Craig Murray and Salisbury – a case of crackpot conspiracism

Craig Murray is a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who was removed from his post in 2004 amid controversy over his admirable refusal to keep quiet about the human rights violations committed by the Karimov regime. Understandably, in view of this experience, Murray has developed a sharply critical attitude towards British foreign policy and the propaganda used to justify it. Unfortunately this often leads him to a blanket rejection of official government statements in favour of ill-founded conspiracy theories. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in Murray’s obsessive campaign to deny Russian state complicity in the nerve agent attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury on 4 March.

The Salisbury attack as a ‘false flag’ operation

Murray’s automatic response to the attack on the Skripals was to dismiss the clear parallels with the Litvinenko murder as “rather too pat and obvious” and to suggest that it “could be a false flag set-up”. This was posted the day after the attack. He followed it up on 7 March by accusing the Guardian of engaging in a cover-up by “totally failing to mention the fact that incident took place only eight miles from the largest stock of nerve agent in western Europe” — namely at the MOD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down. Murray accepted that the use of a nerve agent did imply state involvement in the attack, and added: “But the elephant in the room is — which state?”

The clear implication here was that the Skripals were the victims of a false flag attack carried out by the British security services with the assistance of Porton Down, aimed at framing the Russian government. As to the possible motive for this operation, Murray tweeted: “Russophobia is extremely profitable to the armamaments, security and spying industries and Russophobia reinforces intellectually challenged voters in their Tory loyalty. Ramping Russophobia is the most convincing motive for the Skripal attack.”

The idea that Salisbury’s geographical proximity to Porton Down provided supporting evidence for the existence of a state-organised plot to frame the Russian government for murder was really quite laughable. You can imagine the scene. A group of intelligence agents and scientists are sitting around a table at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory HQ discussing potential victims for their false flag operation. They struggle to come up with an appropriate target. Then someone says: “Hang about, doesn’t that former Russian spy Sergei Skripal live in Salisbury?” The intelligence officer in charge bangs the table: “By Jove, you’re right. That’s just down the road. How convenient. We could pop round to his house, contaminate it with a nerve agent of a type developed in Russia, and be back in time for tea.”

Even some of Murray’s fellow conspiracy theorists questioned this particular fantasy. “I believe that Craig Murray is wrong”, the anonymous author of the Moon of Alabama blog wrote. “Russophobia can be stoked without attempting to publicly kill a retired spy and his daughter.” Instead, MoA pointed to a report in the Telegraph, also published on 7 March, which referred to links between Sergei Skripal and an unnamed security expert, identified elsewhere as Skripal’s former MI6 handler Pablo Miller, who reportedly also lived in Salisbury. Miller worked for Orbis Business Intelligence, a company run by another former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele, which was responsible for compiling the famous dossier on Donald Trump. On the basis of the link with Miller, the MoA author theorised that Skripal might have contributed to the Trump dossier. He drew the following conclusion:

“If there is a connection between the dossier and Skripal, which seems very likely to me, then there are a number of people and organizations with potential motives to kill him. Lots of shady folks and officials on both sides of the Atlantic were involved in creating and running the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign. There are several investigations and some very dirty laundry might one day come to light. Removing Skripal while putting the blame on Russia looks like a convenient way to get rid of a potential witness.”

Murray apparently found this evidence-free hypothesis highly persuasive. In his next article on the subject, posted on 13 March, he quietly dumped the theory of a false flag operation organised from Porton Down and eagerly took up Skripal’s possible connection with Orbis Business Intelligence, asserting that it was “very probable” that Pablo Miller was involved in compiling the Trump dossier and “even more probable” that Sergei Skripal contributed to it. Murray continued:

“But the problem with double agents like Skripal, who give intelligence for money, is that they can easily become triple agents and you never know when a better offer is going to come along. When Steele produced his dodgy dossier, he had no idea it would ever become so prominent and subject to so much scrutiny…. But with the stakes very high, having a very loose cannon as one of the dossier’s authors might be most inconvenient both for Orbis and for the Clinton camp. If I was the police, I would look closely at Orbis Intelligence.”

