WASHINGTON – The Biden administration warned the Kremlin Thursday of the CIA’s conclusion that Russia had covertly offered militants payments to encourage more killings of American and coalition forces in Afghanistan, and issued the diplomatic admonition than Moscow over sanctions Hacking and electoral influence.
However, the government has stopped sanctioning Russian officials for the alleged bounties, clarifying that the available evidence of what happened – especially what Afghan detainees told the interrogators – still does not definitively prove that Russia paid for the reward of attacks paid.
The intelligence community, a senior government official told reporters, “rates with low to moderate confidence that Russian intelligence officers have attempted to encourage Taliban attacks against US and coalition personnel in Afghanistan in 2019 and possibly earlier, including through financial incentives and compensation. “
The New York Times first reported the existence of the CIA’s assessment last summer and that the National Security Council had been running an inter-agent process to develop a range of response options – but those months had passed and the Trump White House had not approved a response. not even a diplomatic protest.
The Times also reported that the available evidence for this assessment centered on what detainees believed to be part of a Taliban-affiliated criminal-militant network reported to the interrogators, along with suspicious travel patterns and financial transfers that the CIA medium placed confidence in his conclusion.
However, it was also reported that the National Security Agency, which focuses on electronic surveillance, placed less confidence in the assessment, citing the lack of electronic listening devices for smoke guns. Analysts from two other consulted agencies, the National Counterterrorism Center and the Defense Intelligence Agency, are also believed to have split, the former supporting the CIA and the latter supporting the National Security Agency.
Former intelligence officials, including in testimony on the subject before Congress, have stated that in the murky world of intelligence, it is rare to have evidence in the courtroom without a reasonable doubt about what an adversary is doing in secret.
President Biden’s administration re-examining the available evidence had uncovered nothing new and significant that could bring more clarity to this murky intelligence portrait, leaving disagreement over the level of confidence, an official familiar with internal reasoning said.
The Biden official’s statement to reporters was consistent with this report.
Intelligence agencies, said the official, “have little to moderate confidence in this verdict, also because of the reporting of detainees and the challenging operating environment in Afghanistan.”
“Our conclusion,” the official continued, “is based on information and evidence of links between criminal agents in Afghanistan and elements of the Russian government.”
The officer did not explain. One problem with the evidence available, however, The Times reported last year, was that the leader of the suspected criminal-militant network believed to have interacted directly with Russian intelligence officials, Rahmatullah Azizi, fled to Russia – possibly connected to a Russian spy agency using a passport.
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April 15, 2021, 6:10 p.m. ET
As a result, the detainees who told the interrogators what they had been told about the alleged agreement were not in the room for talks with Russian intelligence officials themselves. Even without electronic interception, there was a sample of evidence that corresponded to the assessment of the CIA, but no explicit eyewitness account of the interactions.
The Russian government has denied having covertly offered or paid bounties to fuel attacks on American and coalition forces in Afghanistan.
The public disclosure of the CIA’s assessment – and months of inactivity by the White House in response – sparked bipartisan turmoil in Congress. President Donald J. Trump defended the inaction, calling the coverage a “joke”. His White House denied it had been reported and tried to dismiss the intelligence service rating as too weak to be taken seriously.
In fact, it was included in his written briefing at the end of February 2020 and was more widely disseminated to the intelligence community in early May.
However, it was also true that analysts from the CIA’s National Security Agency disagreed on how much confidence should be placed in the agency’s conclusion, based on the incomplete set of evidence available. The Trump administration has played this split.
Michael J. Morell, a former acting CIA director, denied a White House testimony before Congress, suggesting that such an assessment must be unanimously supported by intelligence agencies in order to be taken seriously.
In previous administrations, he said last July, officials would have immediately told both the president and the congressmen of this ruling and any disagreement if the intelligence services had evaluated such information at any level of confidence. If the confidence level were low, an administration would seek more information before acting, while a medium or high confidence rating would most likely result in a response.
“You never have certainty in intelligence,” added Mr. Morell.
Mr Trump never addressed the issue of bounty education in his talks with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin. But after the CIA’s assessment was made public, senior military and diplomatic officials, including then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, warned their colleagues.
“If the Russians offer money to kill Americans or other Westerners, there will be an enormous price. I shared that with Foreign Minister Lavrov, ”said Pompeo during a trip to the Czech Republic in August. “I know our military has also spoken to their senior leaders. We won’t bear that. We will not tolerate that. “
In testimony to Congress and in other statements, senior Pentagon officials said being trapped between a desire not to tighten the White House and a desire not to be indifferent to the safety of the troops, would be indignant when the CIA assessment would be correct, but also hadn’t seen definitive evidence.
“It is not closed because we never complete investigations that involve threats or potential threats to US forces,” said General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., head of Pentagon Central Command late last year when he asked about the status of the Investigation was asked. “We’re looking at it very carefully.”
Meanwhile, as a presidential candidate, Mr Biden attacked Mr Trump for failing to counter the CIA assessment, portraying it as part of a strange pattern of respect that Mr Trump had shown towards Russia. Mr Biden mentioned the matter in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination and brought it up in his first call as President to Mr Putin.
While the sanctions imposed on Thursday were based on suspected Russian misdeeds other than suspected bounties, the senior administration official said that diplomatic action on the information available “is a burden on the Russian government to explain its actions and take action to address this disruption address patterns of behavior. “
The official added: “We cannot and will not accept our staff’s orientation in this way.”
Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt contributed to the coverage.
