Hit Squads & Havana Syndrome
Hyperactive Russian intelligence agents are liquidating enemies and targeting Americans around the world
As Vladimir Putin’s troops make important advances in Russia’s now two year old invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s sprawling intelligence agencies, beefed up with fresh personnel and placed on a war footing, are operating at a new and fearsome level of aggressiveness worldwide. Analysts believe that Russian spies, saboteurs, and assassins are now more active than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the successors to the KGB work to destabilize Western countries from within, slaughter their adversaries, and fulfill Putin’s brutal imperial project abroad.
They’ve left a trail of blood and bodies in their wake.
Two Russian agents recently carried out a brazen mafia-style assassination against Maksim Kuzminov, a former Russian military helicopter pilot who infamously defected to Ukrainian military intelligence, along with his Mi-8 helicopter. His two crewmates died during the operation. He was paid half a million dollars in cash, and given a false passport. Ukraine even produced a documentary about the episode, encouraging other Russians to defect in similar fashion.
This was obviously a major embarrassment for the Kremlin, and a coup for Ukraine’s HUR intelligence service, itself newly aggressive and partnered with the CIA, which has trained many of its officers. Last month, Kuzminov was gunned down and then run over in his apartment’s parking garage in a resort town called Villajoyosa, Spain, a seaside spot popular with Ukrainian and Russian emigres, and which is crawling with Russian agents.
Apparently, he neglected to take even the most rudimentary measures to conceal his identity and safeguard his security, driving around town in a flashy black Mercedes S-Class, spending cash and frequenting nightclubs and bars popular with Russian and Ukrainian emigres. It was a recipe for disaster, particularly because he should have been well aware of the Kremlin’s plans for him if they found him, after they blasted threats to hunt him down on Russian state television.
Predictably, he paid for his carelessness with his life.
Two Russian killers were lying in wait in his parking garage; they emptied six shots into Kuzminov when he showed up, and then ran his bleeding corpse over with their white Hyundai Tucson, a stolen vehicle that was later found burnt a few miles away, apparently with a special accelerant that made it extremely difficult to extract any viable evidence. It was clearly a professional job, and the two hooded gunmen planned it well.
Back at the scene, though, the assassins left a telltale signature: 9-millimeter Makarov shells, from bullets produced only in the former Soviet Union. The grisly message was crystal clear: the Kremlin can and will reach out and touch those it considers enemies and traitors, whomever and wherever they are.
This is nothing new.
Roving Russian hit squads have been active throughout Europe, and beyond, for a very long time. After a brief lull in activity following the Soviet collapse, they found new life under Putin’s leadership, first as director of the FSB, and then president. They killed FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko with a radioactive poison, Polonium-210, placed into his tea at the Millennium Hotel in London in 2006, in what was a notorious and widely-publicized killing that augured a new era of Russian assassinations around the world, often with exotic poisons and nerve agents that could only be found in Russian/Soviet labs.
The GRU attempted to kill defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England in 2018, rubbing a Novichok nerve agent on his door handle, a failed hit that led to the entire town being locked down and quarantined. It also caused the death of an innocent bystander, Dawn Sturgess, who accidentally ingested the nerve agent after touching a discarded bottle of Nina Ricci perfume. Several others were hospitalized, but survived.
In 2019, a man riding a bicycle used a silenced pistol to kill a former Chechen commander in broad daylight in a central Berlin park, in an extraordinarily brazen hit. Police recovered a Glock 26 from a nearby river, and arrested a 49 year old Russian named Vadim Krasikov, who investigators believe works for the FSB. Putin has been trying to arrange a spy swap to get him out of German custody.
Havana Syndrome
Far more disturbing than Russia’s settling of scores with individual enemies overseas, is new reporting about the sinister activities of GRU Unit 29155.
