Killer Spies: The Dark side of Intelligence

January 18, 2024, marked six months since Hardeep Singh Nijjar was murdered in his pickup truck in the parking lot of the Gurdwara he attended in Surrey, British Columbia. Since that time, it has come to light that the Indian Intelligence organization (Research and Analysis Wing), and by extension, the Indian Government, was likely involved. These actions by an intelligence organization on foreign soil are referred to as extrajudicial executions or assassinations.

Hardeep Nijjar and Allegations by Indian Government

Hardeep Nijjar was considered a terrorist by the Indian government in relation to his beliefs of, and actions toward, an independent Khalistan within India. According to the Indian government Nijjar was a criminal and terrorist affiliated with the militant group Khalistan Tiger Force. For more on the allegations made in September 2023 by the Prime Minister and the political concerns surrounding the Nijjar murder, see my interview with CTV.

US Foils a Separate but Related Plot

In November of 2023, US authorities subsequently thwarted another assassination plot surrounding a Sikh separatist and dual Canadian American citizen Gurpatwant Singh Pannun. An individual identified as Nikhil Gupta was allegedly hired by an Indian diplomat, and he, in turn, tried to hire the actual assassin to kill Pannun but hired a US government informant instead. Gupta’s Indian government handler is alleged to have shown him pictures of the body of Nijjar after Nijjar was assassinated. For more on the history and operations of the Research and Analysis Wing (India’s Intelligence Service) see Research and Analysis Wing.

Clandestine World of Intelligence

As a former Intelligence officer with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, my interest in understanding how governments use intelligence agencies as tools of assassinations has been more than just passing interest in the news, it was part of my profession.

Intelligence-driven Assassinations

Over the last twenty-five years there have been repeated instances where politically motivated killings have been associated to or orchestrated by intelligence agencies from around the world. In this article, I review some of the more high-profile assassinations and assassination attempts associated with intelligence organizations that have captured the headlines and public interest.

Understanding the Tradecraft

The intention of this article is to give the reader an understanding of some of the tradecraft used in these extrajudicial killings and illustrate that the use of assassinations by governments is not just the plot of a Tom Clancy novel or a blockbuster movie. Intelligence driven assassinations meet at the crossroad of police investigations and international espionage. The assailants are well trained, target oriented and have experience in disappearing. All this makes the prosecution of these individuals difficult if not impossible.

Tradecraft in Assassinations

For better or for worse, the clandestine nature of intelligence work can be easily manipulated into necessary steps taken to eliminate a threat on foreign soil. Intelligence professionals are trained to use reconnaissance to gather information, while remaining unseen and unnoticed. They are trained to remain gray and then go black when required. These learned tradecraft skills can be used for more dubious and deadly missions, and by some intelligence organizations, they are.

Wet Work and Assassination Techniques

Intelligence professionals on hit teams or kill squads are involved in operational activity known as “wet work” – A general term relating to a clandestine assassination. The term comes from the wetness of blood that is spilt by the victim. In wet work, intelligence professionals use all the tricks and techniques of tradecraft used by any good spy. This includes everything from false identities and forged documents, enlisting unknowing proxies or cut-outs, making a quick exit to non-extraditing countries via a surreptitious route back to their own nation, or hiding out in their embassy until the heat dies down.

Diverse and Reckless Methods

Whether it’s a nerve agent, torture, or a highly radioactive substance, the termination of state threats, opposition leaders, or enemies of the state can be done in surprisingly complex and potentially reckless ways.

Case Study: Alexander Litvinenko: Poisoned Politics

We start this dark journey down the path of intelligence crafted assassinations with Alexander Litvinenko, himself a former Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti or (Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Officer.

In November of 1998, while still living in Russia, Litvinenko publicly accused FSB superior officers of ordering the assassination of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He was subsequently arrested, released, and re arrested twice more (once in 1999 and again in 2000) in relation to his accusations. Litvinenko eventually fled to London, UK where he was granted asylum, and worked as an independent writer, journalist, and a “consultant” for the British Intelligence Services. He ultimately became a British citizen.

Litvinenko further insulted his former Russian motherland by being a staunch critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He publicly accused Putin of orchestrating the assassination of a Russian journalist in 2006. Before attaining the Russian presidency, himself, Putin had been placed in charge of the FSB (formerly the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) by previous Russian President, Boris Yeltsin.

On November 1, 2006, Litvinenko was poisoned by what he believed to be thallium. Thallium is a drug that was commonly used by Russian Intelligence in assassinations at the time. However, in a strange twist of events, Litvinenko was poisoned by something much deadlier, both to him and potentially to the citizens of the UK.

In October of 2006, Andrei Lugovoi, former Russian Federal Protective Services and Dmitry Kovtun, former KGB agent turned businessman and friend of Lugovoi, travelled from Russia to London and met with Litvinenko in a Piccadilly square restaurant for sushi. It was here that both men initially attempted to poison Litvinenko with polonium-210, a highly radioactive isotope. The first attempt failed, forcing the men to try again.

