Even Russian FSB Assassins Have to Submit Performance Reviews

December 21, 2020 1:52 PM

"Bellingcat can now disclose that it and its investigative partners are in possession of a recorded conversation in which a member of the suspected FSB poison squad describes how his unit carried out, and attempted to clean up evidence of, the poisoning of Alexey Navalny. The inadvertent confession was made during a phone call with a person who the officer believed was a high-ranking security official. In fact, the FSB officer did not recognize the voice of the person to whom he was reporting details of the failed mission: Alexey Navalny himself."
posted by benzenedream (52 comments total)

This whole story reminds me of a spy movie. Amazing stuff.
posted by Alensin at 1:57 PM on December 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Reading the news, one is tempted to call the operation “game of groins”.
posted by Namlit at 1:58 PM on December 21, 2020

are we at peak 2020 yet?

with over a week to go, I'm a bit scared to contemplate what this year might have to throw at us
posted by elkevelvet at 2:02 PM on December 21, 2020 [6 favorites]

I love this development! Fuck Putin and his gang of dickheads, who are apparently very easy to socially engineer! The victim, with his own voice! That's gotta be a juicy reward.
posted by rhizome at 2:03 PM on December 21, 2020 [9 favorites]

with over a week to go, I'm a bit scared to contemplate what this year might have to throw at us

Desperate Trump and desperate Putin? Aaron Sorkin's eyes just rolled back into his head.
posted by rhizome at 2:04 PM on December 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Let a thousand Bellingcats bloom.
posted by Glomar response at 2:04 PM on December 21, 2020 [7 favorites]

This whole story is astonishing, but getting Navalny himself to get the admissions out of his antagonists is the cherry on top.

I don't feel a lot of sympathy towards them, but it will not surprise me if all of these operatives are dead within a week.
posted by whir at 2:07 PM on December 21, 2020 [14 favorites]

When I read this I was sad that John Le Carre didn't live just a few weeks more so he could enjoy this bizarre story.
posted by zenzenobia at 2:16 PM on December 21, 2020 [38 favorites]

Karla is rolling in his fictional grave.
posted by BungaDunga at 2:19 PM on December 21, 2020 [8 favorites]

The video is very good (turn on CC for English captions)
posted by BungaDunga at 2:22 PM on December 21, 2020 [13 favorites]

иди домой, писатели 2020, вы пьяны!
posted by lalochezia at 2:32 PM on December 21, 2020 [4 favorites]

brought to you by the goons who went to see Salisbury cathedral, famous for its 123-metre spire.
posted by BungaDunga at 2:42 PM on December 21, 2020 [8 favorites]

I was afraid that Navalny asking him to rate the assassination team leader’s performance on a scale of 1 to 10 was veering too close to Strangelovian satire and would give up the game, but it’s clear this guy was too focused on not bad-mouthing his immediate supervisor.
posted by theory at 2:45 PM on December 21, 2020 [9 favorites]

end of the year personal goal assessments at work are hard enough! i'm doubting they are going to get a cost of living increase in 2021. Что посеешь, то и пожнёшь, as my russian teacher used to say about my homework grades...you reap what you sow.
posted by th3ph17 at 2:57 PM on December 21, 2020 [4 favorites]

However, the cost of living may soon no longer be a problem for those involved.
posted by acb at 3:01 PM on December 21, 2020 [6 favorites]

One thing I've never really understood is, why bother with the whole complicated poisoning scheme, which apparently involved multiple people on the ground in regular communication with a bunch of chemical weapons experts? Why not just send one person to shoot him? Was the thought that, if the plan went off as intended, that the death would look natural?
posted by jedicus at 3:16 PM on December 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

In Soviet Russia, 360 degree performance reviews you!
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:17 PM on December 21, 2020 [15 favorites]

The explanation I've heard for these ludicrously OTT poisoning schemes is that the point is to intimidate other dissidents. Everyone knows who did it; the point is that they can do it, lie about it, and get away with it.
posted by confluency at 3:19 PM on December 21, 2020 [22 favorites]

Bellingcat really deserves an FPP of their own. I see stories from them so infrequently I have to remind myself "yes this is a legit site, not some silly conspiracy site". I mean it's immediately apparent reading the stories and their impact on journalism has been enormous. But the name somehow doesn't inspire confidence.

Who even are they? The about page says they're based in the Netherlands. Wikipedia has a good summary of their impact.
posted by Nelson at 3:41 PM on December 21, 2020 [17 favorites]

Remember those bouts of shaking Angela Merkel suffered back in the summer of 2019?

Since tremor is one of the signs of Novichok poisoning, I think those deserve another look using the same techniques Bellingcat used here.
posted by jamjam at 3:47 PM on December 21, 2020 [5 favorites]

Prank calling an assassin is pretty cool. "Okay thank you for confirming the assassination. Bababooey Bababooey."
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 4:10 PM on December 21, 2020 [6 favorites]

The whole 30+ minute video by Navalny is riveting. The expressions on everyone’s faces as the “chemist” admits more and more ...
posted by freecellwizard at 4:23 PM on December 21, 2020 [6 favorites]

That's gotta be a juicy reward.

