Lawfare Daily: A Giant and Unexpected Prisoner Swap

[Introduction]

Shane Harris: In Russia, they like to convict individuals before they free them. So certainly, as journalists we were watching her case, but when they were both convicted, Alsu and Evan, that was a signal, I think, that okay, something may be about to break here.

Benjamin Wittes: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittes, Editor in Chief of Lawfare, with Shane Harris of the Washington Post and Eugenia Lostri of Lawfare.

Shane Harris: I do think that Russia needed to come up with more people than it was going to get back, so it didn't just look like trading Krasikov for these really high value folks, but I do think at the end it's possible that Putin really just wanted the murderer.

Benjamin Wittes: We're talking today, of course, about the giant prisoner swap,  16 people freed by the Russians and a bunch sent back to Russia. It's a heck of a story.

[Main Podcast]

All right, Shane, I want to start with how this happened. Nobody was expecting a giant prisoner exchange. Evan Gershkovich had only very recently been convicted, and there was some talk of, would he be exchanged for a Russian in German custody for a murder in Berlin?

But I did not hear anybody talking about a multi-country, multi-person exchange of political dissidents and spies and cyber criminals all in, of all places, Ankara. So how the heck did this come to be?

Shane Harris: Well, I could take the long version or the short version. Essentially what happened here is I would go back to, as a good starting point, this past February, when you'll recall that as world leaders were gathering at the Munich Security Conference came this very shocking news that Alexei Navalny the leading Russian pro-democracy advocate and biggest antagonist of Vladimir Putin had died suddenly in a Russian penal colony.

What we did not know at that time was that the United States and Germany were in the midst of a prisoner swap that would have actually gotten Navalny freed in exchange for this notorious --- you alluded to him, I think, in your question, this murderer --- this guy named Vadim Krasikov. That is a name that people should remember when we talk about the story of how this enormous spy swap, the biggest since the Cold War, it's not even… I shouldn't even call it a spy swap because this isn't all spies, but this international prisoner exchange. Because Vadim Krasikov is somebody who Vladimir Putin very badly wanted back in Moscow.

He had been convicted in of a murder in 2019 on behalf of Russian intelligence of a former Chechen fighter who Putin had called a bloodthirsty enemy of Russia. And Krasikov gunned this guy down in broad daylight in the Tiergarten in Berlin and was sentenced to life in prison for it. He had basically been in and out of negotiations over American hostages and others in Russia for some time.

And in February of this year, the Germans and the Americans think they've come to this agreement where Berlin is going to actually release this guy, which is a very controversial move, in order to get Navalny out. And it would be this really triumphant prisoner release that would hopefully also get released Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan who has an American, an ex-Marine, former Marine, who's been held in Russia for more than five years on trumped up espionage charges. I guess I should say he had been because he's free now.

Benjamin Wittes: And just to be clear, Evan Gershkovich is the Wall Street Journal reporter who has been held in Russian jail and was just convicted of espionage, again, with zero evidence, for more than a year now.

Shane Harris: That's right. So in February, officials are feeling really good. Biden administration officials are feeling good thinking they're about to pull off this great deal. Navalny dies suddenly. It's still not clear to U.S. officials I've talked to exactly how he died, but the deal falters. And what happens over the next several months, and that leads to today, is the White House goes back to the drawing board and comes up with a list of other people that it might be able to get out of Russia in exchange for Krasikov that might induce Berlin to come back to the table.

And these are the people, many of them who we see released today, these German nationals and Russian political prisoners who are now going to Germany, some of whom were allies of Navalny. So you can think of this as they couldn't get Navalny, but they got people who were close to him and they got other people who matter a lot in that universe of democracy, activism in Russia.

And this deal, comes together, I think in large part because of the perseverance of the White House, the eventual willingness of Berlin to go along, and this just still unexplained focus that Vladimir Putin has on this contract killer, Vadim Krasikov, the guy who was being held in Berlin.

I talked to U.S. officials in the past 48 hours as all this was coming together and said, look, this is a really big exchange, Russia's letting go 16 people, including some of the most high-profile Americans. Granted, it's getting eight Russians in return, but most of these are people that people have never really heard of.

Benjamin Wittes: Except for Eugenia, who's going to tell us all about it in a moment.

