Did Vladimir Putin know? This is the question that the American secret services and the Department of the Interior asked themselves last August, when they became aware of a parcel bomb plot intended to be placed on cargo planes, destined for Europe… And perhaps soon the United States.
For several weeks now, seemingly harmless cargoes have sparked fires in airports and warehouses in Germany, Great Britain and even Poland. Incidents planned by Moscow, according to American intelligence, which would have had the ultimate ambition of exporting the war to American territory, reported at that time the Wall Street Journal, whose sources spoke of listening to conversations of senior officials of the Russian military intelligence service.
A new sabotage technique in line with those that the West suspects Russia of having deployed during the year 2024, while unexplained fires in warehouses have multiplied, sometimes linked to companies supporting armaments of Ukraine, the GPS jamming which paralyzes the navigation systems of ships and flights across Europe, or the cutting of submarine fiber optic cables.
Risk of a human catastrophe
Once the freight control system was understood and the delivery time of the consumer products that would be trapped was calculated (in the example mentioned on the wiretapping, a “small electronic massage device”), the Russians would therefore have been able to to set up well-established sabotage aimed at burning down American warehouses, the American daily now assumes THE New York Times in an investigation published on January 13. The risk, glaring for American internal security: the loading of one of these sabotaged devices on a commercial flight carrying passengers, who sometimes also take on board small packages in their holds.
Was the Russian president consciously taking such a risk, or was he unaware of the plot? When in doubt, it was necessary to send him a warning, only he being able to avoid “the risk of an obvious catastrophic error”, declared Alejandro Mayorkas, the American Secretary of Homeland Security, in an interview recently. “These packages could catch fire in a fully loaded plane,” he explained. A probable incident in the case, for example, of a plane delayed by bad weather conditions, or in the event of miscalculation on the part of Russian saboteurs.
Getting the message across to Vladimir Putin… without direct communication
Sent by Joe Biden to Russia, it was his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and the director of the CIA, William J. Burns, who were responsible for transmitting the message via several collaborators of Vladimir Putin, to be certain of pass the information on to the head of state. The main element of this message: in the event that such sabotage “results in massive losses in the air or on the ground, the United States will hold Russia responsible for encouraging terrorism”, reports the New York Times. According to the newspaper’s sources, located among senior White House officials, the threat did indeed reach the Russian president. And would have been effective, putting an end to the wave of fires in European warehouses for the moment, and reducing the threat of an air disaster.
American officials nevertheless remain on guard. Because according to these same sources, it is also possible that Russia “uses this time to develop more sophisticated and discreet devices”, mentions the media. As sometimes deadly Ukrainian attacks multiply on the Russian territory of Kursk (in part made possible thanks to weapons supplied by the United States and Europe), Moscow may be determined to take the conflict to the Western territory . A potential new way to try to weaken NATO’s desire to support Ukraine, supposes the American daily, without triggering an open war with the alliance.
To this day, there is no way of knowing whether Vladimir Putin was behind this sabotage plan. “Several officials believe that this plot may have been the work of GRU officers responding to general orders to intensify pressure on the United States and its NATO allies,” notes the New York Times. If no direct communication between the President of the United States and that of Russia has taken place since February 2022, the incident nevertheless showed that indirect communication between the two countries was still effective.
This long absence of direct communication between the two nations could quickly end, since Donald Trump, who will be inaugurated on January 20 and who has promised to “end” the war in Ukraine, already ensures that Vladimir Putin ” wants to meet (him). Information currently refuted by the Kremlin.