A highly secretive agency spies on and arrests American citizens in Russia

This Russian counter-espionage service is today the "Kremlin's most elite security force".

Evan Gershkovich, an American journalist for the newspaper The Wall Street Journal, together with his colleagues, condemns “the largest wave of repression since the demise of Joseph Stalin”. And it's this very secretive unit of the Russian Federal Security Service, namely the Counter-Espionage Operations Department (DKRO), that is said to spearhead this large-scale repressive movement.

The heir to Smersh

In 2024, after being imprisoned for 16 months in Russia, Evan Gershkovich was sentenced to 16 years' detention for espionage. Just a few days after the verdict, he was finally released as part of a prisoner exchange between Washington and Moscow, according to the media outlet Korii. In fact, the journalist had been targeted by the DKRO, headed by Lieutenant General Dmitri Minaïev. In an investigation that he co-wrote with three other colleagues from the Wall Street Journal, Gershkovich reveals that the DKRO is the heir to Smersh, the Stalin-era military counter-espionage service that operated during World War II.

“Although it only has about 2,000 agents, according to American and European officials, the DKRO is the most elite security force of the Kremlin”. “It has the power to force hundreds of thousands of people across Russia to monitor, intimidate or arrest foreigners and Russians it suspects of collaborating with them. DKRO agents are generously paid, even by the standards of the powerful and sprawling Federal Security Service, of which it is a part. [...] According to American and European officials, no DKRO officer is known to have defected to the West,” write the WSJ journalists.

Negotiation levers

It is the DKRO that, for example, participated in the major purge of the Ministry of Defence desired by the Russian president, following the failure of his "special operation" in Kiev, which was supposed to lead Russian forces into the Ukrainian capital in just three days. "Hostage diplomacy": that is the main focus of the DKRO, which has organised a vast campaign of arrests of several American citizens, among them former Marine Paul Whelan, basketball player Brittney Griner, and Evan Gershkovich... The aim being to use these hostages as negotiation levers to obtain the release of the assassin Vadim Krassikov, notes Korii.

And that's not all, as this secret unit also engages in intimidation attempts and targeted harassment of Western diplomats based in Russia. They are capable of putting pressure on Russian high school students studying at the American Embassy School in Moscow to get them to spy on their classmates, the sons and daughters of American diplomats.

(Manon Pierre - Source: Korii/Slates - Illustration: ©Unsplash)