The Guardian reports Russian agents Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov have been using multiple passports from an office that routinely handles passports from government officials and intelligence services. If they are tourists who wanted to visit Salisbury they hardly needed passports from the GRU office that handles them, and coincidentally are within a few numbers of each other.
We are able to determine this kind of nonsense because of investigative reporting inside Russia. Besides being good reporters, these people are also brave. President Putin has a short fuse when it comes to press people that get out of line. The article tells us the obvious, "If the reporting is confirmed, it would be a major blunder by the intelligence agency, allowing any country to check passport data for Russians requesting visas or entering the country against a list of nearly 40 passport files of suspected GRU officers." Some of them even listed the GRU headquarters address as their home address on their application.
Still, it is funny to have the Russians caught in such a stupid mistake, after the stupid mistake of trying to kill a former agent in UK. It is really hard to top that one, but this comes close. Maybe the GRU is getting stretched a little thin after all the election work they have been doing in the US. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.
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