Masha Gesson’s amazing piece today in the NY Times about the prisoner swap is like something out of a John LeCarre novel. It’s absolutely riveting. If you read nothing else about this story, this is the one.
I am including a gift link so you can all read it. This is a short excerpt to whet the appetite:
Weeks after that phone call, Navalny flew back to Moscow and was immediately arrested. A year after that, “Navalny” was winning major awards and heading for an Oscar, and Grozev and Pevchikh were discussing how to leverage that success to secure Navalny’s release.
On that stroll around the reservoir, they came up with a crazy scheme they decided to call Secret Project Silver Lake. They wanted to organize a swap of Russian spies held in Western prisons for Navalny and other Russian political prisoners. When Pevchikh got back to where the team was staying, she Googled “Glienicke Bridge,” a crossing between what used to be East and West Berlin, the site of several prior prisoner swaps, including one that involved four countries and almost 30 people.
It was around this time that Grozev learned that Russia had sent a squad, or squads, of assassins to kill him. Austrian and American authorities warned him not to return to Vienna, where his wife and two children were. I met Grozev around the same time, and played a minor role in helping him get situated. Soon we started meeting every couple of weeks, for what I thought would eventually be a profile of him.
James P. Rubin, who was leading a State Department project on Russian disinformation (and who had recently watched “Navalny”), heard about Grozev’s situation, and offered a room in his own house.
Grozev moved in and spent the next couple of months explaining Secret Project Silver Lake, which Rubin would eventually take to his boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
You just won’t believe it. That initiative led to international intrigue beyond anyone’s imagination culminating in what happened last night:
Jealous Trump, who now looks like a fool for saying Putin would never release Gershkovitz to anyone but him, had this sour comment:
That’s a total lie as I posted yesterday.