Arkady Babchenko (probably): "Well played."
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 4:23 PM on December 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

This sounded like one of those overhyped things, but it really is a discussion in detail about an assassination attempt with the target of said attempt. And so much underpants-related detail. I can't imagine how Navalny must have been feeling between the massive journalistic triumph becoming evident, the bizarre hilarity of the tangents, the need to maintain the deception, and the fact that he was discussing a murder attempt on himself.

2020 больше не наливай.
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 4:23 PM on December 21, 2020 [12 favorites]

The explanation I've heard for these ludicrously OTT poisoning schemes is that the point is to intimidate other dissidents. Everyone knows who did it; the point is that they can do it, lie about it, and get away with it.

Exactly. If Putin just wanted Navalny dead and didn't care about the optics he'd have cut his brakes and been done with him. But it's not just about killing his enemies, it's about sending a message. It's a performance. "Nothing is true and everything is possible."
posted by Anonymous at 4:41 PM on December 21, 2020

it's about sending a message

hey.....nice acetylcholinesterase you have there.

real shame if it would be.......inhibited.
posted by lalochezia at 4:47 PM on December 21, 2020 [22 favorites]

triplicate, always triplicate.
posted by clavdivs at 5:31 PM on December 21, 2020

This is incredible and I knew nothing beyond a glance at the headline at the time about this story. But agree, what the hell is Bellingcat??
posted by latkes at 5:38 PM on December 21, 2020

This article has some background on Higgins and Bellingcat. Higgins has a book out soon, too.
posted by BungaDunga at 5:44 PM on December 21, 2020 [4 favorites]

I suppose this crushes my dreams of opening the first Russian Tea Shop aboard the International Space Station.
posted by mundo at 7:12 PM on December 21, 2020

i guess we can fill in the '?' between 'Collect Underpants' and 'Profit' now.
posted by logicpunk at 9:26 PM on December 21, 2020 [13 favorites]

A few cases where Russia is believed to have poisoned individuals:

-Anna Stepanovna Mazepa in 2004. She was later shot to death in 2006 after surviving the 2004 poisoning attempt.
-Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.
-Sergei Skripal and his daughter Julia in 2018.

I’m relieved NASA has an alternative means to reach the International Space Station now. Previously NASA was paying huge sums, around $90 million per astronaut, to travel on Russian Soyuz spacecraft as the U.S. Space Shuttle was retired in 2011.
posted by mundo at 10:48 PM on December 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

Uh. Wow. This is bonkers.
posted by brundlefly at 10:55 PM on December 21, 2020

This is so ridiculous that my first thought was "they've been calling down this list, how is it possible the last guy would not have been warned and now fall for this, isn't it more likely that Navalny was reverse-pranked by somebody *pretending* just to flood the zone?"

But it's consistent with past ridiculous buffoonery, like the Skripal assassins' RT interview.
posted by away for regrooving at 10:56 PM on December 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

I always thought Brin's "Transparent Society" was a bunch of hooey because what were the odds the wielders of power would be subject to it themselves. It sure is something to see now that Russia through pervasive and routine corruption has created a society where GRU and FSB operatives are tagged by private citizens buying their cellphone records from a guy in the phone company.
posted by away for regrooving at 11:00 PM on December 21, 2020 [4 favorites]

K: But… was it a failure in Omsk?

M: No, in Tomsk, I am speaking of Tomsk!

K: Of Tomsk?

M: Yes.

K: What happened in Tomsk?

M: Konstantin Borisovich!

oh we are literally refilking Tom Lehrer now, is that what we are doing 2020

I am never forget the day
I am given first original paper to write
It was on analytic and algebraic topology
Of locally Euclidean metrization
Of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifold
Bozhe moy!

I think of great Lobachevsky and get idea - haha!

I have a friend in Minsk
Who has a friend in Pinsk
Whose friend in Omsk
Has friend in Tomsk
With friend in Akmolinsk
His friend in Alexandrovsk
Has friend in Petropavlovsk
Whose friend somehow is solving now
The problem in Dnepropetrovsk

posted by away for regrooving at 11:59 PM on December 21, 2020 [13 favorites]

The video is absolutely fascinating. At the end the spy finally asks if it's ok that they're talking on the regular phone! I don't even answer fraud alerts from my bank on my phone if they call me, I diligently hang up and then dial the bank's number to talk about it, because I'm so paranoid about phishing. Wow.
posted by banjo_and_the_pork at 6:17 AM on December 22, 2020 [7 favorites]

