The Suspected Russian Plot to Set Airplanes on Fire

0:04Earlier this year, our colleague Boyan Panchevsky met a source in a swanky hotel bar. The source worked for a European security agency. So we were kind of exchanging notes on that and talking about other stuff. And then, you know, after a few cocktails, I just asked him, so what's keeping you busy now? And he was like, well, you know, among other things, this conspiracy to set airliners on fire. — The source told Boyan a story that sounded straight out of a spy novel. So Boyan and his Wall Street Journal colleagues began investigating it. — So we pieced the puzzle together, and we found out that the Russians had come up with an ingenious way to smuggle undetectable incendiary devices and put them on airplanes.

1:01— That sounds terrifying. Yeah, I've spoken to veteran intelligence operatives, police officers, politicians, historians, and this was not even happening at the height of the Cold War. Russia, or rather than the Soviet Union, wasn't attempting conspiracies that might end in kind of mass casualties of Western civilians.

1:31This plot was alarming, and European intelligence agencies saw it as a big step up in Russian attacks in Europe, a violent conflict that has largely stayed hidden.

1:47Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leinbaugh. It's Friday, December 13th.

2:00Coming up on the show, Russia's escalating shadow war in Europe.

2:22Before Boyan heard about the plot to set fires on airplanes, he'd been reporting on strange events happening across Europe. One early incident was a fishing thrower in the Arctic Sea. It cut a vital internet cable. In Germany, sabotage knocked out a railway network. In the Baltic Sea, a gas pipeline was damaged. In Prague, for example, a bunch of civilians set buses and other civilian infrastructure on fire. A warehouse was set on fire in Britain. And the list goes on and on and on. All of these disparate events, from infrastructure attacks to things that looked like mindless vandalism, Boyan's sources said they were connected.

3:14Russia is expected to be behind many of these attacks. In some cases, there is evidence. There is so-called signal intelligence quite often from Western intelligence services, predominantly American and British, that find kind of chatter in the ether that proves and they have other evidence that are not obviously sharing with us. Other cases are basically sort of looks like a duck, talks like a duck, but it's very difficult to obtain evidence that would hold in court.

3:47Who is carrying out these attacks? Quite often these people are sort of students. They are sometimes refugees in Poland. There was a group of Ukrainian refugees, actually Russian-speaking Ukrainian refugees, who were paid to put out cameras on the railway. And it turned out they were actually working for Russian intelligence and they were doing their bidding in a way that seemed very naive. The cameras were used to spy on trains taking Western ammunition into Ukraine. One of the Ukrainian refugees who installed the cameras is a 22-year-old called Maxim Lecha. He's now serving a six-year sentence in Poland on espionage charges.

4:31He said he did it because it was, quote, easy money. Boyan says the reason Russia is recruiting civilians goes back to its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Europe responded to the war in Ukraine by essentially kicking out most, if not all, of the Russian spies that were operating on their territory. Through his reporting, Boyan estimates that around 500 Russian spies were expelled from Europe. And in one stroke, the Russians kind of lost that vital capacity that they've had. Once that happened, the Russians had to somehow supplement that lost capacity. And what they came up with was a very interesting and in the end, very, very efficient way of operating.

5:24They simply threw the kitchen sink at it. They started using civilians. They just used everyone they could get. So what did your sources say about how Russia is recruiting people? They use the Telegram channel quite a lot, but also other channels, other social media. And basically they offer them money, they wire them money sometimes in Bitcoin. And the person doesn't really know who's at the other end. What's the strategy? What's the goal? Well, the head of the British intelligence service, the MI5, put it succinctly. He said the goal is to create mayhem on the streets of Europe and Britain. And I think that kind of sums it up.

6:09Create chaos in order to create panic, in order to create insecurity, in order to kind of deter European governments, in order to weaken the resolve to support Ukraine. and also in order to force countries like Britain, Germany, the Czech Republic and so on to deploy vast capacities of intelligence gathering, the police, the army, etc. into investigating these cases that happen in their waters or in their soil. Do you have a sense of whether these attacks go all the way up to Vladimir Putin? What I've been told by multiple intelligence and security officials is that the broad brief has definitely been issued by the Kremlin, meaning it has been approved by Vladimir Putin.

7:00When asked by The Wall Street Journal about various attacks, the Kremlin has denied involvement. In one case, it called the accusation absurd and unsubstantiated. European authorities have investigated these attacks and charged some of the individuals involved. But Boyan says the European public generally isn't aware of this shadow war. Essentially, the authorities in countries like Germany, like the Czech Republic, to an extent the Nordic countries, they've come to the conclusion that if they do talk about it in public and if they do reveal to their respective populations that Russia is able to operate inside their countries, that this would kind of weaken the resolve, the popular resolve to support Ukraine.

7:49And Ukraine receives from these European countries enormous financial, political, and military support. But that stance shifted after a brazen attempt to start fires on airplanes. That's next.

8:23Following that tip Boyan got at the hotel bar proved to be a challenging assignment. It would take months of reporting. He spoke with European investigators, watched security camera footage, and reviewed photographic evidence. This is what he found. The incidents happened at two warehouses of the German shipping giant DHL. At those locations, packages are put in big crates to be sent on airplanes around the world. In July, at a DHL warehouse in Germany and one in the U.K., packages destined for North America caught on fire. Boyan watched a video showing a forklift moving one of these crates. First, it's a tiny little fire.

