Report from Warsaw: Russian Plots on Poland Intensifying
Kremlin escalating brazen spy and sabotage war on key Ukraine ally, but no Havana Syndrome incidents discovered, official tells our correspondent.
WARSAW—In the ongoing and intensifying spy wars between Moscow and the west, the arrest last January of a Russian operative plotting to blow up a paint factory in the Polish city of Wroclaw didn't get much attention. But it should have, a senior U.S. official tells me. The paint factory wasn’t some random target. It was right next to a fuel depot. The Russian plan was straightforward sabotage—to ignite a giant conflagration that would cause the fuel depot to explode, resulting in a “terroristic type of event” that could disrupt the flow of weapons to Ukraine through Poland, said the official. “And that's scary.”
The Polish paint factory plot was only one example of a marked uptick in Russian covert operations—including “active measures,” to use the old Cold War term—that is getting ever more attention from U.S. national security and intelligence officials. As a strategic supplement to its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow’s security agencies have stepped up their game of late, deploying bribes, bots and a proliferation of phony news sites pumping out disinformation about the war—not to mention brazen assassinations and sabotage operations such as the paint factory attack (which was aborted and busted by the ABW, Poland’s internal security agency).
The purpose of virtually all of these actions appear to revolve around buttressing Moscow’s goal of crushing Ukrainian resistance—either by undermining political support for Kyiv in the west, disrupting the flow of arms to the embattled nation or, in the case of the recent murder in Spain of a Russian helicopter pilot who defected, punishing any sign of internal dissent to its war goals.
In a sense, the recent flurry of Russian ops is an updated and expanded version of the hybrid warfare playbook the Kremlin used in 2016 when the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Russian military, hacked into Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign emails, laundered the embarrassing contents through WikiLeaks and deployed an army of trolls assembled by (then) Putin crony Yevgeny Prighozin to plant fake stories on Facebook and Twitter. (This was the subject of Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, my 2018 book, co-written with David Corn.)
As it turns out, what’s past is prologue—to much more. Just last month, acting on the same day, Polish, Czech and Belgian officials announced they had uncovered a seemingly continent-wide plot to bribe European Parliament members, with much of the cash believed to have been steered toward leaders of far right nationalist parties more inclined to be favorable to Moscow. The ABW, Poland’s internal security service, disclosed it had conducted two raids, arrested a suspect and seized $88,000 in cash as well as hard drives and phones. At the center of the alleged plot is a powerful pro-Moscow Ukrainian oligarch exiled to Russia, Victor Medvedchuk (whose daughter’s godfather is Putin himself) and who reportedly directed the bribes through the Prague-based Voice of Europe, a Russian propaganda network whose prime editorial target is the Ukrainian government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The European bribery/propaganda plot was a further expansion of an earlier operation during the run up to last October’s Polish elections, said the senior official I spoke to here. (As is standard protocol, he asked not to be identified by name in order to speak more freely about sensitive issues.) Stories began popping up in far right nationalist news sites about Ukrainian refugees committing murders of Polish citizens and getting away with it.
“There were even stories about Ukrainian women breaking up Polish families, seducing Polish men and breaking up marriages,” the official said.
Although details about the origins of these stories remain murky, they were perfectly seamless with Russian messaging seeking to exploit resentment against the one million Ukrainians who have fled to Poland. “It was a tactic [the Russians] would use to get people resentful and cynical towards the Ukrainian refugee population,” the official said.
Kyiv Pipeline
But it is unquestionably the flow of U.S. and NATO arms through Poland that has turned the country into the most critical battleground in the espionage wars. More than 80 percent of all the weapons to Ukraine move by rail through Poland. Last year, the ABW busted another extensive Russian spy ring whose goal was to disrupt those movements: about 10 young Ukrainians who had been recruited by the GRU to scout Polish seaports and place GoPro cameras and tracking devices along railways. The purpose, according to a Washington Post account, was to derail trains carrying arms across the border destined for the Ukrainian military.
To be sure, there is a clear logic to much of this: Russia is waging war against an adversary, Ukraine, whose military and intelligence services have been linked to their own audacious act of cross-border sabotage: the 2022 dynamiting of the Nord Stream pipeline that carried Russian natural gas to Europe. That stunning operation, which involved the deployment of deep sea divers to place explosive charges on the pipeline, was reportedly coordinated by a Ukrainian colonel.
