The increasing desperation of government attempts to “prove” the Russians responsible for the Skripal attack has become increasingly bizarre. They now claim GCHQ picked up from Troodos a message from Syria to Moscow that “the package has been delivered”, and a further one that “two people have made their egress”.
Because of course, if you were sending a cryptic message back from Salisbury to Moscow, you would naturally route it back via Syria, in the certain knowledge that all such calls from Syria are picked up from Troodos. I am sure the Russians already knew that, even before I published it in detail five years ago.
Given Russian involvement in Syria, that somebody is reporting in Syria the delivery of a package to Moscow, would not lead any sane human being to conclude it was delivered in Salisbury.
As for the phrase “two people have made their egress”, presumably this was said in Russian and I cannot understand the translation at all. Exit, egress, go out, leave to outside – there is only one Russian word to express all of these and that is phonetically from the stem “vihod”, either as noun or verb. There is no egress/exit choice in Russian.
The only possible explanation is that the person actually said “two people have left” and the British government propagandists have translated this as the weird “made their egress” to try to make it sound more sinister and more like a codeword.
Reminding me of my previous Troodos article was extremely apposite. Because the point of that article was to prove that alleged communications intercepts proving it was the Syrian government which was responsible for certain chemical weapons strikes in Syria were not genuine. I am very sceptical indeed about the claims being made today.
Does it not seem possible that the cryptic intercepted message may have referred to the 2 Skripals having left the UK, if they have actually been there all this time? It is possible they have been being carefully prepared already, by having appearances altered, to be removed, & that their pets, have not been put down, but sent with them. Hard to say if the Skripals are alive, but they may still be worth more to them alive, & can still be used if necessary. For instance if they were to make any statements, or give any carefully scripted interviews it would be surprising if the did not also outrightly blame Russia. However there is also the possibility that some kind of recording, & or voice technology could’ve been used to imitate Julia Skripals voice, but even if it was actually her, she would not have been able to say very much anyway, or ‘the cat could have got out of the bag’ as it were. it’s hard to say, whether they have been willing or unwilling accomplices in this, but it is also interesting that her boyfriend in Russia, also packed up all his things at least a couple of weeks ago, & allegedly went off to the country Dacha somewhere, & hasn’t been seen or heard from since. He may have been included, & or ‘in on it’ & have gone to be with the Julia, her dad, & the pets. The package delivered to Moscow, mentioned in the message, might be intelligence info, possibly another top secret tape of another call, about where they have been taken to. Apparently she & her father, (& very possibly the boyfriend), were communists, hate Putin & the present Russian Government, so they may have been quite willing accomplices in this whole deception, & or have been well rewarded. Whether she was a willing accomplice or not, Julia, could not now hardly go back to Russia. She would be in danger of being used by MI6, & assassinated to make it look like the Russians did it, but also, there are likely many just ordinary Russian people who would be very angry if she did blame Russia, & she could also be charged with treason in Russia as well. So she is caught now in a big trap, she knows too much, & they, MI6 & company, own her now, like they do her father, & possibly her boyfriend, unless he was ‘the package’ delivered to Moscow, if the Russians found him before he was able to join the Skripals.
Other members of the family may or my not have been ‘in on it’, if they were, they may have had a prearranged ‘code’ to convey some message. How was it that Viktoria was able to record the phone conversation with Julia so easily, if she had no prior knowledge that Julia was going to ring her? Meanwhile in true style of blaming everything on the Russians, no matter how illogical, in order to cover up what they are doing, & lead people off the track with a red herring, they have as usual, made the interpretation of the mysterious message into something to implicate the Russians in the ridiculous & very convoluted fantasy they have made up about the so called ‘novichok poisoning’. Poisoning a lot of people’s minds has been the main kind of poisoning that has been perpetrated here, in order to gain certain benefits. It remains to be seen if it was just a ‘playing for time’, strategy of misdirection, as is done in magic, & if so, what exactly they are busily putting in place next.. There are already a number of benefits, for one, they have used this successfully to put a stop to Russia using diplomacy to negotiate out of many major confrontations & ‘set ups’, by expelling all the diplomats. They have tried every trick in the book for so long, to harass, provoke & or trap Russia into responding in a military way in order to be used to justify a full on NATO, Israel & US attack on Russia on several fronts. I’m sure we have not heard the end of this, & repeating the lies over & over, not only confuses people so they don’t want to have to think about it, but continues to imprint the whole thing firmly in many people’s minds.
