Behind the prisoner swop deal: Spies, a killer, secret messages and unseen diplomacy

WASHINGTON - A turning point came on June 25, when a group of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers sat across from their Russian counterparts during a secret meeting in a Middle Eastern capital.

The Americans floated a proposal: an exchange of two dozen prisoners sitting in jails in Russia, the US and scattered across Europe – a far bigger and more complex deal than either side had previously contemplated, but one that would give both Moscow and Western nations more reasons to say yes.

Quiet negotiations between the US and Russia over a possible prisoner swop had dragged on for more than a year. They were punctuated by only occasional glimpses of hope for the families of the American prisoners – including Mr Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and Mr Paul Whelan, an American security contractor – growing increasingly impatient for their ordeal to end. Those hopes were always dashed when one of the two sides baulked.

But the June meeting changed things, according to accounts from American and Western officials, and other people familiar with the long process of bringing the deal to fruition.

The Russian spies took the proposal back to Moscow, and only days later, the CIA director was on the phone with a Russian spy chief agreeing to the broad parameters of a massive prisoner swop. On Aug 1, seven different planes touched down in Ankara, Turkey, and exchanged passengers, bringing to a successful close an intensive diplomatic effort that took place almost entirely out of public view.

The deal between long-time adversaries – negotiated mostly by spies and sometimes through secret messages hand-delivered by couriers –

secured the release

of Mr Gershkovich, Mr Whelan and 14 other Americans, Russians and Europeans imprisoned in Russia.

The deal also freed, among others, Russian hitman Vadim Krasikov. He had been jailed in Germany since 2019 for the killing of a Chechen former separatist fighter in a park in Berlin. He was the prize most sought by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had publicly praised the killing as an act of patriotism and for years had insisted that Krasikov be part of any swop.

The stunning deal took place against the geopolitical backdrop of the bloody war in Ukraine, where the US is sending deadly weapons to the battlefront aimed at killing as many Russian troops as possible.

And it reached its conclusion even as US President Joe Biden, who got personally involved in the negotiations at key points, was slowly losing hope of continuing his re-election bid following a disastrous televised debate that took place two days after the CIA gave the Russians what proved to be the decisive new offer.

On the morning of July 21, Mr Biden, sick with Covid-19, placed a call from his vacation home in Delaware to Slovenia’s Prime Minister to nail down one of the last pieces of the prisoner agreement. Less than two hours later, he announced he was withdrawing from the presidential race.

Something to bargain with

In December 2022, the authorities in the small, central European country of Slovenia made two arrests that might, at first, have seemed of little consequence. They brought in a couple posing as Argentinian emigrants in the country, living under the pseudonyms Ludwig Gisch and Maria Mayer, who were living a quiet life in the Slovenian capital.

As it turns out, the couple were Russian “illegals”, deep-cover intelligence officers sent abroad to spy on foreign governments.

The arrests would prove critical for the prisoner exchange. At the time, the US had been trying to secure the release of Mr Whelan – who had been arrested in Russia four years earlier on espionage charges – but were always unsuccessful because there was nobody in US custody the Russians believed was worthy of a swop.

Now, with the arrests in Slovenia, US officials figured they had something to barter.

Mr James P. Rubin, a State Department special envoy, and Mr Roger D. Carstens, the department’s chief hostage negotiator and a holdover from the Trump administration, came up with a plan that they called “enlarging the problem” – rather than seek a one-for-one or two-for-one exchange, they would broaden any potential swop to include many more people on both sides.

They took the idea to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who carries an index card in his suit pocket every day with the names of more than 70 Americans wrongfully detained overseas – those who have been freed are in red, while those still held are in black. Mr Blinken then took the proposal to the Oval Office in March 2023 and got Mr Biden to approve it during a one-on-one meeting.

But the ground in the negotiations shifted later in March 2023 when the Russians arrested Mr Gershkovich – a seasoned reporter for The Wall Street Journal covering Russia – and falsely accused him of spying for the US.

The arrest brought one of America’s most influential news organisations into the middle of a diplomatic chess game. The day after Mr Gershkovich’s arrest, on March 30, 2023, Mr Jake Sullivan, Mr Biden’s national security adviser, briefed the President about the case. Mr Biden directed him to lead an effort to make a deal with the Russians to get Mr Gershkovich and Mr Whelan released.

But it was becoming clearer to the Americans what the Russians really wanted: the release of Krasikov. To Mr Putin, the convicted assassin, who had kept his mouth closed throughout his murder trial in Germany, had become “a symbol” of a faithful soldier carrying out his duty to the Russian state, said a person close to the Kremlin who was involved in some of the talks on a prisoner exchange.

Including Krasikov in any prisoner deal meant persuading the German government to give him up, a move that posed significant political risk for Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The Americans had already tried once to get the Germans to trade Krasikov for Mr Whelan and been rebuffed.

