In this second part of a series, Gareth Porter compares the same faulty logic employed in two purposely misleading, so-called British intelligence dossiers.
By Gareth Porter Special to Consortium News
The British government shared what was supposedly a dossier containing sensitive intelligence to convince allies and EU member states to support its accusation of Russian culpability in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England on March 4.
But like the infamous 2003 “dodgy dossier” prepared at the direction of Prime Minister Tony Blair to justify British involvement in the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the intelligence dossier on the Salisbury poisoning turns out to have been based on politically-motivated speculation rather than actual intelligence
British officials used the hastily assembled “intelligence” briefing to brief the North Atlantic Council on March 15, the European Foreign Affairs Council on March 19 and the European summit meeting in Brussels on March 23.
The Need for Dramatic Claims
When Prime Minister Theresa May and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson ordered the production of an intelligence dossier to be used to convince allies and EU member states to join Britain in expelling Russian diplomats, they had a problem: they were unable to declare that nerve agent from a Russian military laboratory had been verified as the poison administered to the Skripals. As the well-informed former Ambassador Craig Murray learned from a Foreign and Commonwealth Office source, the British government military laboratory at Porton Down had been put under strong pressure by Johnson to agree that they had confirmed that the poison found in Salisbury had come from a specific Russian laboratory. Instead Porton Down would only agree to the much more ambiguous formula that it was nerve agent “of a type developed in Russia.”
May and Johnson: Needed dramatic claims.
So May and Johnson needed some dramatic claims to buttress their argument to allies and EU member states that the Salisbury poisoning must have been a Russian government assassination attempt.
A letter from British national security adviser Mark Sedwill to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg released publicly on April 13, refers to two key claims in the dossier of a Russian program to research ways of delivering nerve agent, including smearing it on door handles, and Russian production and stockpiling of nerve agent during the past decade.
But closer analysis of these claims, based in part on information provided by official British sources to the press, makes it clear that the government did not have any concrete “intelligence” to support those Government claims in the intelligence brief.
The Door Knob Claim
The Sedwill letter referred to a Russian “investigation of ways of delivering nerve agent, including by application to door handles” as being part of a broader alleged Russian government program of chemical weapons research and military training.” The letter was obviously implying that it had some secret intelligence on which to base the charge, and some in the British press pitched in to support the claim.
The first paragraph of the The Guardian story on the intelligence dossier said, “Russia had tested whether door handles could be used to deliver nerve agent,” attributing the information to “previously classified intelligence over the Salisbury attack made public Friday.”
In another story about the evidence on the Salisbury poisoning, however, The Guardian, apparently reflecting its understanding of what government officials had conveyed, wrote, “Such an audacious attack could have been carried out only by trained professionals familiar with chemical weapons.” That statement hinted that the alleged Russian “investigation of ways of delivering nerve agents, including by application to door handles” was actually a speculative inference rather than a fact established by hard evidence.
A report in the Daily Mirror, evidently intended to support the government line, actually showed quite clearly that what was being presented as intelligence on alleged Russian research on delivering nerve agent via a door handle was in fact nothing of the sort. It quoted a “security source” as explaining how that claim in the intelligence paper was linked to the belief of counter-terrorism investigators that the Skripals first came in contact with nerve agent on the handle of Skripals’ front door.
“The door handle thing is big,” the unnamed source told the Mirror. “It amounts to Russia’s tradecraft manual on applying poisons to door handles. It’s the smoking gun.” The source was not saying that British intelligence had firsthand information about a Russian tradecraft manual; it was suggesting that one could somehow deduce from the assumed application of nerve agent to the door handle of the Skripal house that this was a sign of Russian intelligence tradecraft.
The source then appeared to confirm explicitly that this inference was the basis of the specific claim in the intelligence brief, commenting, “It is strong proof Russia has in the last 10 years researched methods to administer poisons, including by using door handles.”
The Murder that Contradicts the Dossier
The idea that only intelligence operatives with formal training could have applied nerve agent to a door handle was not based on objective analysis. MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, knows very well that a 1995 murder committed in Moscow with a nerve agent developed by Soviet-era scientists was carried out by a private individual, not a government intelligence unit.