Reasons surrounding the meetings between Litvinenko and two former members of Russian Intelligence Services are up for speculation, but it is likely that Litvinenko was either under the impression that these men were giving him information to pass on to British Intelligence or wanted to defect themselves and looked to Litvinenko for help. In hindsight, these were obvious ploys by Lugovoi and Kovtun to get close to Litvinenko and kill him.

The second attempt at poisoning Litvinenko happened on 2006 11 01, when Lugovoi and Kovtun again asked to meet. However, this time the venue would change to the lobby of a London hotel where they offered Litvinenko a cup of tea, laced with a radioactive isotope. Three weeks later, after suffering immensely, Litvinenko eventually died in a London hospital on 2006 11 23. Doctors had no idea what was killing Litvinenko, until a positive test (conducted by the British Atomic Weapons Establishment) for polonium-210 eventually identified it in his urine samples.

Given the incredibly high radiation level of polonium, Scotland Yard detectives were able to use radiation detection equipment to trace a path, that coincided with the whereabouts and movements of Lugovoi and Kovtun. This included the hotels they stayed in, the sushi restaurant they ate at, the flights they took back to Russia, and even the teapot at the hotel that was used to poison Litvinenko.

Despite the evidence presented, the Russian Government dismissed the allegations of Litvinenko’s poisoning by the former Russian Intelligence Service agents. However, condemnation from the UK and several western countries were loudly voiced against Russia and this extrajudicial killing of their former citizen.

Legacy and Potential Re-emergence

The ability to trace polonium via its radioactive emission plays largely into the change of tactics by the Russian Intelligence Services in future assassination attempts in the UK. As we will see, the Russians learned from their mistakes. But before we skip too far ahead, let’s turn our attention to another country and another intelligence agency kill squad.

Case Study: Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh: Mossad’s Dubai Operation

On January 19, 2010, the co-founder of the military wing of Hamas, Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh was found dead in a hotel room in Dubai. Al-Mabhouh had been accused of kidnapping and murdering two Israeli soldiers in 1989. Additionally, he was believed to have purchased arms from Iran and smuggled them into Gaza. For these reasons Al-Mabhouh was high on the Israeli foreign intelligence (Mossad) hit list.

According to open-source information, and against the advice of others, Al-Mabhouh had booked his trip to Dubai online and informed his family by phone what hotel he would be staying in. This potentially accessible information was enough for Mossad to scramble together a hit team welcoming committee for Al-Mabhouh. The ability of an intelligence organization to monitor the communications, contacts, travel, and whereabouts of a target are all essential components for deploying any operational activity. In this case, the operational activity involved the murder of Al-Mabhouh.

In and around the same time that Al-Mabhouh arrived in Dubai, several teams of Mossad agents (totalling 26 in number) using falsified and forged British, European, and Australian passports (some from actual Israeli dual citizens) began to arrive in Dubai. They stayed at different hotels and used various disguises to try and obfuscate their appearances and keep from being identified on closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras set up in various locations of the Al Bustan Rotana Hotel. The hotel where Al-Mabhouh was staying.

To avoid communicating directly with one another in person, the Mossad agents used encrypted communication devices while conducting surveillance on Al-Mabhouh and inside the hotel. According to reporting from the Dubai authorities, all the alleged suspected Mossad agents sent and received Short Message Service (SMS) messages to the same Austrian phone number. This was most likely a central means of communication as either a fall back in case of encrypted communications breakdown, or to keep a central component of the Mossad updated on the mission.

Al-Mabhouh was staying in room 230, and the Mossad agents were able to follow him to the hallway of his room and eventually gain access to the room adjacent to his. Once Al-Mabhouh left his room, Mossad agents gained access to it and waited for his return.

The next day, Al-Mabhouh’s lifeless body was found by cleaning staff after hotel security came to unlatch the door. To make the hit look like an accidental overdose or a suicide, an open bottle of pills was found beside him. The use of theatrical deception like this was to try and ensure that the Israeli government wasn’t implicated in the death. Before the corpse of Al-Mabhouh’s was discovered, every Mossad agent had fled Dubai and were outside the reach of the Emeriti authorities.

In addition to the discovery of the forged passports, the encrypted communication devices, and the shared SMS number, several of the Mossad agents used Meta Bank credit cards issued out of Storm Lake, Iowa by a company located in New York. The CEO of this company was a former Israeli Defence Force (IDF) Special Forces Officer. In the intelligence world, this individual would be known as a “friendly facilitator”. A trusted individual who is willing to provide logistical assistance on operations, won’t ask any questions and doesn’t have a direct connection to the government or the intelligence agency.

