Today, Explained - Why Russia arrested an American reporter

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

Evan Gershkovich’s detention is a callback to the last time a US journalist was accused of espionage in Russia — and to a Soviet-era tactic for manipulating the West. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Matt Collette, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The State Department, in the last few hours, designated Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich wrongfully detained. It's language that we'd already heard from Secretary of State Antony Blinken. In my own mind, there's no doubt that he's being wrongfully detained. Today, his office made the designation official, which means the U.S. government will have more resources to work on bringing Gershkovich home. Fittingly, the Wall Street Journal broke the story. Now that they have actually designated him as wrongfully detained,

the Office of the Special Envoy of Hostage Affairs and other groups within the government are able then to move forward and push for, you know, advocating for Evan's release. Gershkovich is, of course, not the only American to be detained in Russia, but he is a journalist and he's accused of spying and that has not happened since the Cold War who is Evan? why was he arrested? how might he get out? we've got some answers coming up on Today Explained

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Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Piotr Sauer is a Russia affairs reporter for The Guardian, but he is reporting on Russian affairs from outside of Russia. He left Moscow in March of 2022, not long after the war started. I left Russia, like many other journalists at the time, for security reasons. I was trying to get back into the country, trying to get accreditation from the foreign ministry, but I wasn't able to get the right papers. And now, obviously, after Evan's arrest, I'm not thinking of going back anymore. Piotr has been on the show with us before. In fact, it was just last summer.

And so we called him after learning that he and Evan Gershkovich were friends. I met Evan five years ago on my first day at the Moscow Times, an English language newspaper. As I walked into the office, right away, I was greeted by this big infectious smile of Evan. And he himself moved to Moscow a year earlier also to get a job at the Moscow Times. Evan is the son of Soviet emigres. He grew up in New Jersey, you know, just as an American kid. But because of his background, because of his parents who left Russia in the 70s and moved to the States, he always had an interest in Russia and the broader

region. He spoke Russian at home. You know, he always wanted to report on the country. So when he got the opportunity, he was working at the time for the New York Times. But when he got the opportunity to move to Moscow, he took the leap of faith and took a job at the Moscow Times in 2017. And what was it like working with him? I imagine you guys were like in your mid-20s, late 20s at the time? Yeah, yeah. You know, it was really the start of our careers. You know, I've loved working with Evan. We did a lot of double bylines together. We worked very closely together. You know, he's just an amazing colleague, very generous with his time.

You know, he always wanted to get the story right. He would spend hours and hours interviewing people, re-interviewing them just to make sure he got it right. One myth, I think, is access in Russia. And we found that if you go out looking for people, people are willing to talk. And yeah, Evan, as a person, and I think Evan as a professional, are very interlinked. He was always so good at making sure that the people he was talking to are feeling comfortable. They really felt that he was really interested in their story. He was extremely open, extremely social, extremely curious about you, whether, you know, you were an important businessman or an opposition leader

or a struggling artist. You know, he was so, so diverse in his reporting. What happened after the war started? Yeah, Evan, just like me and many other journalists, he left the country. He temporarily moved to London. And then he was accredited for ministry. So, you know, he always told me, as long as I can report, I should on Russia. So, you know, he bravely returned in the summer and would do regular trips to Moscow and, you know, and report from outside of Moscow as well. So that was his choice. You know, we always discussed this choice, but he said, you know, I should be there because I'm accredited by the foreign ministry.

Many of our Russian colleagues were forced to flee under real threat of prosecution and some Russian journalists were jailed. And he thought, you know, if I'm privileged enough to be able to report as a foreigner, I should do this. What do you know about Evan's arrest? Unfortunately, not that much because the state is saying it's a secret case. It's now been three days since Evan Gershkovich's colleagues at the Wall Street Journal last heard from him. That is as he was entering a steakhouse in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg for a meeting. We now know that he was detained inside that steakhouse. Russia's security service claimed he'd been collecting secrets about a defense factory. We know that the FSB, the Federal Security Services, issued a statement last Monday saying that he's arrested on espionage charges

for spying for the United States. It's obviously an unprecedented, bogus charge. Gershkovich is being held in Lefortova, a notorious prison in the Russian capital. He's the first American to be jailed for alleged espionage since Nicholas Danilov, a reporter then at U.S. News and World Report, who was arrested and put in the same prison, by the way, back in 1986. This is a notorious Soviet era prison where many famous political opponents of the regime have been imprisoned, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous writer during the Soviet Union. You know, this jail is really meant to isolate you

as much as possible from the outside of the world. You know, he'll be spending his time there only with one other cellmate. And that's the only person he'll be speaking to for months. You know, there's no social contact with the other prisoners. It's sort of this maximum security prison, a cell of eight square meters. It's always light there, even at night, so it's quite hard to sleep. You can walk for one hour a day, shower once a week. It's very tough mentally, especially.

