INTRODUCTION

This is Salibury, famous for its medieval cathedral, with the tallest spire in England reaching 123 metres into the sky Salisbury also has the oldest working clock, from the 14th century, and an original copy of the Magna Carta.

Salisbury is a picturesque cathedral city, nestled at the junction of five rivers in Wiltshire, England. Usually the city is a hive of tourist activity and is best known for its many historic landmarks, but on a cold mid-winter’s day in March 2018, Salisbury became the scene of one of the most intriguing and terrifying crimes of the past decade.

On the 4th March 2018, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia drove into the town centre and parked in the upper level car park at the Maltings. They then made their way to the Bishop’s Mill Pub for a drink before dining at Zizzi’s Pizza Restaurant.

After their meal they left the restaurant, walking the short distance around the corner and through an arcade to an open area by the river Avon. They were a curious duo and their behaviour soon began to draw attention.

Sergei was irate and restless. Despite the biting weather and the patches of snow that lay on the ground, he began to sweat profusely. They managed to make it to a bench at the waterfront where Yulia began to exhibit the same symptoms as her father.

Before long, their vision was impaired, and they had lost control of their bodily functions. Unable to sit up Yulia keeled over and laid her head in her father’s lap. Their breathing became laboured and they began to weave in and out of consciousness.

At first passers-by spared them a cursory glance before hurrying on their way. They assumed that they were junkies, drug addicts who were reeling from their latest hit. But then their behaviour began to draw concerned stares.

Maybe they had overdosed? They looked like they were both terribly ill. An onlooker made a call to emergency services and requested an ambulance. Then an army nurse, who happened to be passing by, stepped over to check on them. She was joined by another woman, a local doctor, and they began a quick assessment of the duo.

By now a little group had gathered around them, murmuring and gawking. Sergei and Yulia were worsening by the minute. The doctor and nurse struggled to find a pulse and their faces were draining of colour.

They feared that hypoxia, brain damage due to the lack of oxygen, would set in at any time. Minutes later paramedics and police officers arrived on the scene, carving a path through the concerned onlookers to get to Sergei and Yulia.

The paramedics joined the nurse and doctor already on the scene, and began to work on the two would-be junkies. The medical professionals, certain that this was a case of opioid overdose, began administering appropriate treatment in an attempt to stabilize them so that they could be moved to hospital.

But even as the ambulances loaded up their patients and sped towards the hospital, sirens blaring, police were discovering that this was not a routine case of opioid overdose. Police identified the two individuals on the bench as Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

A few phone calls later they found out that Sergei Skripal was a retired Russian double- agent who had been recruited to work for MI6, the secret intelligence service of the United Kingdom. For years Skripal had leaked Russian intelligence to the British.

Meanwhile, medical staff at the hospital began to realise that they were not dealing with a routine case of drug overdose. They suspected poisoning but they couldn’t determine the source. By 10am the next day, the chief executive of the hospital declared a Major Incident which allowed for the deployment of greater resources to deal with the situation at hand.

And just like that, what seemed to be two junkies, tripping out on a bench on a cold March day, turned into a terrifying labyrinth of chemical warfare, geopolitics, global intelligence gathering and a race against time to save two lives.

Join us this week as we take a look at the remarkable stories of two former Russian spies, and the diametrically opposing outcomes of their narratives.

SERGEI SKRIPAL

Sergei Skripal’s journey as a Russian defector began on a sweltering day in Madrid in the summer of 1996. Skripal was taking a walk with a friend, a Gibraltan businessman he had met during his stay in the city.

Skripal had been sent to Madrid as an undercover agent by the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency. Skripal’s cover in Madrid was as the 1st Secretary (Scientific and Technical) for the Russian embassy.

On this particular summer’s day Sergei’s friend made him a proposition. The man, who was actually a deep cover agent for MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service asked Sergei if he would be willing to provide Russian intelligence to the British.

Without hesitation Sergei agreed to the proposition. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sergei, like many others, had been disillusioned and frustrated with the changes taking

place around him. The upheaval planted seeds of defection in his mind which matured over the years.

