What really happened in Salisbury?
In March 2018, Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter were found slumped on a bench in Salisbury. A new documentary hears from the consultant who tried to keep the victims alive. James Rampton reports
World famous for its magnificent early English Gothic cathedral and beautiful medieval centre, Salisbury is the epitome of a quiet, historic English city. It seems like the last place on Earth where an extremely dangerous geopolitical incident would blow up. Which is why no one could believe it when three years ago Salisbury became the scene of a horrendous attack by a foreign power and the epicentre of an international espionage story that grabbed the world’s attention.
On 4 March 2018, the former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found slumped on a bench in the Maltings in a catatonic state and rushed to Salisbury District Hospital.
They were fighting for their lives, having been poisoned by the deadly nerve agent novichok, which had been smeared on the handle of the front door at his home in Christie Miller Road.
Four days later, the then-home secretary Amber Rudd announced that Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey was also in a critical condition in hospital, having been contaminated when he searched Skripal’s house.
Then, on 30 June, Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley were taken ill at their flat in Amesbury, eight miles from Salisbury, and admitted to hospital. They had been poisoned by a discarded perfume bottle containing the highly toxic substance that Rowley had found and given to Sturgess. Having sprayed the fatal nerve agent on her wrists, tragically on 8 July, Sturgess lost her life.
Dr James Haslam, a consultant in the Intensive Care Unit at the hospital who treated these patients, emphasises how improbable it was that a globally significant incident of this magnitude should take place in such a tranquil city. “I had no idea there were spies in Salisbury. Salisbury is fairly sleepy.”
The consultant, who along with many other notable interviewees – including Bailey and Rowley – contributes to the documentary, Secrets of the Salisbury Poisonings, continues: “Christie Miller Road is an ordinary English cul-de-sac. Who’d have thought someone would have a spy living next door?”
Rowley agrees. “I thought, ‘you’ve got a Russian spy living in Salisbury, and people are trying to kill him. That’s James Bond-y. Wow!’”
When the Skirpals were first admitted to hospital, it was thought they might have been suffering from a drug overdose, but Haslam wasn’t convinced. The consultant, who possesses the un-showy modesty and passionate dedication that distinguishes all the best heroes, says: “My gut feeling was that making the diagnosis of opioid poisoning or toxicity may not have been correct.”
Fortunately, with four of the five critically ill patients we treated, we had really remarkable success. Unfortunately, for Dawn Sturgess, it was such a terrible tragedy
Aware of Sergei Skirpal’s background, the consultant believed it was more likely to be some form of organophosphate poisoning. “I thought at that stage that this could well have been something nefarious. So I spent most of the night on the internet researching. The patients were close to death. I thought that could be the start of a war.”
The police took forensic samples from the Skirpals, which were processed at Porton Down, the top-secret military research facility close to Salisbury.
Haslam recollects that, “when we got the results, they confirmed my suspicions. We knew then that it was a severe form of organophosphate toxicity. There is some literature on it, but no one in the UK had treated nerve agents before because they have never been used on home soil.
“This was a military-grade nerve agent with really quite profound effects. We had to learn on the job, using the reading that we had picked up and experimenting as we went along. We had help from experts on the phone, but we had to work it out for ourselves on the ground and come up with a regime that kept them alive.”
Even so, Haslam admits, he was deeply concerned about his patients. “Some of them were really close to death for a considerable period of time and took a long while to recover. It’s not an easy thing to get over, and so I was very concerned.
“Fortunately, with four of the five critically ill patients we treated, we had really remarkable success. Unfortunately, for Dawn Sturgess, it was such a terrible tragedy. We did our very best for her, but unfortunately she wasn’t able to survive.”
It wasn’t only the patients that Haslam was worried about, though. He was very concerned for his colleagues’ well-being, too. “Even experts on nerve-agent poisoning were saying: ‘This is unsurvivable. Novichok is a universal killer.’”
The consultant adds: “It’s one of the most lethal substances on the planet – even microscopic amounts can kill. So a great deal of threat came with it because we didn't know much about the substance and what the level of danger was to us as a team and whether we might be able to bring it home to our families.