Traceable Links

While the assassination of Al-Mabhouh was left strictly to the wet work Mossad professionals, government sanctioned killings can sometimes employ proxies or cut-outs. For our next globe-trotting stop we head to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where a suspected practical joke ended in the assassination of North Korean’s Supreme leader’s half-brother.

Case Study: Kim Jong-Nam: North Korea’s Deadly Prank and The Unwitting Assassins

Kim Jong-Nam had fallen out of favour with his half-brother, Kim Jong Un, and had been in exile from North Korea since 2003. Under the alias Kim Chol, Jong-Nam posted frequently on his Facebook account concerning his travels and whereabouts. This obviously assisted the North Korean Intelligence Community in tracking and finding him.

At the Kuala Lumpur International Airport on February 13th, 2017, Kim Jong-Nam was arriving from a Malaysian vacation spot and heading to Macau, China. Jong-Nam enjoyed the highlife and was likely headed to Macau to do some gambling, since he was carrying over 100,000.00 in cash in his backpack.

Unbeknownst to Jong-Nam, he was about to become the victim of a deadly prank. While waiting to use the self-check in for his flight, Jong-Nam was approached by two women, Siti Aisyah (an Indonesian citizen) and Doan Thihuong (a citizen of Vietnam). Aisyah rubbed an oily liquid on his face and in his eyes and Thihuong came up behind him and placed a cellophane wrapper with a separate substance on his face. The two substances were components of one of the deadliest nerve agents on the planet, VX.

Jong-Nam died within twenty minutes of exposure to the VX on his way to the hospital. You may be wondering why Aisyah and Thihuong were so willing to expose themselves to components of a deadly nerve agent. The answer is simple, they didn’t know what it was. As with many operational activities Aisyah and Thihuong were cut outs, proxies, or useful idiots. Essentially, they were totally unaware of the actual purpose behind the “prank”.

Months prior to the assassination, Aisyah and Thihuong were recruited by undercover North Korean Intelligence Officers, Ri Ji-hyon (aka James) and Hong Song-hak poising as Chinese and Japanese television producers working on a hidden camera prank show. Aisyah and Thihuong were told that they would be paid for their participation in a show involved pranking unsuspecting people in public places. The pranks involved smearing cosmetics and lotions on subjects faces and capturing the reaction on video.

Surveillance footage from the Kuala Lumpur airport identified several individuals, including a team lead, getaway car driver, and the VX nerve agent chemist as well as four other North Korean suspects later identified as intelligence operatives.

While some of the kill squad high tailed it back to the North Korean Embassy in Kuala Lumpur in the getaway car, others were already back on flights taking a surreptitious route to North Korea. As for Aisyah and Thihuong, they were left to face the charges in the murder of Jong-Nam.

This highlights the sheer ruthlessness of the North Korean Intelligence Services in connection to the assassination of Jong-Nam. Using unwitting foreigners to conduct a dangerous and deadly operation without concern for the consequences Aisyah and Thihuong after the act.

Case Study: Sergei Skripal: Salisbury’s Nerve Agent: Russia Strikes Again

Let’s turn our attention back to the UK. Where on March 4, 2018, in the small town of Salisbury an elderly man and his daughter, sit on a park bench not far from the cemetery where Sergei Skripal’s wife is buried. Skripal and his daughter Yulia come here almost every Sunday to lay flowers at the grave. But today, instead of enjoying the quant scenery surrounding the cemetery, the unsuspecting family is exposed to the Russian super nerve agent known as novichuk.

Sergei Skripal was a former GRU or Russian Military Intelligence officer who, after providing a long list of names of other GRU officers to British intelligence, was arrested in 2004 and sentenced to thirteen years imprisonment for high treason.

In July of 2010, Skripal was released from prison when he was involved in spy swap which included Russian sleeper agent Anna Chapman. At this time, he moved to Salisbury and lived out the life of a retired pensioner, with no one the wiser. Or so he thought.

Skripal worked under the codename “Forthwith” for British Secret Intelligence Service (BSIS) and he had provided whole sections of GRU telephone directories to them. This was not something that the Russian Intelligence Community was going to easily forget or forgive. As such, Russian agents were dispatched to deal with the traitor, as only the Russian Intelligence Community can, with poison.

But the poison of choice wouldn’t be the highly radioactive polonium-210 in a cup of tea that killed Litvinenko. No, this had proven easily identified by British authorities, and too easily traceable. The use of polonium would bring more unwanted attention and suspicion to Russia. But novichuk, concealed in a perfume bottle, and sprayed on the Skripals sometime during the day of 2018 03 04, would be the new modus operandi. After being exposed to the nerve agent, the Skripals are discovered unconscious on a park bench by a police officer. Novichuk had been widely produced during the cold war in Russia and it wasn’t radioactive or easily detectable.

