On March 14, 2018, British Prime Minister Theresa May expelled 23 Russian diplomats. That expulsion order was precipitated by the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal, who had defected from Russian intelligence to British intelligence, and Skripal’s daughter Yulia. That botched assassination attempt by Russia’s military intelligence arm known as GRU injured the Skripals, a police officer, and later, killed an innocent Briton who stumbled across the GRU nerve-agent device.
But who were the expelled diplomats?
Well, spies, mostly. And today I can identify one of them as a high-ranking career GRU officer, Lt. Col. Alexander Shevelev (perhaps since promoted to colonel). Shevelev was responsible for handling numerous GRU operations on British soil and was likely one of the few officers in London briefed into the Skripal assassination attempt before it occurred.
An assessment of U.K. Foreign Office diplomatic lists, helpfully archived by SpyBlog (I have verified the accuracy of these lists), shows that Shevelev arrived in Britain in 2010 and, over the next eight years, served two separate tours out of the British capital. The first tour lasted from 2010-2013, and the second tour from late 2017 until his expulsion in March 2018. In that latter tour, Shevelev served as deputy chief, or deputy rezident, of the GRU station and perhaps even its chief.
But a couple of specific considerations stand out when it comes to Shevelev’s tenure. First, while Shevelev was operating under diplomatic cover as an accredited military attache, he attended few public events that would have been expected of a cover officer. It’s a point worth noting, because while the Russians retain an extensive intelligence presence out of various facilities in London, their officers are instructed to engage in at least basic cover development tradecraft (being seen at public, nonintelligence related events). One of the few official public events that Shevelev attended was a May 2010 remembrance service for United Nations peacekeepers.
Still, Shevelev was well-regarded for his first tour in London. The British domestic security service, MI5, keep an especially close watch on returning intelligence officers in the assessment that they are either returning to handle specific agents or operations they previously established or that they have been promoted. The GRU’s decision to return Shevelev to London means it judged the added scrutiny he would receive as less important than Moscow’s trust that he would effectively manage GRU operations. There will be more reporting in the coming days on the GRU and the Skripal incident from the excellent Bellingcat team.
One final point:
On an amusing but incidental note, Shevelev’s first London posting overlapped with that of current CIA Director Gina Haspel. Shevelev and Haspel’s divergent success suggests that while nerve-agent adventurism might amuse Russian President Vladimir Putin, it’s ultimately an embarrassing, and perhaps even dangerous, career choice.