Is he given a lawyer? He has met his lawyer, a Wall Street Journal appointed lawyer. And it was a great relief to find out that the lawyer said that he's physically in good state and mentally he's not broken. So for his friends, for his family, this was just such a relief because for days we had no idea how he was doing. We've heard that he's reading Life and Faith.

He managed to get it from the library there. Life and Faith is this fascinating book written by Vasilik Grossman, a Soviet writer who witnessed the Second World War, reported on it. And the book is really about excesses of the terrorism, about the Soviet Union. He always told me he wanted to read it. So it's sadly ironic that he has to read it now, being jailed in Moscow. Tell me about the charge of spying. So yeah, I mean, this is an unprecedented charge. Russia has used this charge on other foreigners before, most notably on Paul Whelan, the US contractor who's been in jail for four years now in Russia. On journalists, this hasn't

been used in modern Russia. It's an extremely serious case. You know, he could get up to 20 years in jail. And it's extremely rare for people to be acquitted on this case. So he won't be facing an honest judge. There are Western journalists in Russia. They have been for a very long time. Do you know why Evan was the one who was picked up? It's a very difficult question. And we can only speculate. Obviously, Evan was doing amazing reporting, which was critical of the Kremlin. And Vladimir Putin probably didn't like his reporting. But at the same time, I think a lot has to do with the fact that he was American, that he was a U.S. citizen. There were only around five, six American journalists left reporting on the country at the time of his arrest.

So in the end, I don't think the list was that big. And obviously, this seems like a clear case of hostage taking. What happens next for Evan? Do you know? Yes, he will stay in Lefortovo at least until the end of May. Then the judge will decide whether to extend his pretrial detention. Unfortunately, these spy cases can take months, if not longer. Eventually, if he gets a sentence, he'll be moved to a regular prison.

Usually, those prisons are located somewhere far away from Moscow, in Siberia or in the north of the country. But for now, he is in the fort of A. I guess the only positive thing is that he is able to receive letters. And together with some colleagues, we've set up a letter campaign for him. And it's been amazing to see people he knows, but also people he never met sending letters. He's received over 500 letters so far. I mean, at least those letters have been sent. Hopefully he'll receive them soon. And he can write letters back. So, you know, from a personal perspective, I'm really hoping to get a letter soon and just

see how he's doing. You've written to him there? Yeah, of course. And it was the hardest letter I ever had to write. How do you put into words how you feel, how much you care for him. It had to be in Russian as well, because all letters have to be in Russian. It's a letter you never want to write. And yeah, I obviously teared up. It was incredibly difficult. You said earlier that you have tried to get back into Russia. I mean, it is your job to be in the place where the news is happening. Are you still trying after all of this? At the moment, I don't think that's a good idea for me. We'll see how things develop. And obviously, that also depends on the general situation.

It is important as a Russia correspondent to try to report from Russia. But, you know, there is a point where you need to think if the risks are worth it. And, you know, Russia has really crossed the line with Evans' arrest. Obviously, this is a game changer for a lot of Western journalists. I think it represents that Russia doesn't play by any rules anymore.

There was always this sort of unspoken rule that foreign journalists could report on the country. You know, they harassed and prosecuted Russian journalists for years, for decades. But as a foreign journalist accredited by the foreign ministry, you were allowed to be there. But now it seems like every foreigner could be taken hostage for their own goals, whether that's to exchange someone they want in the West or just to intimidate us. That's unclear, but it's the one thing we do know that you're no longer safe as a foreigner.

Piotr, before I let you go, out of wild curiosity, are you willing to tell me anything that was in your letter to Evan? Yes. The last thing we talked about on Wednesday, hours before his arrest, we talked about Arsenal. It's a soccer team that we both loved, and it's doing really well this season. We could win the league.