In a major investigation carried out jointly by 60 Minutes, Der Spiegel, and The Insider, explosive new evidence of responsibility for so-called “Havana Syndrome” cases seems to have emerged. Havana Syndrome refers to a long-running series of severe and unexplained illnesses among American personnel and their families all over the world. According to this investigation, they are now thought to have been the result of attacks by Russia, using novel directed energy weapons that leave people in agony, often with dire longterm neurological complications.
Havana Syndrome first rose to public prominence in 2016, after a series of strange and sudden illnesses among American personnel serving in the Cuban capital, Havana, during the brief rapproachment between Washington and Raul Castro’s new regime. However, it’s now believed the attacks actually began in Frankfurt, Germany two years earlier in 2014.
Thus far, hundreds of Americans believe they’ve been targeted. Attacks have occurred in Guangzhou, China, Tbilisi, Georgia, Delhi, India, and even Washington, D.C, among other locations. They’ve targeted senior officials serving in the White House and the Pentagon, as well as dozens of diplomats, spies, counterintelligence agents, and operatives working at three letter agencies, along with their families. Frequently, the targets of these attacks were focused on issues relating to Russia.
New evidence seems to suggest a link between these assaults and GRU Unit 29155, a Russian military intelligence unit that is focused entirely on kinetic operations, rather than collecting espionage. They’ve blown up arms depots in the Balkans, killed defectors and political opponents, and have been linked to poisonings around the world, including the failed Skripal hit in England. They’re ruthless, lethal, and well-trained, the creme de la creme of Russian military intelligence.
Now, it seems that members of that secretive squad are also linked to attacks on American personnel using “nonlethal acoustic” weapons, in what seems to be an answer to a running mystery regarding the origin of these illnesses. Obviously, if proven, the physical targeting of Americans would have profound implications for relations between Moscow and Washington, which have already reached an icy nadir after Russia brutally invaded Ukraine two years ago, starting the largest land war since the Second World War, and bringing the world right up to the brink of World War Three in the process.
The most recent attack targeted a senior Department of Defense official in 2023 at the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. It’s unclear if these attacks will continue after these revelations, nor what Washington is prepared to do about it if they do. Clearly, it’s an extremely sensitive subject, and the U.S. government has struggled to respond to it, going so far as to characterize the hundreds of cases as, essentially, mass hysteria.
Unit 29155
Apparently, the son of the commander of the unit and an active agent, a 6'2 tall skinny blonde Russian named Albert Averyanov, has been linked to several of the attacks, and was even seen by one of the victims fleeing the scene in a black Mercedes SUV in Tbilisi. He’s been groomed by his father, Andrey Averyanov, commander of the notorious unit, which focuses on sabotage, assassinations, exotic poisons, and apparently novel attacks with futuristic energy weapons, which Russia has a long history of studying and developing for its military and intelligence services.
Other members of Unit 29155 are linked to what seem to be revenge attacks carried out against at least three CIA officers who worked closely with Ukraine’s intelligence agencies in Kyiv, after the two agencies developed an extremely close partnership in the years after the fall of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych government in 2014.
The nexus connecting Russia and these attacks seems clear, at this point, even without absolutely definitive proof. Of course, spy agencies take care to avoid leaving evidence of that kind. Regardless, they made enough errors to leave a trail of strong anecdotal and circumstantial clues as to who exactly is responsible for these attacks, and why.
Nevertheless, the American government continues to call the attacks Anomalous Health Incidents, or AHIs, amid a fierce debate raging in government about the origins of these bizarre events. Various reports have suggested the victims are merely suffering from “mass hysteria” or some kind of unexplained mass psychogenic illness, leaving victims of the attacks feeling betrayed by the government they served.
The ODNI, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, released a redacted report stating that it was “very unlikely” these AHIs were the result of attacks by a foreign adversary, though the report noted that numerous U.S. intelligence agencies had “low confidence” in that assessment, and various whistleblowers have emerged to refute the finding. Victims of the attacks contend that this is absurd. They’ve had difficulty securing adequate health care from the government, which seems eager to bury the incidents, rather than confront the truth.
