Biden aides warned Putin that Russia’s shadow war threatens air disaster

After seemingly innocent cargo burst into flames at airports and warehouses in Germany, Britain and Poland over the summer, there was little doubt in Washington and Europe that Russia was behind the provocation.

But in August, White House officials became increasingly concerned that Moscow had a bigger plan: to bring the war in Ukraine to America’s shores through covert intelligence.

The question was how to send a warning to the one man who could stop it: Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.

In a series of Situation Room briefings, President Biden’s top aides reviewed details of conversations between senior officials of Russia’s military intelligence arm, the GRU, that described the shipment of consumer products — in one case, a small electronic massager — that went up in flames. test run.

Once the Russians figured out how the packages got through air-cargo inspection systems and how long it took to ship, the next step seemed to be to put them on planes bound for the United States and Canada. discharged.

While cargo planes are the main concern, sometimes passenger planes take smaller packages with spare space in their cargo holds.

“The risk of a catastrophic error was clear,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a recent interview, “that these could catch fire on a fully loaded plane.”

In August, Mr. Mayorkas imposed new inspection restrictions on shipments to the United States. When the warnings began again in October, he quietly pressed the chief executives of the largest airlines flying to the United States to speed up their steps to avert disaster in the air. Some of these precautions became public knowledge at the time; others did not.

But behind the scenes, White House officials struggled to tell whether Mr. Putin ordered or knew about the plot, or whether he was being kept in the dark. And a great effort was made to warn him to put an end to it.

First reaching a playbook developed in October 2022 – When the United States believed that Russia was considering detonating a nuclear weapon in Ukraine — Mr. Biden sent his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and CIA Director William J. Burns to deliver a series of warnings to Mr. Putin’s top aides. As one senior official put it, it took many paths for the message to reach Putin’s ears and sink in.

The gist of the warning was that the United States would hold Russia responsible for “creating conditions of terror” if the provocation caused mass casualties in the air or on land. Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Burns did not specify what that response would be, but said it would take the shadow war between Washington and Moscow to new levels.

This shadow war continues every day as Russia engages in provocation in the hope of breaking NATO’s will to support Ukraine without going to full-scale war with the NATO alliance.

It redefined life in Europe, ending the sense of security that came with the post-Cold War world. At present, the search for saboteurs is carried out around the clock in airports, seaports and submarines, as well as on the streets of large cities such as Berlin, Tallinn and London.

But in this case, the warning reached Mr. Putin, officials said for the first time as they described secret talks with the Kremlin. And they seem to have had the intended effect: Europe’s wildfires have stopped, at least for now. But it is not clear whether Mr. Putin ordered the suspension or for how long. Russia is using the time to build better, more stealthy devices, officials say.

Plausible denial?

The effort to reach Mr. Putin was described by five senior officials interviewed over the past three weeks, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive national security threat. In recent days, as the administration prepares to leave office in a week, some details of the tense exchanges with the Kremlin have just emerged.

Although officials say their efforts to prevent the worst have been successful, it has clearly shaken a few of them. As they leave office, they worry that the Russian military, angered by Ukraine’s embarrassing and sometimes deadly attacks on targets around Kursk and other targets on Russian soil, is now determined to take the conflict to European and American territories. But they want to do it using methods that don’t risk an all-out conflict with NATO.

Perhaps, the Russians evaluated this operation as a natural and proportionate reaction to Ukraine’s attacks on Russian territory.

To this day, US officials do not know whether Mr Putin ordered the operation, knew about it, or whether he only found out because of American warnings.

Several officials have said they suspect the plot may have been the work of GRU officers responding to general orders to increase pressure on the United States and its NATO allies. If the operation goes badly, they say, it would be consistent with past efforts to create plausible deniability for Mr Putin.

The incident showed that although Mr Biden and Mr Putin have not spoken since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, they have maintained indirect channels of communication.

That freeze in direct talks between Washington and Moscow is coming to an end: President-elect Donald J. Trump said Thursday that Mr. Putin “wants to meet and we’re meeting,” though the Kremlin insists there is no meeting. formal conversation. Mr. Trump and his aides are partial to whether the two men are already on speaking terms. They did not say the talks would be limited to the Ukraine war or include other elements of the hostile relationship between Washington and Moscow: the nuclear arms race, Russia’s future in Syria and the accelerating shadow war with the West.

News of air cargo operations leaking from Europe this summer and The Wall Street Journal In early November, intelligence officials reported He believed Russia’s ultimate goal was to expand operations to the United States and Canada.

