Thread by @michaeldweiss

New: After an eighteen-month investigation, @InsiderEng has uncovered new evidence suggesting that Russia’s GRU paid tens of millions of dollars to the Taliban in Afghanistan to target American, coalition, and Afghan military forces. GRU Unit 29155 was behind this operation. We have unmasked the officers and their Afghan agents. theins.ru/en/politics/27…

The program, per four former Afghan intel (NDS) sources we queried, averaged $200,000 per killed American or coalition soldier. There were smaller allowances for killed Afghan troops. One former official estimated that Russia paid a total of approximately $30 million to the Taliban via the scheme.

We confirmed much of what the NDS told @InsiderEng using data exfiltrated from three different Unit 29155 operatives' email boxes. From there we assessed the travel patterns of the Afghan couriers/liaisons, matching their presence in Afghanistan with several noted Taliban attacks on U.S., NATO or Afghan targets.

The operation ran from 2015-2020, when it unraveled after the NDS rounded up over a dozen of the Afghan couriers working for Unit 29155. The head of the program was Lt. Gen. Ivan Kasianenko (left), a deputy commander of the unit who has worked under diplomatic cover as a military attaché in the Russian embassies in Tehran and Kabul. The main GRU liaison with the Taliban was Col. Alexey Arkhipov (right), who continues to negotiate with the Taliban on behalf of Moscow.

These men ran several networks, the most prolific of which operated in northern Afghanistan from a base in Kunduz and was headed by Rahmatullah Azizi, a longtime smuggler, whose recruits included his own family members. Here he is Azizi, at left, at a restaurant in Moscow just in from the Russian Defense Ministry.

Azizi isn't an ordinary Russian agent. He was given several fake passports, one printed in the same numerical sequence as those given to Unit 29155 poisoners of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. Thus, Russia's most notorious black ops team treats him as tantamount to a full-blown officer.

The NDS told us Azizi used a gem-trading business as his money-laundering front to move the Russian funds into Afghanistan. They were right. He set up a company, ARIGS, Ltd. in Russia in Sep. 2017. It was incorporated at Narodnogo Opolcheniya 34, just down the road from GRU headquarters. Here's one of Azizi's Facebook pages for the company:

One Unit 29155 operative, "Artem Rubin," whose real name is Artem Rubtsov, registered for a course dedicated to “the evaluation of rough diamonds” at the Moscow State University’s gemology institute. (Rubin is Russian for "ruby.") He listed ARIGS, Ltd. as his employer in his registration form. We also found that Rubin has traveled with other members of the Afghan network, including Ata Mohamad Amiri, the GRU’s liaison with the resistance movement in the Panjshir region of Afghanistan.

Arkhipov’s role as a GRU liaison with the Taliban was discovered in an unusual way. He makes a cameo appearance in a 2023 documentary, "Hollywoodgate," about the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan and the takeover by the Taliban of the Hollywood Gate Complex, an abandoned CIA base in Kabul. Clad in dark glasses, Arkhipov is featured as one of the many Russian dignitaries attending a 2022 military parade in 2022 in Tehran held to commemorate the first anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul. youtu.be/Bma_jSTYMIU

The existence of a GRU program to bleed Americans in Afghanistan was first reported by the @nytimes, which couched it as "bounties." According to @douglaslondon5, former CIA head of CT for South Asia, the program was far more strategic and ambitious: to drive the U.S. out of Afghanistan and the rest of Central Asia.

We learned that Unit 29155 was using its forward operating base in Tajikistan, at Russia's largest military facility outside of Russian Federation Borders, the 201st Military Base in Dushanbe. This tracks with what Gen. John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said in 2018 about Russian weapons flows to the Taliban emanating from Tajikistan.

The GRU has a long history of operating in Afghanistan, going back to the 1920s. And of course, the prospect of paying back the U.S. for what the CIA did to Soviet occupiers in the 1980s would hardly need selling to either the Kremlin or the Aquarium. We interviewed half a dozen former CIA officers for this story, all familiar with the Unit 29155 payments program, but not necessarily the data and identities we uncovered. The NDS didn't know the half of it either, our Afghan sources said.

Where is everyone now? Azizi's family was exfiltrated to different countries, including Russia and India. Some are now in Europe, posing as asylum seekers in Germany, per our partner @derspiegel. One tried to gain entry to Germany via the Polish border last spring.

One of the younger Azizi brothers, Hasibullah, remains in Moscow. Based on leaked telephone records, Hasibullah is actively working with members of Unit 29155 on new, as-yet-unknown missions. A recent attempt by @InsiderEng to obtain a transcript of his employment status from Russia’s abundant data market resulted in a flat refusal from one otherwise accommodating vendor: “This person works for the Presidential Administration and his data is off limits.”