The Russian bounty program was an alleged project of Russian military intelligence to pay bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing U.S. and other allied service members during the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. The existence of the alleged program was reported in the media in 2020 and became an issue in the 2020 presidential election campaign.
In June 2020, The Washington Post reported that intelligence suggesting the existence of a bounty operation dated to as early as 2018. Both the Washington Post and Associated Press reported that Trump administration officials were informed of the intelligence reports in early 2019. In June 2020, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed, several months earlier, that Unit 29155 of the Russian military intelligence agency GRU had secretly offered Taliban-associated militants bounties to kill U.S. troops and other coalition personnel in Afghanistan, including during peace talks with the Taliban. The New York Times reported that "Officials said there was disagreement among intelligence officials about the strength of the evidence about the suspected Russian plot."
Defense Department officials then reported that U.S. military intelligence was unable to corroborate the reported program. In April 2021, the U.S. government reported that the U.S. intelligence community only had "low to moderate confidence" in the bounty program allegations.
Background
In 2010, Iran reportedly paid Taliban fighters US$1,000 for each U.S. soldier they kill in Afghanistan (). U.S. and British officials have accused Iran of giving support and weapons to the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. In August 2019, The Washington Post reported that Iran's "relationship with the Taliban now spans the economic, security and political realms and is likely to grow as the Taliban asserts itself again." Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have been also accused of supporting Taliban.
Russia initially supported the United States' war on terror and agreed to provide logistic support for the United States forces in Afghanistan. In May 2015, Russia closed a key military transport corridor which allowed NATO to deliver military supplies to Afghanistan through the Russian territory. Intelligence reports that Russia supplies arms to the Taliban have persisted for several years with contact in Northern Afghanistan beginning around 2015. Security officials from the United States and Afghanistan have previously determined that Russia provides financial support and arms to the Taliban and its leaders. Russian government officials have called the accusations baseless. Carter Malkasian, a former adviser to U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan, said that Russia began cultivating relationships with "certain Taliban elements" in northern Afghanistan around 2015, ostensibly as a response to Islamic State activity. According to the BBC, Russia "is deeply concerned about the rise of Islamist fundamentalism in the region spreading in its direction. And it sees the Taliban as one potential bulwark against this." In February and again in May 2019, a delegation of Taliban officials and senior Afghan politicians met in Moscow to hold a new round of Afghan peace talks. Reuters reported that "Russian officials as well as religious leaders and elders had asked for a ceasefire."
Unit 29155 is a covert unit of the GRU tasked with foreign assassinations and other covert activities. The unit has been linked to the 2016 Montenegrin coup plot, the poisoning of Bulgarian arms manufacturer Emilian Gebrev, and the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.
In 2019, 23 American service members were killed during operations in Afghanistan. Ten U.S. service members died from gunfire or improvised explosive devices in 2018 and 16 in 2019. Another two were killed in 2020 prior to the February ceasefire and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Several of the soldiers were killed in green-on-blue attacks (attacks by members of Afghan security forces against coalition forces). In December 2019, the Afghanistan Papers revealed that high-ranking military and government officials were generally of the opinion that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable, but kept this hidden from the public.
According to the lawsuit, filed in December 2019 in the D.C. District Court on behalf of Gold Star families, major U.S. and international defense contractors involved in Afghanistan made illegal "protection payments" to the Taliban, funding a "Taliban-led terrorist insurgency" that killed or wounded thousands of Americans in Afghanistan. A related lawsuit accused the Iranian government. In 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the "protection money" was "one of the major sources of funding for the Taliban."
On February 29, 2020, the Trump administration signed a conditional peace agreement with the Taliban, which calls for the withdrawal of foreign troops in 14 months if the Taliban uphold the terms of the agreement. In May 2020, President Trump said "it is time" to bring U.S. soldiers home from Afghanistan.
Research by Fetzer et al. finds that coalition fatalities increased media coverage of the Afghan conflict and reduced public support for the war across troop-sending NATO countries.
Intelligence gathering Trump White House officials were first informed in early 2019 of intelligence reports regarding a Russian bounty program.
