PerspectiveBritain’s Secret War with Russia

Tucked away in a drab industrial estate on the outskirts of the Swiss town of Spiez lies a multistory, nondescript concrete office block flanked by a parking lot and a soccer field. A modest gate with a small plaque is all that greets visitors.

Tom McTague writes in Defense One that this is the Bernese Oberland, the corner of Switzerland where James Bond met Blofeld in a revolving mountaintop hideaway; where Sherlock Holmes plunged to his death.

He adds:

The building in question, an outpost of Switzerland’s Federal Office for Civil Protection, might be unassuming—home to just 98 academics, engineers, apprentices, and technicians—yet its occupant, the Spiez Laboratory, is world-renowned. The elite facility focuses on global nuclear, chemical, and biological threats, and is one of a limited number of sites designated by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to conduct research and analysis. Safely under the protective cloak of the country’s diplomatic neutrality, Spiez Laboratory carries out its work with little fanfare or controversy.

Over the course of a few months in 2018, however, this gentle existence was upended, as the lab became caught in a cold war between Russia on one side and the United Kingdom and the West on the other, fought in public and in the shadows, online and in person, occasionally flashing hot in deadly fashion. From the attempted assassination of a double agent in a sleepy English city to the expulsion of scores of Russian diplomats from Western capitals, this fight would grow and morph, drawing in a chemical-weapons attack in Syria and rolling scandals about Russian sports doping.