Evan Gershkovich is back, and he has quite a story to tell.
The spy at the front of the cabin drew open the curtain.
Wearing a sand-colored jacket and brown shoes, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, the man had spent the past few hours organizing the final preparations for the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War. Now, as the pilots started the engines to take off for an airport in Turkey’s capital, he came out to look at the 16 prisoners he was escorting to freedom, a haul of Americans, Russians and Germans in their first hours fresh from jails and penal colonies.
Scanning the passengers, he locked his eyes squarely on one of those prisoners—me. He said nothing, staring in silence for nearly a minute. Then he turned and walked back to his curtained-off section of the presidential jet. I was left to wonder about this man at the helm of the exchange, who appeared to hold my fate in his hands.
When I was arrested by Russia’s security forces in 2023—the first foreign correspondent charged with espionage since the Cold War—I never stopped reporting. On my release I set out to identify the man who had taken me, and to learn more about the spy unit that had carried out his orders.
During my 16 months’ imprisonment, colleagues at The Wall Street Journal had been asking parallel questions.
Together, we have identified the man behind the curtain as Lt. Gen. Dmitry Minaev and can now reveal a trove of fresh details about the unit that he runs: the Department for Counterintelligence Operations. Known as DKRO, it is at the very core of Putin’s opaque wartime regime. The story of how it got there reveals much about how Russia’s autocratic system became entangled in a broiling conflict with the West.
Among our findings:
DKRO has played an enormous and unreported role in plunging Russia into its biggest wave of repression since the demise of Joseph Stalin, including a purge of the Defense Ministry after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine faltered.
The department was ordered to secure the release from Germany of Vadim Krasikov, a Russian hit man convicted in the 2019 assassination of a Putin enemy in a Berlin park.
DKRO then accelerated a campaign of arresting American citizens on Russian soil, including basketball star Brittney Griner. DKRO used former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan and me as trade bait to secure the release of Krasikov.
Among DKRO’s other missions was to harass and surveil Western diplomats in Russia, even pressuring students in the U.S. Embassy high school to spy on their classmates.
Despite DKRO’s growing importance to the regime, there was almost no mention of the agency anywhere on the internet until the Journal reported last year that it was behind my arrest. It didn’t even have a Wikipedia page. Almost nobody outside of a tight circle of Russia experts and intelligence officers had ever heard of it.
The more we tugged at this simple question—who in Russia was arresting Americans?—the more we revealed the secret inner machinery that has made it possible for Putin to tighten the screws across Russia’s 11 time zones, creating what a U.N. special rapporteur on human rights called an atmosphere of political persecution “unprecedented in recent history.”
DKRO, one person familiar with the unit’s operations said, was like the axle on a car. Without it, the entire machine would cease to function.
Though it numbers only about 2,000 officers, according to U.S. and European officials, DKRO is the Kremlin’s most elite security force. It wields the power to compel hundreds of thousands of personnel across Russia into surveilling, intimidating, or arresting foreigners and the Russians it suspects of working with them. DKRO officers are generously paid, even by the standards of Russia’s powerful and sprawling Federal Security Service, or FSB, of which it is part.
They enjoy bonuses for successful operations and access to low-cost mortgages, even the best time slots at Russia’s beachside resorts. Not a single DKRO officer is known to have defected to the West, according to U.S. and European officials.
To understand how power really flows in Putin’s security state, we tracked the unseen rise of this shadowy unit of elite spies. We spoke to Russians and Westerners targeted by DKRO, and U.S. and European security and intelligence officials and diplomats who have tried to learn its secrets. Former Russian security officials, exiles and dissidents added their own takes.
Along the way, two of my Journal colleagues were openly followed through the streets of Vienna and Washington in acts of surveillance apparently designed to intimidate. In the hours after one article was published, they were inundated with hundreds of spam emails alongside password-reset attempts. One reporter received a message through an intermediary that the FSB wanted to invite him to Moscow for questioning. The Russian foreign ministry would later label two of them as persona non grata.
At home, DKRO has ordered the arrests of hundreds of Russians accused of spying, collaborating or treason. After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine faltered, the agency largely responsible for its planning—the FSB—won an internal power struggle over who should take the blame, according to U.S. and European officials.
DKRO, along with the FSB’s military-intelligence wing, led a purge of the Defense Ministry, Western security officials said. Dozens of defense officials were accused of corruption. In a chilling historical echo, many were bundled into Lefortovo—the infamous Moscow prison where DKRO’s Stalin-era predecessors sent purged Communists and Nazi spies to be tortured and executed.
