JUDY WOODRUFF: But first: It has been almost a year since Kremlin intelligence officers
tried to kill a Russian defector in the British city of Salisbury by poisoning him with a
nerve agent.
That attack and subsequent death of a British woman last summer from the nerve agent scared
away tourists and shoppers.
As special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports, British authorities and the townspeople are
working hard to get Salisbury's economy back on track.
MALCOLM BRABANT: At Salisbury's twice-weekly market, lively sales patter and cheap prices
are an irresistible lure.
SHANE GILKES, Stall Holder: Pound a punnet, strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, seedless
grape.
Pound a bowl.
Pound a punnet.
MALCOLM BRABANT: Stall holder Shane Gilkes is keen to consign the poisoning to history
and projects an image of confidence and normality.
SHANE GILKES: Took three months to pick back up.
But we're OK now.
People are a bit more confident now back out in the town.
And, yes, here we are, as you can see.
MALCOLM BRABANT: These two officers from the Kremlin's GRU intelligence agency intelligence
agents are blamed for the sharp decline of Salisbury's economy.
This is CCTV footage of them in the city last March.
According to the British authorities, the two agents tried to kill Russian defector
Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia by smearing a tiny amount of a nerve agent called Novichok
on the door of their home in Salisbury.
The Skripals survived, just.
But the deadly nature of the assassin's invisible weapon scared visitors away.
In the market square, at a stall selling Indian street food, Tony Dokhpanjan Singh is still
suffering from the fear factor.
TONY DOKHPANJAN SINGH, Stall Holder: We lost at least 60 percent, 60 percent losses when
it happened.
Then slowly, a little, it picked up.
Now it's like, I would say, it's down about 30 percent at least.
I'm down 30 percent.
A lot of other people -- a lot of people are struggling.
MALCOLM BRABANT: In order to prevent local businesses from going under, the county administration
established an emergency fund and a task force under Pauline Church.
PAULINE CHURCH, South Wiltshire Economic Development and Recovery: We keep a close eye on our businesses.
And some of the investment that we put into businesses, whether it was grants or helping
them with business rates, et cetera, that was to prevent business from making staff
redundant or closing down.
And you have to ensure the local community remains buoyant and confident.
What we really want to do is to bring visitors back to Salisbury, and that's starting to
happen.
MALCOLM BRABANT: The restaurant where the Skripals dined before collapsing was closed
for eight months.
It has been spruced up and is now open for business.
But close to the place where the Skripals were found comatose, these shops are having
a disastrous time.
Staff didn't want to talk on camera, but described sales as being almost nonexistent.
Other retail workers talked about customers still being terrified.
Sausage maker Jim Martin thinks that terror is unjustified.
JIM MARTIN, Sausage Maker: I just think it seems a bit ironic that the city's got I don't
know how many thousand people living in it.
Two people in the whole of that city got it.
MALCOLM BRABANT: Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon is a chemical weapons expert and a senior
adviser to Britain's Ministry of Defense.
He's spent more than 30 years on battlefields around the world, assessing the impact of
chemical warfare.
COL.
HAMISH DE BRETTON-GORDON, Chemical Weapons Expert: I am pretty certain that 99 percent
of the contamination has been identified.
I mean, we have buried over 37 vehicles already.
Hundreds of bags of contaminated material have either been incinerated or buried.
And the Skripals' house in Salisbury is still being decontaminated.
Apart from that, it's all gone.
MALCOLM BRABANT: The Skripals may have survived, but 44-year-old Dawn Sturgess didn't.
She died last July, days after spraying what she thought was perfume on her wrists.
The bottle contained Novichok and had been thrown away by the assassins.
Her death shattered public confidence.
COL.
HAMISH DE BRETTON-GORDON: This is the ultimate terror weapon.
People are fixated by it and terrified by it, because the messaging, particularly from
the British government, has been particularly poor.
Salisbury is safe and open for business.
I have absolutely -- I probably know more than most people about this.
