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

A turning point came June 25, when a group of 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 United States 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 United States and Russia over a possible prisoner swap 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 Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and 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 balked.

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 swap. On Thursday, 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 longtime adversaries – negotiated mostly by spies and sometimes through secret messages hand-delivered by couriers – secured the release of Gershkovich, Whelan and 14 other Americans, Russians and Europeans imprisoned in Russia.

The deal also freed, among others, a Russian hit man, 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 swap.

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

And it reached its conclusion even as President Joe Biden, who got personally involved in the negotiations at key points, was slowly losing hope of continuing his reelection 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 Sunday, July 21, 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.

“The deal that made this possible was a feat of diplomacy and friendship,” Biden said Thursday in brief remarks from the White House, flanked by family members of the prisoners. He praised US allies, saying that “they stood with us, and they made bold and brave decisions, released prisoners being held in their countries.”

“This is a very good afternoon,” said Biden, who has had few of those in the past several months. “A very good afternoon.”

US officials on Thursday insisted that the prisoner swap was by no means the advent of a new detente between Washington and Moscow. Instead, they maintained, it was a deal driven by cold calculations of national interest, a deal in which every side got something it wanted.

If it demonstrated the potential of diplomacy, it also carried a more chilling message from Putin, the former spymaster: He could succeed in snatching and holding Americans and other Westerners hostage in the service of recovering those he sends abroad to do the dirty work of the Russian state.

Something to bargain with

In December 2022, 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 Argentine emigres 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 United States had been trying to secure the release of 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 swap.

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

The following month, in January 2023, CIA officials held secret talks with Russian spies to offer a deal: Whelan’s release in exchange for the couple arrested in Slovenia. The Russians rejected the offer, but made it clear that they were willing to negotiate if the Americans offered more.

This channel had opened years earlier, when Biden and Putin agreed during a summit in June 2021 in Geneva to have their intelligence services communicate occasionally on prisoner issues.

James P. Rubin, a State Department special envoy, and 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 swap 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. Blinken then took the proposal to the Oval Office in March 2023 and got Biden to approve it during a one-on-one meeting.

But the ground in the negotiations shifted later that month when the Russians arrested Gershkovich – a seasoned reporter for The Wall Street Journal covering Russia – and falsely accused him of spying for the United States.

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

For several days, White House officials were careful not to use CIA or other intelligence contacts to inquire about Gershkovich, fearful that it would appear to the Russians that the United States was acknowledging that he was a spy. But it quickly became obvious that the Russians were already treating him like one.

During a phone call, Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, bragged to Blinken that Gershkovich had been caught “red-handed” and that being a journalist did not ensure him immunity, according to a person familiar with what took place during the call.

Blinken called the spying charges outrageous and false, telling Lavrov that “we are both adults” who know that the United States does not use journalists to commit espionage.

But it was becoming clearer to the Americans what the Russians really wanted: the release of Krasikov. To 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.

Putin, the person said, saw Krasikov as a man who had been “carrying out a mission of state importance.” Winning his freedom would be “a signal to all the guys that we won’t leave you behind,” the person said.

Rubin heard from Christo Grozev, who had been the lead Russia investigator for Bellingcat, a research group that had exposed Russian wrongdoing, that Krasikov was the key to a deal. He was not just a Russian agent but was also personally close to Putin, someone the Russian president considered a friend, Rubin was told.

Putin had even spoken publicly about his interest in getting Krasikov released, during an interview in February with Tucker Carlson.

“Over the course of this negotiation, we did reach the conclusion that Krasikov was a key,” Sullivan told reporters Thursday.

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 Whelan and been rebuffed.

In April 2023, weeks after Gershkovich’s arrest, 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, 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 – Whelan and Gershkovich for four Russian spies under arrest, including the two arrested in Slovenia – but the Russians rejected it.

Throughout last year and into this year, the White House kept up discussions with the German government, even as it looked for more prisoners to trade. One official examined the possibility of a Russian being held in Brazil. Another looked into someone in Kuwait.

Carstens, the hostage negotiator, was in Tel Aviv, Israel, last November and heard that Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch close to Putin, was in town. The two agreed to meet in a seaside hotel and Carstens asked whether Putin would be open to a trade of Krasikov for Navalny.

Abramovich said he did not think so. But then he called back a week later and said that he had checked and that, to his own surprise, Putin would be open to such a deal.

On Jan. 16, Biden spoke by phone to 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,” 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 United States 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 realization that the deal was now further away.

That same day, Sullivan kept a previously scheduled meeting with Gershkovich’s parents in his office in the West Wing. While Navalny’s death seemed to extinguish hope for a quick deal, senior US officials remained optimistic in part because Germany had already agreed in principle to give up Krasikov. It was only a matter of time, these officials felt, before they found another way to structure a deal around him.

“I saw his parents, and I told them that the president was determined to get this done, even in light of that tragic news, and that we were going to work day and night to get to this day,” Sullivan said Thursday in recounting his conversation with Gershkovich’s mother and father.

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 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.

Hard copies of the proposal were traded back and forth by courier, though on at least one occasion the “eyes-only” document for Jens Plötner, Germany’s national security adviser, was deemed undeliverable because Plötner was on vacation. (The document was returned to sender in the United States.)

In April, Biden sent the German chancellor the outlines of the proposal in a letter.

Then, at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner later that month, Gershkovich’s mother, Ella Milman, made a direct appeal to the president when she got a chance to speak briefly with him there, urging him to push Scholz for more help in working out a deal for her son.

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 last month, William Burns, the CIA director, spoke with 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 July 19, when 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, Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian American journalist who was also released Thursday 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, last Sunday, the husband of 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, Chanysheva was no longer there.

The husband, 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 this past Tuesday, a total of six Russian political prisoners had been reported missing. Relatives of the Russians who would be freed in the swap 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.

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 7 p.m. Moscow time, nearly two hours after the Russian plane landed in Turkey, that her husband called her from Ankara.

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

Stepping off another plane in Ankara on Thursday 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, Putin embraced a tearful Dultseva as she stepped off the plane in Moscow and handed her an oversize bouquet of white, pink and purple flowers.

In a near-mirror image, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris stood on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington late Thursday as the freed Americans arrived home.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.