In March 2023, I was taken into the same prison by a group of FSB operatives that oversee Rosgvardia, Russia’s National Guard, known as Military Unit 3600, under DKRO’s command.
It was a unique vantage point to observe how such a small cadre of officers has managed to help turn the world’s largest country into a tightly controlled police state. The 9-by-12-foot cells of the maximum-security facility were regularly welcoming new Russian officials and accused collaborators arrested under DKRO’s supervision for spying on behalf of the West or colluding with Ukraine. So many people have been jailed there on espionage or treason cases since the start of the war that FSB officials with the First Investigative Department told me they had doubled their staffing.
The End of the Republican Gentry
Donald Trump’s first and in many ways most enduring political accomplishment is not the humiliation of the Democratic Party he has toppled in two of the last three presidential elections. It is the devastating defeat he has inflicted on the Republican establishment he has marginalized and dispersed. Our once and future president will not win every battle with what remains of the old Republican establishment, and in politics nothing is eternal. But as of Nov. 5, 2024, the “man from Queens” has achieved a domination of the Republican Party that no previous Republican president has ever enjoyed. The modern Republican Party that Ronald Reagan made, and that George W. Bush took into the 21st century, has fallen before the MAGA hordes, and today’s ambitious Republican politicos must say to Trump what Ruth said to Naomi: Whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest I will lodge.
Until recently, when people thought about the political divisions inside the Republican Party, they saw two camps. There was the predominately liberal Republican Party rooted in the Northeast and represented by figures like Nelson Rockefeller and Mitt Romney, and there was the Sunbelt Republican movement led by Ronald Reagan. Sunbelt Republicans were seen as further to the right than their Rockefeller Republican rivals on both economic and social issues. The shift of white Southerners in the 1970s and 1980s to the Republicans from their traditional post-Reconstruction Democratic affiliation decisively tipped the balance between Sunbelt and Rockefeller Republicans, driving the whole party into the more conservative form it assumed under both Reagan and Bush.
Donald Trump clearly does not fit into this model, and his entry into Republican presidential politics in 2015 revealed the existence of powerful forces inside the Republican coalition that its nominal leaders knew little or nothing about. Their consistent underestimation of the importance and staying power of the Trump phenomenon likewise betrays a preference for forgetting the past rather than being warned and instructed by it. Trump’s message and his style have antecedents in our political history, and his ideological, rhetorical, and cultural links to the Jacksonian tradition in American life suggest that his extraordinary political success represents the return to national prominence of potent and enduring forces in American political culture that establishment Republican figures still don’t understand.
The Reagan Republican old guard never understood the complex political cultures of the Southern ex-Democrats and the ethnic Reagan Republicans of the blue-collar Rust Belt. At least since the time of the Civil War, Jacksonian populists have felt deeply alienated from an intrusive and powerful national establishment. The specter of a deranged wokitarian government aligned with the dominant media, the great universities, and enforced through the HR policies of “woke corporations” and “woke generals” is exactly the kind of thing that, historically, has triggered waves of popular and populist rebellion, particularly but not exclusively among Jacksonians. It is a fear in Anglo-American culture that dates to the Reformation: a satanic conspiracy aimed at destroying freedom, reducing people to servitude, disarming them, and delivering them over to the ruthless designs of an internationalist elite.
This fear and the demand that politicians do something about it helped break the trust between the populist and progressive wings of the Southern Republican Party, and it was not only in the South that the angry reaction to radical wokitarianism gathered force. That reaction is one of the principal sources of fuel for the Trump movement, and no American politician understands better or more intuitively how to exploit its possibilities than our new president-elect.
The Reagan-Bush old guard, while sharing Jacksonian distaste for the excesses of the woke movement, never understood how key policy decisions of the George W. Bush administration discredited both the ideas and the policymakers of the Republican establishment in the minds of a radicalizing base. They did not perceive that they had lost their party until Donald Trump walked away with it.
To understand the story of how Donald Trump cast the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt into his own likeness is to understand much more clearly the course of modern American history and to see also why he was able to win two presidential elections with his new coalition. It is also to gain important insights into the meaning of the Trump movement for the American future. For both friends and opponents of the MAGA Republicans, a deeper understanding of the dynamics driving the Trump train will allow them to respond more creatively to the political conditions in which we now live.
William Faulkner once wrote that “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Donald Trump and Team MAGA are living proof that Faulkner got it right. Not only does the living past shape American politics today, but the specific Southern history that so obsessed one of America’s greatest novelists has come alive, and its mighty footsteps have shaken our comfortable postmodern, posthistorical political age to its foundations.
