Defections from Moscow’s most powerful spy agency are so rare, there are believed to be just two living examples. One is Sergei Skripal, who almost died this year. The other talks

Viktor Suvorov was at home when he heard the news. A former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, had been found poisoned on a park bench in Salisbury. Skripal and his daughter Yulia were in a critical condition in hospital; it was unclear if they would live.

Suvorov heard what happened to the Skripals via “other channels”, not just the BBC news, he tells me. A puckish figure of 71, speaking to me in the London offices of his literary agent, a room stacked with dozens of books, he is a little coy about who he might mean, but there seems little doubt he is talking about British intelligence. “I would not like to discuss that,” he says with a good-humoured grin.

Suvorov spent eight years working for Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, Skripal’s old service. During the cold war, Suvorov was considered to be a brilliant officer, destined for great things inside this shadowy world. He spent four years undercover in Switzerland, where it was his job to seek out foreign agents on behalf of the GRU. He was very good at it. Then, one day in June 1978, he made a cryptic phone call to the British consulate in Geneva.

Suvorov met with a Russian-speaking British spook in a forest. He had brought with him his wife – also a GRU officer – and their two small children. Within hours, British intelligence magicked the Suvorovs out of the country. He found himself in the UK, a place he knew only from Ian Fleming thrillers and whose language he didn’t speak.

In communist times, there were regular defections from the KGB; it faced inward – its purpose was to crush internal threats and dissent. Meanwhile, the GRU, Moscow’s most powerful and secretive spy agency, looked for external enemies and was perpetually in the shadows. Defections from the GRU were extremely rare. There are believed to be just two living examples: Suvorov and Skripal.

Skripal is unlikely to be giving interviews any time soon; his whereabouts since leaving hospital remain unknown, at least outside the intelligence services. Unlike Suvorov, Skripal wasn’t a defector, as such: he never meant to end up in Britain. In 2004, he was arrested in Russia for spying for MI6 and convicted of treason; he appears to have betrayed the GRU for money. Six years later, he left a Russian jail for Salisbury, after a US-brokered spy swap. A recent book by the BBC journalist Mark Urban portrays him as an unashamed Russian nationalist, who cheered on Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea from the comfort of his MI6-purchased semi.

You can’t imagine how relaxing a death sentence can be. You don’t worry about money or headaches or getting ill

Suvorov, by contrast, abandoned the Soviet Union for ideological reasons; he became a passionate anti-communist. He doesn’t regard his defection as treachery: as he points out, he left the USSR first – but every other Soviet citizen followed when it ceased to exist. For the past 40 years, he has lived under sentence of death. “I have two death sentences [from the GRU and the Soviet supreme court],” he smiles. “You can’t imagine how relaxing this can be. You don’t worry about money or headaches or getting ill. You think to yourself: ‘It doesn’t matter! I’m dead!’”

Fear, he suggests, can be worse than the thing itself, like a patient waiting for a cancer diagnosis who feels better when they receive the bad news. “Suddenly there is a bloody shark coming towards you. When it’s unknown, it’s very frightening. When you get close, you suspect it’s made of rubber.”

The first evening after Suvorov got to Britain, he began to write, he says. He was determined not to live off the state, and to earn his money independently – if necessary, he says, by cleaning toilets in Paddington station. But he became an astonishingly successful writer, the author of 19 books in Russian, including several about the history of the second world war, which together have sold more than 10m copies. He is famous in Russia – though he hasn’t been back since he defected – and known in all the countries of former eastern Europe. His work has appeared in English, but mostly in editions long out of print.

The UK is home to a small group of Soviet and Russian defectors. The most prominent, Oleg Gordievsky, did immeasurable damage to Soviet intelligence, spending 11 years inside the KGB as a British double agent. Now 80, Gordievsky lives somewhere in the home counties. Suvorov hints that, since Skripal, his own security has increased.

