June 26, 2020
The Trump administration
has been deliberating for months about what to do about a stunning intelligence
assessment.
WASHINGTON —
American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military
intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for
killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops —
amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials
briefed on the matter.
The United States
concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to
assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to
destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards
for successful attacks last year.
Islamist
militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are
believed to have collected some bounty money, the officials said. Twenty
Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which
killings were under suspicion.
The intelligence
finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security
Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the
officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with
making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with
an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White
House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.
An operation to
incentivize the killing of American and other NATO troops would be a
significant and provocative escalation of what American and Afghan officials have
said is Russian support for the Taliban, and it would be the first time the
Russian spy unit was known to have orchestrated attacks on Western troops.
Any involvement
with the Taliban that resulted in the deaths of American troops would also be a
huge escalation of Russia’s so-called hybrid war against the United States, a
strategy of destabilizing adversaries through a combination of such tactics as
cyberattacks, the spread of fake news and covert and deniable military
operations.
The Kremlin had
not been made aware of the accusations, said Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary
for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “If someone makes them, we’ll
respond,” Mr. Peskov said.
Zabihullah
Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, denied that the insurgents have “any such
relations with any intelligence agency” and called the report an attempt to
defame them.
“These kinds of
deals with the Russian intelligence agency are baseless — our target killings
and assassinations were ongoing in years before, and we did it on our own
resources,” he said. “That changed after our deal with the Americans, and their
lives are secure and we don’t attack them.”
Spokespeople at
the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the State Department and the
C.I.A. declined to comment.
The officials
familiar with the intelligence did not explain the White House delay in
deciding how to respond to the intelligence about Russia.
While some of his
closest advisers, like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have counseled more
hawkish policies toward Russia, Mr. Trump has adopted an accommodating stance
toward Moscow.
At a summit in
2018 in Helsinki, Finland, Mr. Trump strongly suggested that he believed Mr.
Putin’s denial that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 presidential election,
despite broad agreement within the American intelligence establishment that it
did. Mr. Trump criticized a bill imposing sanctions on Russia when he signed it
into law after Congress passed it by veto-proof majorities. And he has
repeatedly made statements that undermined the NATO alliance as a bulwark
against Russian aggression in Europe.
The officials
spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the delicate intelligence and
internal deliberations. They said the intelligence had been treated as a
closely held secret, but the administration expanded briefings about it this
week — including sharing information about it with the British government,
whose forces are among those said to have been targeted.
The intelligence
assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured
Afghan militants and criminals. The officials did not describe the mechanics of
the Russian operation, such as how targets were picked or how money changed hands.
It is also not clear whether Russian operatives had deployed inside Afghanistan
or met with their Taliban counterparts elsewhere.
The revelations
came into focus inside the Trump administration at a delicate and distracted
time. Although officials collected the intelligence earlier in the year, the
interagency meeting at the White House took place as the coronavirus pandemic
was becoming a crisis and parts of the country were shutting down.
Moreover, as Mr.
Trump seeks re-election in November, he wants to strike a peace deal with the
Taliban to end the Afghanistan war.
Both American and
Afghan officials have previously accused Russia of providing small arms and
other support to the Taliban that amounts to destabilizing activity, although
Russian government officials have dismissed such claims as “idle gossip” and
baseless.
“We share some
interests with Russia in Afghanistan, and clearly they’re acting to undermine
our interests as well,” Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the commander of American
forces in Afghanistan at the time, said in a 2018 interview with the BBC.
Though coalition
troops suffered a spate of combat casualties last summer and early fall, only a
few have since been killed. Four Americans were killed in combat in early 2020,
but the Taliban have not attacked American positions since a February
agreement.
American troops
have also sharply reduced their movement outside military bases because of the
coronavirus, reducing their exposure to attack.
While officials
were said to be confident about the intelligence that Russian operatives
offered and paid bounties to Afghan militants for killing Americans, they have
greater uncertainty about how high in the Russian government the covert
operation was authorized and what its aim may be.
Some officials
have theorized that the Russians may be seeking revenge on NATO forces for a
2018 battle in Syria in which the American military killed several hundred
pro-Syrian forces, including numerous Russian mercenaries, as they advanced on
an American outpost. Officials have also suggested that the Russians may have
been trying to derail peace talks to keep the United States bogged down in
Afghanistan. But the motivation remains murky.
The officials
briefed on the matter said the government had assessed the operation to be the
handiwork of Unit 29155, an arm of Russia’s military intelligence agency, known
widely as the G.R.U. The unit is linked to the March 2018 nerve agent poisoning
in Salisbury, England, of Sergei Skripal, a former G.R.U. officer who had
worked for British intelligence and then defected, and his daughter.
Western
intelligence officials say the unit, which has operated for more than a decade,
has been charged by the Kremlin with carrying out a campaign to destabilize the
West through subversion, sabotage and assassination. In addition to the 2018
poisoning, the unit was behind an attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016 and the
poisoning of an arms manufacturer in Bulgaria a year earlier.
American
intelligence officials say the G.R.U. was at the center of Moscow’s covert
efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In the months before that
election, American officials say, two G.R.U. cyberunits, known as 26165 and
74455, hacked into Democratic Party servers and then used WikiLeaks to publish
embarrassing internal communications.
In part because
those efforts were aimed at helping tilt the election in Mr. Trump’s favor, his
handling of issues related to Russia and Mr. Putin has come under particular
scrutiny. The special counsel investigation found that the Trump campaign
welcomed Russia’s intervention and expected to benefit from it, but found
insufficient evidence to establish that his associates had engaged in any
criminal conspiracy with Moscow.
Operations
involving Unit 29155 tend to be much more violent than those involving the
cyberunits. Its officers are often decorated military veterans with years of
service, in some cases dating to the Soviet Union’s failed war in Afghanistan
in the 1980s. Never before has the unit been accused of orchestrating attacks
on Western soldiers, but officials briefed on its operations say it has been active
in Afghanistan for many years.
Though Russia
declared the Taliban a terrorist organization in 2003, relations between them
have been warming in recent years. Taliban officials have traveled to Moscow
for peace talks with other prominent Afghans, including the former president,
Hamid Karzai. The talks have excluded representatives from the current Afghan
government as well as anyone from the United States, and at times they have
seemed to work at crosscurrents with American efforts to bring an end to the
conflict.
The disclosure
comes at a time when Mr. Trump has said he would invite Mr. Putin to an
expanded meeting of the Group of 7 nations, but tensions between American and
Russian militaries are running high.
In several recent
episodes, in international territory and airspace from off the coast of Alaska
to the Black and Mediterranean Seas, combat planes from each country have
scrambled to intercept military aircraft from the other.
By Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and
Michael Schwirtz