It occurs to me that I get better anti-phishing training at my boring desk job that the FSB assassins get. Urgency is a huge red flag.
posted by emelenjr at 6:28 AM on December 22, 2020 [8 favorites]

Nice to see Navalny go full commando with the stealthy journalism.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:43 AM on December 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

Motherfucker is you conductin 360 perf reviews on an international assassination conspiracy?
posted by srboisvert at 7:17 AM on December 22, 2020 [18 favorites]

So, what happened in Omsk?
posted by romanb at 8:05 AM on December 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

I'm surprised everybody here is just taking this at face value. I'm not saying that Bellingcat is definitely a CIA front, but it's run by a Eliot Higgins, who also sat on the Atlantic Council (a major pro-war think-tank in Washington). It is hardly a plucky independent media outlet, rather, it has deep ties to the American foreign policy establishment. As such, i think it deserves a healthy dose of skepticism, especially when it produces reporting that clearly supports American imperial interests. And - hear me out - what do we have here exactly? How hard would it be to fake these phone calls, and who benefits from them? How is it that Putin is this all-powerful mastermind, but is somehow unable to assassinate a political rival, and he gets caught in the attempt??

just sayin'
posted by thedamnbees at 8:48 AM on December 22, 2020 [6 favorites]

To suggest that Eliot Higgins is a CIA tool who might be fabricating convenient stories for his masters because he participated in the Digital Forensic Research Council for a few years AFTER he became widely known as an “open source” digital researcher with his Bellingcat site is... highly speculative. I’ve been following Bellingcat for a little while, and even if you might argue that their choice of investigations could be biased, I haven’t seen any reputable refutations of their work.
posted by Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesizer at 9:54 AM on December 22, 2020 [9 favorites]

The thing that gets me about having such a signature move is that it provides such a handy mask to your adversaries' activities or even hands them a tool to sow dissension in Putin's orbit by making it look like he's whacking notionally-friendly oligarchs.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 12:46 PM on December 22, 2020

Well, that Konstantin is either a stealth genius counterpunking Navalny with fabricated admissions of incompetence and comical forgetfulness or he really is sincerely as thick headed as he sounds.
posted by waving at 1:41 PM on December 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

One of Bellingcat’s investigative partners is Der Spiegel, which I think it’s fair to say is not an organization we’d casually accuse of making shit up without some evidence.

The calls to these FSB agents were going to be made by the reporters with or without Navalny. Journalistic ethics as well as laws in the EU (and many other places) require you to give people the right of reply if you’re going to make accusations about them.

If the calls had been fabricated by the reporters with Navalny’s help (and he would’ve had to have been in on it if it went down the way all parties claim it did) this would be pretty easy for the FSB to refute… which they haven’t done. They’ve described the phone calls as a provocation. The thing they’ve claimed is fake is the video that Navalny made.
posted by theory at 5:44 PM on December 22, 2020 [7 favorites]

Mod note: Several deleted. Sorry, but this spiraled way off the actual post topic into some luxurious Fibonacci progression of weird derails. thedamnbees, cool it, please.
posted by taz (staff) at 2:36 AM on December 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

The explanation I've heard for these ludicrously OTT poisoning schemes is that the point is to intimidate other dissidents. Everyone knows who did it; the point is that they can do it, lie about it, and get away with it.

If you're on the lookout for goons coming after you, that's already a level of stress that most people would never have to deal with. But this poisoning thing puts you in the mindset that any item that you are not 1000% sure nobody else had access to could be a vehicle for a deadly poison. That would drive me insane.
posted by jason_steakums at 10:14 AM on December 23, 2020 [4 favorites]

Who even are they? The about page says they're based in the Netherlands. Wikipedia has a good summary of their impact.

There is also a film:
Bellingcat - Truth in a Post-Truth World (2018, dir. Hans Pool)

Right now it looks like you can only stream it in North America with a subscription to Topic.
posted by Kabanos at 7:08 AM on December 24, 2020 [1 favorite]

Напоминаем всем товарищам заполнить отчеты TPS.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:43 PM on December 24, 2020 [1 favorite]

Russian police detained Lyubov Sobol amid a crackdown on activists seeking to draw attention to the nerve-agent poisoning of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny
posted by whir at 10:14 AM on December 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

This is pure theater. It's also so convoluted that all three sides are actively pushing the same story for different reasons and expecting different outcomes, while the extras are just hoping for more publicity despite that gut feeling they're being played.
The polonium, for example, was hard evidence with clear cut motivation.

Seriously, whatever comes of this what's the worse that'll happen to Putin? A Sid Meyer's Civilization style 'We're telling everyone that you suck!' denunciation.

On the other hand, if evidence that this was all fabricated (whoever fabricated it) were to appear the general response would be "Haha, your leaders, they stupid and dishonest.". Democracies give rather more wight to public opinion than oligarchies and shit like this costs so little in comparison to a national budget.
posted by IronLizard at 3:47 AM on January 1, 2021