Ultimately, if Russia were conclusively proven to have been behind these attacks, it would likely be seen as an act of war. This might explain the U.S. government’s reticence to address the issue head on, but it hardly absolves it of betraying American personnel by covering the attacks up. Victims often suffer debilitating longterm health issues, even as the official position of the government remains that they’re suffering from some kind of mass psychosomatic hallucination, something that seems extremely unlikely.
The rebirth of the KGB
Russia’s intelligence services have always fielded brutal and efficient killers, from Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichniki, to Josef Stalin’s agents, one of whom sunk an ice axe into Leon Trotsky’s skull at his villa in Mexico. They’ve never been afraid to spill blood to liquidate traitors and enemies, or to violently counter Western intelligence services.
But Vladimir Putin is a former KGB lieutenant colonel, an intelligence operative himself, with all the paranoia and ruthlessness that connotes. He’s brought a new level of violence and sophistication to what was a broken and decaying system amid the ruins of communism. He’s lavished funding, resources, and attention on Russia’s main intelligence services, the SVR, the FSB, and the GRU; the highest echelons of his government are stocked with former security personnel, the so-called Siloviki, the “people of force.”
Perhaps most importantly, he’s provided a brand new raison d’etre, a fresh ideological rationale for aggression and hybrid warfare around the world, particularly against the West, which is supporting Ukraine, albeit fitfully.
Since the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union, Russia has struggled to develop a coherent political ideology, as Moscow worked to introduce free market capitalism, overcome economic chaos, and solve the many structural problems left behind by decades of totalitarianism. But that era is done, and patriotic Russians of the type who might feel inclined to join the FSB or GRU now have something to rally around again, a new national idea, however bloody and insane it might be. Vladimir Putin’s expansionary imperialism, his gathering of the Russkiy Mir, the Russian World, is that idea, and it’s clear Russia’s intelligence agencies will play a central role in that project, at the tip of Putin’s spear.
In his hybrid war against the Western democracies, Putin’s spies have already had a series of stunning successes. He helped launch Donald Trump into power, interfering in the 2016 election with a covert influence and disinformation operation designed to harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, and aid Trump’s. That meddling has shaken faith in American democracy, exactly as Putin intended. As we approach this next election, it’s likely Russia’s intelligence agencies will use every means at their disposal to assist Trump, an authoritarian ally and partner of the Russian dictator, and someone who has openly spoken of dissolving NATO, the hated alliance containing Putin in Europe.
Clearly, we’re witnessing a broad resurgence of Russian spying on the world stage, with assassinations, what appear to be novel attacks on American government personnel, interference in our elections, and a full-blown hot war in Ukraine, which continues to rock Europe. As it was during the Cold War, the dilemma facing America is as simple as it is difficult: how to effectively confront an aggressive and expansionary dictatorship armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, without open conflict. As it was then, America has to find a way to confront the Kremlin’s malign influence without war.
It’s an extraordinarily difficult balancing act.
Still, the United States has myriad ways to impose costs on Vladimir Putin. Presumably, American spies and their partners abroad are deeply angered and outraged by Putin’s profligate aggression, and will seek ways to undermine his regime at home, and assist those trying to defeat him on the battlefield in Ukraine. Tragically, $60 billion in funding for Ukraine remains trapped in a Congress controlled by Republicans loyal to Donald Trump, who remains loyal to Vladimir Putin. This is perhaps the best demonstration of all about the success of Putin’s hybrid war against America, where his allies control one of our two major political parties, a political reality his intelligence services helped engineer.
It’s not exactly optimistic. Ultimately, then, the battle against Russian imperialist aggression in Ukraine has merged with the battle to preserve America’s battered democracy at home. Both struggles require the defeat of Putin’s puppets and proxies in Washington, in what remains the gravest challenge of all.