After seemingly innocent cargo shipments started catching fire at airports and warehouses in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Poland over the summer, there was little doubt in Washington and Europe that Russia was behind the sabotage. There was no room for doubt.
But in August, White House officials became increasingly alarmed after receiving secret intelligence suggesting that the Russian government had a much larger plan in mind: bringing the Ukraine war inside the United States.
The problem was how to send a warning to the only person who could stop it: Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.
In a series of Situation Room briefings, President Biden’s aides went over the details of conversations between senior officials from Russia’s military intelligence arm, the GRU, in which they said they were investigating consumer products that caught fire, in one case. The company explained the shipment of small electronic massagers as follows. Test execution.
Once the Russian side understands how the baggage got through the air cargo inspection system and how long it will take in transit, the next step is to send the baggage on a plane to the US and Canada until it arrives. It later appeared to be to cause a fire. I was taken down.
Although the main concern was with cargo planes, passenger planes sometimes carry small items in the empty space of the cargo hold.
“The risk of a catastrophic mistake was clear,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a recent interview, adding that “there was a possibility of a fire igniting inside a fully loaded aircraft.”
In August, Mr. Mayorkas instituted new inspection restrictions on cargo shipped to the United States. When the alert was raised again in October, he quietly pressed the heads of major airlines serving the United States to accelerate steps to prevent airborne disasters. Some of these precautions were made public at the time. others were not.
But behind the scenes, White House officials struggled to understand whether Mr. Putin directed the plan, knew about it, or whether he was being kept in the dark. And so began a massive effort to warn him to end it.
Reaching for the playbook first written in October 2022 — when the U.S. believed Russia was considering detonating a nuclear weapon in Ukraine — Biden was the national security adviser. Jake Sullivan and CIA Director William J. Burns were dispatched to issue a series of warnings to Putin’s inner circle. As one senior official said, there were many channels needed to ensure the message reached Putin’s ears and penetrated.
The core of the warning was that if the sabotage caused mass casualties in the air or on the ground, the United States would hold Russia responsible for “enabling terrorism.” Sullivan and Burns did not specify what their response would be, but they made it clear that it would take the shadow war between Washington and Moscow to a new level.
That shadow war continues every day, with Russia turning to sabotage in hopes of breaking NATO’s will to support Ukraine without provoking an all-out war with the NATO alliance.
It redefined life in Europe and ended the sense of security that came with the post-Cold War world. Searches for saboteurs are now being carried out hourly, not only on the streets of major cities such as Berlin, Tallinn and London, but also in airports, ports and under the sea.
But in this case, that warning was conveyed to Mr. Putin for the first time, officials said for the first time about secret communications with the Kremlin. And they seem to have had their intended effect. The surge in fires in Europe has stopped, at least for now. However, it is unclear whether Putin ordered the suspension or for how long. And officials say Russia may be taking the time to develop better, stealthier devices.
A plausible deniability?
Five officials interviewed over the past three weeks about efforts to reach Mr. Putin asked not to be named to discuss sensitive national security threats. Some details of the tense exchanges with the Kremlin have just been declassified in recent days as the administration prepares to leave office in a week.
Officials said efforts to avert the worst were successful, but some people were visibly shaken. As they step down, the Russian military, angered by embarrassing and sometimes deadly attacks by Ukraine around Kursk and other targets on Russian territory, is now determined to take the conflict to European and American territory. I am concerned about this. But they want to do it using technology that doesn’t risk full-scale conflict with NATO.
The Russians saw this operation as a natural and, in their minds, proportionate response to a Ukrainian attack on mainland Russia, which has relied, at least in part, on U.S.-supplied weapons, including missiles. Maybe.
To this day, U.S. officials do not know whether Mr. Putin ordered the operation, knew about it, or only learned of it after a warning from the United States.
Officials said they suspected the plot was the work of GRU officers who were responding to general orders to increase pressure on the United States and its NATO allies. That would be consistent with past efforts to create plausible deniability for Mr. Putin if the operation went awry, they said.
The incident showed that Biden and Putin have maintained indirect communication channels even though they have not spoken since Russia’s attack on Ukraine began in February 2022.
The freeze on direct dialogue between the US and Russia appears to be nearing an end. President-elect Donald J. Trump said Thursday that Mr. Putin “wants a meeting and we are setting it up,” but the Kremlin insists the meeting has not taken place. formal conversation. Trump and his aides have declined to answer questions about whether the two have already met. Will the talks be limited to the Ukraine war, or will it also include other elements of the U.S.-Russia rivalry, such as the emerging nuclear arms race, Russia’s future in Syria, and the accelerating shadow war with the West? They clearly haven’t.
