Intelligence Scoop: Is Russia Preparing to Attack Europe?

Are we dangerously underestimating how close we are to war with Putin? Or are we exaggerating the threat Russia poses to Europe? Listen as David McCloskey and Gordon Corera cut through the fear, the conspiracies and the Kremlin’s deception to reveal what Russia is actually doing, and why. ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: therestisclassified.com/newsletter ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restisclassified Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee 🌍 ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Video Editor: Joe Pettit Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David McCloskey?

  For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books, join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com.

• 0:25David McCloskey?

  Drone attacks, sabotage and assassination plots. In recent weeks, Russia's covert war with Europe has dramatically stepped up. But how far will it all go? And is this a dangerous escalation which might lead to war? Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm David McCloskey.

• 0:43Gordon Corera?

  And I'm Gordon Corera.

• 0:44David McCloskey?

  And we hope you're enjoying the series we have out now on Kim Philby. We're going to be releasing the second episode of that six-part series on Monday. But a reminder, of course, that if you want all of them now, you can sign up to the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com. But we wanted to bring you an episode on a slightly different topic, although still with nefarious Russians, Gordon. So, you know, there's always some commonalities. We want to talk today about what is currently happening between Russia and Europe. Now, we've, we've heard about, we've talked a lot on this podcast about Russian covert

• 1:24David McCloskey?

  action, about Russian active measures in the US and in Europe. But in the last few weeks, I think it's fair to say it feels like something has changed and that we are now in a very dangerous period of escalation.

• 1:39Gordon Corera?

  If you just take August and September, we've had Germany accuse Russian spies of what could have been a spectacular sabotage attack. We've had the CIA director fly to Moscow with a warning. And we've had even America accusing Russian spies of planning assassinations within the US, as well as Poland's prime minister and foreign minister warning of potential drone or missile attacks on NATO and Europe. So there's definitely this sense, David, I think, that things are running hot at the moment. And I've recently been out to the front line with Russia and have been talking to people inside Western intelligence agencies about the fears that Russia, right now, is pushing the boundaries in a way which could escalate things dangerously.

• 2:23Gordon Corera?

  And whether that's going to lead to war, that's one of the questions we're going to look at as we take people really a bit behind the scenes of what's really going on. But first, a word from our sponsors at HP.

• 2:39Gordon Corera?

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• 2:42David McCloskey?

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• 3:21David McCloskey?

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• 3:28Gordon Corera?

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• 3:45Gordon Corera?

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• 4:27Gordon Corera?

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• 5:11David McCloskey?

  So there have been some pretty notable and, I must say, pretty wild events over the past few weeks that have, or might prove extremely dangerous.

• 5:21Gordon Corera?

  That's right. And we're going to look in a bit of depth at some of those. I mean, one of the things that connects them is a lot of them involved drones and drone strikes. And there've been some really close calls. I mean, one involved former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former CIA director David Petraeus. So September 13th, a Russian Geron 5 jet-powered drone strikes a passenger train. Now, that train is in Ukraine, but it's right at the border with Poland, just two kilometers away from Polish and therefore NATO territory. And that is part of a new tactic of, of hitting trains. But it was really notable because of the VIPs who were on the route that day and passing

• 6:06Gordon Corera?

  really close by.

• 6:07David McCloskey?

  I guess it does raise the immediate question of, were the Russians actually trying to kill Petraeus or Boris Johnson? Or is it just, is it just sort of happenstance that they were on that train?

• 6:20Gordon Corera?

  Well, I think that is a good question. And Petraeus himself said, I think that would have been unwise, which is a kind of very David Petraeus comment to try and kill a former CIA director. I mean, I think his point is, it would have been unwise. It would have been very bold to try and actually kill those officials. But it may well have been that they knew that there were these officials passing through around that time. And they kind of wanted to send a message saying, we don't like you going into Ukraine. We know what you're doing. And we're going to hit a train nearby as a signal of that, as a kind of a warning. But I don't think they would have wanted to actually have killed a former CIA director, a former British prime minister. That would have been a really escalatory move.

• 7:05Gordon Corera?

  What do you think?

• 7:06David McCloskey?

  Yeah, probably not, although I think, as we'll see, and as we get deeper into this episode, the extent to which sort of old boundaries or red lines may have existed. I mean, it's a big, open question. It's like, where are the boundaries now?

• 7:19Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 7:19David McCloskey?

  Because you have this other significant incident, which we should talk about, which I don't think has gotten as much attention as the drone strike on the train. It's within Europe, it's in Germany, and it is a, you know, it's a clandestine operation that's actually commissioned by Russian military intelligence, the GRU.

• 7:41Gordon Corera?

  And this is, I think, a really interesting incident, which, you're right, hasn't got the attention it deserves. So late in the evening, August 4th, about 11:30 PM, a bus driver at Leipzig Halay Airport, which is in East Germany, spots something lying on the ground inside the secured apron area near the southern runway. And by one account, he actually goes up to whatever it is and he kind of kicks it or checks it out with his foot.

• 8:09David McCloskey?

  Pokes it with a stick.

• 8:10Gordon Corera?

  Pokes it with a stick, because it wasn't supposed to be there on the runway. And it hadn't been spotted by any of the airport's security systems. And it turns out, when they send a bomb disposal robot to look at it, that it's a drone. It's not like the drone that struck the train. It's not one of these big jet-powered drones. It's not that different from the kind of advanced drone you could buy commercially.

• 8:35David McCloskey?

  It's an FPV. It's like a first-person view drone that you would, you would have a headset on.

• 8:40Gordon Corera?

  And control.

