Pablo Miller OBE (born 1960) [1] [2] is a British former intelligence officer with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), a former British diplomat and soldier who was first secretary of the British embassy in Estonia from 1997. [1]
Miller was an officer in the Royal Tank Regiment together with Mark Urban, who also lived in Salisbury and he was a member of the Royal Green Jackets in the British army. [1] He joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1990. [1] He worked in Nigeria before moving to Estonia. [1]
Russian intelligence claimed that Miller was a senior officer in British intelligence while working undercover as a first secretary of the British embassy in Tallinn, Estonia. The MI6 officer under diplomatic cover in Moscow at this time was Christopher Steele. While working at the British embassy, Miller recruited the former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal to work for the British as a double-agent. [1] [3] [4] He had to retired from the diplomatic corp after Moscow twice named him as an MI6 officer who was recruiting double-agents to betray the Kremlin.
Miller worked for former MI6 Christopher Steele's London-based private intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, which produced the Steele dossier that later imploded as the so-called Russiagate inquiry. [5] [6]
In 2018, the British government issued two DSMA-Notices after the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in March 2018 with a Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury. The notices instructed the British media not to report that Pablo Miller, then a retired MI6 agent, had recruited Sergei Skripal to MI6. [7] [8] [9] As MI6 agent Miller was also known as ″Antonio Alvarez de Hidalgo″. [10] According to the FSB, Pablo Miller was also in contact with Alexander Litvinenko. [11]
After the Amesbury Novichok nerve agent poisonings in June 2018, Urban reported that he was working with Sergei Skripal up to a year before the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury. [12]
In 2002 he was given the Order of the White Star, 3rd Class by the President of Estonia Arnold Rüütel. [2] He was appointed to the Order of the British Empire in 2015 for service to British foreign policy. [1] [13] [14]
The Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, formerly the Main Intelligence Directorate, and still commonly known by its previous abbreviation GRU, is the foreign military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. The GRU controls the military intelligence service and maintains its own special forces units.
In the United Kingdom, D-Notices, officially known since 2015 as DSMA-Notices, are official requests to news editors not to publish or broadcast items on specified subjects for reasons of national security.
Novichok is a family of nerve agents, some of which are binary chemical weapons. The agents were developed at the GosNIIOKhT state chemical research institute by the Soviet Union and Russia between 1971 and 1993. Some Novichok agents are solids at standard temperature and pressure, while others are liquids. Dispersal of solid form agents is thought possible if in ultrafine powder state.
Sergei Viktorovich Skripal is a former Russian military intelligence officer who acted as a double agent for the United Kingdom's intelligence services during the 1990s and early 2000s. In December 2004, he was arrested by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) and later tried, convicted of high treason, and sentenced to 13 years in prison. He settled in the United Kingdom in 2010 following the Illegals Programme spy swap. He holds both Russian and British citizenship.
Mark Lee Urban is a British journalist, historian, and broadcaster. He is a writer and commentator for The Sunday Times, specialising in defence and foreign affairs. Until May 2024 he was Diplomatic Editor and occasional presenter for BBC Two's Newsnight.
The poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services, alternatively known as Laboratory 1, Laboratory 12, and Kamera, was a covert research-and-development facility of the Soviet secret police agencies. Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the laboratory manufactured and tested poisons, and was reportedly reactivated by the Russian government in the late 1990s.
Salisbury District Hospital is a large hospital on Odstock Road, Britford, Wiltshire, England, about 1+1⁄2 miles (2.4 km) south of the centre of the city of Salisbury. It is managed by the Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust.
The Russian Cultural Center is a museum and building in Washington, D.C., supporting Russian culture in the United States and preserving its causes and beliefs. It calls itself, "the official home of Russian culture in the United States," and hosts public events featuring visiting Russian musicians and artists to foster better relations and understanding between the U.S. and Russia. The center is operated by Rossotrudnichestvo, an autonomous agency of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Vil Sultanovich Mirzayanov is a Russian chemist of ethnic Tatar origin who now lives in the United States, best known for revealing secret chemical weapons experimentation in Russia.
