It was just before 10 p.m. on Feb. 12, Boris Karpichkov’s 59th birthday, when the former KGB agent got an unexpected call at his home in the U.K. It was a Russian secret service friend phoning covertly from mainland Europe to warn him of a hit list with eight names on it. Karpichkov, who’d defected to Britain in 1998, was on the list. So was Sergei Skripal, another ex-Russian double agent.
Karpichkov initially dismissed the warning—he’d faced death threats before. Three weeks later, he changed his mind. On March 4, Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were rushed to a hospital after collapsing in a crowded shopping mall in the sleepy cathedral city of Salisbury in southwestern England. British officials determined the two—who remain in critical condition and may never recover—were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in what the U.K. says is the first offensive use of a chemical weapon in Europe since World War II. A local policeman was also hospitalized, and as many as 130 other people in Salisbury may have been exposed.