I have no qualms at all of going to Salisbury and have no fear that we will have any more
casualties.
MALCOLM BRABANT: Ten miles north of Salisbury is Stonehenge, the 5,000-year-old prehistoric
Stone circle that's a World Heritage Site.
LOUISE TUNNARD, Salisbury Museum: For many people, Stonehenge is iconic.
They have traveled all the way around the world.
They want to go and stand by the stones.
MALCOLM BRABANT: Stonehenge had 1.5 million visitors last year, 400 thousand of whom came
from North America.
Normally, many would have visited Salisbury.
But, last year, because of Novichok they stayed away, causing financial problems for the museum
and staff like Louise Tunnard.
LOUISE TUNNARD: We are an independent charity.
And so the majority of our income comes from our visitors, from our ticket sales, from
people coming to use the cafe and the shop.
And so the impact has been big.
MALCOLM BRABANT: The museum is intensifying efforts to win back Stonehenge visitors with
improved displays.
The two Russian intelligence agents claimed that Salisbury's famous attractions were the
only reason they visited the city.
ALEXANDER PETROV, Russian Intelligence Agent (through translator): Our friends have been
suggesting for quite a long time that we visit this wonderful city.
MARGARITA SIMONYAN, Russia Today: Salisbury, a wonderful city?
ALEXANDER PETROV (through translator): Yes.
MARGARITA SIMONYAN (through translator): What makes it so wonderful?
RUSLAN BOSHIROV, Russian Intelligence Agent (through translator): It's a tourist city.
They have a famous cathedral there, Salisbury Cathedral.
It's famous throughout Europe and in fact throughout the world, I think.
MALCOLM BRABANT: There's little prospect of ever bringing the Russians to justice, but
their legacy lingers.
The authorities in Salisbury may be putting on a brave face about how business here is
improving, but it's clear that, nearly one year after the Novichok attack, some traders
are still suffering.
The worry for terrorism, experts, though, is that Salisbury has become a template for
rogue governments or extremist groups which want to inflict maximum damage with a similar
invisible deadly weapon.
As memories of attacks at the Bataclan club in Paris and Berlin's Christmas market fade
with the passing years, chemical weapons expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon fears a new terrorist
outrage inspired by Salisbury.
COL.
HAMISH DE BRETTON-GORDON: The impact of this tiny amount of agent, you know, it's fixated
the world for 10 months, the jihadis, the so-called Islamic State, the Dark Web.
People running it at the moment are telling jihadis around the world to use chemical weapons,
be it in the U.K., the U.S. or elsewhere.
So that has had a profound effect.
And, of course, we have seen the jihadis using chemical weapons frequently in Syria and Iraq.
MALCOLM BRABANT: De Bretton Gordon believes mainland Europe is at greatest risk, because
jihadis are able to move across frontiers more easily than in Britain or America.
COL.
HAMISH DE BRETTON-GORDON: What I would say to the American people is that they shouldn't
worry unduly.
I have recently run a conference and an exercise with the mayor of New York's office, looking
exactly at this sort of thing.
And, actually, the U.S. is better prepared than virtually any other country in the world
to deal with this sort of thing.
MALCOLM BRABANT: Nearly one year after the attack, staff at Salisbury Cathedral hope
that visitors will start flocking back to see its copy of the Magna Carta, the 13th
century human rights document which paved the way for democracy in Britain.
Salisbury's sense of resilience is embodied by the museum's Louise Tunnard.
LOUISE TUNNARD: It was a dreadful attack on the heart of our society, on human beings,
real people.
That was quite devastating.
But there reaches a point where you have to pick yourselves up and carry on.
We live here.
We are bringing up children here.
We're growing old here.
We're falling in love here.
That's how we have to carry on.
MALCOLM BRABANT: And, with that attitude, the Novichok attack will eventually become
another footnote in thousands of years of rich history.
For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Malcolm Brabant in Salisbury.