Russian spooks who tried to hack the chemical weapons watchdog as it probed the Salisbury attack were foiled because a friend of one of the assassins was bugged.
Colonel Konstantin Bakhtin was caught discussing the plot against the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in Amsterdam during phone calls to the GRU headquarters.
A Russian security source said: “The Dutch were watching from the start. They’d tapped his phone so whenever he called they were listening. He was responsible for the tech they used and helped get them their equipment.”
Bakhtin is now reportedly being recalled to Moscow – and is likely to face a sticky end.
During his training, he lived in the same dormitory as Anatoly Chepiga – who used the alias of Ruslan Boshirov in the March novichok attack.
Chepiga lived in flat 28, while Bakhtin lived in apartment 10 at the Russian State Humanitarian University at Building 1, Kirovogradskaya Street. They are reported to have been friends, holidaying together with their families.
In 2014, Bakhtin was tasked with sourcing intelligence on the probe into the Malaysian Airlines flight brought down over Ukraine killed 298.
The news comes after Vladimir Putin’s spy chief, Colonel-General Igor Korobov, fell ill suddenly following a furious dressing down from Putin over the bungled novichok operations in the UK and Amsterdam.

MAGADAN, October 14. /TASS/. Bellingcat, a UK-based open source and social media investigation site, has conducted no investigation of its own into the Salisbury incident, instead it released data leaked by intelligence services ahead of the British delegation’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told the Rossiya-1 television channel.
“Bellingcat conducted no probe into the Salisbury incident. Belligcat had been silent to six months, saying nothing about what had happened there. They simply released information they had been given ahead of the British delegation’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly,” she said.
According to the Russian diplomat, what Bellingcat presented as its own findings in fact were materials provided by Western intelligence services. “But there is no investigation either into the Salisbury or Amesbury incidents. It is nothing but the use of pseudo-mass media as a tool to circulate such fakes,” she said.
If the British version of the affair is to be believed former Russian military intelligence (GRU) Colonel Sergei Skripal, 66, who had been convicted in Russia of spying for Great Britain and later swapped for Russian intelligence officers, and his daughter Yulia, 33, suffered the effects of a nerve agent in the British city of Salisbury on March 4. Claiming that the substance used in the attack had been a Novichok-class nerve agent developed in the Soviet Union, London rushed to accuse Russia of being involved in the incident. Moscow rejected all of the United Kingdom’s accusations, saying that neither the Soviet Union nor Russia ever had any program aimed at developing such an agent.

On September 5, British Prime Minister Theresa May briefed parliament on the investigation’s findings to declare that two Russians carrying passports issued in the names of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov were suspected accomplices in the assassination attempt. Britain regards both men as GRU agents. Petrov and Boshirov in an interview to the RT television channel dismissed the charges.
In late September, The Daily Telegraph claimed it knew the real name of the person suspected of the assassination attempt against the Skripals. The newspaper said that the man originally identified as Ruslan Boshirov was in reality Russian Colonel Anatoly Chepiga, a holder of several government awards. Later on, a Bellingcat representative told the British parliament that the real name of the man identified as Petrov was Alexander Mishkin.
Russian president’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said following this publication that he had “no information that a man by this name has ever received any award.” Following Bellingact’s revelations about ‘Mishkin,’ Peskov said that the Kremlin would refrain from debates about medial allegations about Russian ‘GRU agents.’.

Above: Watch SCMP reporter explore dead drops in Hong Kong
There was a time when Hong Kong was a hotbed of spies: during the Cold War undercover agents from America, China, Britain and Russia were active here. Those days are over, but for Hong Kong’s espionage enthusiasts there is a new reason for some old-school spycraft: art.
Over the past five years, Berlin-based artist Aram Bartholl has reinvented the dead drop, for an ongoing global art project.
On his website, Bartholl describes the project as an “anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space,” and explains that he started it when he was artist in residence at the art and technology centre Eyebeam in Brooklyn, New York in 2010.

A USB connector sticks out of a wall. Photo: Dead Drop
He hid five USB thumb drives around New York City, often embedded in concrete walls or curbs with just the tip sticking out. The idea was for people to plug the bit of the USB sticking out of the wall into their laptops and find… well, just about anything.  Each drive started out with just an explanation about the project, encouraging people to take or leave whatever files they chose. He also posted instructions on how to install their own dead drops on his website. The rest was up to the public, and they took to it avidly.
During the golden age of spying, the dead drop was an invaluable tool: a letter, picture or microfilm would be deposited in a secret hiding place — often a hollow rock, or false bit of brick — for another spy to pick up. That way information could be passed between agents without them ever having to meet in person and endanger their secret identities. In the era of email encryption, and satellite communication, it is doubtful that a dead drop is still a part of a modern spy’s repertoire, but thanks to Bartholl today, there are more than 1,500 active drops across the globe, on every continent save Antarctica.
The project courted controversy after instructions for manufacturing methamphetamine, and schematics for making a bomb were found on drops in Europe
Each drop is catalogued in an online database, giving its date of installation, size and location coordinates. Imagine our excitement when we saw, ninth on the list and installed on March 6, Hong Kong’s very own dead drop, located on the first floor of the Ho Sin Hang Engineering Building at the Chinese University in Sha Tin. We went searching for it and were able to find it without too much trouble.
The Sha Tin drop is a bit different from the typical USB stick drops. It is an online dead drop: once you get in range you are able to join a small wi-fi network and get access to the drop. The site you see is pirate themed, with an explanation about how the project works, a chat area, an online forum and a place to upload and download files.
The project has courted controversy after instructions for how to manufacture methamphetamines, and schematics for making a bomb were found on drops in Europe. We were excited to see what kind of forbidden information Hongkongers were keen to share and, while there were certainly no bomb instructions, the contents were politically provocative: a photograph of the Lennon wall at the height of the Occupy Central protests, and a full length digital copy of Under the Dome, former TV presenter Chai Jing’s documentary about pollution in China, which was recently removed from Chinese video sites.
We uploaded a few surprises ourselves but to reveal them here would hardly be good spying.