Biden aides warn Putin that Russia’s shadow war threatens to cause an air disaster

After shipments of seemingly innocent goods began catching fire 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 sabotage.

But in August, White House officials became increasingly concerned about secretly obtained intelligence suggesting that Moscow had a much bigger plan in mind: taking the war in Ukraine to American shores.

The question was how to send a warning to the only man who could stop this: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In a series of Situation Room briefings, top aides to President Biden reviewed details of conversations between senior officials at the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence arm, who were describing shipments of consumer products that caught fire — in one case, a small electronic massage device — as triggering… experimental.

Once the Russians understood how the packages bypassed air cargo screening systems, and how long it would take to ship, the next step seemed to be to send them on planes bound for the United States and Canada, where they would spark fires once they arrived. discharge.

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

“The risk of something catastrophically going wrong was clear, where a fully loaded plane could catch fire,” Alejandro Mayorkas, Homeland Security Secretary, said in a recent interview.

In August, Mr. Mayorkas imposed new screening restrictions on goods shipped to the United States. In October, when the warnings resurfaced, he quietly pressured senior executives at the largest airlines flying to the United States to speed up their steps to prevent mid-air disaster. Some of these precautions became public at that time; Others didn’t.

But behind the scenes, White House officials were struggling to understand whether Mr. Putin had ordered or been aware of the plot — or whether he had been kept in the dark. A major effort was initiated to warn him against ending it.

Access to game rules first developed in October 2022 – When the United States thought Russia was considering detonating a nuclear weapon in Ukraine Biden sent his National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, and CIA Director, William Burns, to send a series of warnings to Putin’s top aides. As one senior official recounted, several paths were needed to ensure the message reached Putin’s ears and stuck.

The essence of the warning was that if sabotage led to significant casualties in the air or on the ground, the United States would hold Russia responsible for “enabling terrorism.” Sullivan and Burns did not specify the nature of this response, but they explained that it would take the shadow war between Washington and Moscow to new levels.

This shadow war continues every day, as Russia resorts to sabotage in hopes of breaking NATO’s will to support Ukraine, without sparking a full-blown war with NATO.

It redefined life in Europe and ended the sense of security that accompanied the post-Cold War world. Hour-by-hour searches are now being conducted for saboteurs, at airports, seaports and under the sea, as well as on the streets of major cities such as Berlin, Tallinn and London.

But in this case, the warning reached Putin, officials said in describing secret exchanges with the Kremlin for the first time. It appears to have had its intended effect: the string of fires in Europe has stopped, at least for the time being. But it is unclear whether Mr. Putin has ordered a halt, or for how long. Officials say Russia could use the time to build better, more stealth-capable devices.

Plausible deniability?

Efforts to reach Putin were described by five senior officials interviewed over the past three weeks, who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive national security threat. In recent days, as the administration prepares to leave office within a week, some details of tense exchanges with the Kremlin have been declassified.

While officials said their efforts to avoid the worst were successful, it clearly left many of them shaken. As they leave office, they worry that the Russian military establishment, angered by embarrassing and sometimes deadly Ukrainian attacks around Kursk and other targets inside Russian territory, is now intent on taking the conflict to European and American soil. But they want to do so using technologies that do not risk all-out conflict with NATO.

The Russians may have viewed the operation as a normal – and in their view proportionate – response to Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory, which were at least partly dependent on US-supplied weapons, including missiles.

To this day, American officials do not know whether Mr. Putin was the one who ordered the operation, whether he was aware of it, or whether he only learned of it because of American warnings.

Several officials said they suspected the plot may have been the work of Russian military intelligence officers who were responding to general orders to increase pressure on the United States and its NATO allies. They said that would be consistent with previous efforts to create plausible deniability for Mr. Putin in the event the operation went poorly.

The incident showed that Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin maintained indirect channels of communication, even though they had not spoken since the Russian attack on Ukraine began in February 2022.

That freeze on direct talks between Washington and Moscow appears to be about to end: President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Thursday that Mr. Putin “wants a meeting, and we’re working to set it up,” though the Kremlin insisted there was none. Formal conversation. Mr. Trump and his aides are cautious about the question of whether the two men have actually spoken. They did not say whether the talks would be limited to the Ukrainian war or also include other elements of the adversarial relationship between Washington and Moscow: the looming nuclear arms race, Russia’s future in Syria, and the accelerating shadow war with the West.

News of air cargo operations leaked out of Europe this summer and from the Wall Street Journal Reported in early November that intelligence officials Russia’s ultimate goal is believed to be to expand operations to include the United States and Canada.