Court documents in the 1995 murder of banker Ivan Kivelidi, reported by the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, show that in 1994 a Russian criminal syndicate had acquired Novichok nerve agent, which had been synthesized by Soviet scientists, and that it was used the following year to kill Kivelidi and his secretary by applying some of the nerve agent on his telephone receiver.
Boris Kuznetsov, a dissident Russian lawyer involved in the Kivelidi murder case, who fled Russia in 2007 with copies of all the relevant documents, turned them over to the British government after the Skripal poisoning. The knowledge of that episode would account for Prime Minister May’s otherwise surprising acknowledgement on March 12 of the possibility that the poisoning might not have been a Russian government action but the consequence of the Russian government allowing nerve agent to “get into the hands of others”.
An Ongoing Russian Novichok Program?
The Sedwill letter made another sweeping claim of covert Russian production of the line of nerve agent that had been dubbed Novichok. “Within the last decade,” it said, “Russia has produced and stockpiled small quantities of Novichok under the same programme.” If true, that would have been major evidence bearing on the Skripal poisoning, since such a program would be both covert and illegal under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
But neither the Sedwill letter nor any other statement from the British
Sedwill: No evidence.
government has referred to the possession of any evidence for that claim, even in the most generic way. In fact, Prime Minister May said merely that Russia “had previously produced Novichoks and would still be able to do so”.
In contrast to its silence about any kind of information supporting its claim of Russian production and stockpiling of Novichok program in the past decade, the Sedwill letter cited “a combination of credible open-source reporting and intelligence” on the existence of the Russian program that developed the Novichok line of nerve agents in the 1970s and 1980s.
If the UK possessed actual evidence of such a Russian nerve agent program at Shikhany, the former military chemical weapons facility, it presumably would have informed the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) of the fact and presented its evidence to the 41-member Executive Council, the governing body of the organization. It clearly has not done so, and it has not suggested that it was prevented from doing so by the fear of compromising an intelligence source within the Russian government.
The British government could also demand a “challenge inspection” at the facility. Any member of the Chemical Weapons Convention can call for an immediate inspection, and Russia would have had no option but to permit it. But it has not done so, signifying that it does not have the information necessary to identify the location of the alleged production and stockpiling of such a weapon, nor does it have the name of anyone who has worked on such a project.
Suspect Intercepted Russian Communications
Another claim in the British “intelligence” dossier is an intercepted Russian communication that allegedly supports the Russian nerve gas operation accusation.
The tabloid Express reported its sources saying such an intercept had been “a key part of Britain’s intelligence evidence.” The sources revealed that on March 4, a message from Damascus to Moscow intercepted by a listening post in Southern Cyprus contained the words, “The package has been delivered.” And the same message was said to have reported that two named individuals had “made a successful egress” – meaning that they had left.
But without knowing the context in which either statement was made, such quotes are meaningless. And one must ask how often something like those exact words would be communicated to Moscow from a diplomatic or military outpost somewhere in the world every single day. Furthermore, the second message to which the dossier is said to have referred actually revealed the names of the two men who had departed, so it clearly had nothing to do with a covert operation.
The May government was able to convince 29 other states, including the United States, to take action against Russia by expelling its diplomats, representing a deliberate step toward higher tensions with Moscow. But the intelligence dossier it deployed in that effort, as reflected in the Sedwill letter and media reporting, was far from being the kind of information one might expect to provoke such a major diplomatic move. It was instead, like the original 2003 “dodgy dossier” on WMD in Saddam’s Iraq, essentially a collection of misleading claims based on politically-skewed logic.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian on U.S. national security policy and the recipient of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. His most recent book is Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, published in 2014.
