TheChek News Flow

Washington turns to Middle East power brokers to bring prisoners home; a former U.S. Marine for a Russian drug smuggler

ANKARA ESENBOGA AIRPORT, Turkey—Two jets—one American, the other Russian—were approaching the same runway, each carrying a single prisoner, both monitored by a Turkish intelligence officer in the control tower.

In the cockpits of each jet, pilots were navigating through thick clouds toward a cordoned-off area of Turkey’s capital city airport, when the officer’s voice issued directives over a secure line.

Neither jet, he warned, would have permission to land until their crews ticked off a checklist that included taking and texting him photos of every passenger on board. There were to be no news cameras, no last-minute delays or changes to the flight manifests—and no guns.

Two months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Turkey was thrusting itself into the secret world of hostage brokering, orchestrating a carefully choreographed exchange between two hostile powers.

Within minutes, the Turkish officer’s phone lighted up with photos of Russian and American passengers whose faces matched those named on a list prearranged over days of preparation. Air-traffic control signaled clearance to land and the two jets taxied to the agreed distance of 300 meters, their engines still roaring as their doors, precisely facing one another, opened.

From the first plane, wearing a brown T-shirt and khaki pants and carrying a single yellow folder, stepped Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot convicted on cocaine-smuggling charges in the U.S.

From the other—shoulders hunched and gaunt after three six-day hunger strikes at Russia’s remote IK-12 penal colony—former U.S. Marine Trevor Reed shuffled onto the tarmac. Bundled by balaclava-masked agents of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, onto the back of the jet, he had been seated behind a curtain wondering for the duration of the flight where he was headed.

The April 27, 2022, handover, described in exclusive detail by Turkish and American officials and another person present, was the first of several hostage exchanges that Turkey has hosted—among them a prisoner-of-war swap between Ukraine and Russia in September of last year which was the most important and sensitive since Moscow’s invasion. Turkey has more recently helped Qatar mediate between Israel and Hamas to try to extract the estimated 200 Israeli and foreign hostages, including around a dozen Americans, abducted during the militants’ incursion from Gaza.

Not since the height of the Cold War have so many Americans been held as bargaining chips by hostile states. Those held in Russia include Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, who are both kept on espionage charges that they and the U.S. government strongly deny. “We have contacts with our American partners in this regard,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week. “I hope that we will find a solution.”

The burgeoning practice of hostage-takings by rival nations has become so widespread that the Biden administration has declared it a national emergency. And yet the governments America is now tapping to help navigate this pirate world of kidnappings and ransom-payments are all too familiar with the game. In 2018, the U.S. sanctioned Turkey’s interior and justice ministers for the “unjust detention” of Andrew Brunson, an evangelical pastor from North Carolina, delisting them after his release.

Last year, when Russian and U.S. intelligence officials discussed which country could host a prisoner trade given many countries’ travel restrictions on Russian officials, both sides agreed they could trust Turkey.

“It is all about trust,” said one senior Turkish official. “It is intelligence diplomacy.”

If it was once Zurich, Vienna and the so-called Bridge of Spies connecting East and West Berlin that provided the trading floor for spy swaps and hostage deals, that mantle has shifted decidedly east.

Russia added Switzerland and Austria, two historically neutral states, to its “Unfriendly Countries List” after they joined European sanctions. Swiss diplomats, who once held a front-row seat mediating the superpower conflicts of the 20th century, now grumble in WhatsApp groups over being relegated to the bleachers.

Instead, Turkey—a NATO member which still supplies military-linked goods to Russia and sells Ukraine combat drones developed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s son-in-law—is at the center of a group of Middle East power brokers that are amassing diplomatic clout by hosting prisoner swaps, peace talks and backchannel negotiations.

Qatar, a U.S. ally which also hosts the political office of Hamas, helped mediate September’s swap of five jailed Americans for several Iranian prisoners and access to $6 billion in frozen oil revenue. The United Arab Emirates, one of America’s closest military partners in the Middle East—and now a hub for Russian oil trading—hosted last year’s exchange of American basketball gold medalist Brittney Griner and convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.

