WASHINGTON — American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to finish the long-running war there, consistent with officials briefed on the matter.
Us concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.
Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely related to them, are believed to possess collected some bounty money, the officials said. Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it had been not clear which killings were under suspicion.
The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and therefore the White House’s National Security Council discussed the matter at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a requirement that it stop, alongside an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.
An operation to incentivize the killing of yank and other NATO troops would be a big and provocative escalation of what American and Afghan officials have said is Russian support for the Taliban, and it might be the primary time the Russian spy unit was known to possess orchestrated attacks on Western troops.
Any involvement with the Taliban that resulted in the deaths of yank troops would even be an enormous escalation of Russia’s so-called hybrid war against us, a technique of destabilizing adversaries through a mixture of such tactics as cyberattacks, the spread of faux news and covert and deniable military operations.
The Kremlin had not been made conscious of the accusations, said Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “If someone makes them, we’ll respond,” Mr. Peskov said.
Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, denied that the insurgents have “any such relations with any intelligence agency” and called the report an effort to defame them.
“These sorts of deals with the Russian intelligence are baseless — our target killings and assassinations were ongoing in years before, and that we did it on our own resources,” he said. “That changed after our effect the Americans and their lives are secure and that we don’t attack them.”
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Spokespeople at the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the State Department, and therefore the C.I.A. declined to comment.
The officials conversant in the intelligence didn't explain the White House delay choose the way to answer the intelligence about Russia.
While a number of his closest advisers, like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have counseled more hawkish policies toward Russia, Mr. Trump has adopted an accommodating stance toward Moscow.
At a summit in 2018 in Helsinki, Finland, Mr. Trump strongly suggested that he believed Mr. Putin’s denial that the Kremlin interfered within the 2016 presidential election, despite broad agreement within the American intelligence establishment that it did. Mr. Trump criticized a bill imposing sanctions on Russia when he signed it into law after Congress passed it by veto-proof majorities. And he has repeatedly made statements that undermined the NATO alliance as a bulwark against Russian aggression in Europe.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to explain the fragile intelligence and internal deliberations. They said the intelligence had been treated as a closely held secret, but the administration expanded briefings about it in the week — including sharing information about it with the British government, whose forces are among those said to possess been targeted.
The intelligence assessment is claimed to be based a minimum of partially on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals. The officials didn't describe the mechanics of the Russian operation, like how targets were picked or how money changed hands. it's also not clear whether Russian operatives had deployed inside Afghanistan or met with their Taliban counterparts elsewhere.
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