• 8:40David McCloskey?

  And fly. I mean, you can buy these commercially quite, quite cheaply.

• 8:45Gordon Corera?

  Quadrocopter, four rotors.

• 8:47David McCloskey?

  Yeah, this is not a gigantic, you know, sort of drone that actually looks like a plane. I mean, this is like a quadcopter type fake that you would see it, you could see in your neighborhood.

• 8:56Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, about the size of a microwave oven, but stripped of some of the lights and things which, which maybe helped it to move a bit more covertly. But the crucial thing, when they look at it, is they find it was carrying explosives, potentially in some kind of vegetable can, attached to the drone on a mount.

• 9:16David McCloskey?

  Just a drone with a, with a can of sweet potatoes fastened to it. Yeah.

• 9:20Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, but about 600 to 800 grams of military-grade Semtex explosives. And crucially, this drone is found right next to a parked Antonov Ukrainian cargo aircraft. Now, Ukraine frequently uses this airport, Leipzig Halay, as a logistical staging hub for goods and equipment, including military goods, which are heading in for Ukraine. So they found this about 11:30. Then they start reviewing the security camera footage. And what, what they find out from that is that the drone had come into the airport very low, probably avoiding any radar coverage, at about 7:28 in the evening, before at 7:30

• 10:01Gordon Corera?

  PM, so just two minutes later, flying directly in to the Antonov transport aircraft, striking the wing tank area, but then crucially, falling to the ground without detonating.

• 10:15David McCloskey?

  And in this case, the detonator fails to work properly. It, it seems that it was probably disconnected on impact. But the, the crucial bit is that that Antonov aircraft, which is a massive, massive aircraft, I think it's, is it the largest cargo aircraft in the world?

• 10:36Gordon Corera?

  It's one of the big ones, yeah.

• 10:37David McCloskey?

  It's one of the big ones. It, it was fueled with 25,000 liters of kerosene. So had the drone detonated?

• 10:48David McCloskey?

  The explosion would have been absolutely massive and it not only would have destroyed the aircraft, but German security officials afterwards said this would have destroyed a significant piece of the airport itself.

• 11:00Gordon Corera?

  It would be massive, massive. So the investigation clearly starts, they actually find another drone about 10 days later in a field near the airport, which looks similar, but it may have been that there were three drones that they were planning to use with a total of 1.8 kilograms of Semtex. But the fact that this one didn't blow up is crucial for the investigation because it means you've got something to work with and to examine. So inside it, they find two SIM cards and a four or five G phone router on the drone. Now, this is really interesting, I think, because it means that the drone can communicate over a mobile phone network. So that's different from the radio frequency by which if you bought kind of commercial

• 11:43Gordon Corera?

  drone that you might use to control it, because those radio frequencies for commercial drones are monitored and jammed near an airport. So the point is that this actually acts more like a mobile phone and a transmitter for a mobile phone. So it's much easier for it to escape those jamming attempts and means potentially you could control it from a great distance away, relaying a signal through an antenna and then into that router and onto the SIM cards to actually move the drone around, rather than someone with a radio frequency nearby controlling it.

• 12:19David McCloskey?

  I mean, as, as we'll see, as we talk about who was behind this, this is going to be a massive problem forever, because it's essentially like the, the, the same vulnerability that would be created if, if you're a sniper and you're trying to assassinate someone and you're, you're close in proximity to the area, it creates a vulnerability, right, that you can't really overcome. In this case, you snap that because someone can emplace the drone, leave, and then someone elsewhere in Moscow or Tehran or wherever it might be, can fly the thing and maneuver it. And the person frankly, wouldn't even have to be witting of what they were

• 12:59Gordon Corera?

  What they were doing.

• 12:59David McCloskey?

  Moving to a particular site. It's a big problem.

• 13:02Gordon Corera?

  And that's what I think is so interesting, because in this case, the police, the German investigators start searching the area and they think they find the place from which it was launched. It's a kind of abandoned area nearby to the airport and witnesses actually hear an explosion 10 minutes prior to the drone striking the aircraft. And when police go to this, this place, they recover scorched metal, burn marks and antenna remnants around a tree, which looks like it was the local relay setup. So this looks like it might've been the, the launch site and the relay setup site, which was then destroyed and blown up. Once the drone was launched and someone could then control it remotely.

• 13:46Gordon Corera?

  So you, you, you still need that local bit of infrastructure to, to launch this drone, because this isn't a drone that can fly a long distance and to set up this relay. But once you've done it, yeah, it can be controlled a long way away. So, so it looks like there was this external antenna, which was based in this abandoned site near the airport. And crucially, they find a discarded glove snagged onto the antenna hardware. They managed to match the DNA to an existing suspect who the Finns and Lithuanians know about, who's a Belarusian known as Andrei, and who'd already come to the attention of the authorities for criminal offenses and property crimes.

• 14:31Gordon Corera?

  And he, they work out, came into Germany from Latvia, it looks like, on July the 28th, so about a week before the drone was launched. And he looks to be the person who was on the ground deploying it.

• 14:45David McCloskey?

  This will be another theme of this episode, which is the, I think, increasing, growing use of very disposable, cheap assets that are used by foreign intelligence services, often through cutouts and intermediaries, who quite often have criminal backgrounds.

• 15:07Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 15:07David McCloskey?

  And are paid to conduct what they might think are petty criminal offenses in some cases, or to do these kind of operations. I mean, there've been cases in the UK, haven't there, of arson against warehouses? There was an action against former Prime Minister Starmer's home.

• 15:26Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 15:27David McCloskey?

  But by a similar type of kind of, you know, low level disposable asset.