Mind you, Murray was still hedging his bets at this point. In the same article that pointed the finger at Orbis he also suggested that the Skripals could easily have been targeted by Mossad:

“Israel has the nerve agents. Israel has Mossad which is extremely skilled at foreign assassinations. Theresa May claimed Russian propensity to assassinate abroad as a specific reason to believe Russia did it. Well Mossad has an even greater propensity to assassinate abroad. And while I am struggling to see a Russian motive for damaging its own international reputation so grieviously, Israel has a clear motivation for damaging the Russian reputation so grieviously. Russian action in Syria has undermined the Israeli position in Syria and Lebanon in a fundamental way, and Israel has every motive for damaging Russia’s international position by an attack aiming to leave the blame on Russia.”

Conceding that “both the Orbis and Israeli theories are speculations”, Murray added: “But they are no more a speculation, and no more a conspiracy theory, than the idea that Vladimir Putin secretly sent agents to Salisbury to attack Skripal with a secret nerve agent.” Yeah, right.

In a 14 April blog post Murray went on to expand his list of Salisbury suspects to include the US and Saudi Arabia. Skripal’s link to Pablo Miller and Orbis was temporarily forgotten, and it was now the war in Syria that took centre stage. “I have always denied the UK’s claim that only Russia had a motive to attack the Skripals”, Murray wrote. “To denigrate Russia internationally by a false flag attack pinning the blame on Russia, always seemed to me more likely than for the Russians to do that to themselves. And from the start I pointed to the conflict in Syria as a likely motive. That puts Saudi Arabia (and its client jihadists), Saudi Arabia’s close ally Israel, the UK and the USA all in the frame in having a powerful motive in inculcating anti-Russian sentiment prior to planned conflict with Russia in Syria. Any of them could have attacked the Skripals.”

(It will come as no surprise, by the way, that Murray is one of those cranks who repeatedly tries to deny the Assad regime’s horrific use of chemical weapons against civilians in opposition-held territory in Syria. These attacks, too, are all apparently false flag operations, conducted by “jihadists” — a term Murray applies to the entire Syrian opposition, including the White Helmets — in co-operation with their supposed western and Saudi sponsors. The objective of these operations is to frame poor President Assad for war crimes he didn’t commit and provide a pretext for US military intervention.)

Two weeks later, however, the Syrian connection had been put aside as a likely motive and Murray was back to the Orbis conspiracy. Talk of all theories being mere speculation had been abandoned too. In a 28 April blog post he wrote (emphasis added) that it was “extremely probable that this whole incident is related to the Trump dossier and that Skripal had worked on it. The most probable cause is that Skripal — who you should remember had traded the names of Russian agents to Britain for cash — had worked on the dossier with Miller but was threatening to expose its lies for cash.”

By July, however, the theory that the Orbis dossier was behind the Skripals’ poisoning had been demoted from “extremely probable” to a mere “possibility”, and Murray was back to hedging his bets again. He wrote:

“The obvious motive is to attempt to blame and discredit Russia. Those who might wish to do this include Ukraine and Georgia, with both of which Russia is in territorial dispute, and those states and jihadist groups with which Russia is in conflict in Syria. The NATO military industrial complex also obviously has a plain motive for fueling tension with Russia. There is of course the possibility that Skripal was attacked by a private gangster interest with which he was in conflict, or that the attack was linked to Skripal’s MI6 handler Pablo Miller’s work on the Orbis/Steele Russiagate dossier on Donald Trump.”

So, over the course of a few months, Murray named British intelligence agencies, the commissioners of the Trump dossier, Mossad, Saudi Arabia, Syrian “jihadists”, NATO, Ukraine, Georgia and Russian gangsters as possible authors of the attack on the Skripals. The only consistency here has been Murray’s insistence on disparaging any evidence of Russian state involvement by promoting alternative wild theories of his own, none of which had any evidential basis.