So right after the game finished, I made sure to write a letter with the score, give him a bit of highlights and description, just so he has... I know he's really upset. He's not able to watch the game, so I'll make sure to update him. You're a good friend, Piotr. Thank you so much for taking the time today.

Thank you, Niall. Thank you, Niall. Coming up, the last reporter before Evan Gershkovich to be arrested and charged with espionage in Russia. He's going to join us. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained.

Ramp.com slash explained. R-A-M-P dotcom slash explained ramp.com slash explained cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. Сегодня и что оно означает? This is Today Explained. Give me your full name, if you would, Today and what it means. reporter. Nick is the former Moscow bureau chief for U.S. News and World Report, and he was not especially surprised when Evan Gershkovich was arrested. I thought, here we go again. In August of 1986, it was him. Nick was on his way out of Russia. He had just finished a five-year

stint. He was done. And he met up with a friend and exchanged some Stephen King novels for what he thought was an envelope full of news clippings. And then, in an incident he prefers not to remember. Fortunately, most of that's receded from my mind. The KGB ambushed him and threw him into Lefortovo prison. We had rules of behavior that were posted on the wall, what you were supposed to abide by. If you didn't read Russian, I don't know how you could have abided by them. But anyway, there they were. Like Evan, he does speak Russian.

And so when the Soviet Union said Nick was a spy, and what was in that envelope wasn't news clippings, it was top secret documents, he was in a lot of trouble. Being in prison is no good, either in the United States or in Russia. It may be slightly worse in Russia because you are really very isolated, whereas in American detention, you tend to have access to the outside world by television, maybe newspapers, maybe phone calls, maybe visits. That is less true in Russia. When you are in prison the way I was, you tend to feel

that you may have been forgotten. And my understanding was that the United States got quite upset over the fact that a journalist who was not a spy was imprisoned, and there was quite a lot of outrage that surfaced in the United States over all of this. That trickled back to me at some point. The United States did get quite upset, and he was released after a month in a negotiated prisoner swap. Our hostage in Moscow, Mr. Danilov, has been transferred to the custody of our ambassador. A Soviet spy flew from Washington, D.C. to Moscow,

and Nick Danilov flew from Moscow home to Washington, D.C. to Moscow, and Nick Daniloff flew from Moscow home to Washington, D.C. By now, the concept of a prisoner swap with Russia is feeling very familiar. Brittany Griner was released in one of these trades. But Calder Walton of Harvard's Belfer Center says this is not a good idea. He's the author of a forthcoming book called Spies, the Epic Intelligence War Between East and West. And he spent a lot of time looking into the history of these types of allegations. To arrest a foreign journalist was unusual even in the Soviet period. What was much more common was to arrest political dissidents and people who disagreed

with the Kremlin's line of thought on the pretext of being foreign espionage agents. So the crime was quite commonly wielded, but it was unusual, if not unique, to actually arrest a foreign correspondent like Nick Daniloff. It was unusual even in 1986. Here we are now in 2023. There is no more Soviet Union. How did we get from then when it was unusual to today? Well, you're absolutely right. So the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, ceased to exist. But the continuity that you allude to in your question revolves, I'm afraid, around the person of President Vladimir Putin, who was a former KGB officer. His experience in the KGB in the 1980s, exactly at the moment, by the way, when Nick Danilov was arrested, that shaped Putin's view

of the world. Putin has never accepted the fact that the old USSR lost the Cold War, and he continues to try to revise the outcome. Crimea, Georgia, now, now. And it is, alas, unfortunate that what we find today in Putin's Russia is a rolling out of former KGB practices updated for the modern digital world. So I'm afraid when looking at the perspective of who's in charge in the Kremlin, it's entirely unsurprising that Putin's Russia would resort to such horrendous practices as arresting a foreign correspondent on trumped up charges, false charges of espionage. Do you think there is any way at all that Russia believes Evan Gershkovich is a spy? I mean, I think, Noelle, that's to get into the mind of Putin, and I don't really want to go there.

