Bloomberg’s scoop showing how Trump ally Steve Witkoff coached the Kremlin about the best way to curry Trump’s favor is extraordinary because of what it tells us about Witkoff’s questionable loyalty and the Kremlin’s potential influence on US negotiating efforts. But equally interesting is the leaked material and where it might have come from.
The story involves two intercepted phone calls: one between Witkoff and top Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov, and one between Ushakov and Kirill Dmitriev, who has been deeply involved in negotiations with the Trump White House.
The Bloomberg story was published without a byline or dateline, perhaps because noting where the story was written or who wrote it could provide clues about the identity of the source. Bloomberg says only that it has “reviewed and transcribed the audio” of the two phone calls, without giving any indication about sourcing or any investigation done to verify authenticity.
However, given the agency’s reputation for rigorous reporting, it can be assumed that the source was considered very trustworthy before the decision to publish was made.
Ushakov, who was on both calls, appeared to confirm the authenticity of the recordings on Wednesday: although he claimed that some of it was “fake”, he said he would not comment on the rest because the calls were confidential, and said leaking of such discussions was “certainly unacceptable”.
In an interview with the newspaper Kommersant, Ushakov said that some of his conversations are conducted on encrypted government channels, but suggested that the calls with Dmitriev and Vitkoff may have been conducted over WhatsApp. “There are certain conversations on WhatsApp that generally anyone can listen to somehow,” he said.
The contents of the call provide evidence that many already had suspicions about Wittkoff’s closeness to the Russian position in the negotiations. The question of who took the highly unusual step of leaking such sensitive audio to a news agency is more complex.
“It’s really hard to predict. It could be 100m different things, including someone on the Russian side trying to damage Witkoff’s reputation,” said Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA Moscow station chief.
Russian intelligence agencies have a long lineage of intercepting and releasing sensitive political calls, but Moscow has no clear motive behind compromising Ushakov, a key aide to Vladimir Putin, and Vitkoff, Russia’s friendliest negotiator in the Trump administration. However, given reports of divisions among the Kremlin elite over who will manage relations with the US, nothing can be ruled out.
Ukraine may have a motive for making the call public – Kiev is extremely uncomfortable with Vitkoff’s role in the talks and would be eager to weaken his position as well as publicize the shocking extent of cooperation between the Kremlin and the White House adviser. But the risk of a catastrophic confrontation with the Americans if caught would probably give Ukrainian officials pause for thought, and it would also be an impressive technological coup for Ukrainian agencies to be able to monitor WhatsApp calls originating outside Ukrainian territory.
A senior former intelligence official said that although multiple agencies could have intercepted the call, the most likely source was someone inside the US system.
The official said, “There are different ways to intercept the call, including traditional signals intelligence methods, cyber attacks, and access to devices, so theoretically anything is possible, but I strongly suspect that it came from the US, and if that’s the case, then you have two entities that are capable of doing that, the CIA and the NSA.”
Many inside US intelligence agencies are unhappy with the current administration and its policies on Ukraine and Russia, but leaking the audio of the call would be a difficult and potentially extremely dangerous move for any disgruntled employee.
One notable detail is that Bloomberg only obtained the audio of the recording rather than the transcript or report of the call, which suggests that the source was either directly involved in intelligence collection or was senior enough to obtain the raw audio. Another former intelligence officer suggested that a European intelligence service alarmed by Witkoff’s pro-Russian position was most likely behind the leak.
What makes the publication so surprising is that, if the interception of Ushakov’s calls was part of a long-running infiltration, releasing the information would likely have required him to change his devices and communication habits, and thus would have closed a useful intelligence window to whatever agency obtained it.
One of the former officers said, “It’s not entirely surprising that multiple agencies might have this recording, but it is extremely surprising that someone would leak it.”
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