: The Life and Near Death of a Russian Spy

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The situation that presented itself in March 2018 was one quite unprecedented in my thirty years as a writer. A former Russian spy for MI6 was lying in a coma, having been poisoned by a nerve agent, and the world’s press had descended on a small city in the south of England. The man at the centre of all this was someone I had not only met, but had spent hours discussing espionage with.

He had not been giving me an interview as a journalist. I felt confident he would not have wanted everything blurted out over the airwaves. He had seen me because he knew I wrote books, and wanted to do one about post-Cold War spying. By the strangest turn of fate, back in 1988 I had embedded in a Soviet regiment on operations in Afghanistan that he had previously served in. As our conversations started it was apparent that he knew some of the officers I’d met on this assignment well and this seemed to put him at his ease.

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