Saudi Arabia—which has worked with Turkey to help free U.S. and U.K. citizens taken as prisoners of war while fighting Russian forces in eastern Ukraine—has also jailed American citizens for long sentences for criticizing the regime of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. Washington nonetheless has thanked Saudi Arabia for its role facilitating prisoner exchanges with Russia.

The diplomatic shift also throws into stark relief the limits of a central foreign-policy plank of the Biden administration, which broadly views the U.S. in a contest between democracies against authoritarian governments. In reality, America’s dependence on Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or the U.A.E. to help resolve hostage crises and other disputes have put those countries’ human-rights records or their booming trade with Russia on the back burner. Before the war, Biden pointedly excluded Turkey from its 2021 Summit for Democracy, and had warned that its relationship with the U.S. would depend on its freedoms it extended at home.

The next year—after Turkey started mediating between the U.S., Ukraine, and Moscow—Biden praised Erdogan at a summit of leaders from all NATO members.

“I mean, you’re doing a great job,” he said.

A Biden administration official said that after negotiating exchanges directly with hostile nations, it does sometimes seek logistical assistance from others: “We always are grateful when a country helps us, and it sometimes takes a country that is talking to the bad actors.”

A hidden hand of Turkey’s hostage diplomacy is Hakan Fidan, the veteran spy chief with a salt-and-pepper beard whom Erdogan calls his “secret keeper.”

Little known outside the Middle East, Fidan rose to prominence as head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization, or MIT, where he shaped Turkey’s regional strategy of backing Syrian rebels fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad. He then helped Erdogan quash a 2016 coup attempt. In June, Erdogan promoted him to foreign minister and replaced him with Ibrahim Kalin, his chief adviser.

A former army officer who studied politics and administrative science at the University of Maryland, Fidan became Turkey’s youngest-ever intelligence chief in 2010 at 42. Low-key and softly spoken, he has rarely given interviews. In June, Erdogan made him his foreign minister. Former CIA officers who worked with Fidan said he built a network that traversed geopolitical fault lines, fostering close contacts in Washington and Moscow.

Two months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. and Russia both sent requests to Fidan’s office. Would he help facilitate a prisoner swap in Istanbul?

As an offer came into shape to release Reed for Yaroshenko, the Russian pilot, Moscow offered to host the exchange—a proposal the U.S. swiftly rejected for fear the Russians could engineer last-minute changes or renege on a deal, leaving them empty-handed on hostile territory. U.S. and Russian intelligence officials settled on Istanbul to take the job.

Fidan responded that Turkey would help—but said a secluded part of the airport in the capital, Ankara, would be better.

Turkey had never arranged such a prisoner swap between great powers, and the country lacked an established protocol. Fidan delivered the request to Erdogan.

The president, in power for nearly two decades, said yes.

U.S. and Russia’s spy chiefs in Ankara shuttled to the MIT’s remote, 5,000-acre hilltop headquarters, known as “the fortress,” to haggle over parameters for the exchange. Within days, MIT had sent them both a message outlining the details: precise times and locations the flights would land, how many people will be on board and the rules of engagement.

An important stipulation: To preserve secrecy, neither side would film or photograph the exchange.

In the small and cramped cubicle hive of the U.S. State Department’s special envoy for hostage affairs’s office, staff set in motion logistics to receive what they called “a wrongful”—an American they determined had been arbitrarily detained as an act of hostage taking.

Reed, 32, from Granbury, Texas, had once been once posted to Camp David, where his duties included protecting then-Vice President Biden. During a trip to see his Russian girlfriend, he was jailed and eventually sentenced to nine years for allegedly assaulting Moscow police after a drunken night out with friends. Reed denied the assault and repeatedly said Russian law enforcement provided no credible evidence it had taken place. The State Department declared him “wrongfully detained.” U.S. officials said his case was overseen by a secretive FSB unit targeting American Marines known as the Department of Counter Intelligence, or DKRO.