But this account is the first to describe how Mr. Biden’s aides decided that unless they intervened with Mr. Putin directly, the events could lead to disaster: even if unintended, if a plane was delayed by bad weather, or saboteurs were involved. The timing is wrong.

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

Mysterious fires and cable outages

During the first two years of the war, Russia seemed intent on keeping the conflict within Ukraine’s borders. Its missiles never reached NATO territory. One evening, when it looked like a missile might have crossed the border into Poland and killed two farmers, Biden woke up fearing that the two countries were about to slide into open conflict. To Washington’s relief, this was a false alarm. The deflected shot came from the Ukrainians.

That changed in 2024. Cases of sabotage, and suspected sabotage, appeared everywhere: hard-to-explain fires in warehouses, sometimes linked to companies supporting the arming of Ukraine; GPS “spoofing” that crippled navigation systems for shipping and flights across Europe; Cutting undersea fiber-optic cables and pulling anchors from the Russian “shadow fleet” from boats seemed reprehensible.

Washington helped intelligence officials in Berlin uncover a plot to assassinate the CEO of Rheinmetall, the leading arms manufacturer in Germany. The company is one of the leading companies in the production of artillery shells that Ukraine desperately needs.

But when an incendiary device caused a fire in late July at a DHL shipping facility in Leipzig, a former university city in East Germany, it prompted an immediate investigation. Thomas Haldenwang, head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, later told the German parliament that the country had narrowly avoided a plane crash, but did not provide details.

It was the package postmarked from Lithuania, Another explosion occurred in Birmingham, England. A third caught fire at a Polish courier company.

Inside the White House, the biggest concern came in the form of intelligence about conversations between GRU officials, and US officials did not discuss how they gained access to the talks. But they confirmed the implication: The three incendiaries were meant to limit the flow of DHL and other packages, so that the ignition of a highly flammable magnesium-based material could be precisely timed to burst into flames.

The talks indicated that the next step was to transport them on planes to the United States and Canada. But the fear during the operating room discussions was that any unintended delay – caused by weather or planes flying due to heavy traffic – could mean that the devices exploded in midair.

From Washington to Moscow, a warning

In August, the CIA and others concluded that the incendiary devices that exploded in Leipzig, Birmingham, and Poland were actually part of a “field test” conducted by Russian military intelligence, as it attempted to understand the path that packages followed on their way through Europe. The packages were sent from Vilnius, Lithuania, where the Russians maintain a significant intelligence presence.

Mr. Sullivan’s colleagues recall that he was very focused on the risks of attacks in this period, although he said nothing publicly about them. But talks between Russian military intelligence officials left no doubt about where this would go. One senior official involved in the discussions said it became clear that they had to get a message to Mr. Putin, because he was the only one in the Russian system capable of ordering an end to the operation. But reaching it means sending the message through multiple paths.

Sullivan quietly began a series of calls with his Russian counterpart, Yuri Ushakov, beginning by mentioning the Rheinmetall plot. Not surprisingly, Mr. Ushakov denied Russia’s involvement — just as Russian officials denied, in October 2022, that they were planning to use a tactical nuclear weapon.

Sullivan then spoke somewhat vulgarly about how the United States knew, telling Mr. Ushakov that the administration believed the incendiary devices were also Russia’s responsibility — and that they had endangered civilian lives. He added that the biggest concern is the risk of mass casualties if packages explode on board a cargo or passenger plane.

Mr. Burns, the CIA director who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia two decades ago, and the official who knows Mr. Putin better than ever, has raised essentially the same issue with his intelligence counterpart, Sergei Naryshkin, who runs the Foreign Intelligence Service, And Alexander Bortnikov. Director of the FSB, Russia’s two most powerful intelligence agencies. The thinking was that they all had regular access to Mr Putin.

American officials were careful not to say that the goal of the operation was to shoot down a plane; In fact, the devices appear to be designed to explode on the ground. But the risk of a mid-air accident appears high.

While an immediate crisis was averted, Biden aides acknowledge that the incident exposed a larger problem: As the war approaches its third anniversary, the risks are spilling over into new arenas, taking on new dimensions.

“Although a ceasefire in Ukraine would be significant, it is far from everything,” said Richard Haass, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations who has written extensively about what the end of the war might look like.

He said the vandalism “is part of a larger pattern.”

“Russia has turned into a revolutionary player,” he said. Russia has turned into a country that seeks to undermine the international order. The real question is: Can the Trump administration do something about it?