There is still much about the Nord Stream attack that remains unclear—including whether any western officials were aware of it ahead of time. And for what it's worth, the Ukrainian colonel, Roman Chervinsky, has denied through an attorney any involvement and dismissed the reports implicating him as Russian propaganda.
Moscow Miscues
It is also worth noting that, even with the dramatic uptick in Russian covert ops, it doesn’t mean that the Kremlin security services are necessarily the espionage superpower that some in the west ascribe. . Some operations have turned out to be sloppy—witness the botched 2018 attempt to assassinate former Russian military officer turned British double agent Sergei Skripal with a powerful nerve agent—a move that was soon traced by U.K. authorities to Kremlin operatives. And the U.S. intelligence community remains deeply skeptical of the most dramatic claims about Russian ops, recently revived by Sixty Minutes: that Vladimir Putin’s spies are using supersecret microwave weapons that nobody has ever seen to zap U.S. diplomats and spies around the globe, causing debilitating symptoms of crushing ear pain, dizziness, memory loss and psychic distress commonly known as Havana Syndrome. 60 Minutes’ partners in its investigation, Der Spiegel and Insider.com, a magazine staffed by Russian exiles, produced some evidence suggesting a GRU assassination unit might be behind Havana Syndrome attacks, which the U.S. government officially calls Anomalous Health Incidents. But the fact that nobody has ever reported seeing the supposed weapons, among other confounding technical and medical issues, prompted the U.S. intelligence community to conclude last year that it is “very unlikely” that any of these symptoms have been caused by an instrument wielded by Russia or any other foreign adversary. And if anything, a visit to Poland—and a look at what operations the Russians are conducting in this critical NATO country—only bolsters the case for skepticism.
For all the importance Poland plays in the Russian spy playbook, the senior U.S. official I met with—someone with access to highly classified intelligence about everything the Russians are up to in this country—says there have been no cases of supposed Havana Syndrome incidents in Poland that had come to the official’s attention. (In December 2020, NBC News mentioned a CIA officer in Poland “who had experienced symptoms” of Havana Syndrome as among a number of suspected cases, including in East Asia and the United Kingdom,” but offered no further details. If there were any signs U.S. officials were experiencing such attacks, we “would be all over that,” said the senior official. But “there’s been nothing like that around here.” For that matter, there also have been no credible reports of Havana Syndrome attacks in Ukraine during the current conflict, making the idea that Russia would be instead using a presumably highly sophisticated microwave weapon against random U.S. officials for no apparent strategic purpose, such as a FBI counterintelligence agent in Florida (shown on Sixty Minutes in disguise) or the wife of a Justice Department attache in Tbilisi, Georgia even more unlikely.
Michael Isikoff, an award-winning investigative journalist and best-selling author who has reported for The Washington Post, Newsweek, NBC News and Yahoo News, recently joined SpyTalk as a contributing editor.
It seems kinda cheesy to plug your book in a blog that I and many others pay for.
Great to be reading Isikoff on SpyTalk. His skepticism is invaluable. And that book of his (with David Corn, of course), is well worth tracking down.
It's good to have your assumptions challenged and the point about the size of the Havana Syndrome energy weapon or, rather, it's power source, is a deal-breaker. Ditto the random nature of the targets. Like most people, I too had passively accepted the conventional wisdom: its dramatic narrative suckered me. There's obviously a long way to go before we know for sure what went on.
I hate to say this, but that's also true of the Nord Stream bombings. This time the seductive narrative is that a small team in a tiny yacht led by this Ukrainian colonel set the explosives. It's the stuff of action movies and I think Mike's fallen it. The better evidence is the extensive and verifiable work of Scandinavian investigative journalists and OSINT researchers who have identified a small fleet of Russian specialist dive vessels loitering above the blast sites beforehand. If it doesn't get reported by the NYT or Der Spiegel I guess it's not news.
Finally, for anyone not up to date with the Skripal assassination attempt, a lot more is known about the assassins than that they were "Kremlin operatives". This time, OSINT researchers at Bellingcat got at least as far as MI5, if not further.:
Skripal Suspect Identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2018/09/26/skripal-suspect-boshirov-identified-gru-colonel-anatoliy-chepiga/
Second Skripal Suspect Identified as Dr. Alexander Mishkin
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2018/10/08/second-skripal-poisoning-suspect-identified-as-dr-alexander-mishkin/
Third Suspect Identified as Denis Sergeev, High-Ranking GRU Officer
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2019/02/14/third-suspect-in-skripal-poisoning-identified-as-denis-sergeev-high-ranking-gru-officer/