The intelligence finding was reported to President Donald Trump, and the White House National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, officials said. Officials developed a menu of possible options, starting with filing a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and demanding that it stop, along with a growing series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any steps, officials said.
An operation to incentivize the assassination of US and other NATO troops would be a significant and provocative escalation of what US and Afghan officials have said is Russian support for the Taliban, and it would be the first time that the Russian spy unit has orchestrated attacks on western troops.
Any engagement with the Taliban that resulted in the deaths of American troops would also be a major escalation of Russia’s so-called hybrid war against the United States, a strategy of destabilizing adversaries through a combination of tactics such as cyber attacks, spreading fake news and covert and deniable military operations.
The Kremlin had not been informed of the allegations, said Dmitry Peskov, press secretary to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. “If someone does, we will respond,” said Peskov.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid denied that the insurgents have “any such relationship with any intelligence agency” and called the report an attempt to smear them.
“This type of agreement with the Russian intelligence agency is without foundation: our murders and targeted murders were continuous in previous years, and we did it with our own resources,” he said. “That changed after our dealings with the Americans, and their lives are safe and we don’t attack them.”
Spokesmen for the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA declined to comment.
Officials familiar with intelligence did not explain the White House delay in deciding how to respond to intelligence about Russia.
While some of his closest advisers, such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have advised more aggressive policies toward Russia, Trump has taken a complacent stance toward Moscow.
At a summit in Helsinki in 2018, Trump strongly suggested that he believed Putin’s refusal of the Kremlin to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, despite broad agreement within the US intelligence establishment Trump criticized a draft a law imposing sanctions on Russia when it was enacted after Congress passed it by veto-proof majorities. And he has made repeated statements that undermined the NATO alliance as a bulwark against Russian aggression in Europe.
Officials spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the delicate intelligence and internal deliberations. They said intelligence has been treated as a closely guarded secret, but the administration expanded reports on it this week, including exchanging information about it with the British government, whose forces are among those said to have been attacked.
The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on the interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals. Officials did not describe the mechanics of the Russian operation, such as how the targets were selected or how the money changed hands. It is also unclear whether the Russian operatives had been deployed inside Afghanistan or had met with their Taliban counterparts elsewhere.
The revelations were focused within the Trump administration at a delicate and distracted moment. Although officials collected intelligence earlier this year, the interagency meeting at the White House took place when the coronavirus pandemic was turning into a crisis and parts of the country were closing.
Furthermore, as Trump seeks re-election in November, he wants to reach a peace agreement with the Taliban to end the war in Afghanistan.
US 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 unsubstantiated.
“We share some interests with Russia in Afghanistan, and they are clearly acting to undermine our interests as well,” Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., commander of the US forces in Afghanistan at the time, said in a 2018 interview with the BBC.
Although coalition troops suffered a series of combat casualties last summer and early fall, only a few have died. Four Americans were killed in combat in early 2020, but the Taliban have not attacked American positions since a February deal.
US troops have also dramatically reduced their movement outside of military bases due to the coronavirus, reducing their exposure to the attack.
While officials were said to be confident in the intelligence that Russian operatives offered and paid rewards to Afghan militants for killing Americans, they are more uncertain about how high the sting operation was authorized in the Russian government and what their goal might be. .
Some officials have theorized that the Russians may be seeking revenge on NATO forces for a 2018 battle in Syria in which the US military killed several hundred pro-Syrian forces, including numerous Russian mercenaries, while advancing on a post American advanced. Authorities have also suggested that the Russians may have been trying to derail the peace talks to keep the United States stagnant in Afghanistan. But the motivation remains murky.
Officials briefed on the matter said the government had evaluated the operation as the work of Unit 29155, an arm of Russia’s military intelligence agency, widely known as GRU. The unit is linked to March 2018 nerve agent intoxication in Salisbury, England of Sergei Skripal, a former GRU officer who had worked for British intelligence and then deserted, and his daughter.
Western intelligence officials say the unit, which has operated for more than a decade, has been accused by the Kremlin of campaigning to destabilize the West through subversion, sabotage and murder. In addition to the 2018 poisoning, the unit was behind a 2016 coup attempt in Montenegro and the poisoning of an arms maker in Bulgaria a year earlier.
US intelligence officials say the GRU was at the center of Moscow’s undercover efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In the months leading up to that election, US officials say two GRU cyberunits, known as 26165 and 74455, they hacked into Democratic Party servers and then used WikiLeaks to post embarrassing internal communications.
Partly because those efforts were intended to help tilt the elections in Trump’s favor, Trump’s handling of Russia and Putin-related issues has come under particular scrutiny. A special lawyer’s investigation found that the Trump campaign welcomed Russia’s intervention and hoped to benefit from it, but found insufficient evidence to establish that his associates had participated in a criminal conspiracy with Moscow.
Operations involving Unit 29155 tend to be much more violent than those involving cyberunits. Its officers are often decorated military veterans with years of service, which in some cases date back to the failed Soviet Union war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The unit has never before been accused of orchestrating attacks on Western soldiers, but officials informed of its operations say it has been active in Afghanistan for many years.
Although Russia declared the Taliban a terrorist organization in 2003, relations between them have been heating up in recent years. Taliban officials have traveled to Moscow to hold peace talks with other prominent Afghans, including former President Hamid Karzai. The talks have excluded representatives of the current Afghan government, as well as anyone from the United States, and at times appear to work against the grain of the United States’ efforts to end the conflict.
The revelation comes at a time when Trump has said he would invite Putin to an expanded Group of Seven Nations meeting, but tensions between the US and Russian military are mounting.
In several recent episodes, in international territory and airspace from the Alaskan coast to the Black and Mediterranean Seas, fighter jets from each country have rushed to intercept military jets from the other.