Well what a great spectacle all this theatre has been. Western legacy media along with our sycophantic leaders have all exposed themselves to the basic fact that they are morally and intellectually bankrupt. The Goebellesque and montypthythonesque nature on display for all to see. Gee the sheeple are lapping it up. Macaroni man has rolling strikes all over France. Thatcher on valium May and her Blonde haired bobble head foreign minister BOJO are having credibility issues even with their respected family members. Then Orange head Trump the frump well recent release from the senate committee on the Russians ate my lunch have just cleared him of the blatant lie of Russian collusion. But the Dems are still not excepting it. US infrastructure is like a house laden with termites. Largest economic gap since the Gilded age and the stock market still hasn’t crashed hell Even Peter Schiff has recently stated get ready stock up cuase we r heading for some real economic realities.
WHO NEEDS NEXFLIX
The time-line of the comments has become utterly incoherent. Impossible to read them and make sense out of them without jumping up and down the thread and constantly checking the dates and times.
Who is the idiot who did this?
The UK or US secret agency says…. and then you know it is a lie. All they have is lies and suppression of facts, blatant distortions of fact just as Boris and Theresa just do anything they are told or are even initiators of such policies.
Now that MSM are all part of it, we can assume all is just the other way around of what they proclaim.
The British state is now reportedly claiming that the police have identified suspects (doubtless, the two men who had made “egress” – which seems a strange vocabulary choice for either a Syrian or Russian native speaker), but the public are not allowed to know the names of the suspects, which seems an odd way to conduct an investigation into an attempted multiple murder.
Would it kill you to include a link to part 1?
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/04/17/an-alternative-explantion-to-the-skripal-mystery/
Also worthy of a mention is the fact that Putin never said ‘traitors will kick the bucket’ – it is a mistranslation. He said that traitors, overburdened by guilt and estranged from their loved ones, will ‘bite the dust of their own accord’ i.e. without any retribution from the FSB. Earlier in his statement, he also said that Soviet-era intelligence units tasked with elimination of traitors have been disbanded and the post-Communist FSB does not conduct such operations.
When I listened to a video someone posted, the phrase was “regret” or “bitterly regret”, and indeed he was dwelling on betraying oath, friends, and I guess about psychological deprivation of exile. Somewhat ominous, but not as much as Senator Schumer ranting that every day Snowden walks free, a knife in America’s back is twisted again.
If you listen to the full answer – not the truncated thing that’s been floating around – it isn’t ominous at all. He actually says that Russian security services never harm former employees.
It wasn’t the British and they didn’t “convince” anybody to do anything. It was Washington that hatched the plot, used their poodles the Brits as tools in the false intrigue, and forced the rest of their vassal states to comply in the escalation of tensions with Russia that they have been deliberately orchestrating over the past several years. It wasn’t even the figurehead in the White House who arranged for all this deviltry, it was the real powers behind the throne (aka “Deep State”) who pull his strings and allow him to occupy the office unless he obstructs their agenda of world domination across the entire “spectrum.” Anyone with half a brain and enough gumption can see the truth, but no one can really do a damned thing about it.
Britain’s urgent need to tell increasingly ridiculous porkies helps explain CIA’s extreme sensitivity to Udo Ulfkotte. CIA had Ulfkotte’s book ‘privished’ in the US: a brass-plate fake publisher bought the rights and sat on it. Ulfkotte explains how CIA buys propaganda fluffers and puts them to work as journalists. His book neatly explains the hilarious Baron Von Munchausen bullshit coming from upper-class twits in the British press.
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/8dzdbb/the_bestseller_thats_not_for_sale_how_censorship/
“Such an audacious attack could have been carried out only by trained professionals familiar with chemical weapons.”
..or anyone who has ever smeared boogers on a dormitory doorknob. I’m looking at you, Boris…
Those who accept evidence free accusation of anyone of anything should as Portman finally did, understand why facts are indispensable in all human relations and cannot be ignored.
So British counter-intelligence agents (on whom James Bond was modelled) aren’t well enough trained to use the doorknob trick?