Shane Harris: And I said, what is it with Putin and Krasikov? And they just said, look, we still don't really fully know. You hear all kinds of rumors and speculation, which I won't go into, but he was very important for him. And he's really proved to be the linchpin of this.

I will just say, going to your point about no one expected a huge prisoner swap. Yeah, count me among them. And I thought it was actually breathtaking, when we first learned about this and  the remark I had was it's like everybody is coming out.  It's like tonight we settle all family business.

We should note there are a number of Americans who remain in Russia, including Marc Fogel, a school teacher who was arrested for having a petty amount of medical marijuana on his possession. So there are still people who the White House is working to get out, but this is a really big deal, I mean big deal significance wise, and big deal numbers wise, and certainly took me and a lot of journalists by surprise.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, I was over at the Turkish embassy yesterday visiting a group of Turkmen activists who were there protesting, and one of them showed me on his phone the Bureau of Prisons’ inmate locator that these various cyber criminals had vanished from that day. And he said, I don't know what's going on, but something's going on. It turned out he was exactly right. I don't know why he was checking the Bureau of Prisons website for cyber criminals that day, but it was a pretty interesting find. All right, so before we get to what the Russians got in exchange for this, let's talk about the 16 people that they set free.

Let's go through some of the big names individually, perhaps among Washington journalists, at least the biggest marquee name is Evan Gershkovich. Give us a little bit of --- he's a former colleague of yours --- give us a little bit of background on Evan's situation.

Shane Harris: Yeah so Evan is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and he was arrested last year, so more than a year ago, but in 2023 while he was out reporting in the city of Yekaterinburg, which is pretty far from Moscow. And the Russians essentially accused him of spying. They said that he was gathering information about Russian military installations and argued that he was passing it on to the Americans, which of course he and his employer deny. And anyone who's ever been a reporter knows that you don't pass things back to the American government.

So it was a ridiculous charge, but I remember the day that Evan was arrested and it really sent a chill through me. My first question was, my God, what was he doing out there? Because he was far from Moscow, but it was really stunning because if a reporter for a major global news organization like the Wall Street Journal can be arrested and accused of espionage then any reporter can be. And you can't just presume as a journalist that because you're working for a really high profile organization, that you have protection. And we began to immediately, me and other colleagues here and elsewhere, worried not just about Evan, but about other Americans who might be in Russia.

So he really became, I think, probably the most well-known, I would think, of the hostages who were there right now, and there was a really big social media campaign that journalists started of #FreeEvan, #IStandWithEvan. I had a button on my backpack, I would get asked about it in airports. There were all kinds of ways that we raised awareness for that. So, important to note that he has not been there the longest of the people who were released, but I think was probably the most prominent, and certainly the Wall Street Journal has dedicated, an enormous amount of resources to their credit of working to get him back and keeping his case in the public.

Benjamin Wittes: But he was not the only journalist among the group. Vladimir Kara-Murza was released. As well as a case involving a Radio Free Europe reporter whose case has gotten almost no attention. Tell us about them.

Shane Harris: Yeah. So Vladimir Kara-Murza really, I think among one of the more just trenchant critics, and eloquent critics, of Vladimir Putin he is a Ccontributor to the Washington Post opinions section.

He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize this year, which I'm very happy to say he will probably now be able to receive in person at the ceremony, which is great news. You know, Kara-Murza has been someone who has been pretty prominent in American political circles. He was quite close to Senator John McCain.  He's been somebody who's been really a fixture in the global pro-democracy movement of Russia, critics of Putin. Again, somebody who I think that when he was arrested, it was one of those signals that like, like nobody is safe in Russia. It was a feeling that way with Navalny as well, but somebody who really had a very high profile reputation.

The other journalist for Radio Free Europe/Radio Free Liberty, Alsu Kurmasheva. I will confess to not knowing much at all about who she is, other than that she has a body of work that is very impressive and has done a lot of work in Russia. You are right that her case has not received much attention. I will note, though, that one way it did get a lot of attention was just a couple of weeks ago, not long after Evan Gershkovich was sentenced for espionage charges, Alsu Kurmasheva was also sentenced in a very quick order. Those were both signals to people who are watching this, another signal that a prisoner swap might be about to happen because in Russia, they like to convict individuals before they free them. So certainly as journalists, we were watching her case, but when they were both convicted, Alsu and Evan, that was a signal, I think that, okay, something may be about to break here.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, and I would just say that in the democracy world, to U.S. audiences VOA/Radio Free Europe don't necessarily have particularly high profiles. But in the countries in which they operate, these are one of the major news organizations that people really trust. And this was actually a particularly awful case because she went home to visit her mother who was sick and was arrested in the course of that.