In his books, Suvorov has made public sensitive details about the GRU, its secret structure and its foreign residencies around the world. His novel Aquarium is a thrilling account of the GRU’s brutal ethos and unforgiving methods. It opens with new recruits being shown footage of a man being fed, still alive, into a fiery crematorium. This, they are told, is what will befall them if they betray the service; an old hand remarks that the only way out of the agency is via the GRU chimney. (This gruesome death was apparently inspired by real events. It has been suggested the victim was Oleg Penkovsky, executed for treason in 1963, although Suvorov says not.)

He says the agency never forgives anyone who leaves it. That includes Skripal, who exited Russia clutching an official pardon signed by Putin. “The state may forgive. The GRU never will,” Suvorov says. In exile, Skripal had such a low profile that Suvorov confesses he hadn’t heard of him. But when he learned of Skripal’s fate, poisoned by a super-toxin, he had no doubt who was behind it. “Of course, the GRU,” he says, matter-of-factly.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Suvorov was recruited by the GRU in 1970. Photograph: Sebastian Nevols/The Guardian

The British government has laid out a convincing account of how two Moscow assassins brought chemical horror to provincial Wiltshire. Both are career GRU men, identified by the investigative website Bellingcat as Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin. Mishkin is a medical doctor, Chepiga a special forces officer; both were decorated as heroes of Russia in 2014, possibly for undercover work in Ukraine. According to media reports, Mishkin’s grandmother showed neighbours a framed portrait of her son shaking hands with Putin.

The pair admit to having been in Salisbury – they were caught on CCTV – but say they were mere tourists. Suvorov believes that this was not their first assassination and that they belong to a “small club” of Russian state killers. He is scathing about their professionalism and competence. “In my time, this would not have been possible! Such idiots!” he says. He describes the operation as a clue-leaving “chain of stupidity”: flying in from Moscow, staying in a hotel and going to Salisbury twice.

The chief of GRU would say: ‘Knock, knock, Mr Putin. We think it’s now time [to kill Skripal]. Is that OK with you?’

He has no doubt that Russia’s president would have personally approved their mission. “The chief of GRU would say: ‘Knock, knock, Mr Putin. We think it’s now time [to kill Skripal]. Is that OK with you, sir?’ There is an international dimension. Nobody would take such a risk without Putin’s signoff. It isn’t possible.”

In recent years Skripal often travelled abroad. This has led to speculation that he may still have been active operationally – and that this sealed his fate. In Suvorov’s view, Skripal was poisoned pour décourager les autres: to remind GRU employees that the penalty for cooperating with enemy intelligence is a painful and terrifying death.

He suggests that Kremlin murders function on a spectrum. There are the operations where the victim dies without any fuss, perhaps from a “heart attack”. And then there are the more exotic killings, deliberately crafted to create noise and scandal – the ice pick murder of Trotsky being a classic example. The Skripal operation was meant to be closer to the former, he thinks, although everyone in the GRU would get the message.

Of course, it didn’t quite work like that. The Skripals survived and the bungling plot was uncovered. Last month, the Kremlin announced that the man in charge of the GRU, Igor Korobov, had died after a “long illness”. Does Suvorov think this is true? “I don’t know, but my spy instinct tells me that Korobov was murdered,” he says. “Everyone sitting inside GRU would understand this, 125%.” He would have been killed, Suvorov adds, to rub out a witness who might prove a liability were he to skip over to next-door Estonia using a false GRU passport.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The bench on which the Skripals collapsed. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

One intriguing question is whether the Russian embassy in London was looped in on the Salisbury operation. Would it have known about novichok, the poison left on Skripal’s front door, or would Moscow have kept it in the dark? Suvorov believes the embassy may have given logistical support, without being fully informed. Those in the know would have formed a small circle, he suspects. It would have included the killers, a technical expert and a handful of top Kremlin officials.