Boshirov, Petrov and ‘doctored’ evidence

Following the identification last month of two Russian suspects in the Salisbury attack — named by the government and police as Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov — Murray enthusiastically resumed his campaign to discredit the official narrative, with his usual contempt for empirical evidence and objective analysis.

First of all, Murray tweeted two poorly reproduced images of Boshirov and Petrov, and suggested that there was something sinister about the inferior quality of the photos: “To get UK visa, Ruslan Borishov and Alexander Petrov had to submit high grade clear passport photos against a plain white background. So why has HMG issued deliberately foggy photos with dark areas around eyes and murky background, way below accepted for UK visa standard?”

This got over two thousand retweets. But an hour later, having carried out the sort of basic checks that he should have done in the first place, Murray followed up with a further tweet: “I withdraw this. These are photos as issued by the Guardian. What the Met originally issued was much clearer.”

Murray then moved on to question the CCTV images the Metropolitan Police had provided of the two suspects passing through Gatwick airport on arrival in the UK, both of which had the same timestamp. In an article titled “The Impossible Photo”. Murray commented sarcastically: “Russia has developed an astonishing new technology enabling its secret agents to occupy precisely the same space at precisely the same time.”

He continued: “These CCTV images released by Scotland yard today allegedly show Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Borishov both occupying exactly the same space at Gatwick airport at precisely the same second…. There is no physically possible explanation for this. You can see ten yards behind each of them, and neither has anybody behind for at least ten yards. Yet they were both photographed in the same spot at the same second. The only possible explanations are: 1) One of the two is travelling faster than Usain Bolt can sprint 2) Scotland Yard has issued doctored CCTV images/timeline. I am going with the Met issuing doctored images.”

Numerous critics immediately identified the flaws in this analysis. They pointed out that Boshirov and Petrov could have used parallel gates, so would not have been “occupying exactly the same space at Gatwick airport at precisely the same second”. Indeed, it was clear from the different camera angles in the two images that the men were in fact using separate channels. In addition, Murray appeared to be making the bizarre claim that the police had taken the trouble to produce doctored images, but had exposed their own handiwork by carelessly omitting to ensure that the images had different timestamps. A succinct takedown of Murray’s argument by Brian Whitaker can be found here.

Murray’s initial response to his critics was to add an update noting their objections, but questioning whether it was credible that Boshirov and Petrov were “coming through different though completely identical entry channels” because of “the extreme synchronicity” required to produce the identical timestamps. He then appears to have had second thoughts, and added a further update in which he stated: “I am prepared to acknowledge that, given the gate design, they could have passed through different gates in exact synchronicity and this may be a red herring. I am leaving this post up here as it is good to acknowledge mistakes.”

However, undeterred by the exposure of his shoddy research and reasoning, Murray had no hesitation in referring his readers to a third article he had written, titled “Skripals — The Mystery Deepens”, in which he again challenged the official interpretation of events.

Boshirov, Petrov and Murray’s timeline

According to CCTV evidence released by the police, Boshirov and Petrov arrived in Salisbury at 11.48am on Sunday 4 March, before being captured on camera again ten minutes later passing a Shell petrol station on Wilton Road heading away from the town centre. A footpath opposite the petrol station leads to Montgomery Gardens, which in turn leads to Christie Miller Road where Sergei Skripal’s house is situated. The allegation is that the men were on their way to the house, where they contaminated the door handle with a nerve agent, with which the Skripals made contact when they entered and/or left the house. Murray’s contention was that this couldn’t have happened, because the Skripals were not at home at that time.

