Top Secret Russian Unit Seeks
to Destabilize Europe, Security Officials Say
Investigating the poisoning of
Sergei V. Skripal in Britain in 2018. Western officials say an elite unit of
the Russian intelligence system carried out the attack. Credit Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images
·
Oct. 8, 2019
First came a destabilization
campaign in Moldova, followed by the poisoning of an arms dealer in Bulgaria
and then a thwarted coup in Montenegro. Last year, there was an attempt to assassinate a former Russian spy in
Britain using a nerve agent. Though the operations bore the fingerprints of
Russia’s intelligence services, the authorities initially saw them as isolated,
unconnected attacks.
Western security officials have now
concluded that these operations, and potentially many others, are part of a
coordinated and ongoing campaign to destabilize Europe, executed by an elite
unit inside the Russian intelligence system skilled in subversion, sabotage and
assassination.
The group, known as Unit 29155, has
operated for at least a decade, yet Western officials only recently discovered
it. Intelligence officials in four Western countries say it is unclear how
often the unit is mobilized and warn that it is impossible to know when and
where its operatives will strike.
The purpose
of Unit 29155, which has not been previously reported, underscores the degree to
which the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, is actively fighting the West with his brand of
so-called hybrid warfare — a blend of propaganda, hacking attacks and disinformation
— as well as open military confrontation.
I think we had forgotten how
organically ruthless the Russians could be,” said Peter Zwack, a retired
military intelligence officer and former defense attaché at the United States
Embassy in Moscow, who said he was not aware of the unit’s existence.
In a text message, Dmitri S. Peskov,
Mr. Putin’s spokesman, directed questions about the unit to the Russian Defense
Ministry. The ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
Hidden
behind concrete walls at the headquarters of the 161st Special Purpose
Specialist Training Center in eastern Moscow, the unit sits within the command
hierarchy of the Russian military intelligence agency, widely known as the G.R.U.
Maj. Gen. Andrei V. Averyanov,
left, is the unit’s commander. Col. Anatoly V. Chepiga was indicted in Britain
over the Skripal poisoning.
Though much
about G.R.U. operations remains a mystery, Western intelligence agencies have
begun to get a clearer picture of its underlying architecture. In the months
before the 2016 presidential election, American officials say two G.R.U. cyber
units, known as 26165 and 74455, hacked into the servers of the Democratic
National Committee and the Clinton campaign, and then published embarrassing
internal communications.
[Our correspondent Matt Apuzzo reported on
Russia’s blueprint for foreign disruption on “The Weekly,” The Times’s TV
show. Watch on FX and Hulu.]
Last year, Robert S. Mueller III,
the special counsel overseeing the inquiry into Russian interference in the
2016 elections, indicted more than a dozen officers from
those units, though all still remain at large. The hacking teams mostly operate
from Moscow, thousands of miles from their targets.
By contrast, officers from Unit
29155 travel to and from European countries. Some are decorated veterans of
Russia’s bloodiest wars, including in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Ukraine. Its
operations are so secret, according to assessments by Western intelligence
services, that the unit’s existence is most likely unknown even to other G.R.U.
operatives.
The unit appears to be a tight-knit
community. A photograph taken in 2017 shows the unit’s commander, Maj. Gen.
Andrei V. Averyanov, at his daughter’s wedding in a gray suit and bow tie. He
is posing with Col. Anatoly V. Chepiga, one of two officers indicted in Britain
over the poisoning of a former spy, Sergei V. Skripal.
“This is a unit of the G.R.U. that
has been active over the years across Europe,” said one European security
official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe classified
intelligence matters. “It’s been a surprise that the Russians, the G.R.U., this
unit, have felt free to go ahead and carry out this extreme malign activity in
friendly countries. That’s been a shock.”
To varying
degrees, each of the four operations linked to the unit attracted public
attention, even as it took time for the authorities to confirm that they were
connected. Western intelligence agencies first identified the unit after the failed 2016 coup in Montenegro,
which involved a plot by two unit officers to kill the country’s prime minister
and seize the Parliament building.
The Bulgarian arms dealer
Emilian Gebrev survived a poisoning attack in 2015. CreditNikolay Doychinov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But
officials began to grasp the unit’s specific agenda of disruption only after
the March 2018 poisoning of Mr. Skripal, a former G.R.U. officer who had
betrayed Russia by spying for the British. Mr. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia,
fell grievously ill after exposure to a highly toxic nerve agent, but
survived.
Three other people were sickened,
including a police officer and a man who found a small bottle that
British officials believe was used to carry the nerve agent and gave it to his
girlfriend. The girlfriend, Dawn Sturgess, died after spraying the nerve agent
on her skin, mistaking the bottle for perfume.)
The poisoning led to a geopolitical
standoff, with more than 20 nations, including the United States, expelling 150
Russian diplomats in a show of solidarity with Britain.
Ultimately, the British authorities
exposed two suspects, who had traveled under aliases but were later identified
by the investigative site Bellingcat as Colonel Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin.
Six months after the poisoning, British prosecutors charged both men with
transporting the nerve agent to Mr. Skripal’s home in Salisbury, England, and
smearing it on his front door.
But the operation was more complex
than officials revealed at the time.