“The parallels with Covid are very strong. There was a real, constant threat of danger to us professionals looking after them. So there were lots of unknowns, particularly early on, and that made for a difficult working environment.”
Despite all that, Haslam, clearly a humane man, really connected with his patients. “I was there for long periods of their recovery, and then got to know the patients as they became able to communicate. It was really interesting hearing the stories of their lives, particularly from Sergei. Some of the things he had been up to were fascinating.”
Can you tell us about any of them? “No, but he’s had quite a life, put it that way!”
Haslam developed an equally strong bond with Bailey. At one point in the documentary, the consultant breaks down as he says: “Nick Bailey has a tiny little place in my heart.”
The consultant adds: “It was something that not many people will have experienced, and probably the most surreal thing we have both experienced. So it was definitely a bonding thing.
“I felt like I had a real connection with him. We're a similar age, we've both got two daughters of a very similar age. It was a highly unusual circumstance, and we felt like we had a connection through it. I was there for a lot of his admission for those first two weeks, and we had a bonding experience through that.”
The consultant reveals: “Nick and I have kept in contact since and we've met up a few times. We’ve had a drink in a pub, and we've had his family around for dinner. It was a brutal experience for him to go through, very traumatic. So I felt like our connection meant there was more to it than just discharging him.
“And so, we've kept in touch. It’s great to see him doing a lot better and back to doing some work now. He is been a real champion of our hospital charity, the Stars Appeal. He's raised lots of money for us, which is really amazing.”
What do Haslam and Bailey talk about when they meet up, then? “We just check in to see how each other's doing. For Nick, it's been a lot around what he would do.
The message Russians want to get out is: if you betray us, we will take you out. But the use of chemical weapons to me was still the thing that was almost unfathomable
“He's tried to go back to the police a few times, and it hasn't worked out. I think that the experience he went through was just so traumatic, and doing police work is traumatising. The combination just didn't work for him, which is totally understandable. So he felt like the police was not an option any longer.
“He's been doing other things, including some speaking about mental health. Nick has been doing some lecturing at Wiltshire College on policing as well. So he's educating people about that. He's a really gifted public speaker, so I'm sure he'll do brilliantly at that.”
Away from the very personal and emotional tales of the victims in Salisbury, there is of course a much wider global dimension to this story. In the documentary, Rudd says: “It was as though a bomb had gone off on the streets of Salisbury. This was almost an act of war.”
On 14 March, the then prime minister, Theresa May, informed the House of Commons that this country would send home 23 Russian diplomats, referring to the incident as, “an unlawful use of force by the Russian state against the UK”.
Twelve days later, 22 of Britain’s allies declared that they were deporting more than 100 Russian agents. May described it as, “the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history”.
The sudden worldwide interest in the story heightened the stress for Haslam. He remembers: “As soon as I knew that it was organophosphate poisoning, I realised that this was some sort of state-sponsored act because we were aware of our patients’ professional background. My head began to explode at that point because it could be considered an act of war.”
All at once, “the stakes were even higher. Not only were lives at stake, but also we didn’t know how this could escalate. It was a state-sponsored act on our soil, and if lives were then lost, the stakes would be even greater. I did feel the pressure of that for sure.”
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former colonel in the British Army and chemical weapons consultant who advised the government at the time of the Salisbury poisonings, was equally horrified by the implications of the incident. “It was the first chemical weapon attack on the soil of the United Kingdom, and that's why it was so shocking for me.”
The adviser, who coincidentally lives in Salisbury, carries on: “I've spent my career tracking down chemical and biological weapon usage all around the world. But, when I was safely back at home, far from the slings and arrows of Syria, to then see a chemical attack here was just extraordinary.
“The message Russians want to get out is: if you betray us, we will take you out. But the use of chemical weapons to me was still the thing that was almost unfathomable. The strategic implications could have been horrific. It could have been viewed as a route to war back then, but thankfully, it wasn't.”
It will surprise many to hear experts say that we were in fact very fortunate that we got off relatively lightly during the Salisbury poisonings.
