The Gathering Storm | Grey Zone Ep 1

The Wargame

Sky News

Society & Culture, Documentary, News

4.5 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2021

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This episode seeks to explain what the grey zone is. It includes a warning from General Sir Nick Carter, the head of the UK’s armed forces, and Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, about the danger of ignoring attacks in this murky space, while Lieutenant General Graeme Lamb, a former director of UK special forces, warns: “We’re being boiled like a frog!”Sky News journalist Deborah Haynes then travels to Salisbury with the widow of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko to visit the site of one of the most high profile grey zone attacks – the poisoning of another ex-Russian agent, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia.Lord Mark Sedwill, a former national security adviser, talks about how he led the UK’s response to nerve agent poisoning and the fake news that followed.Finally, Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative website Bellingcat, describes how he and his team revealed the true identities of the Russian military intelligence officers named by the UK as prime suspects in the attempted assassination. Russia denies involvement.Interviews:General Sir Nick Carter, chief of the defence staffBen Wallace, defence secretaryLord Mark Sedwill, former UK national security adviser, former cabinet secretaryLieutenant General (retired) Graeme Lamb, former director of UK special forcesMarina Litvinenko, widow of former Russian spy Alexander LitvinenkoEliot Higgins, founder of the investigative website BellingcatColonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, former commanding officer of the UK’s Joint, Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear RegimentCredits:Written and narrated by Deborah Haynes Edited and produced by Chris ScottProduction support from Sophia McBride and Victoria SeabrookAdditional voices provided by Cayetano DelgadoThe head of Sky News Radio is Dave Terris

Transcript

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0:00.0	On a crisp afternoon in March, a smart young Russian woman touches down in London on a flight from Moscow.
0:07.0	Yulia Scripal makes this journey often to visit her father in the historic city of Salisbury.
0:14.0	But this is no ordinary family and no ordinary family reunion.
0:19.0	Yulia's father, 66-year-old Sergei Skripal, is a former double agent, a colonel in Russia's
0:26.6	military intelligence agency, the GRU.
0:29.6	He's believed to have been turned by MI6 in the 1990s to spy for the UK.
0:35.7	It was a high-stakes move, and Moscow eventually found out.
0:40.3	The veteran officer was jailed in Russia for 13 years, but partway through his sentence
0:46.3	in 2010, he was freed and transferred to the UK in a Cold War-style spy swap.
0:59.3	That should have been the end of the story, thanks to an unwritten rule between spies that guarantees their safety in an exchange.
1:02.9	But this code is about to be broken.
1:06.0	On the 4th of March 2018, the day after 33-year-old Yulia arrived in Salisbury, two would-be assassins close
1:14.5	in on Sergei Scrippel's house, armed with a deadly nerve agent. They spray the substance
1:20.5	on the front door handle and leave. It's only a matter of time until the father and daughter
1:26.7	are unwittingly exposed to the poison.
1:29.7	They fall critically ill, victims of an apparent revenge attack blamed on Russia's GRU.
1:36.4	Good evening, this is Sky News Live.
1:38.5	In Salisbury, the centre of a major spy attempted murder investigation.
1:43.1	Having established that a nerve agent is the cause of the symptoms leading us to treat this
1:47.8	as attempted murder, I can also confirm that we believe the two people originally who
1:52.1	became unwell were targeted specifically.
1:55.8	The government has concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act
	...

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