But I think it's much more safe to say this is a vehicle, charging people for espionage is a long-standing vehicle in the Kremlin. So I don't know whether they genuinely believe it, but I think that there's a lot of evidence to say that what they are trying to do is to actually create a swap for one of the Russian agents who have been arrested recently in the West. Last week, the U.S. charged a Russian currently jailed in Brazil who posed as a Brazilian graduate student to spy in Washington. And it's for that reason, I think, he was charged with espionage in order to set in train a process for Russian spies arrested

in the West to be swapped for him. I would also just like to emphasize to your listeners that the US government does not use, the CIA does not use US journalists for cover. It's actually prescribed by law. It's prevented under legislation from doing that. Even receiving intelligence from US journalists, let alone using journalists as cover, it doesn't happen. It used to happen in the past, but since reforms and legislation in the 1990s, it does not happen. All of this lies in absolute sharp contrast to Russia

and the Soviet Union before it, which from its earliest days has used state media organs for cover for intelligence officers. So, for example, the Russian news outlet today, TASS, goes right back to the Soviet Union's earliest days, and some of its earliest so-called correspondents overseas were Soviet intelligence officers. And that continued throughout the 20th century, throughout the Cold War, and it is reasonable to say it continues today. So you're dealing with a very different regime. And it seems to me, as with so much about Putin's Russia, when you hear Putin's Kremlin saying X, Y, or Z that a foreign country is doing, it's usually actually them projecting. So listeners, I would suggest think about it this way.

When the lady doth protest too much, it's usually because the lady is actually doing that thing herself. I could see somebody saying, look, a prisoner swap worked in the case of Brittany Griner. WNBA star Brittany Griner on her way home to the U.S. tonight, freed from Russia in a prisoner swap for a Russian arms dealer convicted here in the U.S., known as the Merchant of Death. She came home. A bad guy was released, yes, but we got the American home. It sounds like what you're saying is Russia understands that this is a possibility. The United States also understands

that this is a possibility. Do you think prisoner swaps are a good idea? Well, I should say to start off with, it looks like the U.S. government has a choice of incredibly bad options. And I'm afraid that I would place a swap as one of the worst of the bad options for the simple reason that it will create the possibility of future hostage taking. If you get into this business, and I'm afraid that this is probably an unpopular

thing to say, and we're all incredibly glad that Brittany Greiner has come home. But I think that the, unfortunately, that case probably reinforced to the Kremlin that hostage taking can work in order to create a swap for people that are detained in the West that the Kremlin wants back. So what should the Biden administration do? In my experience of looking at the history of the way Western governments have dealt with the Kremlin and the Soviet Union and Russia, that light is the best disinfectant. Shine as much light onto their actions as possible

and to use every means available through sanctions, through expulsions. I mean, we know, for example, that the Russian delegation at the UN is still quite significant in New York. There are Russian consulates and embassies throughout the West. These Russian embassies and consulates contain undercover Russian intelligence officers. If I were in the Biden administration, I would be looking to put pressure on allies to gut those consulates and embassies to reduce them to shells, which, by the way, would allow for intelligence officers to also be expelled because they're operating, they're

undercover. And why does that matter? I mean, one might look at that and say, OK, well, you're expelling the Russians, but they just get to go back home. Evan Gershkovich is in a prison. This doesn't seem even. No, it doesn't. But this could be part of a package, a threat to say that if you don't release him,

you will have literally a shell of a diplomatic presence in Western countries. Even Russia at this point, I think, realizes the importance of having some sort of diplomatic presence in the West in order, not least, to maintain channels of communication about the future of the war and the hopeful peace coming out of it. I wonder, big picture, as you look at the history of all of this, we have Western journalists leaving Russia for their own safety. We spoke to Piotr Sauer of The Guardian earlier in the show.

He said he hasn't been able to get back into Russia since the war started. This is a fellow whose job it is to cover Russia. What do we lose when we don't have Western journalists in Russia? Do we really lose anything? Well, the entire purpose of people in your profession is to ask awkward questions to governments and to hold them to account. And it's for that exact reason that journalists are within the crosshairs of the Kremlin. So what do we lose? We lose reporting from within that country, but Russians themselves lose access, albeit usually in roundabout ways through Western websites, reporting about what is going on in their own country. That was Calder Walton. His book is coming out this summer.

It's called Spies, the Epic Intelligence War Between East and West. Thanks on this episode to Vivian Salama of The Wall Street Journal, who you heard at the very beginning of the show. Vivian broke the story today about the State Department's designation of Evan as wrongfully detained. Today's show was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and edited by Aminah El-Sadi. It was engineered by Patrick Boyd and fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Matthew Collette. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thanks for watching!