Dear Craig,
Can you comment on what the Mail Online wrote 9 April,
“It comes as the Mail on Sunday revealed the agent used to poison former Russian agent Mr Skripal and his daughter was specially designed to take ‘four hours to kill them’ so their assassins could flee Britain.”
Thank you
Not to mention that ’boutique Novichock’ is designed to take 4 hours to work on Russians but poisons English policeman instantly. Really clever stuff.
Rosli, the claim is utter bollocks.
Just for arguments sake let’s accept the notion that – somehow, via some unknown magic chemistry – the Russians have developed a nerve agent with a “delayed reaction”, and it is this magic elixir that they smeared on the door knob.
OK, fine, but then you have to accept the notion that the *amount* of exposure that they were both subjected to is going to be different depending – obviously – on how much they fondled that handle on their way out the door and how much hand-washing they carried out in the four hours subsequently.
You also have to accept the notion that if there is a “delayed reaction” then the onset of that “reaction” is going to vary depending on the very different physiology of the two victims (old vs young, male vs female, portly vs svelte, etc.).
(Or, put another way: if it was deadly then they would both fall down dead on exposure because, you know, “deadly”. Thump. Thud. But the longer the period then the greater will be the “spread” between when the first one falls down until when the second victim falls ill because, you know, “physiology”).
But that’s not how it played out: they left the house, felt fit as fiddles for four hours, and then BOTH of them succumbed as soon as they sat on that park bench.
No poison works that way because body chemistry doesn’t work that way: the agent is either so deadly that nobody stands a chance no matter how small the exposure or it isn’t that deadly – in which case different people will succumb at different times.
The story in the Mail on Sunday is “specially designed” to tell you an untruth.
The counterargument is that Putin’s stooges worked for 10 years to develop a poison with 4 hour delay feature so they could discover something that we do not know is possible. It could even have a feature of working much faster in a victim that recently digested Marmite. But then it would be a different substance from those known in Porton Down.
It is even more puzzling why an assassination plot would rely on “4 hour delay” rather than avoiding any clues concerning the perpetrator (or perpetrators). If he/she/they remain unknown, they have all time in the world to travel where they want, with an option to work or retire in England. And if news and leaks are not misleading, no such clues exist.
Hilarious, writing an article based on Daily Mails access to GCHQ secret communications is laughable, give up now!
I’d like to pose a question that I haven’t seen anyone else address: if the Russians wanted to kill an old man who is living alone in a house in Salisbury then why would they attempt to do so when he has a visitor – his daughter – staying with him?
Why not wait until she returns to Moscow and then bump him off?
After all, he wasn’t in hiding. He didn’t have any bodyguards. His movements were predictable.
Even if they needed to follow her to find Sergei Skripal (Why? He wasn’t in hiding) that still doesn’t account for why they had to do it while she was staying in the house.
Why not wait until Sergei took her to the airport and then smear the magic elixir on the door-knob before he returns?
That way he succumbs while slumped in his armchair, rather than on a public bench in a busy park.
Oh, I have thought about that, and there is a possible answer to it that is very ugly indeed.
Cross the Russian state and not only will you suffer for it, but your family will as well.
If the Russian State is that venal then why wait until after they have released Sergei Skripal into the tender care of MI6?
He was arrested, was he not?
He was found guilty of espionage, and incarcerated as a result, was he not?
Both he and his daughter were living in Russia during all that time of his incarceration, were they not?