Sergei and Yulia Skripal survived the attack but were hospitalized in intensive care for several weeks. Three Russian Military Intelligence Officers were eventually identified as having perpetrated the attack against Skripal and his daughter. GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, who traveled to Britain under the alias Ruslan Boshirov, GRU officer Alexander Mishkin using the alias Alexander Petrov, and a major general of the GRU Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev.

As with previous wet work operations, Chepiga, Mishkin and Sergeev arrived within days of the attempted assassinations and left mere days after. However, this operation was more clandestine than the assassination of Litvinenko. There was no prior contact between the Skripals and the hit squad and there was no pre planned meeting or ploy to set up the exposure to the nerve agent. Get in, do the hit, and get out.

Although the assassination attempt of the Skripals failed, the intent of the actions by the Russian government was a success. It sent a message to any Russian citizen who contemplated providing information to a foreign government, “Wherever you run, wherever you hide, we can get to you.” This sentiment shatters the dream of any would be spy that they can simply sell some secrets and live peacefully in the west. In the intelligence realm, sometimes the unintended consequences are the most impactful.

Case Study Alexei Navalny: A Brush with Novichok and the Lethal Political Game

For our last stop on the wet work ride we go to the assassination attempt of Alexei Navalny. On August 20, 2020, anti-corruption activist, and Russia opposition leader, Navalny, was on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow when he began to scream out in pain. The plane made an emergency stop and after placing him in a coma in a hospital in Omsk, Navalny was transferred to another hospital in Germany. It would be confirmed that he had been poisoned by a new form of novichuk after testing from the laboratories of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The OPCW noted the novichok nerve agent was found in Navalny’s urine, blood, skin samples and on his water bottle.

In response to the poisoning, the Russian government denied any involvement and Russian prosecutors refused to open an official criminal investigation.

In the days prior to the poisoning, Navalny had published videos on YouTube that expressed his support for the 2020 Belarusian pro-democracy protests. Additionally, Navalny had written that this kind of ‘revolution’ would soon happen in Russia.

Open-source investigations revealed that agents from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) were involved in Navalny’s poisoning. The investigation described a special unit of the FSB that specialized in chemical substances. The members of the unit had been subsequently tracked using telecom and travel data. Following the investigation but before its publication, Navalny recorded a telephone conversation with Konstantin Borisovich Kudryavtsev, an alleged FSB operative believed to be involved in his poisoning.

Conclusion: The Ominous Shift in Assassination Tactics

Over the past quarter-century, we’ve witnessed a discernible evolution in the intricacy and deployment of assassination techniques and the associated tradecraft employed by intelligence and security professionals. The Russian Intelligence Community’s transition from deploying a highly traceable radioactive isotope in Litvinenko’s case to employing the nerve agent novichuk against the Skripals and Navalny exemplifies this unsettling trend. However, given the survival of the Skripals and Navalny after novichuk exposure, it’s evident that such tactics will likely undergo modifications in future attempts.

Takeaway 1: An Ever-Adapting Arsenal

The choice of “weapons” in these assassinations is in a perpetual state of transformation, seeking to become more lethal and less detectable. This dynamic evolution poses a challenge for authorities, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between targeted assassinations and deaths with unknown causes.

Takeaway 2: Team Dynamics and Investigations

Comparing Mossad’s Mabhouh assassination to the Litvinenko case reveals the varying scales of wet work teams, ranging from a few agents to dozens. Larger groups may involve lookout and reconnaissance agents in addition to the actual assassins. This underscores the importance of a larger team footprint in future investigations, providing law enforcement a better chance of identifying the exodus of agents compared to smaller teams.

Takeaway 3: Communication Protocols and Secrecy

Examining communication protocols, the Mossad agents in Dubai displayed sophisticated methods to obfuscate connections between agents, while Kovtun and Lugovoi likely communicated face-to-face. The absence of traceable communications in Kovtun and Lugovoi’s case emphasizes the pivotal role of understanding kill squad communication strategies. The realization that wet work teams may develop new and more robust communication protocols becomes apparent, albeit the specifics remain unknown but likely.

Takeaway 4: Timing, Planning, and Opportunities

The crucial components of timing and opportunity have consistently played pivotal roles in wet work teams. The meticulous planning leading to the assassination of Kim Jong-Nam contrasts with the less apparent preparations for Mossad’s killing of Mabhouh. Yet, in both instances, the identification and confirmation of the target’s movements provided the catalyst for swift actions.

In essence, this article delves into the extensive measures some governments take to eliminate opposition, dissidents, former spies, or even family members. As we navigate the current landscape of geopolitical instability, the disconcerting success of these assassinations, and the acquisition of targeted victims by the kill squads, sends a stark message: this trend is likely to persist. Unfortunately, the world of intelligence operations, like any operational activity, sees organizations learning from mistakes, both their own and those of others, refining techniques to execute deadly missions without detection.

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