• 15:32Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, that's right. We've seen both the Russians and the Iranians use these type of disposable agents, spies for hire. And sometimes they are, really are petty criminals, kind of low level drug dealers we've seen in the UK, who were told, could you set fire to something, carry out some act of arson for some money? And they're promised this, you know, in some communication over the dark web. And they don't even necessarily know what they're doing. So how far this individual knew what he was doing? I mean, this looks like a slightly more advanced operation than some of those arson attacks. But there is someone else who's thought to be involved with it, according to the German investigators, a Russian called Oleg, and he in turn is believed to be linked to the GRU, so Russian military intelligence.

• 16:16Gordon Corera?

  So he's the one who, who's thought to have been kind of running Andrei, the Belarusian. Oleg is the guy behind it, but he also, it looks like, came into Germany from Turkey. Interestingly enough, the Germans actually seemed to have known he was linked to the GRU, but not put him under surveillance. And then he leaves via Berlin for Serbia and then goes back to Russia. And it's thought, then the combination of these two were behind the operation.

• 16:43David McCloskey?

  What, the Germans basically said, we don't have the surveillance resources to keep up with every single one of these cases. And I, and I think the verbiage we're using of linked to the GRU is important, because another theme of these types of operations is that there are typically many layers between the actual staff officers of a Russian intelligence agency. And perhaps it's something we can talk about at the end too, because I think even in some cases, the people who are tasking these operations are not formally inside Russian intelligence bureaucracies.

• 17:18Gordon Corera?

  They're one step removed often.

• 17:19David McCloskey?

  They're one step removed, or they're in some new entity that has been set up and is almost like a kind of private intelligence organization that's not part of the GRU or the FSB, but that conducts exactly the same types of operations that those organizations do. But the sort of level of distance between the people on the ground at the actual Yeah. state institution or sort of semi-autonomous institution is a huge advantage for the Russians, because it creates exactly this type of problem that the Germans experience, where you think, well, this person is linked to the GRU in some way, shape or form, but how many people like that must try to come into Germany at any given time? It's probably many, many people. And so you can't, from a surveillance standpoint or counterintelligence standpoint, it's a, it's a manpower problem and a resources problem.

• 18:04Gordon Corera?

  And then meanwhile, the explosives are thought to have been smuggled in trucks and then hidden, ready for the attack. I mean, there's one possible storage site under a concrete slab near a pedestrian bridge close to the airport. But all of that, the German investigation does move pretty quickly. And by the start of September, the Germans do blame Russia, blaming the commissioning coming from Russian state intelligence structures, as you kind of suggesting. It's a kind of carefully phrased accusation. And there's a series of diplomatic moves, expulsions and closures. But you, you have to say, this could have been big. I mean, it could have been a really significant moment if that had exploded.

• 18:42David McCloskey?

  I do think another theme of this is that, I mean, you just need one of these things to, to go big. Dantsov detonates and

• 18:52Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 18:53David McCloskey?

  25 people loading another plane nearby are killed, German citizens, let's say. Or David Petraeus is killed on accident by a Russian drone in Ukraine. And, and all of a sudden, we're in an escalatory spiral with the Russians.

• 19:08Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. And it's interesting, because we have seen a lot of drone incidents in recent years. Now, one of the things to say is that a lot of those that we were seeing before In Europe involved reconnaissance, spying. So there was a really interesting report from a London think tank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the IIS, in the summer, which documented this. And actually, I mean, when you look at it, it's amazing. They found 144 incidents between August 2024 and February 2026 across 13 European countries, often seeing drones being flown off Russian commercial vessels. So ships, shadow fleet tankers, coastal freighters, smaller craft.

• 19:52Gordon Corera?

  And they're being used as the launch platforms to then fly reconnaissance drones. And I think half went over military facilities, about 20% over civilian airports, and nearly 25 or so percent were over critical infrastructure, so things like ports and energy installations, with Germany actually reporting the largest number of incidents, including six separate drone sightings over Ramstein Air Base in Germany, which is used a lot by the US as well.

• 20:21David McCloskey?

  Well, it's, it's, it's not just happening in kind of central and eastern Europe either, is it? I mean, because other incidents include an airbase in northeast Belgium, which, by the way, houses US nuclear weapons. Drones observed over, I mean, how many RAF bases has it been in, in recent months? It's wild. Over the French Navy's nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine base in Brittany. I mean, so this is, this is happening all over Europe.

• 20:51Gordon Corera?

  Those ones in the UK, so they were over RAF Lakenheath, RAF Mildenhall, RAF Fairford. And it looks like, for instance, the ones in Lakenheath, November 2024, were linked to a Russian tanker that might have been docked in Hull about 100 miles north at the time. Now, I think what's interesting about these incidents, though, is that they weren't armed. And it looks like what Russia was doing was testing air defenses, testing response times, trying to see whether European governments reacted to them, whether they spotted these drones. And Russia clearly can see gaps in the air defenses. But I was talking to one of the people behind that report, and they were saying, what's

• 21:32Gordon Corera?

  shifted in recent months is not the number of drone sightings, but the fact that they seem to be moving from reconnaissance, which is what they're doing in the past, more towards sabotage, things like Leipzig, which is considerably more dangerous if you're actually, you know, launching drones to actually blow something up.

• 21:52David McCloskey?

  During the Cold War, Gordon, did the Russians, were they similarly provocative against, like, Western European air defenses with their strategic bombers or reconnaissance aircraft?