9:10The thing goes off. And then literal two seconds later, the entire thing is set alight. The entire forklift. Both fires were contained. And Boyan learned that the devices that caused them were concealed in ordinary back massagers. The kind that are shaped like a little cushion for your lower back. But investigators found that these ones were stuffed with magnesium. What's significant about magnesium? Well, magnesium, that certain type of magnesium-based mixture burns at extreme high temperature, and also it cannot be extinguished with the firefighting systems that exist on commercial airliners, because magnesium can even burn underwater, and it develops incredibly high temperatures.

10:03It basically, it was used, if you remember these old documentaries by people like Jean-Jacques Cousteau, the great French marine explorer. Up until the 70s, I think, divers were using magnesium flares even underwater when they were diving in kind of dark waters. So it's extremely dangerous, extremely efficient. Is there any way to detect these devices? They're a satellite in a way that's not traceable. So if you put that device, or at least at that time, had you put that device through a normal airport scanner, X-ray or whatever, it wouldn't have been recognized as any kind of incendiary device.

10:49After these incendiary devices caught fire, a multinational investigation was launched in Europe. German investigators recreated these devices with the components they found in a forensic lab, and they tested them in all imaginable scenarios. And they found that if an airliner was targeted and one of these devices would go off in the cargo and the airliner was flying over Europe, it would have time probably to land, to do an emergency landing at the nearest airport. But had this happened over the ocean, over the Atlantic Ocean, for example, then they wouldn't have time to land and the airplane would have been lost.

11:32What did DHL say about your story? They confirmed that it happened. They confirmed that they worked together with the relevant authorities to get to the bottom of it. And they confirmed that they've boosted their security protocols. DHL is a German company. the German government issued a detailed warning to DHL and companies like DHL to basically increase security because they are being targeted. In Europe, authorities took action against people connected with the plot. In Lithuania, investigators have arrested a man who sent four devices and alleged that he was used as a proxy by Russian spy services.

12:14And in Poland, officials say they've arrested four more people they believe were working on behalf of Russia. A Kremlin spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that any claims of Russian involvement in the plot are unsubstantiated. Even though the plot failed, it's prompted a change in Europe. Before Boyan started investigating, European security officials weren't speaking out about it. And some of them even admitted that, yes, we did cover it up. There was a brief to cover it up when we covered it up. So, you know, even in that kind of circle, in the security establishment, in the military, in the police to an extent, the intelligence community, there are a lot of people who think enough is enough and that we shouldn't be kind of sweeping this under the carpet.

13:04Now, some European authorities are becoming more vocal. The head of Poland's foreign intelligence agency said if the DHL plot had been successful, it would have represented a major escalation in Russia's shadow war. And in October, the head of the U.K.'s MI5 spy agency talked about the threat of Russian-backed criminals. The U.K.'s leading role in supporting Ukraine means we loom large in the fevered imagination of Putin's regime. And we should expect to see continued acts of aggression here at home.

13:41Poland is also becoming much, much more outspoken. They're very willing to attribute things to Russia. Germany is perhaps shifting. You know, I think this to me, to my mind, means that the security establishment has had enough and is trying to kind of jolt people into awareness of what's happening and what are the stakes and what are the risks that we're all basically exposed to now. And this DHL plot feels like it's raising the stakes. It's the most frightening incident or conspiracy that we've learned. And obviously the scary part is that we only learned about this because I had that late night meeting in a hotel bar having cocktails with someone who knew about it.

14:29There might be other things like that out there that we don't know about. What's next in this? I think the assumption is, the fear is, that it's just going to get worse because the level of aggression has been steadily rising in the past, it's almost three years now that the war in Ukraine was going on. And unlike during the Cold War, when there was a clear set of rules of engagement between the two blocs, between the two superpowers, and both of them were wary of going too far and triggering a confrontation that might end up in a nuclear holocaust. I think we've lost that fear. So, yeah, we're in a world where everything goes, from launching missiles into Ukraine to cutting cables to, you know, arson attacks on factories and buses in otherwise peaceful European capitals.

15:25That seems to show that there is much more aggression, at least coming from Russia toward the West than perhaps citizens of the West realize. That's absolutely true in my experience, yes. In the course of my reporting in the past almost three years, that's definitely become apparent to me. And also this discrepancy in the way we see the conflict, in the way we perceive the standoff with Russia. There is no sense that we are an actual all-out war with Russia, whereas on the Russian side, they do think that and they behave accordingly. So unless there is a resolution of the conflict in Ukraine and unless perhaps the West takes a more decisive posture and warns the Russians about some sort of retaliation, it's difficult to see how this will be diffused.

16:16You know, I've spoken to a number of very senior politicians who are well briefed on this matter. And a number of them told me, well, what are we expected to do? We are not going to put incendiary devices on Russian airplanes. We just don't do that. We're democracies. We operate under the rule of law. So it's, you know, it would seem that Western policymakers are in a pickle. And it's hard to see how this gets diffused anytime soon unless there is a broader resolution of the conflict.

16:57That's all for today, Friday, December 13th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode from Max Colchester, Thomas Grove, and Daniel Michaels.

17:38The show's made by With help from Trina Menino. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapok, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Katherine Anderson, Marcus Begala, Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, Nathan Singapok, Griffin Tanner, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis.

18:04Thanks for listening. See you Monday.

18:11Thank you.