Exactly a year before the poisoning,
three Unit 29155 operatives traveled to Britain, possibly for a practice run,
two European officials said. One was Mr. Mishkin. A second man used the alias
Sergei Pavlov. Intelligence officials believe the third operative, who used the
alias Sergei Fedotov, oversaw the mission.
Soon, officials established that two
of these officers — the men using the names Fedotov and Pavlov — had been part
of a team that attempted to poison the Bulgarian arms dealer
Emilian Gebrev in 2015. (The other operatives, also known only
by their aliases, according to European intelligence officials, were Ivan
Lebedev, Nikolai Kononikhin, Alexey Nikitin and Danil Stepanov.)
The team
would twice try to kill Mr. Gebrev, once in Sofia, the capital, and again a
month later at his home on the Black Sea.
Western intelligence agencies
first identified the unit after the failed 2016 coup in Montenegro, which
involved a plot to kill Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic, center. Credit Savo Prelevic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Speaking to reporters in February at
the Munich Security Conference, Alex Younger, the chief of MI6, Britain’s
foreign intelligence service, spoke out against the growing Russian threat and
hinted at coordination, without mentioning a specific unit.
“You can see there is a concerted
program of activity — and, yes, it does often involve the same people,” Mr.
Younger said, pointing specifically to the Skripal poisoning and the Montenegro
coup attempt. He added: “We assess there is a standing threat from the G.R.U.
and the other Russian intelligence services and that very little is off
limits.”
The Kremlin sees Russia as being at
war with a Western liberal order that it views as an existential threat.
At a ceremony in November for the G.R.U.’s centenary,
Mr. Putin stood beneath a glowing backdrop of the agency’s logo — a red
carnation and an exploding grenade — and described it as “legendary.” A former
intelligence officer himself, Mr. Putin drew a direct line between the Red Army
spies who helped defeat the Nazis in World War II and officers of the G.R.U.,
whose “unique capabilities” are now deployed against a different kind of enemy.
“Unfortunately, the potential for
conflict is on the rise in the world,” Mr. Putin said during the ceremony.
“Provocations and outright lies are being used and attempts are being made to
disrupt strategic parity.”
In 2006, Mr.
Putin signed a law legalizing targeted killings abroad, the same year a team of
Russian assassins used a radioactive isotope to murder Aleksander V. Litvinenko,
another former Russian spy, in London.
Unit 29155
is not the only group authorized to carry out such operations, officials said.
The British authorities have attributed Mr. Litvinenko’s killing to the
Federal Security Service, the intelligence agency once headed by Mr.
Putin that often competes with the G.R.U.
An election sign in Chisinau,
Moldova, in 2014 showed representatives of the anti-European Socialist Party
with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. CreditGleb Garanich/Reuters
Although little is known about Unit
29155 itself, there are clues in public Russian records that suggest links to
the Kremlin’s broader hybrid strategy.
A 2012 directive from the Russian
Defense Ministry assigned bonuses to three units for “special achievements in
military service.” One was Unit 29155.
Another was Unit 74455, which was
involved in the 2016 election interference. The third was Unit 99450, whose
officers are believed to have been involved in the annexation of the Crimean
Peninsula in 2014.
A retired G.R.U. officer with
knowledge of Unit 29155 said that it specialized in preparing for
“diversionary” missions, “in groups or individually — bombings, murders,
anything.”
“They were serious guys who served
there,” the retired officer said. “They were officers who worked undercover and
as international agents.”
Photographs
of the unit’s dilapidated former headquarters, which has since been abandoned,
show myriad gun racks with labels for an assortment of weapons, including
Belgian FN-30 sniper rifles, German G3A3s, Austrian Steyr AUGs and American
M16s. There was also a form outlining a training regimen, including exercises
for hand-to-hand combat. The retired G.R.U. officer confirmed the authenticity
of the photographs, which were published by a Russian blogger.
The current commander, General
Averyanov, graduated in 1988 from the Tashkent Military Academy in what was
then the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan. It is likely that he would have fought
in both the first and second Chechen wars, and he was awarded a Hero of Russia
medal, the country’s highest honor, in January 2015. The two officers charged
with the Skripal poisoning also received the same award.
Though an elite force, the unit
appears to operate on a shoestring budget. According to Russian records,
General Averyanov lives in a run-down Soviet-era building a few blocks from the
unit’s headquarters and drives a 1996 VAZ 21053, a rattletrap Russia-made
sedan. Operatives often share cheap accommodation to economize while on the
road. British investigators say the suspects in the Skripal poisoning stayed in
a low-cost hotel in Bow, a downtrodden neighborhood in East London.
But European security officials are
also perplexed by the apparent sloppiness in the unit’s operations. Mr. Skripal
survived the assassination attempt, as did Mr. Gebrev, the Bulgarian arms
dealer. The attempted coup in Montenegro drew an enormous amount of attention,
but ultimately failed. A year later, Montenegro joined NATO. It is possible,
security officials say, that they have yet to discover other, more successful
operations.
It is difficult to know if the
messiness has bothered the Kremlin. Perhaps, intelligence experts say, it is
part of the point.
“That kind
of intelligence operation has become part of the psychological warfare,” said
Eerik-Niiles Kross, a former intelligence chief in Estonia. “It’s not that they
have become that much more aggressive. They want to be felt. It’s part of the
game.”
A
version of this article appears in print on Oct. 9, 2019, Section A,
Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Secret
Spy Unit In Russia Aims To Jolt Europe. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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