Reports from Afghanistan-based U.S. Special Operations forces and intelligence officers that militants had been paid bounties in 2019 for their targeting of U.S. military personnel were raised in 2019 and 2020. The reports were based on interrogations of captured militants (including interrogations by the U.S. military), interrogations of captured criminals; and surveillance data. The accounts from Taliban militants "from opposite ends of the country and from separate tribes" were similar. Early on, intelligence agencies and analysts disagreed over the reliability of findings based on interrogations of the detainees. Intercepted electronic data showed large bank transfers to a Taliban-linked account from an account controlled by the GRU. Afghan officials said that several businessmen who transferred money through the hawala system were suspected of being intermediaries for the bounty program and were arrested in raids. Around January 2020, a joint operation between US forces and the Afghan National Directorate of Security raided a Taliban outpost in Kunduz. Thirteen people were arrested. One fled to Tajikistan while another, an Afghan drug lord Rahmatullah Azizi, was thought to have escaped to Russia. Security forces recovered around US$500,000 from Azizi's house in Kabul. According to the New York Times, U.S. intelligence identified Azizi as a key middleman, collecting multiple cash payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars from Russia and distributing them to Taliban-linked militants. The raid heightened U.S. intelligence suspicion of a Russian financial link to the Taliban and related networks.
Information on the bounty program was circulated in intelligence reports and two officials said that program was known by the region's CIA station chief as well as military forces tasked with engaging the Taliban. The CIA produced an intelligence assessment, reviewing and confirming the findings. The assessment concluded that Russian military operatives had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks on coalition forces in 2019. Rewards from the bounty program were thought to have been collected by Islamist militants or their criminal associates. Military officials also reviewed past combat casualties to determine whether any of the deaths could be attributed to the bounty program. Investigators focused on two attacks on U.S. troops, one of which was a bombing outside Bagram Airfield in April 2019 that killed Marines Robert A. Hendriks, Benjamin S. Hines, and Christopher Slutman. Officials did not describe how military targets were selected or the exact manner by which militants were paid. The unnamed Afghan officials claimed the bounty program offered up to $100,000 for each American or coalition soldier killed.
Intelligence assessment The existence of a Russian bounty program would mark an escalation of the ongoing Second Cold War and the first time GRU is known to have orchestrated attacks on Western military personnel. According to a New York Times report in July 2020, the Trump administration had sought to foster doubts about the existence of a Russian bounty program. The National Intelligence Council, which reported to Trump's director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, produced a two-and-a-half page memorandum stating that the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center assessed with "medium confidence" (i.e., "credibly sourced and plausible, but falling short of near certainty") that the GRU had offered bounties, but that the National Security Agency (NSA) and other Intelligence Community components said they "did not have information to support that conclusion at the same level" and thus had lower confidence in the conclusion. A separate Wall Street Journal report said that the NSA has "strongly dissented" from the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency assessments that the bounty plot is credible and real.
The Department of Defense (DOD), in testimony in July 2020 to the House Armed Services Committee by General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, said that U.S. defense intelligence agencies had no information to corroborate reports of a Russian bounty program in Afghanistan and lacked evidence of "cause and effect linkages to a Russian bounty program causing U.S. Military casualties."Courtney Kube & Ken Dilanian, U.S. commander: Intel still hasn't established Russia paid Taliban 'bounties' to kill U.S. troops , NBC News (September 14, 2020).
Upon taking office, Biden directed his administration to conduct a comprehensive review of U.S. policy toward Russia. The bounty reports were included in the review, along with other issues (such as the poisoning and imprisonment of Alexei Navalny, Russian efforts to interfere with the U.S. elections, and the SolarWinds cyberespionage attack).Abigail Williams, Dan De Luce, Carol E. Lee and Andrea Mitchell, U.S., E.U. impose sanctions on Russia over Navalny's poisoning , NBC News (March 2, 2021).Lara Seligman, Duckworth urges Biden admin to release intel on Russian bounties , Politico (March 1, 2021). In 2021, Senator Tammy Duckworth (Democrat of Illinois) asked Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to publicly release a declassified U.S. Intelligence Community assessment of the Russian bounty intelligence in the interest of transparency.
A spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) said in an April 2021 statement that the United States Intelligence Community had "low to moderate confidence" in the existence of the Russian bounty program. In U.S. intelligence, "moderate confidence" means that that intelligence assessed the information as "plausible and credibly sourced, but not quite corroborated enough to merit a higher rating" and "low confidence" means the conclusion was "based on questionable or implausible information — or information too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid inferences". Officials said that the "low to moderate confidence" was attributable to the sources of the bounty information (Afghan detainees, financial records captured during a raid, and "information and evidence of connections to criminal agents in Afghanistan and elements of the Russian government"), which cannot be taken at face value, as well as an operating environment in Afghanistan that makes intelligence-gathering (to corroborate hypotheses) difficult.