In April 2023, weeks after Mr Gershkovich’s arrest, Mr Blinken gauged the German Foreign Minister’s interest in a possible deal that, besides the imprisoned Americans and the Russian assassin, would also include the release of Alexei Navalny, the prominent Russian dissident whom the Germans had been working to get freed from a Russian prison.

The German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock was cool to any plan that led to the freedom of Krasikov out of concern that it would encourage more hostage-taking, so White House officials decided to engage the chancellor’s office directly.

In the months that followed, Mr Sullivan spoke regularly with his counterpart in Berlin. The two men passed lists of possible prisoners to be exchanged – documents given highly classified, “eyes-only” designations – back and forth between Washington and Berlin.

‘For you, I will try to do this’

Without Krasikov as part of a deal, there was no deal to be had. US officials spent months looking for other Russians in captivity to trade. In November 2023, CIA officers based in Moscow offered another deal – Mr Whelan and Mr Gershkovich for four Russian spies under arrest, including the two arrested in Slovenia – but the Russians rejected it.

On Jan 16, Mr Biden spoke by phone to Mr Scholz, who finally relented, agreeing to include Krasikov in a prisoner deal as long as it also included Navalny.

“For you, I will try to do this,” Mr Scholz told the President. At a meeting in the Oval Office on Feb 9, the two men agreed to pursue the idea, according to a US official.

The optimism would not last long. Navalny died in a Russian penal colony a week later, before the US had formally broached the possibility of including him in a prisoner deal with the Russians. With the shock and sadness of Navalny’s death also came the realisation that the deal was now further away.

The White House once again had to work to persuade the German Chancellor to include Krasikov in a revised prisoner deal.

It took weeks to develop the outlines of a proposal shared with the German government, one including numerous people in Russian prisons whom the Germans wanted released, including former associates of Navalny. The Americans added Vladimir Kara-Murza, another imprisoned Russian dissident, who was also a permanent US resident, as a sort of substitute for Navalny to appeal to Mr Scholz’s desire for a moral imperative to justify the release of a Russian assassin.

The proposal also needed commitments from Slovenia, Norway and Poland that Russian spies imprisoned in those countries would be released as part of the deal.

Mr Scholz approved the deal to include Krasikov on June 7, and on June 25 the CIA officers made the proposal to the Russians in the Middle East. The deal that the Russians agreed to was largely the same as the June 25 proposal, US officials said.

Early in July, Mr William Burns, the CIA director, spoke with Mr Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s FSB intelligence service. Days later, CIA officials and Russian intelligence operatives met again in person, this time in Turkey, to work out the final details of the agreement.

Stage-managed trials, disappearing prisoners

In Russia, a hint that a deal might be close came on July 19, when Mr Gershkovich was sentenced to 16 years in prison after the court suddenly accelerated his trial. The surefire guilty verdict, which had been expected to take months to arrive, was handed down after just three hearings.

The same day, Ms Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian American journalist who was also released on Aug 1 as part of the deal, was similarly convicted in a surprisingly speedy trial.

In Russia, the accelerated, stage-managed trials were seen as important signs of a possible prisoner exchange, as Russian officials had said they would trade only convicted prisoners.

Then on July 28, the husband of Ms Lilia Chanysheva, a Russian political activist behind bars in the Ural Mountains, arrived at her prison on a routine visit to bring her a package. He received worrying news: As of two days earlier, he was told, Ms Chanysheva was no longer there.

The husband, Mr Almaz Gatin, pleaded for help online and, with lawyers, scoured three jails and one other prison. “She’s nowhere to be found,” he wrote.

By July 30, a total of six Russian political prisoners had been reported missing. Relatives of the Russians who would be freed in the swop said they were kept in the dark about their loved ones’ fates – even as the exchange played out online in live footage from the Ankara airport showing a large Russian government plane parked next to smaller private jets.

Ms Tatiana Usmanova, the wife of the imprisoned opposition politician Andrei Pivovarov, said she felt anxious as the drama unfolded, hoping – but not knowing – that her husband had been on that Russian plane. It was only after 7pm Moscow time, nearly two hours after the Russian plane landed in Turkey, that her husband called her from Ankara.

“It felt so new,” she said. “We hadn’t spoken on the phone for three years and two months.”

Stepping off another plane in Ankara on Aug 1 were “Ludwig Gisch” and “Maria Mayer”, the two Russian spies posing as an Argentine couple who were arrested in Slovenia in 2022.

Their real names are Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva. After a short time on the tarmac, they boarded the Russian government plane along with the other six Russians released by the West.

Hours later, in a remarkable moment for the reclusive Russian president, Mr Putin embraced a tearful Ms Dultseva as she stepped off the plane in Moscow and handed her an oversized bouquet of white, pink and purple flowers. NYTIMES