• 22:03Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, they fly bombers. We still fly bombers around. So, so kind of reconnaissance, I think, and testing air defenses, that's normal. And even reconnaissance of potential targets you're going to attack in the event of war, that's normal. But I think Leipzig actually doing the sabotage act with a drone, that's new, I think. That's why we're talking about escalation.

• 22:24David McCloskey?

  And we've also seen other incidents which suggest things are getting even more dangerous, that even more direct warnings that we could be on the verge of war. And after the break, we'll look at how dangerous it all is, what the Russians are trying to do, and why they might even be trying to conduct murder-for-hire inside the US. We'll see you after the break.

• 22:52Speaker 03

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• 22:57Speaker 02

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• 26:21David McCloskey?

  Well, welcome back. So we've looked at the Russian drone threat. We've looked at this particularly, I think, fascinating and worrisome piece of sabotage conducted at Leipzig using this kamikaze drone. And all of this, I think, together suggests that, I mean, something is indeed going on. We look at how Russia is working across Europe.

• 26:46Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, that's right. I think there's, there's lots of different incidents, which, if you put them together, become worrying. So just a few others to run through quickly. September 15th, Italian combat jet, which is on this air policing mission run out of Lithuania, shoots down a drone that penetrates about 60 miles into Lithuanian airspace. That's carrying an explosive, seems to have come from Belarus. Poland has talked about seeing cruise missiles penetrate its airspace. Poland also now saying that Russia is focusing on attacking border crossings, so at the border between Ukraine and its neighbors, including Poland, with the aim there of disrupting deliveries into Ukraine.

• 27:28Gordon Corera?

  So, I mean, that fits with that train strike that we were talking about.

• 27:33David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 27:33Gordon Corera?

  But other incidents as well, including on the Ukrainian border with Moldova. So getting very close to the border with traditional military action, if you like, and also seeing some of these drones, jets, missiles stray into NATO territory. And this is partly that on the ground, the Ukrainians have been doing okay militarily. But in the air, the Russians have developed some of these new jet-powered drones, which can fly faster and higher, and are much harder to hit and stop, I think. And this is a, a problem for Ukraine, which is spilling over a bit in terms of danger as well.

• 28:08David McCloskey?

  Well, it's a, it's a problem that isn't going to go away because when you look at, like, Russian manpower in Ukraine, the math is quite grim for the Russians. But when you look at the math on Russian drone production, the math is quite good. I mean, the Russians can produce something like 400 long-range drones per day. They cost anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 a piece. When you compare that to the, what we can produce from a Western standpoint on interceptors and the cost of those, it just, it's like a, it's a structural problem that's spilling out of this conflict that just, it won't go away. You can't, you can't stop it.

• 28:48Gordon Corera?

  No, I mean, it's absolutely true. And I think the problem is that the Russians have got more ballistic missiles, they've got these jet-powered drones, which are also harder to intercept. And I mean, I remember when I've been in Ukraine in the past. People got quite relaxed about air alerts in the capital Kiev because they were quite confident that the interceptors could take them down. But frankly, now there are too many drones of these jet-powered drones and too many ballistic missiles. And there's a shortage of interceptors, partly because they've been shifted towards the Gulf and the conflict with Iran. So suddenly, actually, people wouldn't always go to shelters immediately when they heard an air raid warning, whereas now it's different. So I think, you know, the drone threat is definitely upped. We've also seen an uptick, though, recently in Russian sabotage.

• 29:33Gordon Corera?

  A lot of these drone attacks are on the border points where supplies are getting into Ukraine. And if you look at the sabotage attacks, again, it looks like Russia targeting supplies heading to Ukraine. So Romanian intelligence officials said they disrupted a sabotage operation targeting NATO facilities, Ukrainian Antonov cargo aircraft, again, a bit like Leipzig. The Estonians have talked about an arson attack on a defence contractor which supplies drones to Ukraine. Italy is looking at an explosion at a munitions factory, not certain it's linked to Russia, but it might be. Big fire in Bulgaria, the defence plant linked to a businessman, Emilien Gebrev, whose factories

• 30:16Gordon Corera?

  have been targeted in the past and who was actually poisoned, I remember covering this back over 10 years ago by the GRU, nearly killed him but didn't. And recently, we've had the head of a German company that supplies drones to Ukraine saying he's living under police protection because of a poisoning plot. So once you put all that together, you go, the Russians are upping the pressure on those who are supplying weapons to Ukraine and those kind of supply lines which go into Ukraine.

• 30:45David McCloskey?

  There's all these kind of mysterious incidents, for example, in the Netherlands, where you have pipes and iron beams and other kind of debris that are deliberately placed on railway tracks. I mean, I think 30 or so locations across the Netherlands had this happen. Some of these things are tied to the rails. In several of the locations, debris is removed and then they reappear after workers clear the tracks. In one case, a train hits an object, but no one's injured. I mean, there's no evidence tying that to Russia so far, but you can see a kind of pattern of just an attempt, frankly, by the Russians to disrupt the supply lines, the munitions that are feeding the war in Ukraine.

• 31:28David McCloskey?

  And, but you know, we'll probably talk about this more, but I think to sap political will inside these countries for their stance on the war in Ukraine.

• 31:36Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, and a couple of other incidents which have just come to light, which are interesting as well. So activity in the sea. Now, there was one particular incident a couple of months back, which has only just emerged, which I think is really interesting. I mean, it looks more like reconnaissance in the event of war rather than actual sabotage. But deep in Arctic waters near the Svalbard Archipelago, which is Norwegian territory up in the Arctic, although there's a kind of Russian community there, NATO allies catch Russian subs training to unleash some kind of secret weapon, you know, designed to disable the critical undersea cables without being noticed.