I think it’ll be good to have a legal process to show who was responsible and their rationale. That will help give some of the victims and their families some sense of accountability
De Bretton-Gordon, who has written a book about his experiences entitled Chemical Warrior: Syria, Salisbury and Saving Lives at War, says: “While I know it will mean nothing to poor Dawn Sturgess’s family, overall we were incredibly lucky. Although only a quarter of an egg cup of novichok was used in Salisbury, it still could have killed 1,000s of people.
“It’s incredibly toxic. If chlorine, the original chemical weapon, is toxicity level I, then the nerve agent sarin, which was developed in the Second World War, would be toxicity level 5, the nerve agent VX, which we've heard so much about from the North Koreans, would be toxicity level 50,000, and novichok would be toxicity level 60,000. So in simple terms, a molecule of novichok is 60,000 times more toxic than a molecule of chlorine.”
Consequently, fearing contamination from the exceptionally toxic substance, the authorities in Salisbury ended up having to mount a very costly operation to bury 80 police cars, nine ambulances, and an air ambulance, as well as buying Skripal’s house.
What lessons can we draw from the Salisbury poisonings, then? De Bretton-Gordon says: “The desperate thing is that somebody died and other people have had life-changing injuries. People may have been a bit naive about the Russians and some of our adversaries. But I think they need to realise that there are people who want to do us harm, and that if we show weakness, then they will do us harm.
“A lot of our enemies are bullies, and we must make sure that we are robust, and we must make sure that we have measures to protect ourselves. We've learned a lot from the Salisbury event.”
“I think people should not be naive. It can be a tough world out there, and we've got to stand up to it. We cannot capitulate – otherwise we will be rolled over.”
The other lesson that we can draw from the event is that, “the people of this country should be relieved to know that we've got amazing security services, police, scientists, and medical personnel, who are behind the scenes, every day of every week of every year, working to keep people safe. The novichok event has shown what a good system we have behind us doing that.”
For his part, Haslam thinks we need some answers. “There was a sense of grievance when we were working on these patients. It was a horrible, heinous act. I hope they get some sense of justice. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with the public inquiry and whether we will get some form of justice from that.
“I think it’ll be good to have a legal process to show who was responsible and their rationale. That will help give some of the victims and their families some sense of accountability. The trouble is that, without having a judicial process, people sense that justice hasn't been done and don’t even know who to hold to account.”
The doctor continues, “it was most awful for the victims and their families, of course. But for the whole of Salisbury, and even in some ways for our nation, it was an affront, and I think people need to be held to account for that.”
The consultant also believes we can take some positives out of the experience, though. “The stakes are really high in ICU. We get to see extremes of physiology, of people in that grey area between life and death. We do see a lot of death.
“But we also see some incredible successes, people who have been close to death whose lives we've been able to save. That's why we're so dedicated because it really is so meaningful. You get to hear the stories of people when they come back months later and tell us how they're doing. That’s just amazing.”
Salisbury attack: Police officer poisoned with novichok felt like ‘life was being taken away slowly’
Russian spy chief said UK is using Skripal case to ‘distract from shameful exit from Afghanistan’
Salisbury attack: Russia will ‘do it again’ if UK does not act after Skripal and Litvinenko, government warned
Haslam adds that the survival of the four victims of the Salisbury poisonings, “felt like a massive triumph. Because it was such a heinous act, that gave us even more of an incentive to do our best for them. Because it just felt like this just wasn't right. And so, to see so many survivors from something that a lot of people thought was unsurvivable made us feel proud, but also just thrilled for our patients.
“I think we rose really well to an unprecedented challenge. It’s the sort of thing you can look back on and tell your grandkids, ‘we were there’. There’s still a real sense of pride. It was a great achievement.”
It would be remiss, however, to end without remembering the one person who sadly died as a result of this dreadful event: Dawn Sturgess. Rowley closes by reflecting on their closeness. “I know she cared for me. She was definitely marriage material, a hundred per cent … I carry a hell of a lot of guilt because I gave that novichok to my girlfriend. Still to this day, it chokes me.
“It’s my girlfriend I lost, my partner, my soulmate.”
‘Secrets of the Salisbury Poisonings’ premieres on Discovery+ on 26 December
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