Ex-MI5 Officer -Russia Had No Motive To Harm Double Agent Sergei Skripal

A Former MI5 agent has dismissed claims by the British Prime Minister Theresa May that the nerve agent, alleged to have been used to attack former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal, must have originated from Russia.

In an interview with Russia Today, Annie Machon also said that Russia had ‘absolutely no motive to harm Skripal

It’s no wonder the Tories are so desperate to ban RT

The former MI5 intelligence officer ignored calls from politicians to boycott the TV network in the midst of the Skripal scandal, sitting down with RT to discuss the latest in the Salisbury case. While many pointed the finger at Moscow after it was alleged that the weapon was a military-grade agent developed in Russia, Machon raised a question that many seem to have forgotten to ask: Where’s the motive?

“From the very start of this story… they need to work out what the motive was,” she said. “Skripal was a guy who had been caught by the Russians. He’d been tried and convicted, sent to prison, and then released and pardoned by the Russians, and sent back to the UK.

“He had been debriefed – picked clean, intelligence-wise, both by the Russians… and by MI6 when he came to live in the UK. So what is the motive there?” she asked.

The ex-MI5 officer, who resigned in 1996 to blow the whistle on the incompetence and crimes of spies, continued to explain to Dod that – just because the chemical weapon was supposedly developed in Russia – it does not necessarily mean the attack was state-sanctioned.

“(Chemical) agents can be developed and used by governments all over the world,” she said. “If this Novichok agent was developed in Russia, it doesn’t mean it’s stayed in Russia – [any more than] any of the other agents developed by Germany, the USA, or the UK have stayed in their own countries.”

“The fact that the… UK facility for identifying those agents was able to identify this very quickly would indicate that they know exactly what this nerve agent is, which means that they have the chemical formula for it too. So, who knows where it came from?

“It might have been developed in Russia, but it doesn’t mean that is state-sanctioned by Russia. It’s a damaging conflation in a particularly sensitive diplomatic time.”

Machon is not the only former British Official to question the UK government’s version of events surrounding the poisoning of Sergei Skripal.

Former British ambassador Craig Murray, said that the media were “falling over themselves in the rush to ramp up the Russophobia”, before pondering ‘which state’ was actually responsible for the attack.

In an article titled “Russian to Judgement” Murray went on to say that:

“The same people who assured you that Saddam Hussein had WMD’s now assure you Russian “novochok” nerve agents are being wielded by Vladimir Putin to attack people on British soil. As with the Iraqi WMD dossier, it is essential to comb the evidence very finely. A vital missing word from Theresa May’s statement yesterday was “only”. She did not state that the nerve agent used was manufactured ONLY by Russia. She rather stated this group of nerve agents had been “developed by” Russia.”