• 32:16David McCloskey?

  What do you mean secret weapon?

• 32:17Gordon Corera?

  Secret weapon. I mean, we love a secret weapon. It does sound a bit James Bond because it's coming from their like super-secret military research department, which I love, is called Googie, which is the undersea warfare director. I mean, it's a comic name, it's not quite Spectre, but they've got deep-sea submarines to do sabotage. And in this case, I mean, we don't quite know what they were going to do, but it looks like British, Norwegian and American ships confronted them and they left the area before they got to do anything. But it's still, it's another sign of activity, isn't it?

• 32:48David McCloskey?

  I think they've been breeding sharks that have a taste for undersea cables, Gordon. I think that's what it might be. That's my guess.

• 32:54Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, and if you want to find out more about how Russia is using the sea to prepare for war, then do subscribe to our newsletter at therestisclassified.com/newsletter because we're going to have a piece looking into this kind of really interesting story in the next week or so. But also, and we talked about this, you know, trailed it earlier, didn't we, David, that there's actually been unusually, I think, an accusation by the US government against Russia for activity within the US and involving US citizens. I mean, that's, that's also a sign of something slightly new and a different risk appetite, isn't it, from the Russians?

• 33:28David McCloskey?

  Well, so I might push back on that one a little bit, just because I do think it is provocative, and there's a reason why the DOJ, the Department of Justice, has prepared this indictment, because you don't obviously want Russians murdering people in the US. But it has probably happened before, happened in DC. There was a very sketchy incident involving a former Russian official who died in mysterious circumstances. And the Russians have also attempted to find, probably with the intent to kill defectors who have left Russian intelligence and resettled to the US. So it's not without precedent. But I think coming in the context of what we've been discussing, it was a Stalin quote

• 34:12David McCloskey?

  that quantity has a quality all its own. So if you take all of these incidents that maybe in isolation have a historical parallels, but are all happening at once, I think it does create a sense that we're at a different stage of the escalatory ladder with the Russians.

• 34:30Gordon Corera?

  So we should maybe just explain briefly what this US indictment was, because it is quite interesting. Five people accused of a plot to murder a dissident on US soil, three senior Russian spies, a former Colonel, his son, who's an FSB officer, and then the really bizarre bit, a Cuban dance teacher who lives in Russia after marrying a Russian and teaches salsa. I mean, again, it's the slight bizarre world of spies occasionally comes up. But the accusation is this dance teacher uses a network of Spanish-speaking contacts internationally and kind of reaching out to them on Facebook message boards to basically find people to do jobs for Russia. So it's back to the kind of disposable agents, spies for hire.

• 35:15Gordon Corera?

  And in this case, they contacted someone in the US, asking them to carry out surveillance and potentially kill a dissident. So they did carry out some of the surveillance and, you know, were given some money for that, but then offered $40,000 to eliminate the target. And the person who's asked to do this says they don't want to do it.

• 35:35David McCloskey?

  $60,000 to tango them to death.

• 35:37Gordon Corera?

  If you've seen me tango, then I think that would be definitely to death.

• 35:41David McCloskey?

  If you've seen Gordon tango, then he owes you $60,000 for having to sit through that.

• 35:46Gordon Corera?

  Not a pretty sight. Beyond the bizarro, you know, kind of salsa dance and nature of it, it's back to the spies for hire, isn't it? And people doing that and trying to employ people to carry out attacks, including also trying to get a US citizen to murder someone in Lithuania. That's also in the indictment as well.

• 36:02David McCloskey?

  In that case, there actually was surveillance on this group. And this time, there was an offer of $25,000 to kill that victim in Lithuania. The US citizen, I think, quite wisely declined, but one of those former FSB officers says he could, you know, okay, you don't want to murder someone, I'll give you a simpler job, like setting fire to a warehouse or throwing a bottle of petrol at an electricity substation. So it is interesting that we have a kind of gig economy for Russian sabotage and assassination, where you can have people who are, they're contacted on Facebook, they're contacted

• 36:46David McCloskey?

  on Telegram, they might have some kind of criminal past, and they're given a job and they could be paid a certain amount for killing someone or a certain amount for, you know, spraying graffiti somewhere or committing arson. And it's a fascinating piece of this, is just how cheap it is. I mean, it's just not expensive and the Russians are not putting their own networks at stake here. They're finding existing social and criminal networks and tapping into those to get jobs done.

• 37:15Gordon Corera?

  It's deniable because you've got, you know, one step removed, no Russian's going to get arrested. And as you said, it's kind of low risk and relatively low cost. When you start to put all of these stories together, so kind of Leipzig, the train, this US indictment, there's a lot recently, and we'll get to some of the other warnings that have been coming up, which I think has led to the question of, is this?

• 37:40Gordon Corera?

  A deliberate step change from Russia? Or are we just in a kind of moment where we're, we're seeing more because we're, we're looking for things more? But I think the evidence is that, that there is something going on with the Russians at the moment. There is a deliberate escalation on the Russian part. And that's definitely the sense I get from talking to people, you know, in Western intelligence agencies at the moment. They are seeing an uptick in activity. Something is going on.

• 38:07David McCloskey?

  I, I think it's interesting to flip this a little bit because I mean, I think the big question here is what are the Russians up to? What are they, what are they trying to accomplish? What do you think it looks like from Moscow, Gordon? Like how, if you, if you, if you flip this and you don't look at it from Western intelligence, but you look at this from the standpoint of the Russian leadership, the Kremlin, Putin, what do you think this looks like? Why are they doing it? What are they hoping to gain?