As a fast-track spy in 1970s Switzerland, Suvorov was sometimes asked to help “illegals” – deep-cover agents living abroad. He knew nothing of their activities. He was ordered to check for a red lipstick mark on a monument in Geneva’s Mon Repos park, close to his family apartment. Every day, his wife walked past with their children, his daughter and baby son in a pram. The lipstick meant an illegal wanted to make contact.

Suvorov is a figure of medium-small height, dressed in a tweed jacket and purple tie, which he puts on to pose for photographs. We talk in English and Russian; he looks more like an emeritus professor than the GRU recruit who once made parachute drops alongside military intelligence platoons, and who traversed countless miles of snow on frozen nights.

Skripal – a “big, sporty guy”, as Suvorov describes him – better resembles the typical GRU officer. A former paratrooper, he served undercover in Afghanistan and China before being posted as a “diplomat” to Malta and Spain. Suvorov, meanwhile, worked closely with the Spetsnaz – Soviet elite special forces – searching out escape routes for military intelligence units and recruiting informants.

Skripal and Suvorov have never met, and it seems unlikely that they ever will. British intelligence discourages its Moscow assets from fraternising with each other, Suvorov says, a rule that came about following the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko after he met former KGB agents and drank radioactive tea. Suvorov says he was a “good, good friend” of Litvinenko’s, and spoke to him after he was taken to hospital. Initially, he didn’t believe Litvinenko had been poisoned, but during one call, Litvinenko’s voice faltered “like a gramophone”, he says, and the mobile tumbled from his grasp. “Such a nice guy. Suddenly he was killed. A terrible death.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Salisbury attack suspects Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov. Photograph: Tass/Getty

I first met Suvorov in 2015. At the time, a public inquiry was under way into Litvinenko’s murder. It concluded that Putin “probably” approved the operation, together with the head of the FSB, the agency that succeeded the KGB. The men identified by the inquiry as the killers, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, were lousy assassins: they left a ghostly trail of polonium across London, and tipped the murder weapon down the bathroom sink.

Are Moscow’s spy agencies losing their touch? Suvorov says there has been a major falling off since the glory days

In 2016, a decade after the Litvinenko murder, a team of GRU officers hacked into the servers of the US Democratic party, according to Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor investigating collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The release of these stolen emails by WikiLeaks hurt Hillary Clinton and helped her opponent, who is now in the White House. The operation might be marked down as a great Kremlin victory, but it was hardly clandestine. In July, Mueller laid bare the GRU plot in a forensic indictment, embarrassing both Putin and Trump.

Are Moscow’s spy agencies losing their touch? Suvorov says there has been a major falling off since the glory days of the GRU, in the 30s and 40s, when its agents stole US atomic secrets. This decay is part of a general debasement, he thinks, affecting everything in post-communist Russia, from rocket-building to journalism. The country is “slowly crumbing”, he says; those who can are moving abroad.

***

Viktor Suvorov is a literary pen-name: he was born Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun in Soviet Ukraine; his father a military officer, his mother a nurse. (His Ukrainian roots are another reason the Kremlin might have it in for him, sources in Moscow tell me.) His father was a confirmed Bolshevik who believed the USSR could flourish were it not for the “bad guys at the top”, and Suvorov grew up a “fanatical communist”. He attended military school, joined the Red Army and took part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. An outstanding officer, he trained tactical reconnaissance sergeants and served in the intelligence division of the Volga military district headquarters – an experience Suvorov describes in Aquarium.

In 1970, he was recruited by the GRU. He was now part of an elite organisation that was a bitter rival of the KGB. His disillusionment with the Soviet system began only when he got to Geneva, he says, where he was attached to the UN mission. Suvorov says he was summoned to the airport one day to watch the arrival of an Ilyushin-76 transport plane from Moscow. When its ramp was lowered, gold bars were taken out of the cargo bay – to buy food from America. “We couldn’t feed ourselves,” he says.