Bellingcat is a Netherlands-based investigative journalism group that specialises in fact-checking and open-source intelligence (OSINT). It was founded by British citizen journalist and former blogger Eliot Higgins in July 2014. Bellingcat publishes the findings of both professional and citizen journalist investigations into war zones, human rights abuses, and the criminal underworld. The site's contributors also publish guides to their techniques, as well as case studies.
Christopher David Steele is a British former intelligence officer with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from 1987 until his retirement in 2009. He ran the Russia desk at MI6 headquarters in London between 2006 and 2009. In 2009, he co-founded Orbis Business Intelligence, a London-based private intelligence firm.
The poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, also known as the Salisbury Poisonings, was a botched assassination attempt to poison Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military officer and double agent for the British intelligence agencies in the city of Salisbury, England on 4 March 2018. Sergei and his daughter, Yulia Skripal, were poisoned by means of a Novichok nerve agent. Both spent several weeks in hospital in a critical condition, before being discharged. A police officer, Nick Bailey, was also taken into intensive care after attending the incident, and was later discharged.
A-234 is an organophosphate nerve agent. It was developed in the Soviet Union under the FOLIANT program and is one of the group of compounds referred to as Novichok agents that were revealed by Vil Mirzayanov. In March 2018 the Russian ambassador to the UK, Alexander Yakovenko, claimed to have been informed by British authorities that A-234 had been identified as the agent used in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. Vladimir Uglev, one of the inventors of the Novichok series of compounds, said he was "99 percent sure that it was A-234" in relation to the 2018 Amesbury poisonings, noting its unusually high persistence in the environment.
On 30 June 2018, in Amesbury, two British nationals, Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess, were admitted to Salisbury District Hospital in Wiltshire, England. Police determined that they were poisoned by a Novichok nerve agent of the same kind used in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, 8 miles (13 km) away, almost four months prior. Sturgess died on 8 July, and Rowley regained consciousness two days later.
Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev, in Europe alias Sergej Fedotov is a Russian officer of military intelligence service GRU. He is suspected to be the local coordinator of the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal 2018 in the UK and the 2015 poisoning of Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev in Sofia.
The Salisbury Poisonings is a fact-based drama television series, starring Anne-Marie Duff, Rafe Spall and Annabel Scholey which portrays the 2018 Novichok poisonings and decontamination crisis in Salisbury, England, and the subsequent Amesbury poisonings. The series was broadcast in three parts on BBC One in June 2020, and has been shown in four parts elsewhere. It was created by Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn for Dancing Ledge Productions.
On 20 August 2020, Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent and as a result, he was hospitalized in serious condition. During a flight from Tomsk to Moscow, he became ill and was taken to a hospital in Omsk after an emergency landing there, and then, he was put in a coma. He was evacuated to the Charité hospital in Berlin, Germany, two days later. The use of the nerve agent was confirmed by five Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) certified laboratories. On 7 September, doctors announced that they had taken Navalny out of the induced coma and that his condition had improved. He was discharged from the hospital on 22 September 2020. The OPCW said that a cholinesterase inhibitor from the Novichok group was found in Navalny's blood, urine, skin samples and his water bottle. At the same time, the OPCW report clarified that Navalny was poisoned with a new type of Novichok, which was not included in the list of controlled chemicals of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
The Insider is an online publication specializing in investigative journalism, fact-checking, and exposing fake news. It was founded by independent Russian journalist Roman Dobrokhotov. The publication operates websites in both Russian and English, along with a Telegram channel, an Instagram account, two TikTok accounts, and two YouTube channels: one for on-air programs and another for edited video content.
In the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War, many Russian diplomats and embassy officials were declared personae non gratae by countries around the world in 2022, and many foreign diplomats were also formally asked to leave Russia after their accreditation was cancelled.
In the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War, in the time leading up to and after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, a number of citizens of the Russian Federation and of other nationalities working for Russia have been identified publicly as spies or agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Russia's foreign intelligence service (SVR) or the third intelligence arm, the military intelligence service (GRU). Each arm having their own remits.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)