So it was, it's the most obviously hostage taking one among them, and I believe it happened really as just as Putin needed more leverage. Okay. So those are the sort of big four from an American point of view, but there's also this large group of domestic dissidents which is like something that I don't think we've seen since the Cold War, which is the sort of the United States negotiating on behalf of political dissidents within Russia. Are these all Navalny people or are, is there a more diverse array of them?

Shane Harris: Well it’s, a number of them are Navalny people. I think it's probably more of a diverse, most of his closest associates had fled Russia already, but there were heads of three of his regional offices who had been imprisoned on extremism charges.

And they were part of this group and I'm going to --- you're going to forgive me because my Russian pronunciations are not expert --- but Lilia Chanysheva, who ran the office, one of his offices in Bashkortostan, Vadim Ostanin, who ran a regional office in Baranol, and Ksenia Fadeyeva, who led an office in Tomsk. And Fadeyeva was actually with Navalny in August 2020, helping him make a film, in the hours before he was poisoned with a nerve agent by Russian operatives. So these are people who were pretty prominent and close to Navalny. And I think go to this idea that was important for getting the Germans on board because they were really interested in getting Navalny, trading Navalny for this assassin, Krasikov, was something that Berlin got round to doing. With Navalny gone, maybe you can get these other three really important people and that ultimately helped a lot.

We also know that included in this deal is Ilya Yashin, who's a long time political opposition leader, and a friend of Navalny's since they were younger, and part of a progressive political party in the early 2000s. So that gives you a sense of the flavor for some of these people. There were others in here as well, I'll note too an interesting case because it was in the news recently. There's a man named Rico Krieger, who was an aid worker who had been arrested in Belarus.

Benjamin Wittes: And sentenced to death!

Shane Harris: And sentenced to death for allegedly operating as a Ukrainian intelligence operative. He was sentenced to death in a move that I think a lot of people now read as Vladimir Putin's good friend Lukashenko, the other dictator, the one running Belarus, as a way to put pressure on Germany.

Rico Krieger is a German. And there was this very obviously staged, tearful confession that Krieger made and it was aired on Belarusian television of him inside of a prison cell in a handcuff confessing to everything he did for Ukraine. It was obviously nonsense. He was forced to do it. But when Lukashenko just the other day suddenly pardoned Rico Krieger, that was another one of these signals.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, that should have been a signal.

Shane Harris: Yeah, telling you something's afoot here, and that's when we started making calls about Krieger and figured out that, yeah, eventually that he was in this mix, too, of these people who, he of course was flown to Russia before he was flown to Turkey, and we'll go back to Germany, but he was effectively a Russian prisoner, you could think of him that way.

Benjamin Wittes: All right, so let's talk about who the Russians got in return, and let's work our way down from savage murderers. First, we get the guy who shoots the Chechen fighter in the Tiergarten. That’s, he's the prize guy, right? But then there are, before we go down to the lower tier, the Estonians released somebody who was accused of espionage, and the Slovenians released people accused of espionage.

What, this seems like a traditional spy swap. We nail some spies, or our allies nail some spies. They arrest some U.S. hostages. We swap, it's in Ankara, not in a bridge in Berlin or somewhere at night in Vienna, but it has a very Cold War flavor. Who are these people?

Shane Harris: Yeah, it does. And it's important to keep that in mind too, because usually when we talk about these swaps, it's spies for spies, but now it's, spies for aid workers, for journalists.

So we're still learning some of these details. Interestingly the people released from Slovenia --- they’re a couple --- and there are some indications that their children went with them because there are two more people on the roster who landed in Ankara that were not accounted for. And we think it might be their kids.

So it's like reminiscent of “The Americans” or something. But this was this couple who was released and they had been imprisoned on espionage charges. Now, remember when we're talking about people in these other countries convicted of espionage, we're talking about people who went through, what we would recognize as criminal trials for espionage.

