A special unit within the FSB - the Federal Security Service of Russia, is engaged in tracking, fictitious arrests and convictions, or even kidnappings, of foreigners, so that they can then be included in talks for exchanges with Russian spies captured in the West.
Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal journalist who also became the first journalist convicted of espionage in Russia since the Cold War, talks about this unit in his first investigation for the publication, after in August 2024 returned to the United States as part of just such an exchange.
Evan Gershkovich was arrested during his business trip to the Urals in 2023, and in July 2024 was sentenced to 16 years in prison in a colony on espionage charges. On August 1, he and 15 other convicted foreigners and Russian oppositionists were included in an exchange for eight Russian citizens, including former FSB officer Vadim Krasikov, convicted in Germany for the murder of a former Chechen field commander. It was also the largest such deal between the West and Russia of its kind since post-Soviet times.
The investigation is dedicated to the FSB's counterintelligence operations department, which, according to the WSJ, is behind the case of Gershkovich and other defendants in espionage cases in Russia. The investigation sheds light on how this special department of the FSB, about which almost nothing was known until recently, operates, write Gershkovich and his co-authors, two of whom were openly monitored in Vienna and Washington while working on this material. They call the department "elite shadow espionage".
This unit is preparing an exchange of foreigners for Russians convicted in the West. They are responsible for the return to Russia of Vadim Krasikov, a former Russian special services officer convicted in Germany of murder and the most valuable chapter in the exchange, of which Gershkovich was also a part.
According to the journalists, the FSB department first received an order to organize the release of Krasikov, and then began to select candidates for the exchange. That is why a "campaign to arrest American citizens" was organized on Russian soil, which also included basketball star Britney Griner. The latter was convicted in Russia for drug smuggling and in December 2022 was exchanged for Russian Viktor Bout, serving a sentence in the US for arms smuggling.
Gershkovich himself was arrested in order to raise the stakes for the exchange of Krasikov, the investigation claims. The journalist calls himself and former US Marine Paul Whelan, also convicted in Russia for espionage, "bait" for the exchange of Krasikov.
"In one of the offices of the First Investigative Department, sitting under two portraits, one of Putin and the other of Dzerzhinsky, the chief investigator in my case explained to me that I was accused of working for the CIA on the grounds that this department of the FSB had identified me as such. The investigator said that was enough for him," Gershkovich wrote.
Lieutenant General Dmitry Minaev, a Hero of Russia from the Chechen war, is the name of the head of the FSB's counterintelligence operations department and is directly involved in making decisions about the arrest of this particular American citizen and choosing which Russians to exchange him for, the authors of the investigation claim.
"He understands everything that is happening around him - everything", said a Western official who has met with Minaev several times. "He immediately understands who is iron and who is rags."
According to WSJ data, it was he who led both the arrest and the subsequent exchange of Evan Gershkovich.
Dmitry Minaev is not a public figure, but the WSJ reporter met with him - on the plane that took him out of Russia after 16 months in prison. Minaev personally accompanied the exchanged foreigners during their deportation from Russia on August 1, introducing himself to them as an "FSB employee" and even appeared in one of the videos filmed during the exchange.
Also on the plane with Minaev was Sergei Latkov, the former head of the "Tenth Department", which specifically monitors foreign journalists. According to the WSJ, Sergei Latkov now works in the presidential administration.
The leadership of the department in the FSB, the WSJ claims, has direct access to Vladimir Putin. Major General Vladislav Menshchikov, head of the First Department of the FSB, which also includes the counterintelligence department, personally reported to the president about Gershkovich's arrest, the publication writes. He is so close to the president that he played hockey with him.
According to the WSJ, it is the FSB's counterintelligence operations department that creates in Russia "an atmosphere of political persecution that the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has called "unprecedented" in recent history. According to Greshkovich, this is also the department responsible for "the biggest wave of repression in Russia since the time of Joseph Stalin."
According to the WSJ, the department employs about 2,000 people, who receive high salaries even by FSB standards. The publication did not specify specific amounts, but claims that in addition to monthly salaries for successful operations, employees also receive significant bonuses. Recently, the department's staff has doubled.
The department has a wide range of powers, it can attract employees from other FSB divisions for its special operations and receives the necessary cover. "Once the team is assembled, they are given carte blanche", a former employee of another Russian intelligence agency told the WSJ.
Their activities do not end there. The department's employees are behind strange incidents involving foreigners in Russia, including the mysterious death of an American diplomat's dog in Russia, spying on children, an attempt to recruit a school student into an embassy, and flat tires on diplomats' cars.
They are particularly interested in middle-aged Americans with military experience and previous service in the military who fly to Russia to meet women (or men) they met online.
In Ukraine in particular, this department has organized bombings on railway lines. Citing Ukrainian sources, the WSJ writes that Sergei Minaev was involved in the attempted assassination of the head of the GRU of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, Kirill Budanov.
The department also operates in other countries, including former Soviet republics, recruiting or kidnapping local residents there for future exchanges with Russian intelligence officers, the WSJ claims. We remind you that a trial is currently underway in the UK against a group of Bulgarians who worked as Russian spies. The case revealed that they had prepared the kidnapping of Bulgarian Hristo Grozev, as well as Roman Dobrokhotov, a Russian investigative journalist, founder and editor-in-chief of The Insider.
Furthermore, it was this department, together with the FSB's military intelligence department, that organized the several consecutive "purges" in the Russian Ministry of Defense, writes WSJ, citing Western intelligence agencies for this claim.