Further disillusion came when he and his “wonderful spy wife” Tatiana went on holiday. They took the train from Basel and travelled across West Germany to east Berlin, passing the wall. “It was the same people, same history, same bloody Germans. [But] it’s a Mercedes here and it’s a Trabant there,” he recalls with a laugh. He read George Orwell’s Animal Farm. “At first I thought: ‘These aren’t Russian pigs, they’re pigs from Berkshire.’ Then I realised it was about the people in the Kremlin. They had banned the book inside the Soviet Union because they recognised themselves.”

He read Nineteen Eighty-Four. “Orwell was never a communist, but was close to them. He understood the totalitarian state has to be like that. He never visited the USSR, but he realised everything better than anybody could imagine,” Suvorov says. He says his wife – the daughter of an intelligence officer – agreed to defect with him. They have been married for 47 years. “It’s an achievement,” he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Suvorov’s books have appeared in 27 languages. Photograph: Sebastian Nevols/The Guardian

From his new home in the UK, Suvorov wrote one of the most influential books of the perestroika era, Icebreaker. When it was published in 1988, his argument was heretical: that Stalin had been secretly plotting an offensive against Hitler’s Germany, and would have invaded in September 1941, or at the latest by 1942. Stalin, he wrote, wanted Hitler to destroy democracy in Europe, in the manner of an icebreaker, thereby clearing the way for world communism. The book undermined the idea that the USSR was an innocent party, dragged into the second world war. Russian liberals supported Suvorov’s thesis; it now has broad acceptance among historians.

Altogether, Suvorov’s books have appeared in 27 languages. His first, Liberators, was a vivid personal account of life in the Soviet army, and his primers on Soviet military intelligence have become mainstream texts. In a previous interview, he pointed out that there is a tradition in Russian literature of military officers turning their experiences into books – Tolstoy, Lermontov and Solzhenitsyn. Suvorov doesn’t rank himself with these greats, but notes that war offers rich material. “There is a sense of romance in battle,” he says.

Post-Skripal, he has written a new book about the GRU, currently being translated from Russian into English and scheduled for publication next year. He says his trainers at the GRU academy in Moscow never explicitly mentioned novichok to him; the USSR developed the powerful nerve agent in the 1970s, and it appears to be one of many lethal substances at the GRU’s disposal. But his instructors did make clear that, “from time to time”, the GRU has to eliminate its enemies. He was told: “When you have such an operation, an expert will meet you. He will personally explain how to do it.” The GRU has its own dedicated chemicals directorate, he says.

As well as attempted murder in Salisbury, did the Kremlin interfere in British politics by assisting the Brexit vote? Suvorov admits he has no inside information here but, based on his knowledge of Moscow’s methods, he thinks it was an opportunity: “If there is any kind of internal problem in the camp of your enemy, you try to exploit that.”

Despite our current political turmoil, he remains an admirer of Britain, describing it as a place of great “creative imagination”. And what about its spies? He declines to say much about MI6, the organisation that spirited him away to a new life, other than that it is full of “clever” and “professional” people.

I have met many Russians living in exile. They include KGB defectors wanting assistance with their memoirs, oligarchs who quarrelled with Putin, and political opponents of the regime in Moscow. Some adjust to exile; others don’t. Suvorov is undoubtedly the happiest I have encountered. He is still lovingly married. His grownup children are clever and successful, he says, and he has two grandchildren.

There is still every possibility the GRU will try to kill him, he says. This despite the fact that his books have – to some degree – flattered the GRU and served as an advertisement for its subterranean activities. “Will they forgive me? No. It’s not a question of whether they like me or dislike me. It’s an example for everyone else. Yes, you can escape. Yes, they like your books. But they will remember you, always.”

Before we shake hands and go our separate ways, I ask Suvorov one final, delicate question. I don’t want to reveal his home address – I don’t know it – but where should I say that he lives? Suvorov laughs again. “Say England. Or perhaps Wales. Or maybe Great Britain.”

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