Could the US have saved Navalny?

Mint

4 days ago

The summer sun was reflecting off the Mediterranean, warming the leather seats of a white Rolls-Royce convertible as the shadowy Russian behind the wheel cruised the cliff-top roads overlooking the Côte d'Azur.
In the passenger seat rode Odessa Rae, a flame-haired Canadian actress and Oscar-winning filmmaker. She had flown to Monaco to meet Stanislav Petlinsky, a self-described 'security consultant" with a background in military intelligence who once worked in Vladimir Putin's office and still boasted access to the president. The night before, he had treated her to a €190 tasting menu of seaweed-garnished langoustine tartare and braised sea bass. But Rae wasn't sure how Petlinsky would react when she revealed the reason for this trip in July 2023, and her friends in New York worried he might abduct her.
As the wind tousled her hair, she floated an audacious question: What would it take to get Putin to release his archnemesis from prison?
Rae had grown up in Asia, spoke Japanese in a 1990s Levi's commercial with Brad Pitt, helped bring the rom-com 'Crazy Rich Asians" to theaters and once played a wild, underworld spirit in the Superman series 'Smallville." Now, she was playing a central role in 'Secret Project Silver Lake," a discreet effort to free a real-life hero: the subject of her Academy Award-winning documentary, 'Navalny."
Her film had helped make Alexei Navalny, a charismatic Russian opposition leader, the world's most famous dissident, chronicling his almost unbelievable endurance run of arrests, assaults and a near-fatal poisoning with the nerve agent Novichok. He had vowed from a German hospital bed to return to Russia and defy Putin, who loathed him so much he refused to utter Navalny's name. Arrested on arrival in Moscow, Navalny was in solitary confinement at the IK-6 penal colony east of the capital.
Rae had a trump card of sorts. She knew Putin wanted to spring one of his own cronies from prison in Germany—an FSB hit man, Vadim Krasikov, serving life for murdering a Kremlin opponent in a Berlin park.
A trade sounded like a fascinating idea, Petlinsky said. He promised to take it to Putin, and Rae returned to Manhattan, hopeful that she and her cohorts were furthering their unlikely bid to free the closest figure Russia ever had to a Nelson Mandela.
Thousands of miles away, the White House was largely unaware of this Monaco back channel. The Biden administration was trying to tightly control negotiations with Moscow over one of its gnarliest foreign policy problems, the rising number of Americans wrongly imprisoned—effectively taken hostage—in Russia. They included a former Marine, Paul Whelan, and our Wall Street Journal colleague, Evan Gershkovich, both jailed as political pawns on espionage charges the U.S. government rejected as bogus.
The FSB, successor to the KGB, had offered the CIA a trade for the Americans, but only for an unconscionable price—America must convince Germany to free Krasikov. The Biden administration was reluctant to force such a nauseating compromise onto a valued ally—and worried that even entertaining the idea would encourage Putin to ensnare more Americans. Months earlier, they had released arms dealer Viktor Bout for WNBA player Brittney Griner, and before her first game back, the FSB had snatched Gershkovich. America needed to look less eager, the White House felt.
Seven months would pass before Washington and Berlin were ready to move on a deal modeled on that first proposal by Rae, but just as soon as they were, it was too late. On Feb. 16, 2024, Russian state media announced that Navalny had died at the notorious 'Polar Wolf" prison at the age of 47. Authorities at the gates told his mother the cause was 'sudden death syndrome."
To this day, a debate continues over whether the U.S. missed a chance to save Navalny, or whether back-channel efforts to free him inadvertently precipitated his demise. One camp believes he could have been exchanged if the Biden administration had moved faster, before he was sent to the harsh arctic prison in Dec. 2023. They place particular blame on Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden's national security adviser, who was simultaneously assembling a complex, multinational agreement to save Navalny and jailed Americans and juggling an unmanageable set of geopolitical threats, including wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
The aging president, working limited hours and occasionally struggling to remember where negotiations stood, wasn't pressing enough for a deal, these people contend.
On the other side is an alternative thesis, shared by some top U.S. officials: Russia's paranoid president was never going to release his most popular opponent. Some involved in the negotiations wonder if the efforts to free Navalny pushed Putin, or his security chiefs, to finally reach a fatal decision on what to do with the meddlesome activist who routinely exposed the corruption of their regime.
The truth, wrapped inside Kremlin secrecy and the psychology of Russia's longtime autocrat, may never be known. The CIA later concluded that Putin might not have meant for Navalny to die when he did, though some European officials doubt such unintended harm could befall the most important dissident in a country as tightly controlled as Russia.
What is clear, as new reporting on the negotiations show, is that efforts to save Navalny and American prisoners in Russia proceeded at a pace the White House was never going to be able to control. Tech billionaires, celebrity journalists, spies and even Hillary Clinton stepped in to advance Secret Project Silver Lake. Gershkovich's arrest brought the collective power of Rupert Murdoch and his media conglomerate into the fray, as his family and executives called on world leaders from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman to help sway Putin.
Was Navalny's death inevitable? Or did the U.S. miss its chance to save him and the prospect of a different Russian future? It certainly seemed possible to rescue him in the summer of 2023, when Rae returned to Manhattan and met up with her partner in 'Silver Lake," one of the world's most famous spy-hunters: a Bulgarian investigative journalist-in-exile who was nervous about texting Petlinsky. After all, a Russian spy ring had tried to abduct him.
Christo Grozev was living in one of the few places he hoped Russia wouldn't dare touch him, Manhattan, an ocean away from his Bulgarian homeland or his family in Vienna, whom he would visit accompanied by armed bodyguards. A lanky, funny and restless ball of nerdy energy, he made his name scouring flight records, satellite imagery, social-media posts and other digital breadcrumbs to reveal the identities of Russia's most dangerous undercover agents, including Krasikov. He befriended Navalny and helped him identify, and even prank call, the FSB team that poisoned him, a scene captured in 'Navalny," Rae's documentary.
