A Russian agent involved in the clean-up of Alexei Navalny’s near-fatal nerve poisoning in August revealed in an unintentional confession how the Russian activist’s underpants were smeared with the toxin Novichok by a Russian Federal Security Service intelligence unit.
His revelation was made in a remarkable and lengthy telephone conversation with Navalny himself, who posed as a high-ranking Russian official who wanted to know why the assassination attempt failed. Investigative news exchange Bellingcat collaborated with Navalny and listened to the conversation.
Konstantin Kudryavtsev, a member of a suspected FSB intelligence squad, revealed in the 49-minute conversation how the assassination plot was organized and monitored. He revealed details of the subsequent reorganization to erase all evidence of the assassination attempt, which took place on August 20 in Siberia’s Tomsk.
Navalny almost died of poisoning and was transferred to a German hospital after an international outcry. Tests in Berlin indicated the presence of the nerve agent Novichok in his body.
Last week, Bellingcat, along with a handful of media partners, revealed the members of the unit behind the murder. They are breaking open source data and obtaining cell phone logs on the black market for their exposure.
On Friday, Russian leader Vladimir Putin neither confirmed nor denied FSB involvement in the assassination attempt, but joked that if they had wanted him dead, “they would probably have ended it.”
First contact
The telephone conversation with the Russian agent took place on December 14, several hours before Bellingcat and its partners announced their first discovery of Navalny’s poisoning. They reported that an elite Russian chemical weapons intelligence service had been following Navalny for the past three years, until his near-fatal poisoning in August.
According to Bellingcat, the FSB troupe began shadowing the Russian activist, who has long been a thorn in the side of the Kremlin, in 2017, shortly after announcing that he would run against Putin in the presidential election.
Six to ten agents from the unit, which specializes in toxins and neurotransmitters, followed Navalny on more than 30 trips, according to phone records, flight manifestos and other documents revealed by Bellingcat in a joint investigation with CNN, Russia’s news website The Insider and Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine.
In his talks with Navalny, Kudryavtsev added significant new details to the operation and explained how he was sent to clean things up. Navalny, who is recovering in a secret location in Germany, posed as a key assistant to a senior official of Russia’s National Security Council, saying he was tasked with conducting an analysis of the poisoning and identifying what went wrong.
The phone number he used disguised itself from the FSB’s headquarters, according to Bellingcat, who helped arrange the disguise of the real number from Kudryavtsev. A researcher from Bellingcat sat on the call and recorded it.
At first, Kudryavtsev seemed reluctant to discuss the details by telephone. But Navalny used the typical brusque manner of Russian officials and told him it was urgent and that he had to fill in a report to be “discussed in the Security Council at the highest level.”
“Which item of clothing was the emphasis?” Asked Navalny.
“Underpants,” Kudryavtsev replied.
Navalny then asked exactly where Novichok was applied.
“Inside, the branch,” Kudryavtsev replied.
Novichok can be absorbed through the skin.
Navalny fell ill on a flight home from Tomsk to Moscow. The pilot diverted the plane to Omsk so that Navalny could receive life-saving treatment from a doctor. Kudryavtsev noted in the conversation that if the flight had not been redirected, “the result would have been different.
“So I think the plane played the decisive role.”
He added, “[We] did not expect all this to happen. I’m sure everything went wrong. “
Kudryavtsev was also asked what dose was used and whether a sufficient amount had been administered. Kudryavtsev said that had not been the problem.
“As I understand it, we added [a] a little extra, he said.
Kudryavtsev is a specialist in chemical and biological weapons after graduating from the Russian Academy of Chemical Defense. Bellingcat has found that he later worked at the 42nd Center of the Department of Defense – a biological security research center.
Western governments say Navalny was poisoned by Soviet nerve agent Novichok, the same substance identified by British officials used in an attack in Britain in 2018 in an attempt to kill former Russian spy Sergei Skripal. The European Union has sanctioned FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov and senior Kremlin officials over the attack on Navalny.
Subsequent tests by French and Swedish laboratories of Navalny’s liquids confirmed the German result. In an interview with a German newspaper in October, Navalny accused the Kremlin of being behind his poisoning.
“I have no other versions of how the crime was committed,” he said.
FILE – Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, not seen in the photo, is transferred on a stretcher to an ambulance before being driven to a medical evacuation airport in Germany, at Omsk Hospital, in Omsk, Russia, August 22, 2020.
The action
In its initial exposure, Bellingcat said the FSB unit that overshadowed Navalny consisted of six to ten agents, including doctors and toxicologists in the late 1930s and 1940s. The operation was ordered by military researcher Colonel Stanislav Makshakov, who communicated with leading figures at the FSB before and after Navalny’s travels, cell phone logs suggest. Makshakov, deputy head of the FSB’s Criminalistics Institute, is believed to have previously worked at a chemical institute in the closed city of Shikhany-1.
Kudryavtsev traveled to Omsk twice after the poisoning – on August 25 and October 2, according to flight data. Phone logs that Bellingcat bought showed that he was in regular contact with Makshakov before and during the suspected time frame for the poisoning.
In his conversation with Navalny, Kudryavtsev stated that Makshakov was the troop commander, and that FSB agents Alexey Alexandrov and Ivan Osipov, both doctors, were the main men who applied the poison in Tomsk. Initially, during the telephone interview, Kudryavtsev told Navalny that questions about the operation would best be directed to Makshakov.
Bellingcat
Russian officials have accused Bellingcat of being an arm of Western intelligence. But Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins rejected the claim in an interview with VOA, saying the Kremlin should provide evidence.
“They are just trying to excuse their own incompetence,” he said.
Higgins said the Kremlin was trying to suggest that it “has a fantastic intelligence service, but history only shows that it has not.”
Bellingcat first caught international attention in 2018 with its unmasking of the Russian intelligence workers behind the assassination attempt on the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the UK. The men identified by Bellingcat were then named by the British government.
Higgins said that after the investigation into the Skripal poisoning, Bellingcat saw that Russian intelligence services were trying to tighten their operations to protect the operators’ identities. It also tried to set traps for Bellingcat.
“They made some attempts to make it harder for us to do what we do. The problem is that the whole system is completely rotten to its core,” Higgins told VOA.
“Because of corruption, you have a lot of databases that are usually only available to insurance companies, government agencies and the like. So, things that are pretty harmless like property records, car records and flight records and things like that are out there,” he said.
Higgins said that it is not difficult to find people who are willing to sell data as telephone records.
“So by using all this information from different sources, you can combine it to reconstruct what’s happening,” he explained.
“You can use phone records, which include the position of cell phones, to find out where people are and when they call and to whom,” he said.
Higgins added that although Bellingcat does not have the details of the actual conversations between identified FSB agents and officials allegedly involved in the poisoning of Navalny, it thinks the fantasy that their presence near him – and their successor to him – is not linked to the plot.
He said that buying phone logs from black marketers and Navalny’s conversations “under the guise of a fictitious, high-ranking aide” raises ethical questions about this method of obtaining data. clearly falls within the framework of the predominant public interest, in view of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the Skripal and Navalny poisonings. “
Higgins acknowledged that the simple practice of persuading an FSB operator to talk about the operation has added details that he and his team could not secure through their database guide.
In the Navalny case, Higgins said “no one else is investigating. The Germans have said they could only investigate if Navalny had died. And the only possible way to really find out what happened is to take these steps, even if they are extreme. “
Source: sn.dk