But the account is the first to describe how Mr. Biden’s aides determined that if Mr. Putin didn’t intervene directly, events could lead to disaster: even the unexpected, if a plane was delayed by bad weather or saboteurs mistimed it.

“This was a powerful example of the convergence of national security and homeland security,” Mr. Mayorkas said.

Mysterious fires and cable cuts

In the first two years of the war, Russia seemed determined to keep the conflict within Ukraine’s borders. Its missiles have never entered NATO territory. Mr. Biden awoke one evening to fears that the two countries would be in open conflict when a missile appeared to cross the Polish border and kill two farmers. To Washington’s relief, it was a false alarm; The wrong shot came from the Ukrainians.

That changed in 2024. Provocations and suspected provocations appeared everywhere: unexplained fires in warehouses, sometimes linked to companies supporting the armaments of Ukraine; GPS “spoofing” paralyzing navigation systems of shipping and flights in Europe; Anchors dragged by Russia’s “shadow fleet” of barges are blamed for the cutting of underwater fiber-optic cables.

Washington helped intelligence officials in Berlin uncover an assassination plot against the chief executive of Germany’s leading arms manufacturer Rheinmetall. The company is a leading producer of artillery shells, which Ukraine desperately needs.

But in late July, an incendiary device started a fire at DHL’s cargo facility in the former East German university city of Leipzig, prompting an immediate investigation. Thomas Haldenwang, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, later told the German parliament that the country narrowly averted the plane crash, but he did not give any details.

It was a package Postage stamp from Lithuania, Another incident occurred in Birmingham, England. The third one caught fire in a Polish courier company.

Inside the White House, the biggest concern came in the form of intelligence about conversations between the GRU. American officials would not discuss how they gained access to the talks. But they did confirm the contents: The three burners were designed to study how DHL and other packages flowed, so that the highly flammable magnesium-based material could be timed to ignite.

Rumors suggested that the next step would be to put them on planes to the US and Canada. But the fear during Situation Room discussions was that an unexpected delay – due to weather or circling planes due to heavy traffic – could mean the devices go off in mid-air.

Warning from Washington to Moscow

In August, the CIA and others concluded that the incendiary devices in Leipzig, Birmingham and Poland were actually part of a “field test” by the GRU as it tried to figure out the path the packages took as they traveled through Europe. The packages were sent from Vilnius, Lithuania, where the Russians maintain a significant intelligence presence.

Mr. Sullivan’s associates recall that he was very concerned about the risk of attacks during this period, although he said nothing about it publicly. But conversations between GRU officials left no doubt as to where this was headed. One senior official involved in the discussions said it was clear they had to get the message to Mr Putin because he was the only person in the Russian system who could order the operation to be halted. But reaching him meant sending the message in several ways.

Mr. Sullivan quietly began a series of calls with his Russian counterpart, Yuri Ushakov, outlining the Rheinmetall plan. Unsurprisingly, Mr Ushakov has denied Russian involvement – just as Russian officials denied in October 2022 that they planned to use tactical nuclear weapons.

Then, speaking somewhat elliptically about how the United States knew, Mr. Sullivan told Mr. Ushakov that the administration believed the incendiary devices were also Russia’s responsibility and that they endangered civilian lives. The big concern, he said, was the risk of mass casualties if the packages were flown on a cargo plane or a passenger plane.

Mr. Burns, the CIA director who served as America’s ambassador to Russia two decades ago and is the official who knows Mr. Putin best, said essentially the same thing to his intelligence equivalent, Sergei Naryshkin and Alexander Bortnikov, who ran the SVR. Director of the FSB, two of the most powerful Russian intelligence agencies. The idea was that they all had regular contact with Mr. Putin.

U.S. officials were careful not to say whether the goal of the operation was to shoot down a plane; in fact, the devices were designed to go on the ground. But the risk of an accident in the air seemed high.

Although the immediate crisis was averted, Mr. Biden’s aides acknowledge that the incident reveals a larger problem: As we approach the war’s third anniversary, the stakes are leaping into new arenas and taking on new dimensions.

“As great as a ceasefire in Ukraine is, it’s far from everything,” said Richard Haass, former president of the Council on International Relations, who has written extensively about what an end to the war might look like.

The provocation, he said, “is all part of a larger pattern.”

“Russia has become a revolutionary actor,” he said. “Russia has become a country that tries to break the international order. And the real question is: Can the Trump administration do anything about it?