Benjamin Wittes: Right, Slovenia, real legal system.

Shane Harris: Yes.

Benjamin Wittes: Member of the EU, member of NATO.

Shane Harris: Yeah. Yeah. Not kangaroo courts like we have in Moscow, although that's probably an offense to the kangaroos. But what's really interesting about the Slovenian case --- and then we can talk a little bit more about who these other people are --- it wasn't always clear that Slovenia was going to go along with this. At the Munich security conference, Vice President Harris actually had a sideline with the Slovenian prime minister to make sure he was on side. And what we've only learned in recent days is that as recently as July 21st, we're talking two weeks ago, at the point where the Biden administration thought the deal was done, there were some signs that maybe Slovenia was going a little wobbly.

And President Biden, who was then recovering from COVID at his house in Rehoboth, placed a call to his Slovenian counterpart and just said, look, I just want to make sure that you're committed here and got them back on sides. One hour after that phone call, Biden made the public announcement that he was not running for president.

Benjamin Wittes: This is what we call multitasking.

Shane Harris: Multitasking, exactly. That may have been Joe Biden's last official act as a declared candidate for president. But that gives you a sense, I think, of the way that U.S. officials had to engage at very high levels. We've talked about, the efforts to get Krasikov out of Berlin.

That was something that, Biden and Olaf Scholz discussed personally. And finally, Scholz came around to this and basically, as we're told, said to the president, for you, I will do this. Similar to the case with Poland, with Norway. It's not entirely clear to me if these are names that the U.S. came up with or the Russians kind of signaled that they wanted, but these are individuals who fit that traditional mold of what you would think of as a “spy swap.” And then, I'm sure Eugenia will talk about the three that are coming out of the U.S., but these are obviously individuals who were convicted of various cybercrimes. Bad people who did things and were serving real time but were deemed, I think, sufficient for the deal to induce Russia.

Benjamin Wittes: And I just want to emphasize here because when we think of Russian operatives in the United States, we have this, we're kind of conditioned by things like “The Americans” and these cases that, the case that “The Americans,” the Illegals case that “The Americans” were based on, there's something faintly comic about it.

There is nothing comic about Russian operations in Europe. The Berlin case is an example. They murder people, right? The killings in, or the poisonings in England, right? These are very aggressive active operations that often involve lethal force of one sort or another, and there's just a very qualitatively different degree of aggressiveness with which the Russians will behave in the United States for all kinds of reasons than what they will do in Europe, which they think of as their backyard.

All right, that brings us to the lower echelon of the totem pole. Eugenia, I confess that when I heard that there was a big trade in the works, and the news kind of trickled out yesterday that this was happening, I was not expecting this to be a cyber security story. And yet---

Eugenia Lostri: I was not prepared for this to be a cyber security story. I woke up today and I was not anticipating having to do much.

Benjamin Wittes: You didn’t think, ‘I'm going be on the Lawfare Podcast talking about Russian prisoner swaps.’ There's a bunch of cyber criminals that they included on the list and my question is why is this and who are they?

Eugenia Lostri: So we have three out of the eight prisoners going back to Russia who are, I would qualify them as cyber criminals, maybe more tech related, not all three of them have like, are hackers, just to make sure that we have that distinction in mind.

And as Shane mentioned before, all three of them are coincidentally the ones that are coming back from the U.S. instead of from the allied partners. So the first one, and I'm just going to go in order of how long they've been in the U.S. So first we have, and you'll have to forgive my pronunciation of Russian, which is non existent.

Benjamin Wittes: It's okay, you're very good about forgiving our Argentinian Spanish pronunciation.

Eugenia Lostri: That is true. Feel free to jump in and correct the pronunciation. So first we have Roman Seleznev. So he's been in the U.S. since 2014. He was extradited from the Maldives, which it's kind of interesting. There's an interesting backstory there because the Maldives were supposed to be a safe haven for Russian criminals who would go vacation there. And it was only through apparently a secret agreement between the U.S. government and the Maldives that they were able to get him back in 2014. And he was convicted in the U.S. in 2016 for orchestrating a cyber-attack on a bunch of American businesses.

