The Skripal Files

A Sunday Times Best Book of 2018 Agent. Prisoner. Target. Who is Sergei Skripal? 4 March 2018, Salisbury, England. A man and his daughter are found slumped on a bench, poisoned by the deadly nerve agent Novichok. He was a Russian national who became an MI6 spy. Russia are publicly accused of carrying out the attack by the British government, sparking a diplomatic crisis between Russia and the West. Then two innocent people find a discarded perfume bottle used in the attack and one of them, Dawn Sturgess, tragically dies. It is now a murder investigation. How exactly did we get here? Based on interviews with Sergei before his poisoning, Mark Urban explains the most shocking espionage incident in a decade. In The Skripal Files he describes precisely how an otherwise loyal Russian intelligence officer was turned into an agent by MI6, how Skripal was betrayed so that he found himself in a Siberian prison, and why, years later, he was targeted for assassination. 'An account that reads as if it were ripped from a Cold War spy novel' TIME 'Other books will follow on the Skripals, but they will struggle to match the texture of Urban's research, its knowledgeable hinterland' The Times von Urban, Mark