The War That Came in From the Cold.

It is just appropriate, very appropriate, that the poison used in the attempted murder of former Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, was a nerve agent belonging to the Novichok group. It seems the cold war has been resurrected  from its very cold grave. And with it the old, thunderous, East-West spy fiction. James Bond, Len Deighton, Frederick Forsyth, Jeffrey Archer, John Le Carre... Check the name alone, Novichok, translated from Russian as newcomer. Only it wasn't a newcomer, the incredibly lethal chemical weapon having been manufactured by the old Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s. The same way there wasn't much pussy galore in Pussy Galore.
Honestly, it is difficult to tell at the beginning this wasn't fiction. A Russian double agent, a former double agent is the candidate for an extermination plot. We can still go along with the fact that the motive, or lack of it, simply makes the plot a very curious one. Sergei Skripal had been arrested and imprisoned by Russia for his treachery, had come to London as a result of a cold-war-style prisoner swap and has been living in his adopted country for a fairly long time without incident, save for the death of his son and wife. Deaths suspicion must now necessarily revisit. The common consensus is that he is no longer a valuable asset in the esoteric spy business. He no longer did active work for British intelligence and the access he had to secrets in Russia had long been blocked with his arrest. So why would Russia want to kill him? Why didn't they just execute him in the first place, when anger and outrage was still hot? Why now when his malfeasance has grown so forgotten and,  in fact, few remember him? Since it is fiction, we can still live with that and assume that the motive will reveal itself on later pages. We now move to the execution of the plot and this is where fiction, except extremely bad fiction, begins to fall apart. Fiction with its  smooth, seamless plots. It begins to crumble and hues of reality, cold, hard reality with its tangled contrivances begin to set in with its natural sloppiness. Even an amateur can see instantly that the execution of the plot is insanely sloppy. Why use an agent that could be so easily traced to Russia, a rare nerve gas that had Russia's signature sprawled all over it? Even more traceable than radioactive polonium, the agent used in the murder of Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko. Polonium, discovered  by the famous Marie Currie and named after her native Poland. Lethal it was but in all likelihood, it would have to be used in the open, air interference an issue, and there was simply no guarantee it would kill father and daughter at the same time. Even a rookie assassin would have done a better job. A murderer had left a trail of clues so wide and bright the great Sherlock Holmes or Hercules Poirot would have retired instantly.
All fingers now point at Russia. And even if this were a red herring contrived to embarrass Putin, Russia would still have a lot of explanation to do as to why such a deadly arsenal slipped out of its fingers.  But, in all reality, events emanating from the Skrikpal Affair are in the realm of conjectures and probabilities and it wouldn't do any harm to inject one now. Chemical agents have formulas, well-known to the designers. They are therefore not all that difficult to replicate. Former Soviet scientists have not been well treated and, in fact, some have shifted allegiance to other countries after the break-up of the Soviet Union. What if a determined plotter is able to buy a formula from a pressed or disgruntled scientist? At least one of these countries has an axe, serious axe, to grind with Russia. What if this sordid affair emanated from such a place? We are not mentioning names, just unleashing the amateur detective instincts that all of us possess.
Nobody is exonerating Russia here. At least until the facts are fully unraveled. Indeed someone has suggested that Russia intelligence might be sending warnings to would-be traitors that perfidious undertakings have serious consequences and that no betrayer will be allowed to enjoy the fruits of his exertions, whether in the long or short run.
That would be a very silly thing to do. The opprobrium such acts will attract far outweighs whatever the intended benefits of security. Benefits that could be secured with less money and effort and image damage by plugging the loopholes traitors exploit. The image of Mother Russia has suffered enough with the annexation of Crimea and notorious, worldwide, activities of Russian hackers and it will hardly improve with the grotesque knowledge and imagination of coarse Russian agents sneaking into the UK, hiring cars and smuggling chemical weapons all the way to Salisbury. Just imagine the MI6 carrying out similar plots on British traitors in Moscow!
The whole affair has been a very poor plot and an even poorer execution, stuff of very, very cheap fiction, and if it indeed finally emerges that it originated in Moscow, it would not only cast Putin into serious infamy but would also go a long way in reinforcing the image of Russian agents in cold war spy fictions as brutal, unthinking, muscular spies.