So basically he was infiltrating point of sale systems, he was stealing credit card information, selling that on the dark web, and that led to a loss of $169 million for financial institutions. And for that, he was convicted for 14 years, and some months later, in 2017, he pled guilty to two other cases. One for being involved in a racketeering operation in Nevada, and then a conspiracy to commit bank fraud in Georgia. And for that, he was convicted for 27 years, which I believe remains a record conviction for a hacker.

Benjamin Wittes: So he’s, in the world of cyber criminals in U.S. custody, he's a big deal.

Eugenia Lostri: Yeah, he is. Just to give you a sense of the financial losses that he caused, not only do we have the $169 million, but the cybercrime ring was held responsible for other $50 million in online identity theft, and the bank fraud conspiracy was for $9 million. So that's quite a lot of money.

Now, interestingly, because all three of these people have some type of connection to the Russian government, he's the son of Valery Seleznev, who's a member of the Russian Duma, right? So, read into that whatever you have to read, but, he's connected.

Now, the second person that we have is Vladislav Klyushin. He was sentenced in September 2023 --- so more recent --- to nine years, and he was participating in a $93 million inside trading scheme. So basically what he did, he and his co conspirators, they were working for a Moscow based IT services company. They were offering APT simulations, penetration testing, basically for defensive purposes.

That's what they alleged. But basically what they were doing was hacking into American networks, stealing inside confidential information, and then trading with that information. He earned $34 million for these crimes, which he had to forfeit, and then he's been ordered to pay restitution.

Benjamin Wittes: Earned is a funny word for it

Eugenia Lostri: He put in a lot of work for it.

Benjamin Wittes: Okay.

Eugenia Lostri: He was also, getting money from other people, and he was investing it in this scheme, and he was getting like a 60 percent cut out of their earnings. So, he had a whole thing going there. So he was arrested in Switzerland in March 2021 and extradited to the U.S. later that year in December, and to get to the point where I tell you how is he connected to the Russian government, I think it's interesting to note that one of his coconspirators was one of the 12 Russian nationals that were named in Special Counsel Mueller's report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. We always end up coming back to that report, apparently.

Benjamin Wittes: The Mueller report is never two steps below the surface.

Eugenia Lostri: No. Again, reading to that how much of a connection he may have to the government or, we know that the company that he worked for was used by the Russian government, the president's office, a bunch of agencies, regional bodies, right? They were, they were apparently good at what they were doing.

And now the last one is Vadim Konoshchenok, and he's the one that I would not necessarily place in the cybercriminal bucket. It's more of a tech, dual use technology, smuggling technology case, but the case was being handled by the U.S. Attorney's Office National Security and Cybercrime Section, so I'm still going to talk about him.

So he came to the U.S. --- he has not been sentenced, he has not been convicted, but he was extradited from Estonia in July 2023 --- and he's involved with conspiracy for his involvement in a scheme to smuggle sensitive, and here I'm quoting from DOJ, sensitive American made electronics and ammunition to the Russian defense sector through a Moscow based company.

The companies that he's involved with, they were sanctioned in early 2022 by OFAC and the BIS because of their role in the invasion of Ukraine. So there is grounds there to believe that the smuggling of technology that he was a part of was contributing to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Some of the technology could be used in the development of nuclear and hypersonic weapons, quantum computing, other military applications, and I think, important to note, if he had been convicted, he would have faced a maximum of 30 years in prison. So that gives you, I think, a sense of, how important he was.

Benjamin Wittes: I totally get why this last guy is of interest to Putin in the context of a prisoner exchange. But it seems to me the inclusion of the, granted high value, cyber criminals is a little mysterious.

And I want to ask both of you about three possible theories. One is Eugenia's suggestion that the individuals have a certain protexia, to use the Russian phrase, because they are the son of a Duma member or because they're kind of involved with the power elites. The second is that, hey, we just don't have a lot of high value Russians anymore in our custody. And so the Russians are working their way down the food chain, and these are the sort of highest value Russians that we're holding.

And the third, which I'm tempted by, honestly, is the fact that cybercrime is sufficiently important to the Russian state that this is the equivalent of more direct espionage activity during the Cold War, and that these guys really matter to them. So Eugenia, why --- and then Shane --- why do you think Vladimir Putin cares about these people?