So why not “suffer” them then when it would be effortless and nobody would be in any position to complain?
Why wait until they were in a foreign country before deciding that now is a good time to dish out that “suffering”?
Your explanation doesn’t make any sense at all.
As someone who survived WW2 and was at primary school with John Lennon and at present we have warmongering thugs in the West trying to start WW3 I think his Instant Karma is appropriate.Lets have Love instead of war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLy2SaSQAtA
@ Dave Lawton April 10, 2018 at 13:05
I also survived WWII – I was born in 1943. In 1967 I went on the Hippy Trail overland to India (mostly hitch-hiking, at least through Europe, a ten-month ‘trip’. Quite an awakening.
@Paul Barbara Yes those were great times.John Lennon put funds into International Times our counterculture underground paper and still going on line.Yes it was the great awakening.
Sergei Skripal obviously was not believed, either by himself or the British security agencies or police, to be in any danger whatsoever.
Not only was he living openly, not hiding his past, but his house does not appear to have either CCTV or an alarm system (I could see no sign of them from pics of the house, anyhow).
So how does he magically become a target? This case screams out ‘British False Flag Attack (or hoax)’, with the objective of smearing Putin and thus diluting his condemnation of CW False Flag ops by our proxy mercenary headchoppers in Syria. That has been my position since the outset. Russia and Syria were warning that new CW False Flag attacks were being planned, and even disrupted some, but of course no one wanted to know (actually, they already knew, because the headchoppers work to their and their allies’ agenda).
Paul, the Russians make the (to my mind, eminently sensible) observation that if Sergei Skripal represented any danger to the Russian state after his arrest then they would never have released him in a prison-swap – they would have left him incarcerated in a Russian cell.
At the time of his incarceration his residual value to the Russians consisted entirely in his value as a commodity to be swapped, and once the swap was made his value to the Russians would have dropped to…. zero.
That’s not to say that the Russians didn’t decide in 2018 that Skripal had to be eliminated. Maybe they did.
But it does mean that if they wanted him dead then it would be for something that he has done in the years AFTER he was released and settled down in Salisbury.
Nobody is asking that question: what has Sergei Skripal been up to since coming to Britain, and has he been Up To No Good?
You would think that a western investigative journalist would see value in investigating that line of questioning but, alas, no.
State stenographers, each and every one of them.
“Nobody is asking that question: what has Sergei Skripal been up to since coming to Britain, and has he been Up To No Good?”
The same question was mostly unasked by the MSM of Litvinenko. ‘A Fierce Critic of Putin’ was all you needed to know. Litvinenko did not author the book bearing his, ‘Blowing Up Russia’ – it was written by a Russian Jewish emigre living in New York. Berezovsky and Goldfarb thought it would sell better with a former spy’s name on it. Litvinenko’s second book project was a total dud and not even translated into English. After that his salary from the ‘Cultural Organisation’ ceased and he had to forage for other income. In the FSB, Litvinenko had specialised in financial crimes, blackmail and extortion . . .
As it happens, only one story was covered by the MSM – a blackmail gig he apparently offers to a journalist called Julia Svetlichnaya. The police did follow up this line of enquiry but it was dismissed by the CPS.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/dec/03/world.russia2
Equally, Yulia was in no danger in Moscow. She had spent some years in UK but had recently decided to make Moscow her preferred home with the renovation of an apartment and – according to the Russian press – planning a nursery.
The reporting has changed recently from the ‘horrific assault on the homeland’ to a ‘finely targeted attack’ . . . she has also magically become a target in need of our protection.
If she really was poisoned by Russian agents and only saved by the good people of Salisbury, wouldn’t there be at least one PR pic in the tabloids? Everyone remembers the picture of Litvinenko in his hospital bed and the headline, ‘The Bastards Got Me.’ In fact, large numbers of PR people were trooping in and out of Litvinenko’s room – actually very poor medical care for someone with failing immune systems.
