After innocent-looking cargo shipments began catching fire at airports and warehouses in Germany, Britain and Poland over the summer, there was little doubt in Washington and Europe that Russia was behind the sabotage.
But in August, White House officials became increasingly alarmed by secretly obtained intelligence suggesting Moscow had a far larger plan in mind: bringing the war in Ukraine to American shores.
The question was how to send a warning to the one man who could stop it: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
In a series of Situation Room briefings, President Biden’s top aides reviewed details of conversations among top officials of the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence arm, who were describing shipments of consumer products that burst into flames — in one case, a small electronic massager — as a test run.
Once the Russians understood how the packages made it past air-cargo screening systems, and how long they took to ship, the next step appeared to be sending them on planes bound for the United States and Canada, where they would trigger fires once they were unloaded.
While the main concern was cargo planes, sometimes passenger planes take smaller packages in spare space in their cargo holds.
“The risk of catastrophic error was clear,” Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, said in a recent interview, “that these could catch fire in a fully loaded aircraft.”
In August, Mr. Mayorkas placed new screening restrictions on cargo being shipped into the United States. In October, when the warnings resurged, he quietly pressed the top executives of the largest airlines flying into the United States to accelerate their steps to prevent a midair disaster. Some of those precautions became public at the time; others did not.
But behind the scenes, White House officials were struggling to understand whether Mr. Putin had ordered or was aware of the plot — or if he had been kept in the dark. And a major effort was begun to warn him to end it.
Reaching for a playbook first developed in October 2022 — when the United States believed Russia was considering detonating a nuclear weapon in Ukraine — Mr. Biden dispatched his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, to send a series of warnings to Mr. Putin’s top aides. As one senior official recounted, many paths were needed to ensure the message reached Putin’s ears, and sank in.
The core of the warning was that if the sabotage led to mass casualties in the air or on the ground, the United States would hold Russia responsible for “enabling terrorism.” Mr. Sullivan and Mr. 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.
That shadow war continues, every day, as Russia turns to sabotage in hopes of breaking NATO’s will to support Ukraine, without setting off a full war with the NATO alliance.
It has redefined life in Europe, ending the sense of security that came along with the post-Cold War world. There is now an hour-by-hour search for saboteurs — at airports, seaports and undersea, as well as on the streets of major cities like Berlin, Tallinn and London.
But in this case the warning got through to Mr. Putin, the officials said in describing the secret exchanges with the Kremlin for the first time. And they appear to have had their intended effect: The rash of fires in Europe have ceased, at least for now. But it is unclear whether Mr. Putin ordered a halt, or for how long. And it is possible, officials say, that Russia is using the time to build better, stealthier devices.
Plausible deniability?
The effort to get to Mr. Putin was described by five senior officials interviewed over the past three weeks and who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive national security threat. In recent days, as the administration prepares to leave office in a week, some of the details of the tense interchanges with the Kremlin have only just been declassified.
While the officials said their effort to avert the worst was successful, it clearly left several of them shaken. As they leave office, they are concerned that Russia’s military, angry at the embarrassing and sometimes deadly Ukrainian attacks around Kursk and other targets inside Russian territory, is now determined to bring the conflict to European and American territory. But they want to do it using techniques that would not risk an all-out conflict with NATO.
The Russians may well have considered the operation a natural — and, in their mind, proportionate — reaction to the Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil, which have been at least partly dependent on U.S.-supplied weapons, including missiles.
To this day the U.S. officials do not know if Mr. Putin ordered the operation, whether he knew about it or whether he only learned of it because of the American warnings.
Several officials said they suspected the plot could have been the work of G.R.U. officers who were responding to general orders to increase the pressure on the United States and its NATO allies. That would be consistent, they said, with past efforts to create plausible deniability for Mr. Putin should the operation go badly.
The incident demonstrated that Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin maintained indirect channels of communication, even though they have not spoken since the Russian attack on Ukraine began in February 2022.
That freeze on direct conversations between Washington and Moscow appears about to end: President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Thursday that Mr. Putin “wants to meet, and we’re setting it up,” though the Kremlin insists there has been no formal conversation. Mr. Trump and his aides are cagey on the question of whether the two men have already talked. They have not said if the conversations will be limited to the Ukraine war or will also include the other elements of the hostile relationship between Washington and Moscow: a brewing nuclear arms race, Russia’s future in Syria and the accelerating shadow war with the West.
News of the air cargo operations seeped out of Europe this summer, and The Wall Street Journal reported in early November that intelligence officials believed Russia’s ultimate goal was to expand the operations to the United States and Canada.
