MOSCOW/AMSTERDAM--The British government says Russia is to blame for poisoning former spy Sergei Skripal with a nerve agent, and most chemical weapons specialists agree.
But they say an alternative explanation cannot be ruled out: that the nerve agent got into the hands of people not acting for the Russian state. The Soviet Union's chemical weapons programme was in such disarray in the aftermath of the Cold War that some toxic substances and know-how could have got into the hands of criminals, say people who dealt with the programme at the time.
"Could somebody have smuggled something out?" said Amy Smithson, a biological and chemical weapons expert. "I certainly wouldn't rule that possibility out, especially a small amount and particularly in view of how lax the security was at Russian chemical facilities in the early 1990s."
While nerve agents degrade over time, if the pre-cursor ingredients for the nerve agent were smuggled out back then, stored in proper conditions and mixed recently, they could still be deadly in a small-scale attack, two experts on chemical weapons told Reuters.
Accounts of security deficiencies at weapons facilities indicate that, at least for a period in the 1990s, Moscow was not in firm control of its chemical weapons stockpiles or the people guarding them. When Russian banking magnate Ivan Kivelidi and his secretary died in 1995 from organ failure after a military-grade poison was found on the telephone receiver of his Moscow office, an employee of a state chemical research institute confessed to having secretly supplied the toxin.
In a closed-door trial, Kivelidi's business partner was convicted of poisoning Kivelidi over a dispute. At the trial, prosecutors said the business partner had obtained the poison, via several intermediaries, from Leonard Rink, an employee of a state chemical research institute known as GosNIIOKhT. The same institute, according to Vil Mirzayanov, a Soviet chemical weapons scientist who later turned whistleblower, was part of the state chemical weapons programme and helped develop the "Novichok" family of nerve agents that Britain has said was responsible for poisoning Skripal.
In a statement to investigators after his arrest, viewed by Reuters, Rink said he was in possession of poisons created as part of the chemical weapons programme which he stored in his garage. On more than one occasion, he said, he sold the substances to supplement his income and pay down a debt.
The poison in the Kivelidi case was sold in a deal brokered by an ex-policeman contact of Rink's. Rink handed over the poison, in an ampoule hidden inside a pen presentation box, in a meeting at Moscow's Belorussky station, according to his statement.
Rink received a one-year suspended prison sentence for "misuse of powers," according to Boris Kuznetsov, who was a lawyer for Kivelidi's business partner during the trial. Kuznetsov said he believed his client was innocent, and that Kivelidi was poisoned by rogue intelligence officers acting without the knowledge of the Russian president at the time, Boris Yeltsin.
He added that he would share files from the case with the British authorities, because he believed they could be relevant to the Skripal investigation. Reuters was not able to contact Rink.
The Soviet chemical weapons programme was a sprawling operation spread across far-flung provincial cities that incorporated the world's largest chemical arsenal, publicly declared at 40,000 tonnes. When the Soviet Union ceased to exist, funding dried up, scientists' salaries were in several months of arrears, staff morale slumped and facilities were left to fend for themselves with little government control or oversight.
According to a 1995 report published by the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington security think-tank, and based on accounts from industry insiders, physical security at the facilities was deficient. It said railroad entrances to the facilities were padlocked but unguarded, and at some sites chemical weapons were stored in buildings with wooden doors and tiled roofs that an intruder could get into with little difficulty.
Chemical weapons were stored in silos without tamper-proof seals, making it difficult to detect if small quantities were being siphoned off.
A second report by the Stimson Center four years later highlighted the risk of Soviet chemical weapons scientists - who earned a pittance when they were paid at all - being recruited by criminals, terrorists, or rogue states. "All the ingredients for successful black marketeering are present through the chemical and biological complexes - under- or unemployed, scientists and managers, valuable commodities at far-flung locations, and poor security," the report said.
In some cases in the early 1990s, highly toxic chemical agents wound up outside Russian territory, in ex-Soviet facilities in newly-independent states such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. According to Mirzayanov, the former Soviet chemical weapons scientist, the "Novichok" family of nerve agents developed by the GosNIIOKhT institute was tested in Nukus, Uzbekistan.