Novichok must have come from Porton Down or a US lab. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4utEI2EU64
Hats off to Radio Scotland drive time interview with a former MI5 intelligence officer tonight. She was allowed to state her points and the presenter asked follow up questions to allow her to expand on some of them. As she agreed almost 100% with the points Craig made, it may disappear soon.
Credit where credit is due for a refreshing bit of honest reporting contradicting the official line.
Ooos, Newsdrive, not drive time. Will be on the iPlayer soon.
Does anyone think that the reason Yulia is kept away from the public is that she’s refusing to play ball with SIS and after her little stunt (chances are she was free to roam around and managed to borrow a phone off some unsuspecting passer-by most likely on the premises of the hospital if she was there) she’s being watched 24-7 for fear of her blowing the lid off this false flag?
I’ve thought this too because I am not sure our secret services or whatever they are would have told or wanted her to say that her father was ok and resting when she spoke with Viktoria Skripal and indeed it was only when she had said this the report came out that Sergei had woken up. Another thing is that the media keep saying is that the had woken up from a coma without clarifying that it was a medically induced coma they were in which is very different to being comatose.
V interesting analysis of Skripal case from a chemist’s perspective;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4utEI2EU64
I read it the other way around. That the two people were the Skripals.
“Two people successfully departed” [= into the next world]
however even the msm seems to be getting cautious about the story….? note the careful wording in this effort by the bbc frankgardner, beginning the retreat from gungho guillotine hysteria,,,,? reposted from the saker.,
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43710126
Analysis: Will Russia get access to Yulia Skripal?
By BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner
Unseen by the public, Yulia Skripal was discreetly discharged from hospital in Salisbury last night, hours ahead of this morning’s announcement.
She is understood to have been taken to a secure location somewhere in Britain while discussions take place over her future safety and protection.
For the UK government this could prove to be a delicate diplomatic problem. She is a Russian citizen and Moscow has been pressing for consular access.
But it is by no means clear where she will want to settle given her narrow escape from death in this failed assassination attempt on her and her father, Sergei.
Whitehall officials say reports that the Skripals are to be given a new identity in the US are premature.
Samples of the nerve agent have been tested by the Defence Chemical Biological Radiological and Nuclear Centre at Porton Down in Wiltshire, in an attempt to verify its source.
Its head said the precise source of the nerve agent had not been verified, but it was likely to have been deployed by a “state actor”.
A diplomatic crisis between Russia and the West has followed, with more than 20 countries expelling Russian envoys in solidarity with the UK.
Russia’s request for a new, joint investigation was voted down at the international chemical weapons watchdog at The Hague on 4 April.
Yulia and Sergei Skripal were taken to Salisbury District Hospital after being found slumped on a bench in Salisbury
Mr Skripal is a retired military intelligence officer who was convicted of passing the identities of Russian intelligence agents working undercover in Europe to the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.
He was jailed for 13 years by Russia in 2006, but was released in 2010 as part of an exchange for 10 Russian spies arrested by the FBI.
Ms Skripal regularly travelled from the UK and Moscow, and had returned from Russia the day before the pair were poisoned.
You say she’s a Russian Citizen? What if she’s now a UK Citizen too?
As we can read, extraordinary rendition procedures, which had previously been applied to islamic fighters, have been re-introduced for WITNESSES of criminal offenses! I wonder how the justice system will deal with this.
She’s a UK citizen now and refused to meet with the Russian Consulate.
According to whom? She hasn’t spoken a word in public save for the phone call she made. How do we even know the “statements” read on her behalf are actually hers? Time for the Russians go to the High Court and get the writ…
I was sceptical the first moment I heard about it. I have developed a sensitivity to propaganda emanating from the UK, Australian, Israeli and US governments, none of whose words I ever take at face value these days.
I find it more plausible that the Russians realised they were being spied upon, and by whom, and sent what might be “…. уходи по-английский” with few extra choice words that only Russians would understand.