When the MI6 agent approached him in Madrid, Sergei was ready to sell state secrets to the British. Speaking to a BBC journalist years later, he confided that he didn’t accept Russian democracy and was unwilling to serve the new government.

From that point forward Skripal’s journey with MI6 was fairly uneventful and travelled a predictable trajectory. He found ingenious ways of slipping the British spooks classified information, primarily using invisible ink and casual drop-offs through his wife overseas.

Then in 2006 everything fell apart when he was arrested and taken to Lefortovo, a prison in Moscow used for prisoners who were accused of political crimes like dissent, espionage and treason.

At Lefortovo, Sergei was charged with espionage and treason and relentlessly questioned for hours on end. He was tried and sentenced to 13 years of hard labour in a high security detention centre.

But Skripal’s journey was not to end in the obscurity of a Russian gulag. In 2010 he was released to the British as part of a prisoner swap and was resettled in the UK by MI6, which is how he came to be living in Salisbury at the time of the poisoning.

In March 2018, Russian assassins made their way to Skripal’s modest home in Salisbury, where they laced his doorknob with a nerve agent. Both Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who was visiting him from Russia, were exposed to the poison which began to produce symptoms a few hours later.

As Skripal and Yulia lay in a critical condition at the Salisbury Hospital, government and law enforcement officials in the UK scrambled to piece together what had happened to them. Their minds kept going back to another strikingly similar incident – the poisoning of Alexander Litvenenko, more than a decade before.

ALEXANDER LITVINENKO

Alexander Litvinenko was a former Russian FSB agent, working for the Russian Secret Service tackling organised crime. During his time as an agent Litvinenko openly accused the FSB of the assassination of Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky.

He was arrested several times and charged with exceeding the authority of his role, before being dismissed by the FSB in 2000. Fearing for his safety, he fled to the UK with his family where he became a journalist, writer and a consultant for MI6, the British secret service.

In November 2006 Litvinenko entered the Millennium Hotel in London’s Mayfair, where he was scheduled to meet an old colleague, another former Russian secret service agent named Andrei Lugovoi. He had another man, Dimitri Kovtun, in tow.

The men settled down in the hotel’s Pine Bar where they exchanged pleasantries and chatted. Knowing that Litvinenko was not a big drinker, Lugovoi ordered a pot of green tea. Towards the end of the meeting Logovoi gestured towards the untouched pot of tea and encouraged Litvinenko to have some.

Litvinenko obliged but he only took a few sips of the drink. After wrapping up the meeting the men parted ways and Litvinenko headed home. That night around 11pm, Litvinenko began to feel very sick.

Staggering to the bathroom he vomited violently and from then on began to throw up convulsively every twenty minutes. He was soon frothing at the mouth and in terrible pain. He did not however contact emergency services or make his way down to the hospital.

Almost 48 hours later, when his condition began to deteriorate rapidly, his wife called an ambulance and he was taken to the local hospital. His condition only worsened until, almost a week after his meeting with Lugovoi, his wife admitted to hospital staff that he may have been poisoned.

When detectives interviewed Litvenenko he confirmed his wife’s suspicions that he had been poisoned. He also alluded to his connection with the British Secret Service, quietly mentioning that he had a contact in MI6.

Two weeks after his admission to hospital Litvinenko was transferred to a hospital in central London. By then he was exhibiting symptoms that were similar to patients who had undergone intensive radiotherapy. His doctor made a note to radiology to check for radioactive sources of poisoning.

A Geiger counter was used to check for radioactivity, but picked up nothing. Then on the 21st of November, three weeks after he had first met Lugovoi, a pharmacist at the hospital suggested that a radioactive isotope may have been used to poison him.

Blood and urine samples were then sent to the British Atomic Weapons Institute in Aldermaston. Tests revealed the presence of a rare radioactive isotope; Polonium 210. A second test was conducted to confirm the findings before the results were released.

The confirmed results showed that Litvinenko had been poisoned using Polonium 210. Six hours after the results were released Litvinenko died in hospital after suffering from cardiac arrest. A post-mortem autopsy showed that Litvinenko had ingested Polonium 210, twice.