By April 2022, Reed was in his third year of imprisonment, held at IK-12, a facility hundreds of miles east of Moscow that had repeatedly thrown him into solitary confinement for acts of insubordination. It was his latest prison in a stint of a half dozen that included Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo, also once home to Whelan and now the Journal’s Gershkovich. Reed had written to his parents Joey and Paula to say his body had been damaged by bouts of Covid-19 and symptoms of tuberculosis and asked for them to send toilet paper, water and meat.

Reed’s parents launched a campaign, standing in the rain outside the White House with placards, eventually landing a presidential meeting after a CNN journalist asked Biden about their plight. Biden invited them inside, and after an emotional discussion, authorized a deal to trade Reed for Yaroshenko, the Russian pilot imprisoned in the U.S.

Days later, prison guards thrust a piece of paper in Reed’s arms—a direct request to Vladimir Putin for a pardon—which he refused to sign. America’s ambassador to Russia had to call to tell the defiant prisoner “if you sign that paper you won’t regret it.” He obliged.

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Given the black shirt and slacks he had worn in court and allowed to shower for the first time in weeks, Reed was taken to a holding cell, where he carved his service branch into the thick, nearly soundproof walls: “U.S. Marine Corps.” Hours later, masked men in fatigues from Alpha Group, the FSB’s special forces, ushered him onto a plane, as a Russian state news crew filmed the departure.

On board, Reed was told to sit with security officers at the back, while the senior FSB operatives leading the operation were in front, concealed by a curtain. Reed listened as his guards chatted reverentially in Russian about the officer running the operation, Col. Sergei Latkov, whom they had seen on other jobs. As the plane arched toward the Black Sea, Latkov walked through the curtain to address Reed.

“Hello,” he said in English. “How are you?”

Unbeknown to Reed, Latkov was a longtime intelligence officer who once served as the head of the 10th section of the FSB’s DKRO unit—the subdivision that tracks foreign journalists—according to a 2006 memo alerting Putin to a CBS news crew’s activities in the country, later published by Agentura, a Russian-focused investigative outlet. The DKRO led the arrest of Gershkovich, and helped detain Reed and Whelan, according to U.S. and other Western diplomats, intelligence officers and former Russian operatives. Latkov is now with the Presidential administration, Putin’s executive office, according to flight records.

“Good. How are you?” Reed shot back in Russian, which he had greatly improved in prison. Latkov smiled and returned to his seat.

Hundreds of miles away at Ankara airport, a Turkish MIT officer stepped into the control tower. “This is an operation,” he said to the traffic controllers as he explained that two planes would shortly land on a cordoned-off runway on the southern side of the airport usually used by VIPs. The swap was to take place in secrecy, with no news cameras.

For some previous prisoner exchanges, U.S. officials had booked commercial flights to save money, but Reed’s medical problems meant they needed to charter a State Department OpMed, or Operational Medicine, plane.

The jet began to descend toward Ankara shortly after the MIT officer called to run through the checklist. It arrived minutes after the Russian jet. The American delegation had prepared in minute detail for the flight protocols, but as the plane touched down and taxied toward the Russian jet, it was unclear which delegation should move first to begin the exchange.

As the two jets sat on the runway, Reed saw another man emerge through the curtain.

“I’m Roger Carstens, I’m here to identify you.”

“It’s me!” Reed replied, eagerly. Ambassador Carstens, the U.S. special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, turned and walked out of the jet without another word. For a moment, Reed worried he had somehow jeopardized his release. Within minutes he was being ushered onto the tarmac by Latkov and another officer.

In Cold War exchanges, American and Soviet delegations would halt a short distance away from each other, leaving prisoners to walk the final steps to freedom. But Carstens and Latkov greeted one another, shaking hands on the tarmac as they welcomed Reed and Yaroshenko.

