October 8, 2019
First came a
destabilization campaign in Moldova, followed by the poisoning of an arms
dealer in Bulgaria and then a thwarted coup in Montenegro. Last year, there was
an attempt to
assassinate a former Russian spy in Britain using a
nerve agent. Though the operations bore the fingerprints of Russia’s
intelligence services, the authorities initially saw them as isolated,
unconnected attacks.
Western security
officials have now concluded that these operations, and potentially many
others, are part of a coordinated and ongoing campaign to destabilize Europe,
executed by an elite unit inside the Russian intelligence system skilled in
subversion, sabotage and assassination.
The group, known
as Unit 29155, has operated for at least a decade, yet Western officials only
recently discovered it. Intelligence officials in four Western countries say it
is unclear how often the unit is mobilized and warn that it is impossible to
know when and where its operatives will strike.
The purpose of
Unit 29155, which has not been previously reported, underscores the degree to
which the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, is actively fighting the West with his brand of
so-called hybrid warfare — a blend of propaganda, hacking attacks and
disinformation — as well as open military confrontation.
“I think we had
forgotten how organically ruthless the Russians could be,” said Peter Zwack, a
retired military intelligence officer and former defense attaché at the United
States Embassy in Moscow, who said he was not aware of the unit’s existence.
In a text
message, Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, directed questions about the
unit to the Russian Defense Ministry. The ministry did not respond to requests
for comment.
Hidden behind
concrete walls at the headquarters of the 161st Special Purpose Specialist
Training Center in eastern Moscow, the unit sits within the command hierarchy
of the Russian military intelligence agency, widely known as the
G.R.U.
Though much about
G.R.U. operations remains a mystery, Western intelligence agencies have begun
to get a clearer picture of its underlying architecture. In the months before
the 2016 presidential election, American officials say two G.R.U. cyber units,
known as 26165 and 74455, hacked into the servers of the Democratic National
Committee and the Clinton campaign, and then published embarrassing internal
communications.
[Our
correspondent Matt Apuzzo reported on Russia’s blueprint for foreign disruption
on “The Weekly,” The
Times’s TV show. Watch on FX and Hulu.]
Last year, Robert
S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the inquiry into Russian
interference in the 2016 elections, indicted more than a
dozen officers from those units, though all still remain at large.
The hacking teams mostly operate from Moscow, thousands of miles from their
targets.
By contrast,
officers from Unit 29155 travel to and from European countries. Some are
decorated veterans of Russia’s bloodiest wars, including in Afghanistan, Chechnya
and Ukraine. Its operations are so secret, according to assessments by Western
intelligence services, that the unit’s existence is most likely unknown even to
other G.R.U. operatives.
The unit appears
to be a tight-knit community. A photograph taken in 2017 shows the unit’s
commander, Maj. Gen. Andrei V. Averyanov, at his daughter’s wedding in a gray
suit and bow tie. He is posing with Col. Anatoly V. Chepiga, one of two
officers indicted in Britain over the poisoning of a former spy, Sergei V. Skripal.
“This is a unit
of the G.R.U. that has been active over the years across Europe,” said one
European security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe
classified intelligence matters. “It’s been a surprise that the Russians, the
G.R.U., this unit, have felt free to go ahead and carry out this extreme malign
activity in friendly countries. That’s been a shock.”
To varying
degrees, each of the four operations linked to the unit attracted public
attention, even as it took time for the authorities to confirm that they were
connected. Western intelligence agencies first identified the unit after the failed 2016 coup
in Montenegro, which involved a plot by two unit officers to kill
the country’s prime minister and seize the Parliament building.
But officials
began to grasp the unit’s specific agenda of disruption only after the March
2018 poisoning of Mr. Skripal, a former G.R.U. officer who had betrayed Russia
by spying for the British. Mr. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, fell grievously
ill after exposure to a highly toxic nerve
agent, but survived.
(Three other
people were sickened, including a police officer and a man who found a small bottle that British officials
believe was used to carry the nerve agent and gave it to his girlfriend. The
girlfriend, Dawn Sturgess, died after spraying
the nerve agent on her skin, mistaking the bottle for perfume.)
The poisoning led
to a geopolitical standoff, with more than 20 nations, including the United
States, expelling 150 Russian diplomats in a show of solidarity with Britain.
Ultimately, the
British authorities exposed two suspects, who had traveled under aliases but
were later identified by the investigative site Bellingcat as Colonel Chepiga
and Alexander Mishkin. Six months after the poisoning, British prosecutors charged both men with transporting the
nerve agent to Mr. Skripal’s home in Salisbury, England, and smearing it on his
front door.
But the operation
was more complex than officials revealed at the time.
Exactly a year
before the poisoning, three Unit 29155 operatives traveled to Britain, possibly
for a practice run, two European officials said. One was Mr. Mishkin. A second
man used the alias Sergei Pavlov. Intelligence officials believe the third
operative, who used the alias Sergei Fedotov, oversaw the mission.
