A former MI6 agent has said that Britain has been infiltrated by a large network of Russian sleeper agents on the request of the nation's president, Vladimir Putin. Professor Julian Richards, who spent almost 20 years in intelligence and security for the British Government, said his former colleagues simply "don't know" how many spies are out there.
Richards' warning follows the arrest of suspected Russian spies Sergey Skvortsov, 59, and wife Elena Koulkova, 58, in Sweden. The former government agent, now working in the Faculty of Business, Humanities and Social Science at the University of Buckingham told The Sun Online: “There could be a lot of them out there that we just don’t know about.”
Richards warned that the spies could be primed to kill on Putin's command. In reference to the 2018 poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, he said: "Theoretically they could assassinate someone, if they needed to.
