https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/us/politics/russia-afghanistan-bounties.html
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/06/report-russia-paid-taliban-bounties-for-killing-us-troops/
Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says
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. A Taliban spokesman did not respond to messages seeking comment.
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.
https://www.businessinsider.com/don...in-christopher-steele-uk-boris-johnson-2020-6
Evidence of Russia's 'likely hold' over Trump was covered up by the UK government, according to a former British spy
- The former MI6 agent Christopher Steele said the UK government covered up evidence about US President Donald Trump's ties to Russia, The Guardian reported on Monday.
- Steele reportedly told a UK parliamentary investigation in 2018 that "a blanket appeared to be thrown over" the information he provided Prime Minister Theresa May's government.
- Steele said that he had handed over a dossier on Trump's links to Russia in 2016 but that "no inquiries were made or actions taken thereafter."
- UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson suppressed the publication of the parliamentary committee's report before the UK general election in December.
The UK government covered up evidence of Russian President Vladimir Putin's "likely hold" over US President Donald Trump to protect its relationship with the US, a former British spy said, The Guardian reported on Monday.
Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent, told a UK parliamentary investigation in 2018 that Prime Minister Theresa May's government ignored evidence of Putin's relationship with Trump.
The committee responsible for the investigation, the Intelligence and Security Committee, was due to publish its report last year. However, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson refused to publish it before December's general election, and it is still unpublished.
Steele said May's government, in which Johnson served as foreign secretary for two years, threw a blanket over the allegations about Trump's relationship with Putin.
The former spy said he presented a dossier on Trump's relationship with Russia to UK security officials in 2016, the year Trump won the US general election. However, Steele said that "on reaching top political decision-makers, a blanket appeared to be thrown over it," according to The Guardian.
"No inquiries were made or actions taken thereafter on the substance of the intelligence in the dossier by" the UK government, he said.
Steele, who led the MI6 Russia desk for three years, included the claim in evidence he provided to the Intelligence and Security Committee in August 2018 for its investigation into Russian interference in British democracy, The Guardian said.
In his evidence, Steele said May's government decided not to act on the information it received in order to protect the UK's close and long-standing relationship with the US.
"In this case, political considerations seemed to outweigh national security interests," Steele said, according to The Guardian. "If so, in my view, HMG made a serious mistake in balancing matters of strategic importance to our country."
He added that "a prospective trade deal should never be allowed to eclipse considerations of national security."
Steele said the UK government was reluctant to act when it would present "difficult wider political implications," using allegations of Russian interference in the UK's 2016 referendum on EU membership as an example.
"Examples of this include reporting on the Kremlin's likely hold over President Trump and his family/administration and indications of Russian interference in and clandestine funding of the Brexit referendum," Steele said, according to The Guardian.
Though it was completed in October and sent to Johnson, the ISC's report into Russian interference has not been published. Johnson refused to release it before the UK's general election in December.
The UK government has insisted that the highly anticipated report cannot be published until a new ISC is formed.
However, six months on from the general election, the committee has still not been formed. The BBC reported last week that the holdup was due to Johnson's Conservative Party failing to agree on MPs to nominate as committee members.
A cross-party group of opposition MPs last week urged Johnson to publish the report.
The letter, shared exclusively with Business Insider, pointed out that six months was the longest that Parliament had ever had to wait for the ISC to be formed.
It said that Johnson's failure to release the report was an "affront to democracy" and that it was "untenable" for Johnson "to continue to block the publication of the Russia report."
Before last year's general election, The Times reported that Johnson's government held back the report because of the "embarrassing" links it revealed between the Russian secret service and donors to the Conservative Party.
A representative for Johnson on Monday indicated that the committee would be formed in the coming weeks.
"Work to establish the committee is ongoing and it will be established as quick as current circumstances allow," they said, adding that "further announcements including members of the committee will be made in due course."
Trump's relationship with Russia and Putin has been scrutinized since the 2016 presidential campaign.
The special counsel Robert Mueller found that Russia worked to get Trump elected, though his investigation did not find enough evidence to suggest that Russia coordinated with the Trump campaign.
Trump has repeatedly praised Putin and Russia, and he said he trusted Putin's word over that of the US intelligence agencies that found that Russia meddled in the 2016 election.
John Bolton, Trump's former national security adviser, said in an ABC News interview last week that Putin did not see Trump as a "serious adversary."
"I think Putin thinks he can play him like a fiddle," Bolton said.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...donald-trump-ex-spy-christopher-steele-claims
Johnson and May ignored claims Russia had 'likely hold' over Trump, ex-spy alleges
Exclusive: Christopher Steele claims May government turned blind eye to Trump allegations
Boris Johnson and Theresa May ignored claims the Kremlin had a “likely hold” over Donald Trump and may have covertly funded Brexit, the former spy Christopher Steele alleges in secret evidence given to MPs who drew up the Russia report.
In testimony to MPs, the MI6 veteran accused the government led by May and in which Johnson was foreign secretary for two years of turning a blind eye to allegations about Trump because they were afraid of offending the US president.
Steele first presented a dossier about Trump to senior UK intelligence figures in late 2016, who he says took it seriously at first. But, he writes, “on reaching top political decision-makers, a blanket appeared to be thrown over it”.
“No inquiries were made or actions taken thereafter on the substance of the intelligence in the dossier by HMG [Her Majesty’s government],” Steele says in the critical document.