They may also be dead
I believe the Teresa May and her accomplices would stop at nothing to blame Russia for the Skripal poisoning. We have seen this type of “Black ops” before, haven’t we? According to Global Research: “Fifteen years ago, fake Intelligence was used as a justification to invade Iraq in 2003. Colin Powell’s “intelligence report” presented to the UN Security Council in early February 2003 was FAKE. It was copied and pasted from the internet by members of Tony Blair’s staff… It is worth noting that most of the dodgy dossier evidence pertaining to Tony Blair and George W, Bush was available before the onset of the Iraq war in March 2003… Fake intelligence as well as plagiarized quotations had been slipped into an official intelligence report pertaining to Iraq’s WMD presented to the UN Security Council by Secretary of State Colin Powell on February 5, 2003.” I do not know if; the Skripal, are dead but I would not rule out that possibility.
Very clearly “the West” is trying to frame Russia. They are following the Republican playbook. If you can’t win fairly, cheat and deliberately lie. The big question is how long is it going to take for the populations of “the West” to realize that their governments are lying to them and that the “Western Press” goes along with the charade. It is amazing to me that “the West” calls RT and Sputnik propaganda when “the West” has an interview with Putin, the “Western Press” produces a James O’Keefe style edited version of the interview to show to their public but the Russian public gets the full unedited interview.
I’m going to use your quite valid claim as the basis for my own theory. As a wee bit of background, I believe it is a mistake for Mr. Porter and others to accept there is any truth whatever in what the British Government has been saying. Well, except for the Skripals collapsing at the public place. Since none of it makes a bit of sense – except for Russia being pure evil – so I’m going with a tinfoil hat version of my own which uses the KISS methodology. Keep It Simple, Stupid.
I postulate there never was an attempt to murder either the spy or his niece. The earliest parts of the Criminal Russia Theater were critical, for the two Skripals would be observed by many people in a very public place. Suppose one of them, or perhaps both, agreed to stage a horrific scene where they went all glassy eyed and lost control of their bowels and whatever else happened. He/She/They would have been informed that they would have a bad “trip” from which they’d speedily recover in the hospital, that they’d be given XX Million dollars in spending money to enable the Good Life for the remainder of their days, and adequate/acceptable guarantees the “trip” wouldn’t be their last one. They’d self-dose themselves with a precise amount of BZ or whatever it was, and wait for it to kick in. After they’ve been whisked away out of public view, the Brits could shape the story any way they pleased, and this would include “spiking” the blood/tissue samples which were turned over to the UN agency and held in their freezers for future ‘investigations’.
The behavior of the niece is what triggered this train of thought. Seems to me an innocent Russian victim would come out of the hospital chattering like a magpie about her dreadful adventure, and would immediately hook up with friends and family at home as well as making plans to go back to her life in Russia. No doubt her story would be worth a nice piece of change when sold to some Major Magazine. But that’s not what happened. Her going into hiding with her new friends in the UK Police and Intelligence apparatus just doesn’t ring true.
But what the hey – Russia has been demonized. Google and other “mainstream media” hardly mention the story anymore except when it’s added to the growing list of Kremlin Crimes.
Mission Accomplished?
“Mission Accomplished”, unless, like someone in a witness protection program who returns to visit his homeboys and gets snitched out to the rival gang-bangers, the Skirpals may resurface and be exposed…
Time to eat a little crow – turns out others have had this same idea a LONG time before I did!
https://thesaker.is/a-curious-incident-part-x/
The Saker had a great rant regarding the Syrian situation on Guns-n-Butter on Weds April 18
https://kpfa.org/program/guns-and-butter/
Of course, Zachary, she might be being held against her will.
Zachary, the official narrative concerning the Skripals begins to resemble the numerous theories of JFK murder (CIA, FBI, MI6, Israel, mafia, LBJ, Cubans, etc). The Skripal story continues to change from day to day. Now the door handle version has been discarded already and the next one is that Scotland Yard has spotted some possible attackers when studying the passenger lists on incoming and outgoing flights from and to Moscow during the critical days. It is assumed that the murderers did their job in the Skripal house.