• 38:31Gordon Corera?

  I think it's a really good question and I definitely think it's the right one to ask. I think they see the West and particularly Europe escalating its support for Ukraine. So Russia struggling on the battlefield to win in Ukraine, seeing Europe take up more of the slack, particularly as the Trump administration has pulled back from supporting Ukraine. So Europe becomes the main problem for Russia. Russia, remember, is seeing deep strike drone attacks within Russia on its energy infrastructure, its kind of gas refining facilities, its oil facilities. It's seeing attacks within Moscow. We've seen that in the last few days.

• 39:13Gordon Corera?

  It is seeing deep drone strikes and what it sees as sabotage operations inside its country, which it obviously knows is being carried out by Ukraine, but thinks it's been done with European either intelligence or European munitions or European support.

• 39:31David McCloskey?

  They're, they're not wrong.

• 39:33Gordon Corera?

  And they're not wrong.

• 39:33David McCloskey?

  They're not wrong. I mean, the French, the French provide targeting intelligence that helps the Ukrainians conduct these deep strikes into Russia. I mean, I think, is the UK still providing the Storm Shadow?

• 39:43Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, missiles.

• 39:45David McCloskey?

  Missile system, which the Ukrainians use to conduct deep strikes. So again, I'm not trying to justify a Russian sabotage campaign. Those who've listened to the pod for long enough would know that neither of us are big fans of Russian sabotage, but it's just, I think it's an interesting way to, to, to sort of flip the perspective a little bit and say, like, how does, how does the world look when you see it through the lens of Vladimir Putin? And I think you're spot on that the Russians think that they're just doing things that, that the West, Ukraine and its partners are already, are already doing to them.

• 40:15Gordon Corera?

  I think you're right. They see it partly as payback. And I think they want to try and deter ongoing European support for Ukraine. So I think their calculation, which I think we'll come to is wrong, but is that if they can inflict pain on European countries, whether it's sabotage, disruption, also fear through some of these attacks, they will make European countries think twice about continuing to back Ukraine, that they might withdraw support from Ukraine and then Ukraine is in real trouble. So I think that is the Russian calculation that we're seeing. But I mean, the, the result, you know, so far is that it's not working. If anything, it's the opposite.

• 40:58David McCloskey?

  When you look at how badly things are going for the Russians on the ground in Ukraine, I mean, the, the net losses that they're sustaining from a manpower standpoint are like 6,000 people a month net that they cannot, they cannot replace. Like one and a half million battlefield casualties going back to the start of the war. And if it keeps going like this for like another year and a half, there's going to be another 750 or so thousand. I mean, we're, we're approaching a world where 10% of the sort of military age male population in Russia is going to be either killed or injured as part of this conflict, which is like ticking up toward, but not quite at World War One levels in Western Europe.

• 41:41Gordon Corera?

  But it's serious.

• 41:42David McCloskey?

  So it's very serious and it, it means that structurally, none of this stuff is going anywhere because they're going to try to relieve pressure on themselves by destroying or sabotaging the networks and infrastructure in the West that's, that's feeding the conflict as they see it.

• 41:56Gordon Corera?

  One intelligence source I was talking to did say to me, he said, that's what makes Putin dangerous at the moment is because there is an air of desperation, which could lead him to take gambles, to try and do things, to try and change the dynamic precisely because it's not going well on the battlefield, to try and, you know, up the stakes elsewhere. And I think the other worry is that Russia might have an even more ambitious goal, which would be to try and provoke, create an incident which could test and maybe break the NATO alliance. And this is, I think, where we're getting all these, you know, warnings about perhaps something more imminent and even more serious than sabotage at the moment.

• 42:38Gordon Corera?

  The polls in particular, I mean, I've heard Polish ministers speak out about this. Polish intelligence services have been talking about the potential for a staged incident, perhaps using captured Ukrainian drones and then sending them over a border to blow something up. Polish prime minister has warned of some kind of drone or rocket attacks on European countries. Perhaps, again, the idea is to do something which isn't quite a full scale invasion. There's no sign of that. They haven't got the manpower. They don't want to invade Europe and create a full on land war, but do something which would cause confusion within the NATO alliance about how to respond.

• 43:22Gordon Corera?

  So if you had that kind of incident where maybe they use Ukrainian drones to blow something up in Poland or in Lithuania, and then you're left with this question, well, is that an attack by Russia? Or is it not? Do you trigger the NATO collective self-defense mechanism and say, well, this is a, this is an attack? An attack on one is an attack on all. We're all going to war with Russia. A lot of people will be like, whoa, hang on a sec. We're not sure about that. Some might be up for more aggressive behavior. And so suddenly what you do is create division and splits within the alliance, which of course is what Russia wants. And I think that's the, one of the worries at the moment.

• 44:01David McCloskey?

  If we put our, you know, Vladimir Putin hats on and think about how he and the people around him see the world, I, I think one of the scary parts of this is that I think the Russian perspective is that the Western alliance, NATO, however you want to describe it, actually wants to dismantle Russia and sees the, the sort of breakup of the Russian state as, as an end goal of this conflict. And so therefore the Russian mindset would be that splintering NATO is, is not a provocation, it's a defense strategy.

• 44:39Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, and a win.

• 44:40David McCloskey?

  To prevent that from happening and a massive win. So a lot of this comes back to the, I think, the way that the, you know, Putin and the Kremlin are, are viewing the conflict in Ukraine and the broader conflict with the West. And it's why I think it is, it's a really scary situation because all of these actions that we talk about and frame as, as Russian aggression and provocation, which I think they are, are seen as defensive actions.

