In late June, CIA officials held a secret meeting with Russian intelligence officers in an undisclosed Middle Eastern capital city to present a proposal for a possible prisoner swap. It was the latest in a series of offers US officials had made to Russia in a yearslong effort to secure the release of Americans imprisoned in Russia.
But this time, the CIA had something new to offer: Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin who’d been convicted of executing a man in broad daylight in Berlin and was serving a life sentence in a German prison.
The proposal the CIA offered to the Russians that day was the culmination of months of work by US officials to convince the Germans to release Krasikov, who’s seen as having close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The expansive deal presented that day included trading the Russian assassin for two high-profile Americans jailed in Russia on baseless charges of espionage: former US Marine Paul Whelan and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.
The Russian officials took the proposal back to Moscow. In early July, in a phone call with CIA Director Bill Burns, the Russian side indicated to the Americans that they agreed to the deal in principle, but the specifics still needed to be hammered out. Then on July 17, Moscow accepted the terms by transmitting their answer to the CIA, setting the stage for the largest prisoner exchange between the US and Russia since the Cold War, one that involved 24 prisoners and seven countries.
It was a remarkably swift conclusion to years of painstaking negotiations between the US and more than half a dozen countries.
Read CNN’s full timeline of the negotiations.