Shortly after, footage of the handover appeared on Kremlin-controlled media, the faces of the Russians officials blurred, and the scene presented as a victory for Putin in his score-settling grudge with the West. Erdogan’s government was surprised; the Americans complained.

Sometime later, Turkish officials quizzed their Russian counterparts about the breach of rules—why had they filmed the exchange?

In reply, the Russians offered a curt denial: “We didn’t.”

Five months later, a Turkish intelligence officer ascended again into the air-traffic control tower, to guide another jet from Russia into the section of Ankara airport, the stage for the most complex hostage swap since the Ukraine conflict began.

A plane was bringing Ankara some of Russia’s most prized prisoners of war: five Ukrainian commanders taken during Russia’s siege of a steel plant in the eastern city of Mariupol. Among them was Col. Denys Prokopenko, commander of the Azov Regiment, a National Guard unit long tarred by Russia for its origins in a nationalist militia. In Poland, a plane was waiting to take off for Ankara with Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician and close personal friend of Putin’s, who had been captured by Ukraine’s security service after escaping house arrest at the start of the war.

Ten mostly British and American foreign fighters taken prisoner from Ukrainian battlefields by Russia were settling into the gold-trimmed leather seats of a third jet, bound for the Saudi capital, Riyadh, the crew passing out fresh salmon to the emaciated prisoners, who smoked celebratory cigarettes midflight. On the plane, Shaun Pinner, a British prisoner, noticed a celebrity look-alike, talking to an aide.

“I said to him, you really look like Roman Abramovich…and he said, ‘I am Roman Abramovich.’”

The Russian tycoon and longtime owner of London soccer team Chelsea, had been working as a mediator, attending peace talks in Turkey, which let him safely dock his superyacht there, away from European sanctions. He had traveled to Ankara and Riyadh, meeting Turkish and Saudi leaders ahead of the swap and was in Rostov-on-Don to personally ensure no last-minute derailments. The oligarch posed for pictures on the plane while Pinner joked that he wished he’d bought his team, West Ham United. “Chelsea was closer to my house,” Abramovich replied.

Once that jet touched down in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, another 200 prisoners of war would be driven in convoy to the border with Ukraine, to cross into home territory. Ukraine would send some 50 Russian soldiers across its borders.

Collectively, they were some of Russia and Ukraine’s most valuable prisoners. Nobody wanted to move first.

“We don’t trust the Russians,” said Ukraine’s presidential chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, who coordinated the exchange in Kyiv.

The plane carrying the Mariupol commanders landed in Ankara, where Ukraine’s head of military intelligence, Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, was waiting to receive them. After a fierce debate, the Russians relented to let him board the plane to confirm their identities.

He sent photos to Yermak in Kyiv. The five men looked exhausted and emaciated after four months in Russian captivity, but it was them. Medvedchuk’s plane left the Ankara runway for Moscow, and hundreds of miles away, the Ukrainians shuffled across the border, one of them sinking to his knees to kiss the Ukrainian soil.

This time, it would be Russia complaining that Turkey had broken the rules. The Russians said they had agreed to release the Ukrainians to Turkey on the grounds that they stayed there, far from the fight, until the war’s conclusion.

Instead, a few months later, the Ankara airport had another visitor: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who flew in on a Czech jet, loaded it up with the Ukrainian commanders, then returned home.

Publicly, Russia objected that it hadn’t been informed in advance. Privately, Russia assured Turkey it wanted to continue working together.

By then, freed pilot, Yaroshenko, had been personally appointed by Putin to Russia’s civic chamber, a government body that facilitates contacts between society and the state.

Reed, now free, was on a very different life journey: Months later, deployed as a volunteer to fight the invasion of Ukraine, he was near the strategic town of Bakhmut, when shrapnel tore through his legs. He was evacuated to Germany by a nongovernmental organization and is now back in the U.S.

Turkish officials say they are standing by should Washington need their services in cutting a deal for any future American hostages.