The FBI’s January 6th Role Unearthed
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/fbi-missed-basic-step-gathering-intel-lead-jan-6-doj-watchdog-finds-rcna183449
The FBI failed to take the "basic step" of canvassing its field offices for intelligence ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to a long-awaited Justice Department's inspector general report released Thursday.
FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate told investigators that the lack of a canvass was a "basic step that was missed" and that he would have expected it to have occurred, the inspector general's office said.
The inspector general did find that the FBI "recognized the potential for violence" and took "significant and appropriate steps" even though it played "only a supporting role in preparing for and responding to" the events of Jan. 6.
The report also includes details that will almost certainly fuel the "fedsurrection" narrative that has been growing on the right and among Donald Trump supporters: the false notion that the federal government was responsible for instigating the attack.
While the review found "no evidence in the materials we reviewed or the testimony we received showing or suggesting that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on January 6," the inspector general's office said 26 confidential human sources, or CHSes, were in Washington that day. None of them were "authorized by the FBI to enter the Capitol or a restricted area or to otherwise break the law on January 6, nor was any CHS directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts on January 6," the inspector general said.
Four FBI confidential human sources entered the Capitol, according to the inspector general, one of whom testified at the Proud Boys trial in which several members of the far-right group were found guilty of seditious conspiracy. A total of 13 confidential human sources entered the restricted area around the Capitol, the inspector general’s report said, while the remaining nine never entered the Capitol or restricted areas. Only three of the 26 FBI confidential human sources had specifically "been tasked by FBI field offices to report on specific domestic terrorism case subjects who were possibly attending the events of January 6," while the 23 others attended "on their own initiative and were not tasked by FBI field offices to attend the events," the report said.
Half of U.S. Teens Permanently Online
Pew reports. “Amid national concerns about technology’s impact on youth, many teens are as digitally connected as ever. Most teens use social media and have a smartphone, and nearly half say they’re online almost constantly, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 conducted Sept. 18-Oct. 10, 2024.”
But there’s a gender divide, especially among teenagers who say they “almost constantly” use either app: 19 percent of girls say they use TikTok that often, while the same share of boys are constantly on YouTube.
And even this extremely online demographic isn’t using all websites equally. Just 6 percent of teenagers polled said they use Threads, Meta’s microblogging app, and only 32 percent use Facebook — down from 71 percent a decade ago. The only Meta product a majority of teenagers use is Instagram, whose popularity has increased since 2014.
There seems to be a preference for image- and video-based platforms among the teenagers polled: X and Reddit were also much less popular, with 17 percent and 14 percent of teens saying they use them, respectively. And teens’ X usage has declined significantly over the past decade: a decade ago, when it was still called Twitter, 33 percent of US teens used it. But teens’ use of some image-based apps — including Snapchat — is on the decline as well. In fact, the only app that has experienced a rise in popularity is WhatsApp, which is now used by 23 percent of teenagers.
Feature
An interview with Javier Milei: The public sector is the illness.
Items of Interest
Foreign
October 7th changed the Middle East forever.
Trump team considers plans for Iran’s nuclear program.
Macron appoints fourth PM this year.
Interview: Kemi Badenoch’s fight for the West.
Domestic
GOP Steering Committee picks chairs.
Nancy Pelosi actively working to undermine AOC’s chairmanship bid.
DOGE attracts Democrat interest.
The Joe Manchin exit interview.
Hamburger: The stakes for free speech in Trump’s civil verdict.
Trump plans to pardon January 6th offenders.
Charlamagne tha God warns Biden against preemptive pardons.
Arizona Republicans relieved Kari Lake headed to VOA.
Eric Adams leans right on border, criticizes media.
Bobby Scott entertains Virginia gubernatorial run.
Assassination task force recommends dozens of Secret Service reforms.
Luigi Mangione family blindsided by shooting arrest.
How security teams protect top executives.
The American university is rotting from within.
Woodrow Wilson in a darker key.
Media
How ProPublica botched the Pete Hegseth story.
Soave: When bureaucrats mislead you, expose them.
Health
Obamacare is the missing word in health care rage.
AOC casts her voice for team “but”.
Ephemera
The Spectator’s Christmas reception.
What The Spectator taught Benjamin Franklin.
Dick Van Dyke saved from wildfire by neighbors.
Spoiler: Eddie Redmayne’s Day of the Jackal twist.
Review: Kraven the Hunter is just as bad as you thought.
Timothee Chalamet and the cast of A Complete Unknown on Bob Dylan.
Daniel Penny to be J.D. Vance’s guest at Army-Navy game.
Podcast
Quote
“Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel.”
― Ivan Turgenev