Chapter Four
On March 4th, 2018, a former Russian military intelligence officer turned British spy and his daughter were rushed to hospital in Salisbury, England, suffering from the effects of an alleged poisoning.
The UK media went into overdrive. What happened? Who poisoned them? How? With what?
His name was Sergei Skripal. Reports said he and his daughter, Yulia, were in critical condition at Salisbury District Hospital.
Curiously, according to Channel 4 journalist Alex Thomson, one of the only things the UK government did that evening — while a former British spy and his daughter lay fighting for their lives — was issue a D-Notice to the UK media. Not a press release. Not a public warning. A media gag.
A D-Notice — more formally a DSMA-Notice — is an official request from the government to news outlets asking them not to publish certain information, allegedly for reasons of national security. Technically it’s voluntary. In practice, it’s a leash.
These notices are rare. And they’re not binding. In fact, earlier that same year, the press ignored a similar D-Notice regarding the author of the Trump–Russia dossier. Christopher Steele’s name was published anyway — by the BBC, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph.
But this D-Notice was different. This one advised media outlets not to publish the names of two individuals and the company they worked for.
The company was Orbis Business Intelligence.
The two individuals were:
- Pablo Miller, the MI6 officer who originally recruited Sergei Skripal.
- And Christopher Steele, Skripal’s former MI6 handler and author of the now-infamous “dodgy dossier” that falsely claimed Donald Trump was being blackmailed by Russia.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why the government didn’t want those names tied to this story. Orbis were the very firm hired by Hillary Clinton’s campaign — via intermediaries Fusion GPS and law firm Perkins Coie — to dig up dirt on Trump. That dirt became the Steele Dossier. The same Steele Dossier that helped kickstart the almost decade-long Russiagate circus.
So, within weeks of the poisoning, one thing became blindingly obvious:
The UK government had placed a media gag on the very same people at the heart of both the Trump-Russia disinformation campaign and the Skripal affair.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I find it an extraordinary coincidence that two separate D-Notices, on two global scandals, would name the same man — and yet we’re supposed to believe they’re unrelated.
Do you?
Two D-Notices. One name. And we’re supposed to believe this is just a coincidence? The odds of that being true are somewhere between a ‘Snowball’s chance in hell’ and Lord Lucan being found alive and well, working the night shift restocking shelves at a Tesco’s in Kent.
But, apart from Alex Thomson’s tweet, I’ve seen no other British mainstream journalist ever mention this D-Notice in connection with the Skripal story.
As Noam Chomsky once said to the BBC’s Andrew Marr — it’s not that journalists self-censor. It’s that they wouldn’t be in the positions they hold if they thought any differently in the first place.
And so it was: the media followed the government’s lead. No questions asked. The narrative was set:
It was Russia.
In the Conservatory.
With the Novichok.
According to The History Thieves by investigative journalist Ian Cobain, the Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee estimated that 80–90% of all potentially sensitive news stories were submitted to them by journalists before publication. One committee member even noted that they were consulted “almost every working day.”
Within days, the government announced that the Skripals had been poisoned by a nerve agent “of a type made in Russia.” That phrase — deliberately vague — was repeated endlessly by every news outlet in the country. It was never properly defined. And it didn’t need to be.
It sounded definitive.
At the time, the UK’s Foreign Secretary was none other than Boris Johnson. And true to form, he lied. Repeatedly.
At one press conference, Boris claimed scientists at Porton Down had been “absolutely categorical” that the Novichok came from Russia. A week later, Porton Down’s chief executive Gary Aitkenhead publicly contradicted him, saying:
“We have not identified the precise source.”
A polite way of calling the Foreign Secretary a liar. Boris was never fully questioned on the incident.
That wasn’t the first time Boris dodged questions as Foreign Secretary. During Israel’s massacre of civilians at the Great March of Return in Gaza — where dozens of Palestinians were killed, including medics and journalists — Boris quite literally turned and fled when asked to comment.
But back to Salisbury.
Although Sergei and Yulia Skripal survived, one completely innocent person didn’t.
Weeks after the incident, a woman named Dawn Sturgess bought what she thought was a bottle of perfume from a charity shop. She sprayed it on her wrist.
It killed her.
Authorities claimed the bottle contained Novichok. That was the story.
How that bottle ended up in a charity shop, who put it there, or why — we never found out.
No serious investigation. No answers.
Also unaddressed: the fact that at the time of the Skripal poisoning, the British military had just wrapped up the largest biological warfare training exercise in UK history, right there on Salisbury Plain. What are the odds?
And there’s more. The first adult on the scene who came to the Skripals’ aid just happened to be… wait for it… the Chief Nursing Officer of the British Army, Colonel Alison McCourt. Her daughter was with her. Both were later given awards for their bravery.
Just another coincidence, I’m sure.
Then came the BBC’s Newsnight special, which confidently reported that Novichok could only be manufactured at a site called Shikhany in Russia. What they failed to mention is that Shikhany is just one of many Soviet-era sites — and that the U.S. Department of Defense helped dismantle a similar chemical weapons facility in Uzbekistan back in 1999.
So no — it wasn’t “only Russia” that knew how to make Novichok.
Which makes the phrase “of a type made in Russia” about as useful as saying someone was stabbed with a knife “of a type made in Sheffield.” Technically meaningless. Politically explosive.
Even WikiLeaks revealed that Hillary Clinton’s State Department had instructed staff not to speak about Novichok years before the incident — which makes one wonder just how “secret” this nerve agent really was.
