“Treason is the biggest crime on Earth, and traitors must be punished,” said Russian President Vladimir Putin in an interview with Financial Times in June 2019, commenting on the poisoning of a former GRU officer and double agent who spied for Western intelligence Sergei Skripal and his daughter. “I am not saying that it’s necessary to punish in [the] way that was done in Salisbury, added Putin, “not at all. But, nevertheless, traitors must be punished.”
Last week, before the airwaves got hit with the whirlwind of bizarre reports of a failed coup in Russia, news broke out about another failed Russian plot, taking place in 2020. The Russians ran a clandestine operation to kill a high-ranking Russian intelligence official, Aleksandr Poteyev, who was living in Miami, Florida, under the protection by the U.S. government as part of a highly secretive program that is designed to keep former spies safe. Poteyev defected here, having given up the names of 11 deep-cover Russian agents who operated in the U.S. and collected valuable intelligence for the Kremlin while posing as regular Americans.
The operation to eliminate Poteyev, ordered by Putin, fell through when a Mexican scientist, Hector Alejandro Cabrera Fuentes, whom the Russians coerced to track down Poteyev, sparked a red flag with security. Fuentes, who wasn’t trained in operational tradecraft, tried to pass through the gate of Poteyev’s apartment building in Miami Beach by tailgating another car. Fuentes ultimately got arrested.
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This wasn’t the first time that the Russians targeted those who have crossed the Kremlin around the world, including here on U.S. soil. In fact, there’s an entire doctrine, called “Wet Deeds” – the spilling of blood.
The practice dates back to the early days of the Soviet Union. Wet Deeds was the favorite tool of Lenin, Stalin and now Putin to “eliminate” (likvidirovat’) persons perceived as a threat to the regime. Putin renewed the practice of “wet affairs” or “special tasks” by approving a federal law, “On Countering Extreme Activity,” in 2002, two and a half years after he assumed the presidency. The law was updated in 2006, authorizing targeted assassinations for “extremist activity,” which includes “crimes” such as “diminishing national dignity” and “publicly expressing slander or false accusation of persons who hold Russian government positions.”
These “special tasks” are carried out by Russian military intelligence operatives and include killings, kidnappings, poisonings, “forced suicides” and other acts of intimidation and murder. Throwing a victim out of a window or making the victim jump is a very common tactic, along with staging car explosions and other “tragic accidents.”
Prior to 2020, the Russians targeted Kremlin critics on U.S. soil twice. In March 2007, former CIA officer and staffer for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Paul Joyal survived a brutal attack near his home in Maryland. The attackers shot Joyal in the groin four days after he implied during a “Dateline NBC” broadcast that Putin and the Kremlin were responsible for the death of Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former FSB officer and Putin’s vocal critique, in Great Britain. Although the FBI was originally involved in the case, five years after this highly likely murder attempt, the criminals had not been found.
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In November 2015, Mikhail Lesin, a former Russian media executive and Putin adviser, was found dead in an upscale Washington, D.C., hotel. Lesin’s death happened a day before he was due to be interviewed by the Justice Department about the Kremlin-funded media company, RT, which he had founded. In October 2016, his death was deemed “accidental” by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Washington and the Metropolitan Police Department. But an official at the Chief Medical Examiner’s office revealed that Lesin’s neck bone was fractured in a way that is “commonly associated with hanging or manual strangulation.”
On Russian soil, the Kremlin’s hit men conduct “wet deeds” at will. In July 2004, the New York–born Russian-American journalist and the chief editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, Paul Klebnikov, was gunned down with nine bullets on the streets of Moscow late at night. Through his work, Klebnikov exposed the corruption of the Russian oligarchs.
The botched Russian plot in 2020 suggests that perhaps Putin’s assassins are not as highly trained as Stalin’s. Stealthiness used to be the hallmark of the Russian tradecraft involving “special tasks” – the assassins did their job, leaving no trace of foul play. According to a 1993 CIA document, even “in cases where the Soviet hand is obvious, investigation often produces only fragmentary information, due to the KGB ability to camouflage its trail.”
Some Americans are not buying the story that the recent armed revolt in Russia was authentic. Here’s a litmus test that would show whether the Russians ran a false-flag operation or whether Putin’s regime is about to collapse. If Prigozhin is indeed a traitor, Putin will hunt him down wherever he may be hiding.
If Prigozhin becomes the target of Putin’s assassination playbook, the coup is real. If Prigozhin and Wagner hitmen open up a second front targeting Ukraine from Belarus, we will know that Team Biden was outplayed by Putin again.