News of the air cargo operation came from Europe this summer, and the Wall Street Journal reported in early November that intelligence officials believe Russia’s ultimate goal is to expand the operation into the United States and Canada. .
But this account is the first to describe how Mr. Biden’s aides decided that without direct intervention with Mr. Putin, the event could lead to disaster. Even unintentionally, if bad weather delays a plane or saboteurs become victims. The timing is wrong.
“This was a powerful example of the convergence of national security and homeland security,” Mayorkas said.
Mysterious fire and cable cut
For the first two years of the war, Russia seemed determined to keep the conflict within Ukraine’s borders. The missile never entered NATO territory. One night, when it appeared that a missile might have crossed the border into Poland and killed two farmers, Mr. Biden was awakened to fears that the two countries were about to descend into open conflict. To Washington’s relief, it was a false alarm. The errant shot came from the Ukrainian.
Things have changed in 2024. Incidents of sabotage and suspected sabotage occurred everywhere. Unexplained fires in warehouses are sometimes linked to companies that help arm Ukraine. GPS “spoofing” crippled navigation systems for ships and flights across Europe. The disconnection of an undersea fiber-optic cable appears to have been caused by the anchor being pulled from a “shadow fleet” of Russian barges.
Washington helped intelligence officials in Berlin uncover an assassination plot against the chief executive of Germany’s major arms manufacturer, Rheinmetall. The company is a major producer of shells that Ukraine desperately needs.
However, an incendiary device caused a fire at a DHL cargo facility in the former East German university city of Leipzig in late July, prompting an immediate investigation. Thomas Haldenwang, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, later told Germany’s parliament that the plane crash had been narrowly avoided, but he did not elaborate.
The package was postmarked from Lithuania, as was another package that was postmarked in Birmingham, England. The third incident involved a courier company in Poland that exploded into flames.
The biggest concern inside the White House was in the form of intelligence regarding conversations between the GRU, but it did not say how American officials had access to the conversations. But they confirmed the contents. The three incendiary bombs were aimed at investigating how DHL and other shipments flow, and could be timed to ignite highly flammable magnesium-based materials.
The conversation indicated that the next step was to put them on a plane to the United States and Canada. However, a concern that was raised during the Situation Room discussion was that the device could stop mid-air due to unintended delays caused by weather or traffic jams that caused planes to turn.
Warning from Washington to Moscow
In August, the CIA and others revealed that the incendiary devices detonated in Leipzig, Birmingham and Poland were actually part of a “field test” by the GRU to figure out what route the packages would take on their way through Europe. It was concluded that this was an attempt. The package was sent from Vilnius, Lithuania, where Russia has important intelligence operations.
Mr. Sullivan’s colleagues remember him being very focused on the dangers of attacks during this period, but he said nothing publicly about it. But conversations among GRU officials left little doubt about where this would lead. A senior official involved in the talks said it became clear that a message needed to be conveyed to Putin because he is the only person in the Russian system who can order an end to the operation. But to reach him, I had to send messages through multiple channels.
Sullivan quietly began a series of telephone conversations with Russia’s Yuri Ushakov, starting by mentioning the Rheinmetall conspiracy. Unsurprisingly, Ushakov denied Russian involvement – just as Russian officials denied in October 2022 that they were planning to use tactical nuclear weapons.
Mr. Sullivan then dwelled a bit on how the United States knew, telling Mr. Ushakov that the government believed the incendiary devices were also Russia’s responsibility and had endangered civilian lives. Ta. A big concern is the risk of mass casualties if the cargo takes off on a cargo or passenger plane, he said.
CIA Director Burns, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Russia 20 years ago and is the highest-ranking official who knows Putin best, told Sergei Naryshkin and Alexander Bortnikov, who run the SVR, a comparable intelligence agency to Putin, made essentially the same argument. Director of the FSB, two of the most powerful Russian intelligence agencies. All of them were believed to have regular access to Mr. Putin.
U.S. officials were careful not to say the purpose of the operation was to shoot down the plane. In fact, the device appeared to be designed to operate on the ground. However, the risk of an airborne accident appears to have been high.
Although an immediate crisis was averted, Biden’s aides acknowledged that the incident revealed a larger problem. As the war reaches its third anniversary and intensifies, risks are spilling over into new areas and taking on new dimensions.
“As big as a ceasefire in Ukraine is, it is far from the whole story,” said Richard Haas, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who has written extensively about what an end to the war would look like.
He said the sabotage was “all part of a larger pattern.”
“Russia has turned into a revolutionary subject,” he said. “Russia has turned into a country that seeks to disrupt the international order. And the real question is, can the Trump administration do anything about it?”