The first dose was 100 times smaller than the second dose which ultimately killed him. Police tracked Litvinenko’s movements back to the Pine Bar at the Millennium Hotel, where they found heavy Polonium 210 contamination.

As investigators began to dig into the case they discovered that Lugovoi had put Polonium into the green tea that he had given Litvinenko on that fateful November day.

Unfortunately for Litvinenko, his assassins, Lugovoi and Kovtun, used the perfect poison. Polonium is difficult to identify and extremely destructive, decimating cells inside the body and shutting down vital organs. It’s a ruthless killer which lacks an antidote and makes short work of its victim.

THE ANTIDOTE

Almost twelve years after Litvinenko’s murder, Sergei Skripal, also a former Russian intelligence officer who had defected to the United Kingdom and worked as a double agent for MI6, lay in a hospital bed fighting for his life.

As investigators and medical staff worked feverishly to unravel the mystery surrounding Skripal’s illness they began to piece together a grim picture. Several days after the incident, British Prime Minister Theresa May announced that the agent used to poison the Skripals was Novichok.

The three standard drugs used in this type of poisoning scenario are atropine, pralidoxime chloride and diazepam. Of these three atropine is most important when dealing with patients exposed to nerve agents.

In order for atropine to work most effectively, it needs to be administered quickly. When paramedics reached the Skripals on the 4 March they initially suspected an opioid overdose. They noticed that both Sergei and Yulia had very weak heart beats, and immediately administered atropine which is routinely used in such cases.

The dose given at the scene was small but significant and could very well have made the difference between life and death. Once they had a positive diagnosis of Novichok, doctors then began to flood their systems with atropine.

Yulia Skripal was discharged from hospital on the 9th of April, and her father Sergei was released on the 18th of May. A few days after Sergei was discharged from hospital, Yulia Skripal released a video in which she stated that she was lucky to be alive and thanked staff at the Salisbury hospital for their care.

DIFFERENT OUTCOMES

The cases of Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal bear many similarities. They were both Russian intelligence agents; Litvinenko worked for the FSB while Skripal worked for the GRU, the military arm of Russian intelligence.

They were both defectors. Litvinenko fled to the UK in the year 2000 after several arrests. When he arrived at Heathrow Airport he walked up to the first police officer he saw and said he was a Russian FSB agent seeking political asylum in the UK.

Skripal was recruited by MI6 as a double agent in 1996 when he was assigned with the codename FORTHWITH.

Litvinenko and Skripal were also poisoned on British soil in apparent assassination attempts authorised by the highest levels of Russian government. But the similarities between their cases ends here.

While Litvinenko was poisoned by a radioactive isotope which had no antidote, Skripal was poisoned by a nerve agent that had an easily accessible antidote. Litvinenko died because his assassins used the perfect weapon; a poison that had no cure. Skripal lived because his assassins, for whatever reason, chose not to use such a deadly weapon.

ANOTHER DEADLY POISON

The Bible talks about an insidious poison, weaponized to ensure the maximum level of devastation on all who come into contact with it. It’s called Sin. A debilitating agent that soaks into the deepest recesses of the human mind, making us incapable of thinking clearly.

The Bible describes sin in various ways but perhaps the most striking illustration of sin is found in Isaiah 14:12-13 where the Bible describes Satan or Lucifer, the author and originator of sin.

Before he was Satan, Lucifer was a magnificent angel in heaven, revered by all the heavenly host and honoured by God. But Isaiah 14:12-14 describes the reasons behind his fall:

“How you are fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! For you have said in your heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.”

The key element that makes sin such a debilitating and destructive poison is selfishness. A relentless, gnawing self-interest that drives all those who are affected by it to seek their own exaltation at the expense of everyone else.

The destructive effect of sin on the human psyche can be seen in the results of various different studies conducted in the areas of social psychology and behavioural economics in recent years.

For example, in a fascinating paper on psychological or moral licensing, Stanford University researchers Daniel Effron and Dale Miller make some interesting assertions.