However, among the Graig Murray blog commenters there is one most interesting observation by “PreProle”, on April 19, 2018 at 15:25, and it is discussed further by various other commenters. Sergey’s car was observed by eyewitnesses, around 9 a.m. on that very day, coming to town from the east, on road A30 (which leads to the direction of Porton Down). It is claimed that both passengers had turned off the GPS function of their phones, so it is not possible to study their movements.
This version (that the passengers themselves were in possession of the poison) would clarify most of the unexplainable twists and turns in the following events.
– the quick reaction and rage of the UK government, trying to put the blame on Russia, and the immediate expulsion of the Russian diplomats
– turning the world’s attention to the “chemical attack” on Syria instead, to demonize Russia further, with the joint bombing effort, before any proof was received
– the multiple desperate explanations when and where Sergey and Julia came in contact with the poison
– the need to send the policeman to their house (where the poison probably was left), and his becoming affected
– the claim that the 2 victims were kept under coma for weeks, unable to communicate
– the necessity to gather the pets and incinerate them at Porton Down
– the plan to hide Sergey and Julia with new identities (never to be seen again)
Naturally, this is pure speculation.
Also, there is one more thread concerning the Russian relatives of Julia’s boyfriend, who, reportedly, were not happy about their relationship, especially his mother. Now, how she would be behind the murder scheme, is, in my opinion, too far stretched.
Generally speaking, I expect more scandals in and around Russia, to finally stop or at least disturb the Football World Cup. Russia as the “axis of evil” must not be permitted to get any positive publicity in this context. And we thought that only backward Latin Americans would start wars around football.
Lisa this thing about the GPS is interesting, but how does anyone know if the Skripal’s phone GPS was turned off?
John, as far as I understood, this claim about GPS turned off came from the UK police. Or, as someone suspected, the police tries to hide the info about the movements of Skripals insisting that their GPS was turned off.
I’ve read so much about the case that I start forgetting details, and who said what.
I agree that this is beyond “dodgy dossier” and “stretching evidence”. I would add that the primary “confirming evidence” from OPCW is kept secret, not allowing to check if it is physiologically possible — spiking of samples after collecting should have different products than having a substance in the body for more than two weeks.
Jeff, the populations are stupid so they will believe anything their governments tell them. By the way, I don’t know if this is a picture of the actual door handle, but the photo I saw with police standing next to the door, doesn’t show a knob, but a lever type handle? The latest we are hearing is that the chemical was a liquid so how does one pour liquid of a narrow door HANDLE and get it to stay there? I still maintain that the real mystery in this farce is the policeman who was supposed to have touched the door handle, became ill and then got completely better after just a few days. Nothing has been heard of him since, not even a peep from say any of his relatives or neighbours. There have been no actual reports of this chemical being found anywhere else in Salisbury, but they are telling us that the restaurant might have to be demolished and that it will take months to clean up the centre of the town. There was a time when our government use to try to make their lies at least feasible, now they just say anything at all because they know the public are brain dead and don’t think outside of the current reality TV show.
PS. to my comment: I would love to hear from the doctor who treated the Skripals at the hospital, who was so outraged by the claim of a chemical poisoning that he wrote to his own local Salisbury new paper to say that there were NO patients at the hospital suffering from any chemical poisoning!. Where has he gone? How about the nurses and other medical staff who were there. Have they been silenced? they haven’t signed any official secrets act so why no info from this direction?m Questions questions question!
John Wilson,
Good posts. It is one hundred percent clear that the Skirpals chemical event in Salisbury was staged/fabricated by British, U.S. governments/intelligence agencies for geopolitical reasons. Remember just two days after the event some of the politicians in U.K. were talking about kicking Russia out of Security Council. The things did not turn out the way they wanted. However they were able to vilify Russia to some extent in the World in which The West dominates the media.
Kick Russia out and keep these two very small Nations France and U.K. in Security council! Both these Nations live on debt. France’s grandeur is almost meaningless now, economically France being a German Colony. As I see it, The whole Political and other Ruling Establishment in the West lives in illusions now; and they are a danger to the survival of the World and its’ inhabitants.
