Behind the US-Russia prisoner exchange: Spies, a killer, secret messages and unseen diplomacy

Washington: A turning point came June 25, when a group of CIA officers sat across from their Russian counterparts during a secret meeting in a Middle Eastern capital.

The Americans floated a proposal: an exchange of two dozen prisoners sitting in jails in Russia, the United States and scattered across Europe, a far bigger and more complex deal than either side had previously contemplated but one that would give both Moscow and Western nations more reasons to say yes.

Quiet negotiations between the United States and Russia over a possible prisoner swap had dragged on for more than a year. They were punctuated by only occasional glimpses of hope for the families of the American prisoners — including Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and Paul Whelan, an American security contractor — growing increasingly impatient for their ordeal to end. Those hopes were always dashed when one of the two sides balked.

But the June meeting changed things, according to accounts from American and Western officials and other people familiar with the long process of bringing the deal to fruition.

The Russian spies took the proposal back to Moscow, and only days later the CIA director was on the phone with a Russian spy chief agreeing to the broad parameters of a massive prisoner swap. On Thursday, seven different planes touched down in Turkey and exchanged passengers, bringing to a successful close an intensive diplomatic effort that took place almost entirely out of public view.

The deal between longtime adversaries secured the release of Gershkovich, Whelan and 14 other Americans, Russians and Europeans imprisoned in Russia.

The deal also freed, among others, a Russian hit man, Vadim Krasikov. He had been jailed in Germany since 2019 for the killing of a Chechen former separatist fighter in a park in Berlin. He was the prize most sought by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had publicly praised the killing as an act of patriotism and for years had insisted that Krasikov be part of any swap.

The deal reached its conclusion even as President Joe Biden, who got personally involved in the negotiations at key points, was slowly losing hope of continuing his reelection bid.

On July 21, Biden placed a call from his vacation home in Delaware to Slovenia’s prime minister to nail down one of the last pieces of the prisoner agreement. Less than two hours later, he announced he was withdrawing from the presidential race.

In December 2022, authorities in Slovenia made two arrests that might, at first, have seemed of little consequence. They brought in a couple posing as Argentine emigres in the country, living under the pseudonyms Ludwig Gisch and Maria Mayer.

As it turns out, the couple were deep-cover Russian intelligence officers.

The arrests would prove critical for the prisoner exchange. At the time, the United States had been trying to secure the release of Whelan — who had been arrested in Russia four years earlier on espionage charges — but were always unsuccessful because there was nobody in US custody the Russians believed was worthy of a swap.

Now, with the arrests in Slovenia, US officials figured they had something to barter.

James P. Rubin, a State Department special envoy, and Roger D. Carstens, the department’s chief hostage negotiator, came up with a plan that they called “enlarging the problem” — rather than seek a one-for-one or two-for-one exchange, they would broaden any potential swap to include many more people on both sides.

They took the idea to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who got Biden to approve the proposal in March 2023.

But the ground in the negotiations shifted later that month when the Russians arrested Gershkovich and falsely accused him of spying for the United States.

The day after Gershkovich’s arrest, on March 30, 2023, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, briefed the president about the case. Biden directed him to lead an effort to make a deal with the Russians to get Gershkovich and Whelan released.

It was becoming clearer to the Americans what the Russians really wanted: the release of Krasikov. To Putin, the convicted assassin had become “a symbol” of a faithful soldier carrying out his duty to the Russian state, said a person close to the Kremlin.

But including Krasikov in any prisoner deal meant persuading the German government to give him up, a move that posed significant political risk for Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

In April 2023, weeks after Gershkovich’s arrest, Blinken gauged the German foreign minister’s interest in a possible deal that, besides the imprisoned Americans and the Russian assassin, would also include the release of Alexei Navalny, the prominent Russian dissident whom the Germans had been working to get freed from a Russian prison.

The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, was cool to any plan that led to the freedom of Krasikov, so White House officials decided to engage the chancellor’s office directly.

Without Krasikov as part of a deal, there was no deal to be had. In November 2023, CIA officers in Moscow offered another deal — Whelan and Gershkovich for four Russian spies, including the two arrested in Slovenia — but the Russians rejected it.

On January 16, Biden spoke by phone to Scholz, who finally relented, agreeing to include Krasikov in a prisoner deal as long as it also included Navalny.

“For you, I will try to do this,” Scholz told the president. At a meeting on Feb. 9, the two men agreed to pursue the idea, according to a US official.

But Navalny died in a Russian penal colony a week later, before the United States had formally broached the possibility of including him in a prisoner deal with the Russians. The White House once again had to work to persuade the German chancellor to include Krasikov in a revised prisoner deal.

It took weeks to develop the outlines of a proposal shared with the German government, one including numerous people in Russian prisons whom the Germans wanted released. The Americans added Vladimir Kara-Murza, another imprisoned Russian dissident, who was also a permanent US resident, to appeal to Scholz’s desire for a moral imperative to justify the release of a Russian assassin.

The proposal also needed commitments from Slovenia, Norway and Poland that Russian spies imprisoned in those countries would be released as part of the deal.

Scholz approved the deal to include Krasikov on June 7, and on June 25 the CIA officers made the proposal to the Russians in the Middle East. The deal that the Russians agreed to was largely the same as the June 25 proposal, US officials said.

Early last month, William Burns, the CIA director, spoke with Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s FSB intelligence service. Days later, CIA officials and Russian intelligence operatives met again in person, this time in Turkey, to work out the final details of the agreement.