It was Grozev who identified Petlinsky as a possible line to Putin. Rae had found him amenable and rather charming in Monaco, and on her return to New York, she huddled with Grozev and the head of investigations at Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, Maria Pevchikh, who first hatched this plan to free him 18 months earlier. Over Signal, the encrypted messaging app, the three began texting Petlinsky to outline an exchange calibrated to satisfy each side. He replied with messages, suggestions and prisoners' names.
Bulgarian investigative journalist Christo Grozev.
In effect a trio of friends, more experienced in Hollywood and investigative journalism than prisoner diplomacy, was outpacing the White House, concocting a creative solution to retrieve Russia's most celebrated dissident. By August, they had assembled a draft of roughly 20 names, a trade larger and more complicated than any in U.S.-Russian history. Petlinsky, circulating their idea in Moscow, received encouraging feedback. But to propel it, he needed proof the U.S. government backed it. He wanted Sullivan to broach the offer.
Sullivan, Rae complained to the Russian, was too cautious. Instead, Navalny's friends turned to a former Green Beret who had helped free Americans held in Venezuela, Iran and Afghanistan. Roger Carstens, appointed during Trump's first administration as the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, then retained by Biden, was fascinated with Grozev. Carstens, who still wore combat boots with his suit, called Grozev one of the world's 'back-channel wizards," the kind of street-smart fixer who could open doors the Ivy League law-school alumni in the Biden White House didn't even know existed.
This was an extraordinary opportunity for three friends and a mysterious, bon vivant Russian operator to align two of the most powerful, and hostile, governments on earth. And yet Petlinsky was worried about a variable they couldn't control—media coverage—particularly from the newspaper most invested in the story.
'No press," he texted.
Wall Street Journal Publisher Almar Latour entered the White House carrying a note in his pocket, handwritten with his message for Sullivan: 'Now is the time to act."
The Journal's front page lay on the national security adviser's desk, bearing a giant portrait of Gershkovich and a two-word headline, a prison-time count: '100 Days."
'He has committed no crime, only journalism," the text read.
Fox News and MSNBC were broadcasting images that morning of the prisoner, standing tall in a Russian courtroom's glass cage. The Journal's advocacy campaign was firing on all cylinders, and Gershkovich's face looked out from a digital billboard on Times Square and from banners at Shea Stadium in Queens and Arsenal Stadium in London.
Editor in chief Emma Tucker was only eight weeks into her new job, sleeping on a mattress on her unfurnished Manhattan apartment's floor, when Gershkovich was jailed. But she had swiftly mobilized the newsroom's staff to 'scream from the rooftops" about the injustice. Murdoch had confidentially allowed executives to allocate a 'limitless" budget to free the reporter and, along with his family and executives, had been dialing world leaders—the prime minister of Qatar and crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Senators from both parties had demanded Gershkovich's release.
The Journal's reporters had obtained an important insight: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz would consider releasing Krasikov, especially if it meant Navalny and Gershkovich could go free in the bargain. To proceed, Germany wanted the White House to make the request, essential political cover.
Quiet diplomacy fell to Latour, who worried that if the White House didn't act quickly, Gershkovich might get snagged in a yearlong trial.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, left, and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, shown in the Oval Office during the Biden presidency.
Yet as Latour sat down in the West Wing office, he could see Sullivan, the youngest national security adviser since John F. Kennedy's Camelot cabinet, was on another page. Scholz's government wasn't psychologically ready to release Krasikov, Sullivan argued. Freeing a murderer was an unprecedented ask of America's most important NATO ally. Germany's coalition government was fragile and divided, and its foreign minister was aghast at the prospect of crossing this moral threshold.
The dilemma weighed on Sullivan, who had taken flak from Murdoch-controlled Fox News for swapping an arms dealer for the WNBA's Griner. The administration needed to explore alternative trades that wouldn't include the murderer or other ways to pressure the Kremlin. Sullivan had considered punishing Putin by expelling Russian hockey players in America, including Alexander Ovechkin, the NHL star chasing Wayne Gretzky's all-time scoring record. He decided against it.
Sullivan lamented to Latour that he didn't yet see 'a pathway." 'I do not want to give false hope," he added. 'All I can do is tell you that we have a clear commitment." Latour left the White House meeting confused. Germany wouldn't be ready until the U.S. sent a formal request. And Sullivan was reluctant to send one until Germany was ready. The two most powerful governments in the NATO alliance were circling each other like two teenagers at a school dance, each waiting for the other to make a move.
Roger D. Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs during the Biden presidency and first Trump administration.
Latour sent a meeting summary to Carstens. Time was wasting, the special envoy felt, his concern boiling into frustration. The pathway was obvious, he believed, yet the White House had discouraged him from even visiting Germany, where he could advance talks. His emails to White House staff were going unanswered.
Rae proposed a workaround: Petlinsky could fly to New York and meet Carstens there. But when the day finally came, in November, the Russian texted to say he had been mysteriously blocked from boarding his plane in Dubai. Carstens was suddenly needed in Israel. Talks were stuck.
But as fate had it, another 'back-channel wizard," happened to be in Tel Aviv—a Russian billionaire Carstens knew could slip a message to Putin. And this time, the White House wouldn't have time to stop him.
Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson are leaders on The Wall Street Journal's World Enterprise Team. This piece is adapted from their new book, 'SWAP: A Secret History of the New Cold War," which will be published on Aug. 19 by HarperCollins (which, like the Journal, is owned by News Corp).
Write to Joe Parkinson at [e-mail] and Drew Hinshaw at [e-mail]