• 45:05Gordon Corera?

  By Russia. Yeah. And I think a, a big question for Europe and for Russia is how the US would respond. I mean, I was in the, the Baltics a few months ago for a security conference. I did a panel with lots of spy chiefs and also sat with some Americans who said they weren't sure how the Trump administration would come to NATO's aid. And I went right by the border and it's amazing when you go right to the border between the Baltic states and Russia, you, you have this sense that you could imagine the tanks rolling over there and they were putting sensors there to be able to, you know, detect if that happened. And the big question is, well, what would Washington do if that happens? And I think that again, at the moment, there is a question mark in a way there wouldn't have been in previous points about Washington's response.

• 45:47David McCloskey?

  Well, let's talk about the American angle a little bit because I think at the moment we've had this interesting mix of US warnings to Moscow, also outreach. And I mean, interestingly, in late August, the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, actually went to Moscow for a conversation with the Russians.

• 46:06Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, he went out from, from Regan, Latvia, flew from the Baltics on his C-17A military transport plane. We talked to Bill Burns, former CIA director, didn't we? About what it's like to fly on these visits and even to go to Moscow. Cause he went to, to talk in the run-up to the Ukraine war, to basically say to the Russians, don't do it. On this case, I don't know what your sense is of the Ratcliffe mission, but it was partly to say to Putin, things aren't going well for you. Now is the time to deal and not to escalate. That was the message.

• 46:36David McCloskey?

  Doesn't seem to have been absorbed.

• 46:38Gordon Corera?

  I don't know.

• 46:39David McCloskey?

  The Russian leadership. And, and Ratcliffe didn't end up meeting with Putin, did he?

• 46:43Gordon Corera?

  No.

• 46:43David McCloskey?

  In that visit, it doesn't seem. I mean, but again, I think it probably does come back to a concern on the part of Western intelligence broadly, or the CIA in particular, that we have this really volatile mix of All of the Russian aggression we've just discussed sabotage, drones, assassination plots, I mean, really kind of state sponsored terrorism across Western Europe. And the Russians also feel backed into a corner in Ukraine.

• 47:11Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 47:11David McCloskey?

  And frankly, I mean, there's also the below the water line piece here, which is may there have been specific intelligence that was picked up that prompted the visit that was concerning to us.

• 47:22Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, because there were some interesting reports that some of the CIA warnings might have been about the kind of Russian sabotage or possible plans for an incursion or provocation or something. Also that there were some worries that Russia had had viewed the kind of US entanglement in the Gulf with the Iran war as a distraction and as a weakness. And again, you know, offering a window of opportunity for Russia to escalate. And I think Ratcliffe might have wanted to play that down. I mean, it is interesting as well because we are seeing some signs from the US administration that they're looking at negotiations as well. And they're offering the carrot of business deals and better relationships with the US. Now, I mean, you can look at this different ways, whether it's smart to have a kind of

• 48:04Gordon Corera?

  carrot and stick approach to the Russians to be saying, you know, don't do these attacks. And by the way, there's better business deals on offer. But you could also view it the other way in which the Russians are going, great, you know, we're being offered some business deals. They don't seem to care that much about our escalation.

• 48:19David McCloskey?

  That's, I know, that's, I think the best approach with the Russians is that the carrot is not using the stick. There's only a stick. There shouldn't be a carrot. There should just be a big stick and a smaller stick or no stick at all. If you do the things that we want to be. It just, I agree with you. I think the idea that somehow a set of business deals would incentivize the Russians or somehow convince Putin that this legacy gamble he has made in Ukraine that's going terribly, he should somehow reimagine.

• 48:53Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 48:53David McCloskey?

  His entire legacy. It just that, I don't know. It doesn't, it doesn't seem particularly compelling to me, but I, you know, I don't know. It just, I'm skeptical that on the negotiation side, we would be able to change Putin's mind about some of the fundamentals here because he just doesn't view Ukraine as a country. He views it as a Russian vassal state. And we fundamentally, I think, still disagree with that.

• 49:18Gordon Corera?

  So I guess, I mean, as we start to bring it to a close, I mean, there is definitely an escalation going on. I think you're right to say that some of this activity, like maybe the US indictment, is the kind of thing we've seen before. But there do seem to be escalations in some of the drone strikes and some of the sabotage campaigns, definitely bigger warnings from some European leaders. I mean, the French President Macron did a briefing for politicians at the Elise Palace, which he apparently did to warn French politicians that things were, were getting dangerous. You're having the Lithuanians actually preparing evacuation routes, you know, out of Vilnius, the capital towards Poland, just in case something happens. So there is a little bit, I think, of anxiety at the moment and this

• 50:02Gordon Corera?

  question about whether it's going too far, you know, whether some of the war talk is a little bit too much because, you know, we're not seeing a Russian troop build up on the borders of, you know, the Baltics or Poland. And yeah, they've not got the capacity to do that while they're stuck in Ukraine. I mean, they do not want a land war with NATO. I think that feels, you know, really, really implausible to me, which isn't to say there aren't other risks, though.

• 50:29David McCloskey?

