Video: How the FBI recruited Deripaska and half a dozen other Russian oligarchs
2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55
The main news of the weekend is that the American special services in 2014-2016 tried to recruit "half a dozen" Russian oligarchs, led by Oleg Deripaska. The plan, which involved the author of the controversial Trump dossier Christopher Steele, was unsuccessful.
The plan of the American special services to recruit Russian oligarchs became known from an article in The New York Times. The publication describes in detail the attempt to recruit Oleg Deripaska. They tried to persuade him to cooperate, promising a solution to long-standing problems with an American visa, which Deripaska was not given due to suspicions of links with organized crime. To do this, the FBI asked the State Department to let Deripaska into the United States, where agents met with him twice - in September 2015 and 2016. But Deripaska answered negatively to all questions about interference in the US elections and the relationship of the Russian authorities with organized crime, and as a result refused to cooperate.
Deripaska was not the only one whom they tried to persuade to cooperate: the American special services developed a whole plan of recruiting "businessmen close to Putin," there were half a dozen names on the list, writes NYT. Who else was on the list, the publication does not tell, noting only that it was about “the richest people in Russia, whose fortune depends on Vladimir Putin,” and that there were no successful recruitment cases.
US Department of Justice officer Bruce Ohr participated in the implementation of the plan in 2014-2016. As an intermediary for establishing contacts with the oligarchs, he enlisted the former Mi-6 employee Christopher Steele, who later drew up the scandalous "dossier on Donald Trump."
Whether attempts to recruit Russian billionaires continued after 2016 is unknown. The only other member of the Russian Forbes list interviewed by American investigators is Viktor Vekselberg. In March 2018, he was interrogated and his electronic devices searched by officers from Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, who is investigating alleged Russian interference in the US elections. A month later, Vekselberg (like Deripaska) came under personal US sanctions. CNN wrote that in 2018 Mueller's team was able to interrogate two Russian oligarchs, who was the second is still unknown.
In the NYT article, the American FBI looks naive: an attempt to recruit one of the most loyal oligarchs, almost all of whose assets are concentrated in Russia, could not be crowned with success without trusted intermediaries and intelligible proposals. What were the other attempts, we do not know, but in the place of Russian big businessmen they would be nervous now. The Kremlin will most likely find out who else they tried to make agents of the US special services.
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