The Skripal Files, Mark Urban
The Skripal Files, Mark Urban
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The Skripal Files
The Life and Near Death of a Russian Spy

Author: Mark Urban

Narrator: Mark Urban

Unabridged: 9 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/02/2018


Synopsis

This program is read by the author.

The explosive story of the poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and what it reveals about the growing clandestine conflict between the West and Russia.

Salisbury, England: March 4, 2018.

Slumped on a bench, paralyzed and barely able to breathe, were a former Russian intelligence officer named Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. Sergei had been living a quiet life in England since 2010, when he was expelled from Russia as part of a spy swap; he had been serving a lengthy prison sentence for working secretly for the British intelligence agency MI6. On this Sunday afternoon, he and his daughter had just finished lunch at a local restaurant when they started to feel faint. Within minutes they were close to death.

The Skripals had been poisoned, not with a familiar toxin but with Novichok, a deadly nerve agent developed in southern Russia. Was this a message from the Kremlin that traitors would not escape violent death, even on British soil? As Sergei and Yulia fought for their lives, and the British government and their allies sought answers, relations between the West and Russia descended to a new low.

The Skripal Files is a remarkable and definitive account of Sergei Skripal’s story, which lays bare the new spy war between Russia and the West. Mark Urban, the diplomatic and defense editor for the BBC, met with Skripal in the months before his poisoning, learning about his career in Russian military intelligence, how he became a British agent, his imprisonment in Russia, and the events that led to his release. Skripal’s first-hand accounts and experiences reveal the high stakes of a new spy game that harks back to the chilliest days of the Cold War.

About Mark Urban

Mark Urban is Diplomatic and Defense Editor of the BBC’s Newsnight. He has covered many of the world’s conflicts during the past twenty-five years, including the Iraq campaign that began in 2003. He lives in London.


Reviews

Goodreads review by James on October 24, 2018

I have to confess to having been a little dubious of a book published on the Skripals this soon after the events surrounding their near death. At the time of publication, the online investigators of Bellingcat had only just unearthed the identities of their alleged GRU poisoners and I doubted this w......more

Goodreads review by Star on August 31, 2022

A scary look at the vendettas against previous Russian spies. They'll get you even after you've "retired". So much information just about shorted out my brain. Some parts I had to read over and over to understand, but I'm glad I did.......more

Goodreads review by Morag on January 13, 2021

Only criticism is that i'd like more time to have been spent on the fatality, Dawn Sturgess. Maybe there's no more to know but I felt her story was glossed over......more

Goodreads review by Translator on March 03, 2019

This book was published so (relatively) quickly after the entire Skripal poisoning affair and the fallout thereafter that I thought it was surely going to be a slap-dash affair, cobbled together from random sources and reading as though it were put together by an amateur sleuth. We've all read rushe......more

Goodreads review by Andrew on July 17, 2020

As described in the introduction, this is a book about an "East-West spy battle that had barely slackened after the end of the Cold War". Originally it was going to focus on the story of Operation Ghost Stories, the 2010 FBI operation that resulted in the capture of ten Russian sleeper agents in the......more