Because Russia’s strongest weapon against the West is «truth». That’s why RT is giving great liberty to their staff in the US. The truth is a deadly weapon against the American elite, the Deep State and the Corpratocracy in MSM…
I wish old Garth had proof-read his article. Some important sentences are unintelligible.
Who was Sergei Skripal employed by? Was it only Christopher Steele and his compny of retired MI6 fiends or was be really employed by SCL/Cambridge Analytica?
follow the money
Our “governments” are staffed entirely with liars and criminals. Once you realize this, a lot of the mystery and confusion around politically sensitive events is dispelled. You cannot trust a single thing these criminals tell you. And this applies especially to the news media. Rich and powerful people will stop at NOTHING to gain more wealth and power. Whatever evil, criminal activity is necessary to further their schemes, they will do it, with no moral compunctions whatever. Please remember this, and you will no longer be fooled by these perpetrator’s lies and deceptions. Just understand that they are your enemies, and will stop at nothing to rob and deceive you.
Sorry, but Gareth’s normal intelligent and sensible reports are not useful this time (or the first part of this “report”.) The “door handle” story is nonsensical. Where did the “samples” used by the lab come from? if from the door handles, this means nothing if the “victims”, conveniently seen by nobody since March 4, could have been suffering from anything else eg fish poison. If blood samples were taken and these showed the deadly nerve gas which kills at once(!) who gave permission if these two were unconscious and we know that NO Russian embassy staff or any friends or relatives have been allowed to see them? IN fact, we have no idea where either “victim” is, just “trust me” from UK UNSC rep Karen Peirce. The whole story can only be explained when we know who benefits from bad relations between Russia and the “West”, and the main likely perpetrator is NATO, whose former actions could easily lead to this.
“The whole story can only be explained when we know who benefits from bad relations between Russia and the “West””
Limiting notions of motivation undermines understanding.
Mr. Skripal lived in the “United Kingdom” for a number of years ate and enjoyed shelter facilitated by his associations.
Mr. Nemtsov experienced difficulty keeping his hands in his pockets and his trousers on.
Mr. Litvinenko lived in the “United Kingdom” for a number of years ate and enjoyed shelter facilitated by his associations.
Mr. Berezhovsky lived in the “United Kingdom” but operated internationally for a number of years ate and enjoyed shelter facilitated by his associations, although his relatively long association with Mr. Abramovich did likely lead to disappointment.
Consequently in all cases cited there are many potential motivations not restricted to “who benefits from bad relations and the “West”.
Practitioners don’t tend to assign similar significance to cui bono as do spectators, and as a consequence tend to arrive a more informed views.
Britain is a member of the “Five Eyes” alliance, which jointly runs the largest and most pervasive surveillance apparatus on the planet. Anytime – and this has happened several times over the past few years – it claims to have based intelligence/ policy assessments on “open-sourced reporting” it should be assumed they are lying. Surely all countries who stood “shoulder-to-shoulder” in expelling Russian diplomats knew this, but did it anyway.
One can go further and say the “Five Eyes” Alliance is the actual working apparatus-of-governance used by the actual,rulers: the financial powers in Wall Street and City-of-London and their Military/Industrial/Intelligence/Media/University Complex. The LaRouche folks identify this Complex (correctly, I believe) as the current form of the British Empire, and, via Synarchy Internationale, has subsumed all the other ruling apparati, and their ruling classes of former European Empires into one cooperating Global Empire (NWO). It’s a Sort of “Oligarchs of the World Unite” (against the people). Everyone was watching the socialist/communist/ anarchist movements, completely missing (by design, since they run the media) this fascistic Synarchist Movement.
Other countries who expelled diplomats didn’t do it because they believed for one moment that the story had any credibility, hey did it because they are members of the club.
john wilson – exactly.
backwardsevolution – There is this very interesting article in Der Spiegel titled ” The Changing Face of Germany”. Very informative article. But the new German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, of the SDP party is raging against Russia and wants Germany to be tough on Russia.
You can see how messed up these European Political Leaders are, not much different from what is happening here. I hope that they can avoid taking Europe to another war on the continent. The war on the European continent is going to be very disastrous.