Soon, officials
established that two of these officers — the men using the names Fedotov and
Pavlov — had been part of a team that attempted to poison
the Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev in 2015. (The other
operatives, also known only by their aliases, according to European
intelligence officials, were Ivan Lebedev, Nikolai Kononikhin, Alexey Nikitin
and Danil Stepanov.)
The team would
twice try to kill Mr. Gebrev, once in Sofia, the capital, and again a month
later at his home on the Black Sea.
Speaking to
reporters in February at the Munich Security Conference, Alex Younger, the
chief of MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, spoke out against the
growing Russian threat and hinted at coordination, without mentioning a
specific unit.
“You can see
there is a concerted program of activity — and, yes, it does often involve the
same people,” Mr. Younger said, pointing specifically to the Skripal poisoning
and the Montenegro coup attempt. He added: “We assess there is a standing
threat from the G.R.U. and the other Russian intelligence services and that
very little is off limits.”
The Kremlin sees
Russia as being at war with a Western liberal order that it views as an
existential threat.
At a ceremony in November for the G.R.U.’s
centenary, Mr. Putin stood beneath a glowing backdrop of the agency’s logo — a
red carnation and an exploding grenade — and described it as “legendary.” A
former intelligence officer himself, Mr. Putin drew a direct line between the
Red Army spies who helped defeat the Nazis in World War II and officers of the
G.R.U., whose “unique capabilities” are now deployed against a different kind
of enemy.
“Unfortunately,
the potential for conflict is on the rise in the world,” Mr. Putin said during
the ceremony. “Provocations and outright lies are being used and attempts are
being made to disrupt strategic parity.”
In 2006, Mr.
Putin signed a law legalizing targeted killings abroad, the same year a team of
Russian assassins used a radioactive isotope to murder Aleksander
V. Litvinenko, another former Russian spy, in London.
Unit 29155 is not
the only group authorized to carry out such operations, officials said. The
British authorities have attributed Mr.
Litvinenko’s killing to the Federal Security Service, the intelligence
agency once headed by Mr. Putin that often competes with the G.R.U.
Although little
is known about Unit 29155 itself, there are clues in public Russian records
that suggest links to the Kremlin’s broader hybrid strategy.
A 2012 directive
from the Russian Defense Ministry assigned bonuses to three units for “special
achievements in military service.” One was Unit 29155. Another was Unit 74455,
which was involved in the 2016 election interference. The third was Unit 99450,
whose officers are believed to have been involved in the annexation of the
Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
A retired G.R.U.
officer with knowledge of Unit 29155 said that it specialized in preparing for
“diversionary” missions, “in groups or individually — bombings, murders,
anything.”
“They were
serious guys who served there,” the retired officer said. “They were officers
who worked undercover and as international agents.”
Photographs of
the unit’s dilapidated former headquarters, which has since been abandoned,
show myriad gun racks with labels for an assortment of weapons, including
Belgian FN-30 sniper rifles, German G3A3s, Austrian Steyr AUGs and American
M16s. There was also a form outlining a training regimen, including exercises
for hand-to-hand combat. The retired G.R.U. officer confirmed the authenticity
of the photographs, which were published by a
Russian blogger.
The current
commander, General Averyanov, graduated in 1988 from the Tashkent Military
Academy in what was then the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan. It is likely that
he would have fought in both the first and second Chechen wars, and he was
awarded a Hero of Russia medal, the country’s highest honor, in January 2015.
The two officers charged with the Skripal poisoning also received the same
award.
Though an elite
force, the unit appears to operate on a shoestring budget. According to Russian
records, General Averyanov lives in a run-down Soviet-era building a few blocks
from the unit’s headquarters and drives a 1996 VAZ 21053, a rattletrap
Russia-made sedan. Operatives often share cheap accommodation to economize
while on the road. British investigators say the suspects in the Skripal
poisoning stayed in a low-cost hotel in Bow, a downtrodden neighborhood in East
London.
But European
security officials are also perplexed by the apparent sloppiness in the unit’s
operations. Mr. Skripal survived the assassination attempt, as did Mr. Gebrev,
the Bulgarian arms dealer. The attempted coup in Montenegro drew an enormous
amount of attention, but ultimately failed. A year later, Montenegro joined
NATO. It is possible, security officials say, that they have yet to discover
other, more successful operations.
It is difficult
to know if the messiness has bothered the Kremlin. Perhaps, intelligence
experts say, it is part of the point.
“That kind of
intelligence operation has become part of the psychological warfare,” said
Eerik-Niiles Kross, a former intelligence chief in Estonia. “It’s not that they
have become that much more aggressive. They want to be felt. It’s part of the
game.”
Michael Schwirtz