Basing his analysis on a “very useful timeline” from the BBC, Murray wrote: “At 09.15 on Sunday 4 March the Skripals’ car was seen on CCTV driving through three different locations in Salisbury…. There is no CCTV footage that indicates the Skripals returning to their home…. The Skripals were next seen on CCTV at 13.30, driving down Devizes road. After that their movements were clearly witnessed or recorded until their admission to hospital.” Let us examine this chronology in more detail.

Their early morning car journey (for which no CCTV evidence has yet been produced) would have taken the Skripals along Wilton Road towards the centre of Salisbury, which they bypassed via Churchill Way North, before heading north-east away from the town centre along London Road. If they did make this trip they were presumably on their way to the cemetery where Sergei Skripal’s wife Liudmila and son Alexander are buried. While Murray finds it suspicious that the Skripals had reportedly turned off their mobile phones that morning, and suggests this may have been an “attempt to avoid surveillance”, a more innocent explanation would be that they didn’t want to take calls while visiting their family members’ graves or have the occasion disrupted by their phones ringing.

Murray states that the Skripals were “next seen” when their car was caught by a CCTV camera as it passed the Devizes Inn pub, heading down Devizes Road towards the town centre from the north-west. The Daily Mirror, which published the video clip on its website, gives the time as 1.35pm. (The timestamp was evidently slightly out.)

Devizes Road is to the north of Sergei Skripal’s house in Christie Miller Road, whereas the Skripals’ early morning travels would have taken them down Wilton Road to the south. How did their car get onto Devizes Road? Where did it come from? What route did the Skripals follow before their car was caught by CCTV passing the Devizes Inn on their way into town? Murray has shown no interest in these questions. However, from a cursory glance at a map of Salisbury, the most obvious explanation would be that their afternoon excursion had started at Sergei Skripal’s house.

If that was so, the Skripals would have taken the following route. Having turned right out of Christie Miller Road they would have driven to the top of India Avenue, before doing another right turn into Devizes Road and heading towards the town centre, passing the Devizes Inn security camera on their way. The journey from Sergei Skripal’s house to the Devizes Inn is only three-quarters of a mile and would have taken a matter of minutes.

In fact the Mirror published further CCTV footage, ignored by Murray, which confirms this theory. It shows a burgundy BMW identical to Sergei Skripal’s travelling north up India Avenue at 1.33pm. (The timestamp says 2.55pm but the Mirror report states that it was 1hr 22mins out.) The CCTV camera overlooks the back gate of 73 Macklin Road, which is only four hundred yards from the Skripals’ home. The gate can be seen here on Google Street View. Swing right so you’re facing down India Avenue in the direction the car came from. That red brick building at the bottom of the road is at the entrance to Christie Miller Road.

The details of the Skripals’ morning journey remain frustratingly vague, and unsubstantiated by any released CCTV footage. Assuming that it did take place, though, we can be certain that they returned home, because we know they left the house just after 1.30pm and headed into the town centre, via India Avenue and Devizes Road. On arrival at 1.40pm they parked their car at Sainsbury’s in the Maltings shopping centre, and had a drink at The Mill pub followed by a meal at the Zizzi restaurant, before being found collapsed on a bench at 4.15pm, after being poisoned with a nerve agent identified as novichok.

Having been caught on CCTV just round the corner from the Skripal house at 11.58am, Boshirov and Petrov were next spotted back in the town centre, walking down Fisherton Street towards the train station, at 1.05pm and 1.08pm. (The Daily Mail published CCTV footage of the two men outside Dauwalder’s stamps and coins shop, which is situated in Fisherton Street in between the other two locations.) So it is entirely compatible with this timeline that Boshirov and Petrov could have applied the nerve agent to the door of Sergei Skripal’s house at some point after noon, and that this was how the Skripals were poisoned. Murray’s assertion that the Skripals could not have been targeted in this way, because they weren’t at home then, doesn’t hold up.