Eugenia Lostri: So I don't have a clear answer as to why these people made the cut and why others didn't. Maybe it is a) because there is some sort of, protection, there is some sort of interest domestically that is pushing for, okay, if you need someone that maybe it's not as important, but you can still get another name, maybe that's a name that you can get.

From the cyber side, I want to say the U.S. government has been making a point for some time about how they view these indictments and bringing these charges forward as a real way to disrupt a lot of the malicious activity. They've made a point. You've seen many of the press releases, the way that they're framing it, they're talking about this being a message, this being, you're going to do it and eventually we're going to get you, right?

And, I may be naive, I don't know that might just be the way that you want to frame it, but I think if you give up some of the people that have taken longer and maybe provide a higher value hacking power, you are undermining yourself. And I wonder if that has any bearance at all in what names made it to the list or not.

Benjamin Wittes: Shane, what do you think?

Shane Harris: I don't know for sure, but I'll propose a fourth option which is based to some degree in some reporting that some colleagues and I have been doing here, which is that Putin didn't care about any of these other seven people. He only wanted Krasikov. And because the Americans had come up with---

Benjamin Wittes: Wait, just pause there. Putin only cared about the murderer. Go on.

Shane Harris: Yes indeed, whom he has called a patriot. That he only wanted Krasikov and that the Americans and the Germans came up with this list of these additional, activists and democracy activists who were friends of Navalny, coworkers of Navalny to get Berlin on board.

And so the American list was growing and the Russians didn't want to make it look like they were like, giving up 16 people for one guy. And they need to come up with some other names. And these are the names that are doable.

One reason I'm a little hesitant on saying that's the reason is because, some countries were balky at this, the Slovenians didn't quite want to go on it. So it's not like these guys are insignificant. And Eugenia has done a really good job of talking about why they are significant people. So I don't mean to make it look like they're just thrown in as a nothing. But I do think that Russia needed to come up with more people that it was going to get back, so it didn't just look like trading Krasikov for these really high value folks.

But I do think at the end, it's possible that Putin really just wanted the murderer and other forces in Russia probably came up with a list of like, all right while we're at it, who else can we get?

Benjamin Wittes: Let's get some cyber criminals too.

Shane Harris: And to your point there too, Ben, there is a point at which this, the Russian state and cybercrime are interlinked.

So if you're coming up, you got to find some names. All right. Let's find some legit people that would be ones that we would want to get back. And I suspect maybe even in the case of, I don't know this for a fact, but of, the couple that were in Slovenia who were married. Maybe there's a sense of  well,  there's like a humanitarian gesture here. They're married with kids. Let's get them home.

Benjamin Wittes: All right. So let's talk a little bit about how this went down. When we think of centers for prisoner exchanges, I honestly don't think of Ankara. How did the Turks get involved?

Shane Harris: That's a good question. I still don't know how exactly the Turks got involved on this and why it was deemed as a place for this to work. It could be because both the United States and Russia have relations with Turkey. It's certainly not what you think of when you think of as a neutral arbiter.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, it's a NATO country.

Shane Harris: Yeah. Like they didn't go to Oman or like Switzerland. So I don't really know is the answer to that.

What I do know from reporting is they played a pretty significant role in this. Notably and if you want to get into the weeds of journalistic practice you will notice that a number of news organizations, including the Washington Post, when they alerted readers to this swap cited Turkish officials as the source of that. The big reason for that being, and it's no secret at this point, but a number of news organizations were operating under an embargo which means that we were privy to certain details of this very sensitive swap on the agreement that we not publish anything until everyone was out of harm's way. And there were some news organizations that did not follow that request from the U.S. government.

So when we, when this was happening and the Turkish officials came out and said, hey, this is happening. It's like okay, now you have a whole government involved saying we're doing this, we facilitated it. Turkey took a little bit of a victory lap in some of these statements, their intelligence service coming out saying we've been very involved in this and we were key to this. It makes them look good, I suppose.

Benjamin Wittes: Are they overstating their role?

Shane Harris: I don't know. It's a question that we'll have to dig into and I haven't had time yet of like, why Turkey and what did they,  what was this? So I suppose we'll find out more about that. But I was a little bit surprised in that. There were rumors going around about other countries in the Middle East that might play host to this. But yeah, it turned out to be, Erdogan’s lucky day to bring the nations together on the tarmac.