But this account is the first to describe how Mr. Biden’s aides determined that unless they intervened with Mr. Putin directly, the events could lead to a calamity: even an unintended one, if a plane was delayed by bad weather, or the saboteurs got the timing wrong.
“It was a powerful example,” Mr. Mayorkas said, “of the convergence of national security and homeland security.”
Mysterious fires and cable cuts
For the first two years of the war, Russia seemed determined to keep the conflict within Ukraine’s boundaries. Its missiles never strayed into NATO territory. On the one evening when it appeared a missile may have crossed the border into Poland and killed two farmers, Mr. Biden was awakened for fear the two countries were about to stumble into open conflict. To Washington’s relief, it was a false alarm; the awry shot came from the Ukrainians.
That changed in 2024. Cases of sabotage, and suspected sabotage, appeared everywhere: hard-to-explain fires at warehouses, sometimes linked to companies supporting the arming of Ukraine; GPS “spoofing” that paralyzed the navigation systems of shipping and flights across Europe; cuts in undersea fiber-optic cables in which the dragging anchors from Russia’s “shadow fleet” of barges seemed culpable.
Washington helped intelligence officials in Berlin uncover an assassination plot against the chief executive of Germany’s leading arms maker, Rheinmetall. The company is a leading producer of the artillery shells that Ukraine desperately needs.
But when an incendiary device triggered an fire in late July at a DHL cargo facility in Leipzig, the former East German university town, it prompted an immediate investigation. Thomas Haldenwang, the chief of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, later told the German Parliament that the country had barely averted a plane crash, but he gave no details.
The package had been postmarked from Lithuania, as was another one that went off in Birmingham, England. A third burst into flames at a Polish courier firm.
Inside the White House, the biggest concern came in the form of intelligence about conversations among the G.R.U. American officials will not discuss how they got access to the conversations. But they confirmed the content: The three incendiaries were intended to scope out how DHL and other packages flow, so that the ignition of a highly flammable magnesium-based material could be precisely timed to catch fire.
The conversations indicated that the next step was to get them on planes to the United States and Canada. But the fear that coursed through Situation Room discussions was that an unintended delay — from weather or airplanes circling because of heavy traffic — could mean that the devices went off in midair.
From Washington to Moscow, a warning
In August, the C.I.A. and others concluded that the incendiary devices that went off in Leipzig, Birmingham and Poland were actually part of a “field test” by the G.R.U., as it tried to understand what path packages follow on their way through Europe. The packages were sent from Vilnius, Lithuania, where the Russians retain a significant intelligence presence.
Associates of Mr. Sullivan’s recall him being highly focused on the risk of the attacks in this period, though he said nothing publicly about it. But the conversations among the G.R.U. officials left little doubt where this was headed. One senior official involved in the discussions said it became clear they had to get a message to Mr. Putin, because he was the only one in the Russian system capable of ordering the operation to end. But getting to him meant sending the message through multiple paths.
Mr. Sullivan quietly started a series of calls with his Russian counterpart, Yuriy Ushakov, beginning by noting the Rheinmetall plot. Not surprisingly, Mr. Ushakov denied that Russia was involved — much as Russian officials had denied, in October 2022, that they had been planning for the use of a tactical nuclear weapon.
Then, speaking a bit elliptically about how the United States knew, Mr. Sullivan told Mr. Ushakov that the administration believed that the incendiary devices were also Russia’s responsibility — and that they had put civilian lives in danger. The big concern was the risk of mass casualties, he said, if the packages went off on a cargo plane or a passenger plane.
Mr. Burns, the C.I.A. director who served as American ambassador to Russia two decades ago and is the official who knows Mr. Putin best, made essentially the same case to his intelligence equivalent, Sergey Naryshkin, who runs the S.V.R., and Alexander Bortnikov, the director of the F.S.B., the two most powerful of the Russian intelligence agencies. The thinking was that all of them had regular access to Mr. Putin.
The U.S. officials were careful not to say that the intent of the operation was to bring down an airplane; in fact the devices appeared to be designed to go off on the ground. But the risk of an in-air accident seemed high.
While the immediate crisis was averted, Mr. Biden’s aides acknowledge that the incident revealed a larger problem: that as the war grinds on to its third anniversary, the risks are spilling into new arenas, and taking on new dimensions.
“As big as a Ukraine cease-fire would be it’s far from everything,” said Richard Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations who has written extensively on what an end to the war might look like
The sabotage, he said, “is all part, of a larger pattern.”
“Russia has turned into a revolutionary actor,” he said. “Russia has turned into a country seeking to undermine the international order. And the real question is: Can a Trump administration do something about that?”