And let’s not forget: the UK military’s Porton Down facility, which holds Novichok and works on nerve agents, is just a mile or so from the very park bench where the Skripals collapsed.
Just another coincidence, right?
None of this mattered to the press. The narrative was locked in.
It was Russia. It could only be Russia.
The UK led the largest mass expulsion of Russian diplomats in history — over 120 expelled globally. Donald Trump alone expelled 60. Half the world’s total.
Why? To prove he wasn’t Putin’s puppet.
Bizarrely, the logic of the day was this: Trump was secretly working for Putin… so to prove he wasn’t, he had to punish Russia. With no hard evidence. Over an incident that, until then, had no confirmed fatalities — except a British woman with no known link to the Skripals.
Relations between Russia and the West dropped to Cold War levels.
Was this the beginning of World War Three?
And where are the Skripals now?
To my knowledge, no UK journalist has ever been allowed to speak with them. Sergei Skripal hasn’t been seen in public since. Not even once.
It was Russia.
Case closed.
Don’t ask questions.
Especially any questions about where the Skripals are now.
Let’s just state the obvious here.
It made no sense for Russia to poison Sergei Skripal in 2018 simply because he’d once been a spy for Britain. That was old news. He’d already been arrested by Russia in 2004, sentenced to 13 years for treason, and then released in a spy swap in 2010. He wasn’t some rogue agent on the run — he was handed over, officially, and quietly resettled in the UK.
For eight years he lived in Salisbury. No drama. No headlines. No threats. Nothing to suggest he was on anyone’s radar — including Russia’s. So if they wanted him dead, why wait nearly a decade?
Unless he popped back onto the radar for a different reason entirely.
Sergei Skripal just happened to be the former asset of Christopher Steele — the man behind the dodgy dossier that claimed Donald Trump was compromised by Russia. The same dossier that sparked a media frenzy, FBI surveillance, and a years-long investigation into a theory that turned out to be smoke and mirrors.
And suddenly, one of Steele’s old sources — maybe even one of the people he leaned on to build that fantasy — winds up poisoned on a park bench. Within months of the dossier being discredited.
So maybe it wasn’t revenge for past spying. Maybe it was cleanup.
Or maybe, once again, we’re not supposed to ask.
Fast forward to the current day (2025)
Several U.S. lawmakers — including Tulsi Gabbard and President Donald Trump — have begun making noise about investigating the origins of the Russiagate scandal. Some have even floated the idea of prosecuting Barack Obama for his alleged role in authorising surveillance against the Trump campaign.
But here’s the problem.
You can’t investigate Russiagate without colliding head-on with two things the establishment has worked tirelessly to bury:
- Seth Rich — the DNC staffer who was shot dead in Washington, D.C., under mysterious circumstances just before the emails appeared on WikiLeaks.
- Sergei Skripal — the former MI6 asset poisoned in Salisbury, whose handler was Christopher Steele, the very man who authored the discredited dossier that helped justify the entire “Trump–Russia collusion” narrative.
Once you ask where the emails came from — you land on Rich.
Once you ask where the dossier came from — you land on Steele.
And once you ask who Steele was connected to — you land on Skripal.
And that’s when the house of cards really starts to wobble.
So far, no official U.S. inquiry has dared to seriously address these overlaps. To do so would require confronting the role of British intelligence, the silencing of Julian Assange (which is covered in the next chapter), and the fact that the mainstream media spent years peddling a fabrication without evidence.
In short:
You can’t follow the Russiagate thread to the end without tripping over the Skripal case.
Which might explain why the thread is being carefully clipped by those in the highest authority before it ever reaches the needle.
Because this isn’t just about one man on a park bench in Salisbury, or one staffer murdered in D.C., or one fake dossier laundered through MI6 into the FBI. It’s about the fact that they’ve managed to pull this off — in full view — and still no one will touch it.
In the last chapter we saw that CrowdStrike admitted under oath they had no evidence Russia hacked the DNC. None. That entire narrative — from hack to leak to Mueller — was built on a fabrication. One that “journalists” won Pullitzer prizes for pushing, while others like Luke Harding went on to write best-selling books called “Collusion”, even though there was clearly proof of none.
In the U.S. Tulsi Gabbard and Trump are dismantling the Russia “hack” theory as a hoax, but nobody seems to want to ask the obvious if that is true. If it wasn’t a hack, where did Wikileaks get the files from? Nobody can ask that question and be heard.
Sergei Skripal, the one man connected to both the Trump dossier and British intelligence, got hit with a chemical weapon months later — and still, no one’s allowed to ask questions?
You’re telling me I’m the only one in this country who sees this? The only one with the balls to say it? I don’t believe that. There are journalists up and down the UK who know what went on here. Who know there’s something deeply wrong with the official version of events. Who’ve read the same documents I have. But they won’t say a word.
Because they’re scared. Scared. Just as Ray McGovern told me they were years ago. Scared of losing their jobs. Scared of editors. Scared of Ofcom. Scared of being called conspiracy theorists. And most of all, scared of being right.
Because being right comes with consequences. Ask Julian Assange.
But this matters. Because if they can bury this — if they can bury the obvious in bullshit — two stories of such global magnitude — then what the hell else have they lied to us about?
How can we trust a single word they say about Russia? Or Syria? Or Gaza? Or COVID? Or anything whatsoever in the future?
If they do, if they do expose Russiagate as a scam but not ask the obvious questions that follow — it won’t be just a thread they clipped. It will be the whole damn tapestry.
Support the message? Share it.
One link. One friend. One moment.