Murray had no excuse for ignoring the India Avenue CCTV footage. If you search for skripal car cctv on Google, one of the first links that comes up is to the Mirror report (“Haunting CCTV shows ex-spy Sergei Skripal and daughter driving into town hours before being found poisoned”). In addition, Channel 4’s FactCheck published an article on 7 September that drew attention to this evidence. Yet Murray continued to assert that there was no evidence of the Skripals’ whereabouts between their early morning journey to London Road and the Devizes Inn sighting, and that consequently “there has never been any indication that the Skripals returned to their home”. Murray was obviously more interested in cooking up conspiracy theories than in doing some basic research into the subject.

Boshirov and Petrov – sightseeing tourists or GRU operatives?

The notorious 13 September RT interview with Ruslan Boshirov and Aleksandr Petrov, in which they presented their tale of being simple tourists visiting Salisbury for entirely innocent purposes, interested only in seeing the area’s historical sights, provoked widespread ridicule. But not from Craig Murray, who found their story entirely credible.

For Murray, there was nothing suspicious about the fact that on 4 March the two Russians arrived in Salisbury at 11.48am and were caught on CCTV ten minutes later walking west down Wilton Road, just round the corner from Sergei Skripal’s house. There are no tourist sites that could be accessed by that route — the cathedral, which was one of the stated objectives of Boshirov and Petrov’s visit to Salisbury, is in quite another direction, to the south-east of the station. Yet Murray declared that there was “nothing inherently improbable in the tale told by the two men” and that “their demeanour throughout the photographs is consistent with their tourism story”.

The most Murray was prepared to concede was that Boshirov and Petrov were “not being entirely open” about their trip to the UK. However, he thought there was an alternative explanation: “Most likely interpretation of that is that they are a gay couple – not a good thing to admit in Russia, sadly – and that they are involved in the dodgy end of the bodybuilding supplements trade.”

When a Bellingcat investigation uncovered the real identities of Boshirov and Petrov, revealing them to be GRU officers Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin, Murray just tried to undermine Bellingcat’s findings by poking holes in their research. After they located a portrait of Chepiga among a display of Heroes of the Russian Federation he immediately denounced this as “very obviously fake”, claiming that the lighting was wrong and the Chepiga photograph was out of chronological sequence.

“Craig, you’re REALLY bad at this”, Aric Toler of Bellingcat tweeted in response. “Try again. We found the same photo from multiple photos, from many angles, from different accounts, from different years.” Toler pointed to a photo posted on the Russian social media platform Odnoklassniki 15 months earlier as an example, and asked: “Do you think that we planted this photograph back in 2017, waiting for Chepiga to go try and poison Skripal, then use it to blow his identity?”

This is how Murray operates. Any interpretation of events that undermines the UK government narrative is eagerly embraced, however ridiculous it might be, but hard evidence in support of the view that the Russian state was responsible for poisoning the Skripals is dismissed out of hand.

Conclusion

You might think that the incoherence and sometimes outright absurdity of Craig Murray’s analysis of the Salisbury attack would have completely discredited him. But you’d be wrong.

Aaron Bastani of Novara Media has hailed Murray as “the only person who conducted anything resembling investigative journalism around the Skripal story”, while George Galloway applauded Murray’s ill-researched “Skripals — The Mystery Deepens” piece as “brilliant forensic work”. Jonathan Cook has written that Murray was “almost alone in asking troubling questions about the British government’s strenuous efforts — in the absence of any obvious evidence — to put Russia in the frame for the poisoning of the Skripals”, and complained that “anyone like Murray who thinks critically — who assumes that the powerful will seek to promote their interests and avoid accountability — is instantly dismissed as a conspiracy theorist or in Putin’s pocket”.

This is a sorry reflection on a section of the left, who have themselves lost the capacity for critical thinking and believe that a knee-jerk rejection of government statements and mainstream media coverage as all just lying propaganda is an adequate substitute for independent and objective analysis. The warm reception given to Murray’s idiocies is just one more example of that depressing trend.