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.
“This is where the Skripal case is interesting and the Litvinenko case before it. It was the GRU - military intelligence - that was exposed as being involved."
Russian agents spent years gradually settling into regular life in the UK by taking up jobs in industries like national defence to insert themselves into positions of "access", Richards says.
"We know that the UK has always been a particular target for the Russians. They know that we’re potentially a very useful connection into the American intelligence system."
In terms of the specific numbers of members of the UK-based Russian spy network, Richards said the UK intelligence agencies remain unsure. He explained: "Either it’s a big problem and we don’t have an idea of the scale of it and how many are out there, but I think it’s more likely it’s not that big of a problem, and because they are so difficult to do, there probably aren’t many of them out there. But there are some, particularly in the UK."
Robert Baer, a former CIA operative, has said Russian 'illegals' could spend years employed in a company before becoming "operational", the Express reported. He said: "What you want with an illegal is someone not under surveillance. You can use them for spotting reports. That’s when you find someone like a Pentagon officer, or a State Department officer, and then you look at who seems interesting, who’s going into an interesting job, and you tell Moscow and maybe later on someone posted overseas will approach them."
In this week's case in Sweden, police abseiled from Black Hawk helicopters during a dawn raid on Skvortsov and Koulkova’s Stockholm home earlier this week. Skvortsov is currently in custody, accused of carrying out "gross illegal espionage activities" over at least the last decade. His wife Koulkova, who has been accused of assisting him, has been released on bail. Both have denied the charges.
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