Their research focuses on the theory that people often give themselves permission to exhibit morally questionable behaviour, such as lying or expressing racist attitudes, if they feel that they can do so without discrediting themselves.

In other words, people are prone to do the wrong thing if they can justify it or get away with it without being caught. This theory is also explored by behavioural economist Dan Ariely.

Ariely’s research shows that human beings generally make choices that are influenced by self-interest, rather than what is morally right or wrong. Much of this research exposes the inherent inconsistencies and eccentricities within the human mind. The Bible calls this self- interest Sin and makes a startling statement about it in Jeremiah 17:9:

“The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?”

This verse highlights three key points that summarise the biggest problems associated with sin. Firstly, it tells us that sin leads us to lie to ourselves. Secondly it tells us that the human heart has been compromised by sin, impairing our ability to make good choices.

And thirdly, the Bible tells us that sin is difficult to detect, much like the radioactive polonium 210 isotope that was given to Alexander Litvinenko. But unlike Polonium, sin has an antidote that can completely transform our hearts and minds and set us on the road to complete recovery.

THE REMEDY

Now, while the Bible tells us in Romans 3:23 that all have sinned, and in Romans 6:23 that the wages of sin is death, it also gives us hope. In John 3:16 the Bible tells us:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

Jesus is the antidote to the insidious poison of sin, and his death and power can save us from its devastating effects. He can bring physical, mental and emotional healing where sin has ravaged a trail of disease. He can bring hope where sin has brought despair and death.

The Bible tells us that the poison of sin has many facets. Two of the most important facets are the penalty of sin, and the power of sin. Jesus is able to deliver us from both of these facets and give us complete freedom. Hebrews 2:14 tells us this:

“Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same; that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil;”

Jesus became a man so that he might deliver us from the penalty of sin which is eternal death. Through Jesus we have the assurance that the power of death can have no hold on us,

and we can look forward with hope to an eternity with him. Notice what the Bible says later in Hebrews 2:18:

“Because He Himself suffered when He was tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted.”

You see, Jesus knows what we have to deal with when we battle against sin, and not only does He know, He is also able to help us with our struggles and give us the grace to overcome.

While Sergei Skripal and Alexander Litvinenko both battled against deadly poisons that ravaged their bodies, only one of them survived. Only one of them was able to overcome.
Skripal was saved because he was given an antidote.

That was the only delineating feature in their stories. One of them had an antidote and the other didn’t. Both Novichock and Polonium were deadly poisons damaging cells and shutting down vital organs.

But while Novichok was countered by the effects of atropine there wasn’t a sufficiently strong agent to counteract the devastating effects of Polonium. Alexander Litvinenko died without an antidote.

And the Bible tells us that each of us has been infected by the poison of sin. It’s a debilitating agent that can bring us to our knees and blot out any hope that we may have of eternal life. But the good news is that God has provided us with an antidote!

Through the life, death and resurrection of His son Jesus, God offers us the antidote that we so desperately need, and with it the amazing hope of eternal life. All we need to do is reach out and grab hold of it. So, what are we waiting for? Jesus tells us this in Revelation 3:20:

“Behold I stand at the door and knock, if any man hear my voice and open the door I will come into him and dine with him.”

Jesus is knocking on the door of your heart. Why don’t you choose to let him in today?

SPECIAL OFFER

If you’d like to accept the gift that Jesus offers, if you’d like to experience the real hope and happiness it brings, then I’d like to recommend the free gift we have for all our Incredible Journey viewers today.

It’s the booklet, Atonement. I’m sure you will want to read this booklet that explores how Jesus has the power over sin and strife in our world today, and in our own hearts. This is our gift to you and is absolutely free. I guarantee there are no costs or obligations whatsoever. So, make the most of this wonderful opportunity to receive the gift we have for you today.

PRAYER

Be sure to join us again next week, when we will share another of life’s journeys together. Until then, I wish you God’s richest blessings and invite you to join me as we pray.

Dear Heavenly Father. Thank you for the offer of salvation that you give us. Thank you for the precious gift of eternal life. We reach out to you today and accept your offer. We want to give you our lives, and we ask these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.