The allegation is contained in a short summary of a larger file of information presented in August 2018 by Steele to parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC), inquiring into Kremlin infiltration into British politics and public life.
Steele accuses May’s government of selling British interests short by not taking matters further: “In this case, political considerations seemed to outweigh national security interests. If so, in my view, HMG made a serious mistake in balancing matters of strategic importance to our country.”
The Russia expert concluded: “A prospective trade deal should never be allowed to eclipse considerations of national security.”
Steele’s confidential testimony is revealed for the first time in a book by the Guardian journalist Luke Harding, Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West, to be published next week.
Downing Street said on Monday it could not comment on the Russia report or its evidence until it was published. The cross-party committee finished the report in October 2019 but, ahead of December’s general election, Johnson refused to release it. After the election, he cleared the report for publication in principle, but doing so would require the ISC to be reconstituted.
The committee is yet to be formed amid growing speculation that there is a row about who will chair it. Downing Street has indicated it wants the former transport secretary Chris Grayling to do so.
But No 10 needs the Conservative nominees to the nine-strong committee to agree to support Grayling because the opposition minority want to vote for somebody else. In law the appointment of the chair is a matter for the committee. As a result the long-awaited document is still yet to be released, prompting complaints in Westminster and accusations from Labour, the SNP and the Liberal Democrats of an attempted cover-up.
PM accused of cover-up over report on Russian meddling in UK politics
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“We increasingly think the real reason this is all being held up is because of No 10,” said an SNP source. The Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesperson, Alistair Carmichael, said the delay was “utterly reprehensible”.
Steele’s summary evidence is likely to raise concerns that Downing Street may have suppressed the ISC’s final Russia report to avoid embarrassing questions in the run-up to the election, and afterwards, as Britain left the EU, although No 10 has consistently denied that is the case. These include whether Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 EU referendum in support of Brexit and whether Vladimir Putin holds compromising information on Trump, Johnson’s ally.
“My understanding, arising partly from personal experience with the ‘Trump-Russia dossier’, is that this government perhaps more than its predecessors is reluctant to see (or act upon) intelligence on Russian activities when this presents difficult wider political implications,” Steele writes in his testimony to MPs.
“Examples of this include reporting on the Kremlin’s likely hold over President Trump and his family/administration and indications of Russian interference in and clandestine funding of the Brexit referendum.”
Steele was one of several Russia experts who gave evidence to the ISC. He spent 22 years working for MI6 and led its investigation into the 2006 polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. Later Steele went into private business intelligence.
In 2016, he wrote a dossier on Trump’s links with Russia on behalf of the Democratic party under Hillary Clinton. It alleged the Kremlin had been cultivating Trump for at least five years and had mounted an extensive espionage operation to back his campaign for the White House. Last year, the special counsel, Robert Mueller, described Russian government interference as “sweeping and systematic”.
Steele’s dossier also featured claims that Putin’s FSB spy agency filmed Trump in a Moscow hotel room with two sex workers in 2013. Trump has denied the allegations.
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump shake hands during a bilateral meeting at the G20 leaders summit in Osaka last year
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Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump shake hands during a bilateral meeting at the G20 leaders summit in Osaka last year. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
It is unclear how much of Steele’s testimony and the information he provided is reflected in the Russia report. The document has a public section and a classified annexe. Some of those who have read it hint that its public part is discursive and does not include recommendations.
It is expected to say there is no evidence of any successful interference by Russia in recent British elections, but will highlight a surprising lack of coordination across Whitehall to examine what Moscow has been attempting to achieve.
In his memo to MPs, Steele also argues that Russia under Putin has become a “powerful rogue state”. A lack of pushback from the UK and others has emboldened its bad behaviour, he writes. This trajectory was not inevitable and, he says, has been driven by a “corrupt political elite” fearful of regime change and seeking to protect its “ill-gotten” wealth.
He cites seven “paradigm shift” moments that have surprised and wrong-footed successive western governments. They include the breakup of the oil company Yukos, the poisonings of Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal, and the invasions of Georgia and Ukraine. He also mentions Russian election meddling, in particular during the 2016 US presidential vote. In each case the west’s response was limited. Moscow perceives this as “weakness”, he writes.
According to Steele, Putin and his associates have a particular “love-hate” obsession with Britain. Vast amounts of “illegitimate” wealth is hidden in the UK; at the same time London is home to an influential émigré community, which the Kremlin views with suspicion. Putin wanted to embarrass and humiliate the UK in order to “cow” other countries and to further his corrupt and amoral agenda, the ISC was told.
Over the years, Russia’s elite has established a powerful presence in London, the committee heard, thanks to lavish expenditure and investment. Lawyers, accountants, estate agents and lobbyists have all helped oligarchs penetrate “British political and business life”. Not all of these London firms are “bad actors”, Steele says, but many are party to “corrupt and destabilising forces” emanating from the Kremlin.
“This gradual and more subtle erosion of our norms and politics, including our political parties, poses a significant threat,” he told the MPs.
In Steele’s analysis, Putin always had malign intentions but lacked the resources to follow through.
Russia under Putin now represents potentially a greater threat to the UK and its way of life than terrorism, the MPs heard.
“No terrorist group has to date successfully deployed a weapon of mass destruction, either nuclear or chemical, in the UK. Russia has deployed both,” Steele points out, adding: “If not effectively deterred going forward, clearly Putin’s regime will stop at little to achieve its objectives.”
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