  No, you know, and to that point on the other risks, I mean, I think if we, if we go a little deeper into the, the sort of Russian espionage and frankly, the sabotage and assassinations piece of this, I think that there are some structural reasons to be really concerned about these incidents, not only continuing, but frankly, just it being a matter of time before something really, really bad happens. And, and it potentially provokes a, a more vicious escalatory cycle. Because I think, you know, and I should also comment to listeners, there's a journalist named Michael Weiss, who writes a great Substack

• 51:13David McCloskey?

  called The Foreign Office. And he is, I think he's also writing a book on the GRU. And he, he has, he works with Insider and Bellingcat, and he's been behind a lot of these investigations into what Russian intelligence is up to. And he makes, I think, a really compelling point that we tend, when we talk about sabotage, or we talk about the GRU, we talk about these, these organizations, we're actually missing the fact that the Russian intelligence space over the last maybe five to 10 years, but in particular in the last five, since the war in Ukraine, it's really changed. It's become a much more bottom up kind of system

• 51:56David McCloskey?

  in which these different organizations, some of which are frankly semi-autonomous from the state, are competing for attention and patronage from the Kremlin. Many of them are financed by billionaires who are not actually, they're, they're obviously all associated with the state, but they're kind of, they're taking private funding and pushing them almost like a donation into these, into these organizations. And it's become a much more sort of corporatized intelligence environment where you're getting credit for conducting audacious, risky operations. And when you do that, you attract more funding, you attract more attention from the Kremlin, and that's good for you. So like, the idea that this

• 52:41David McCloskey?

  stuff, it's not quite like Putin can just turn the spigot off because you have all of these organizations that are doing this. You know, the Cold War way of thinking about the way these organizations run is just totally gone.

• 52:54Gordon Corera?

  Yeah. I mean, what I think is really interesting, when you, when you talk about it that way, is it, it, there's a parallel there with when we looked at the Nord Stream plot, which was obviously by the Ukrainians, in which it was a kind of semi-autonomous plot done by a group allegedly linked to Ukrainian intelligence, who decided they were going to do this and how much they told the state wasn't clear. But that was a pretty aggressive form of sabotage. I agree. It's a more fluid and therefore more dangerous environment, isn't it? In which you've got lots of actors trying, trying to do things. There's a difference as well, we're seeing between European governments and how they talk about these. Some, some of the, you know, the poles are talking about it very loudly, others are not. There's some question about whether actually part of the Russian

• 53:37Gordon Corera?

  strategy is to kind of, it's almost like a PSYOP to, to get Europeans to freak out of it, to get them to panic, to, to, to be on guard for anything happening, to see everything, you know, every small incident, cyber attack, or, you know, electricity substation going down, or, you know, air traffic control going down here in Britain, to think, oh, is it the Russians? Is it the Russians? And to be kind of edgy and therefore think, well, maybe the, you know, maybe we should back away from this. So I think there's also a kind of psychological aspect to this, where the communication of risk, I think, in Europe has not been done very well by governments in terms of how to talk about drones, incursions, and other things without freaking people out.

• 54:16David McCloskey?

  People maybe should be a little freaked out because if you have a Russian intelligence system, some of which is part of the state and some of which is sort of not, that is in competition with one another for the, the most kind of audacious and flashy operation they can, they can conduct in Europe. And by the way, those operations are cheap for them to run, right? Relatively easy. They're using cutouts. They're using existing networks. They're not actually having to build their own infrastructure inside Europe or take a whole lot of risk inside the continent. You know, it creates this massive problem

• 54:58David McCloskey?

  for Western counterintelligence and law enforcement, which is that you actually can't defend against it. There's this fundamental asymmetry in which Western counterintelligence, law enforcement, in order to sustain that level of public trust, has to be right every time.

• 55:15Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 55:15David McCloskey?

  And the Russians only need to do something once, kill the former CIA director on a train, cause a mass casualty event at a European airport, and all of a sudden, the whole psychological perspective inside that country and maybe its politics change as a result. And all of this stuff, I mean, the amounts that the Russians are paying these agents are like hundreds or maybe low thousands of dollars in crypto to do this stuff. So it's just, it's super cheap.

• 55:43Gordon Corera?

  What we're saying is we are at a dangerous moment. I mean, I spoke to one Ukrainian who said to me, he thought that perhaps if the US was kind of paralyzed politically after the midterms, if there was chaos there, some kind of dispute, that's the moment the Russians might try and do something big, like a bigger incursion or provocation. I'm, I'm still not sure that, that that's necessarily where we're heading. I think we may still be heading not necessarily to a, you know, deliberate choice to escalate towards war. But as you were saying, the risk is miscalculation. You know, the Russians miscalculate about the impact, for instance, of one of these attempts or one of these sabotage attempts, drone strikes goes wrong and kills people and leads to a cycle of escalation. Then

• 56:28Gordon Corera?

  you are at risk of conflict, not from the two sides choosing to go to war, but of it escalating almost by mistake into war.

• 56:37David McCloskey?

  Or the, the risk is just that we're now living in a, in a security environment where these kind of events are just going to keep happening constantly, right? Even if, even if you don't slip into another, a new stage of the sort of escalatory ladder, you have to bake this risk in if you're a, you know, Western sort of, you know, domestic security official, counterintelligence official, police person, like this kind of stuff is just going to keep happening and you probably can't stop.

• 57:06Gordon Corera?

  So I think that's a, a good place to leave it with the sense that we are at a more dangerous moment, even if it might not necessarily lead to the most alarmist scenarios of war. A reminder, of course, that if you're waiting for Kim Philby, then he's back next week, next Monday. And then next Thursday, we'll have another one of these intelligence scoop episodes, looking at different issues or things out of the news. So do stay tuned for that.

• 57:31David McCloskey?

  And a reminder, of course, if you want to hear that entire Kim Philby series and all of the incredible bonus content we have alongside it, that you can right now just go and join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com. And also sign up for the newsletter at therestisclassified.com/newsletter for that piece on Russia's war at sea next week. We'll see you next time.

• 57:56Gordon Corera?

  See you next time.

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