Benjamin Wittes: So, one thing that you alluded to before but I want to come back to is President Biden's personal role in this. You mentioned his call with the prime minister of Slovenia. Was this something that he was in a significant way, pervasively involved in? Did he have to approve this personally? What do we know about the personal involvement of the president?

He certainly has been making public statements about it today. Is this a personal accomplishment of Joe Biden or should we think of it as a more routine staff level thing?

Shane Harris: I think that we should view this as a personal accomplishment for Joe Biden. And then I'll get to maybe one or two other people who I think deserve credit here.

Hostage negotiations, prisoner swaps, spy swaps, all of these things don't occur ultimately without the approval of the president of the United States. And we have seen many examples of American presidents getting very deeply and emotionally involved in the plight of Americans who have been unjustly detained or taken hostage.

Benjamin Wittes: That was how the Iran Contra affair started.

Shane Harris: You took the words out of my mouth. Yeah. Ronald Reagan in the 1980s deeply felt the plight of Americans who were held hostage. He met regularly with their families at the White House. People were tying yellow ribbons around trees. He famously said, we don't trade arms for hostages, except we did.

And he engaged in activities to get those people freed and to do some other things in Nicaragua, that led to the Iran Contra affair that nearly could have led to his impeachment. Reagan felt it deeply. He felt it emotionally. He related to people emotionally on a personal level.

I don't want to overdraw comparisons to Joe Biden, but Joe Biden is that kind of person. He met with the families of people who were detained in Russia at the White House. He gave them tours. When kids or young family members would be at the White House, he'd make sure they had time to play on the swing set.

He took a really deep personal interest in this. We know from reporting and from things that he has said, he was briefed during his presidential daily briefing the day after Evan Gershkovich was arrested. And we understand from a senior administration official at that point he said to Jake Sullivan look, open up the channels and figure out a way to get this guy back, which I guess he'd done really already with others, too.

So I think he felt it very deeply. It's not surprising. I do think another person who deserves a lot of credit for this, and we've heard this not just from U.S. officials who work with him, but from foreign officials as well, is Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, who really does seem to have been along with, I think, Tony Blinken and Bill Burns, the CIA director, one of the top people really pushing this, but really at the White House, at the staff level, it seems like Jake was the one who was doing things like, coming up with lists of people who they could get out who were political prisoners, looking for a way to keep going when it looked like the deals were falling apart.

Someone who works closely with him told me that when the news came that Navalny had died, it was like the wind went out of the sails at the White House. And this person said it seemed like Jake was the only one left with any optimism. And it was notable to me today that Jake did the briefing from the podium in the White House press room and he started choking up in that briefing.

And I don't think that's performative. He's not a performative person. I think he really became invested in this. He spent the last 48 hours, we're told, before the hostages, the prisoners came back, on the phone telling their families and saying, and we want you to come to the White House to be with us here.

So I think that really that's pretty significant work by him. Tony Blinken worked this very hard with his counterparts in Germany. He had tough conversations with Lavrov. And, and Bill Burns, the famous diplomat without portfolio was tasked a number of times to use this special channel, as the Russians like to call it, that allows the CIA to talk to intelligence in Russia. And that channel was used as the conduit for sending the proposals back and forth and doing the negotiation. A job that he actually has been doing a lot of when it comes to people held in Gaza right now, Israelis held in Gaza. So those are the big names, I think.

And, as these things always go, it becomes personal. And one of the things I love about stories of hostage negotiations is they are all about trying to balance policy with emotion. You're talking about real people who are suffering, who are languishing, who are dying, who have limited time and their families, all they want is for them to come home and all they have are questions and all they want are answers and action. And I think people I've talked to over the years, none of them are impervious to that pressure that comes from the family and none of them want to fail these people. So yeah, I think it's a deeply personal endeavor.

Benjamin Wittes: Well, so this story has all but one thing that make it a perfect Shane Harris story.

It has hostage negotiations, which are a Shane Harris specialty. It's an intelligence community story. It has families who are desperate to get their people home. The only thing it lacks is a UFO.

Shane Harris: Correct.

Benjamin Wittes: Shane Harris, Eugenia Lostri, thank you both for joining us today.

Shane Harris: Thanks, Ben.

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