Advisers to US President Joe Biden tried to pass on a warning to Russian President Vladimir Putin last year when American intelligence learned of plans to send explosive devices on cargo planes from Vilnius, the New York Times reports.
In the summer, several incidents of shipments catching fire at airports and warehouses in Germany, the UK, and Poland were recorded. It was later reported that the incendiary devices sent from Lithuania on DHL planes were part of a Russian covert operation.
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In August, White House officials received secret intelligence that the goal of this Russian operation was to figure out how to move these shipments and start fires on cargo or passenger planes flying to the US and Canada.
Then they began to consider how to get the message to Putin who could prevent the attacks.
Biden’s top advisers examined conversations between the leaders of Russian military intelligence (GRU), where they discussed plans to try to send everyday objects that would catch fire.
Once the Russians understood how such shipments would pass through cargo inspection systems and how long it would take to send them, they prepared for the next step – sending such shipments by planes to the US and Canada, where they would catch fire once they were unloaded.
“The risk of catastrophic error was clear – that these could catch fire in a fully loaded aircraft,” said Alejandro Mayorkas, the US Secretary of Homeland Security, in a recent interview.
In August, Mayorkas introduced new cargo inspection requirements. In October, when the warnings resurged, he secretly pressured the CEOs of the largest airlines flying to the US to speed up steps to prevent midair disasters.
Meanwhile, White House officials were trying to establish whether Putin himself was aware of the plan, and efforts were made to warn him to stop such actions.
Similar to October 2022, when the US believed that Russia was about to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Biden sent his National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and CIA Director William J. Burns to deliver a series of warnings to Putin’s advisers.
According to one senior official, quoted by NYT, it took many conversations to ensure that the message reached Putin and was heard.
The core of the warning was that if such sabotage caused a large number of casualties on the ground or in the air, the US would hold Russia responsible for “enabling terrorism“. Sullivan and Burns did not specify what that response would be but made clear it would take the shadow war between Washington and Moscow to new levels.
The warning reached Putin, officials told the NYT, and such incidents in Europe have ceased, at least for now. However, it is not clear whether Putin has ordered them to stop and for how long. Officials say Russia may simply be preparing to build better and more covert sabotage devices.
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