Last August, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was freed by Russian authorities in a prisoner exchange with the United States. Russian national-security state officials had arrested Gershkovich on March 29, 2023, on charges of espionage on behalf of the CIA. In a secret trial, he was found guilty and later sentenced to 16 years in prison.
During the entire ordeal, I wrote several articles about the case:
https://www.fff.org/?s=Gershkovich
Since the time of Gershovich’s arrest, both the Journal and U.S. officials have fiercely denied that Geshkovich was a spy. That’s probably true but the problem is that their denials are rather worthless because if he was a spy, they would deny it anyway. Moreover, given Operation Mockingbird, the program in which the CIA employs assets in the mainstream press, it would not be beyond the realm of reasonable possibility that Gershkovich was a CIA asset. Moreover, if he was, it is not unreasonable to assume that he would have kept that fact secret from the Journal.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris greet Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, Alsu Kurmasheva and Vladimir Kara-Murza at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, Thursday, August 1, 2024, after the men’s release in a prisoner swap with Russia. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
Nonetheless, it is more likely than not that Gershkovich was arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced for simply writing articles that were critical of Russian president Vladimir Putin and his war in Ukraine. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that an authoritarian ruler would not take kindly to an American journalist writing critical stories in a conservative U.S. newspaper about a war that was provoked by the U.S. government and that was now resulting in the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers.
One of the aspects of the case that mystified me was the Journal’s failure to describe the events surrounding Gershkovich’s arrest. Surely Gershovich shared those matters with his Russian lawyers, who could then have shared them with Journal officials. Why wouldn’t the Journal and U.S. officials want to get Gershkovich’s side of the story out to the world before his trial or even after it?
Once Gershkovich got released, I figure that he would explain the events leading up to and surrounding his arrest. Did the arrest come up completely out of the blue? Or was there more to what happened when he got arrested?
According to a July 19, 2024, article in the Wall Street Journal, the Journal reported that “Evan was arrested in a restaurant while on a reporting trip for the Wall Street Journal.” An article dated July 18, 2024, on wmtw.com, stated “The Russian Prosecutor General’s office said last month that the journalist is accused of ‘gathering secret information’ on orders from the CIA about Uralvagonzavod, a plant about 150 kilometers (90 miles) north of Yekaterinburg that produces and repairs tanks and other military equipment.” According to that wmtw.com article, “Gershkovich’s employer and U.S. officials have dismissed those charges as fabricated and denounced the trial as illegitimate and a sham.”
But what is still not clear is what exactly was being dismissed and denied. Yes, it was clear that the Journal and the CIA were denying that Gershvich was a spy. But what about the events surrounding his arrest? Was he just eating dinner in that restaurant where he was arrested? Or was he having dinner with someone else, like a trusted source? If the latter, did that source give him information, either orally or in writing? If so, what did that information consist of? Was it about that military plant?
Last December 12, Gershkovich wrote his first article since his release from custody. It was a very long article in the Wall Street Journal, co-authored by three other writers. It was entitled “Tracking Putin’s Most Feared Secret Agency—From Inside a Russian Prison and Beyond.”
I figured that we would finally learn about the events leading up to and surrounding Gershkovich’s arrest. Alas, not a single word about those events. Gershovich simply states “When I was arrested by Russia’s security forces in 2023 — the first foreign correspondent charged with espionage since the Cold War — I never stopped reporting. On my release I set out to identify the man who had taken me, and to learn more about the spy unit that had carried out his orders.
The rest of the article is about the Russian official who was responsible for the Russian unit that arrested Gershkovich. Nary a word about the exact circumstances leading up to and surrounding the arrest itself.
That makes no sense to me. Why the longtime silence surrounding Gershkovich’s arrest itself? Wouldn’t a detailed explanation of that event go a long way to confirm the truthfulness of the Journal’s and the CIA’s denials and dismissals?
On October 11, 2024, the New York Times reported that Geshkovich is “writing a memoir about his time in prison, his five years living in Moscow, and Russia’s slide toward autocracy.” It would be nice if his memoir includes a detailed account of the events leading up to and surrounding his arrest.
