The Suspected Russian Plot to Set Airplanes on Fire

Summary

Summary of "The Suspected Russian Plot to Set Airplanes on Fire" Episode of The Journal

Release Date: December 13, 2024

---

1. Introduction to the Plot

The episode opens with host Kate Lymbaugh recounting an intriguing encounter between Wall Street Journal reporter Bojan Panczewski and a source from a European security agency. This meeting, which took place in a high-end hotel bar, revealed a disturbing conspiracy: a Russian plot to set airplanes on fire.

• Kate Lymbaugh [00:05]: "Earlier this year, our colleague Bojan Panczewski met a source in a swanky hotel bar. The source worked for a European security agency."
• Bojan Panczewski [00:36]: "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."

2. The Russian Strategy: Using Civilians

The investigation uncovered that Russia, facing the expulsion of approximately 500 spies from Europe following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, had shifted its tactics. Lacking traditional espionage operatives, Russia began recruiting ordinary civilians, including students and refugees, to carry out destabilizing activities across Europe.

• Bojan Panczewski [05:14]: "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."
• Kate Lymbaugh [07:08]: "Do you have a sense of whether these attacks go all the way up to Vladimir Putin?"
• Bojan Panczewski [07:15]: "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."

3. Recruitment and Execution

Russia employs various platforms, notably Telegram and other social media channels, to recruit individuals. The recruits are often enticed with monetary incentives, sometimes paid in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, without clear knowledge of their handlers' identities.

• Bojan Panczewski [06:08]: "They use the telegram channel quite a lot, but also other channels, other social media. And basically they offer them money, they wire the money, sometimes in Bitcoin, and the person doesn't really know who's at the other end."
• Bojan Panczewski [04:19]: "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."

4. The DHL Warehouse Incidents

A critical part of the plot involved incendiary devices concealed within ordinary back massagers, which were then placed inside large crates destined for North American flights at DHL warehouses in Germany and the UK. These devices contained magnesium-based mixtures that burn at extremely high temperatures and are undetectable by standard airport security measures.

• Bojan Panczewski [10:36]: "First it's a tiny little fire. The thing goes off and then literally two seconds later, the entire thing is set alight. The entire forklift."
• Bojan Panczewski [11:08]: "Magnesium, that certain type of magnesium based mixture burns at extreme high temperature and also it cannot be extinguished with the firefighting systems that exists on commercial airliners."

5. Investigation and Evidence

European investigators launched a multinational probe after the devices were discovered. Forensic analysis revealed the sophisticated nature of the incendiary devices, and simulations indicated that if triggered over the ocean, an aircraft would likely be lost due to insufficient time for emergency landings.

• Bojan Panczewski [12:17]: "German investigators recreated these devices with the components they found in a forensic lab and they tested them in all imaginable scenarios."
• Bojan Panczewski [13:00]: "DHL confirmed that it happened. They confirmed that they worked together with the relevant authorities to get to the bottom of it."

6. European Response and Shifts in Policy

Initially, European authorities maintained silence to avoid public panic and to preserve support for Ukraine. However, the severity of the DHL plot acted as a catalyst for change. Countries like Poland and the UK have become more vocal about attributing such attacks to Russian intelligence, signaling a shift towards greater transparency and acknowledgment of Russia's shadow activities.

• Bojan Panczewski [14:32]: "Poland is also becoming much, much more outspoken. They're very willing to attribute things to Russia."
• Kate Lymbaugh [14:55]: "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."

7. Implications for the Future

The failed plot serves as a stark indicator of escalating aggression from Russia towards the West. With the traditional deterrents reminiscent of the Cold War era waning, there is growing concern that such tactics will become more frequent and sophisticated. Policymakers express uncertainty on how to effectively respond without compromising democratic principles.

• Bojan Panczewski [16:04]: "It's the most frightening, frightening incident or conspiracy that we've learned. ... There might be other things like that out there that we don't know about."
• Bojan Panczewski [17:05]: "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."
• Kate Lymbaugh [16:53]: "That seems to show that there is much more aggression, at least coming from Russia toward the west than perhaps citizens of the west realize."

Conclusion

This episode of The Journal reveals a sophisticated and alarming strategy by Russia to destabilize Europe through covert operations aimed at causing chaos and undermining support for Ukraine. The use of civilians as proxies highlights an evolution in tactics that poses significant challenges for European security agencies. The failure of the plot has nonetheless served as a wake-up call, prompting European nations to become more transparent and proactive in addressing the shadow war orchestrated by Russian intelligence.

---

Note: This summary excludes advertisements, intros, outros, and non-content segments as per the provided instructions.

Transcript

[Kate Lymbaugh]

Earlier this year, our colleague Bojan Panczewski met a source in a swanky hotel bar. The source worked for a European security agency.

[Bojan Panczewski]

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.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

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.

[Bojan Panczewski]

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.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

That sounds terrifying.

[Bojan Panczewski]

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.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

This 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. Welcome to the Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Kate LYMBARD. It's Friday, December 13th. Coming up on the show, Russia's escalating shadow war in Europe.

[Advertisement Speaker]

This episode is brought to you by. Indeed. We're driven by the search for better. But when it comes to hiring, the best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all. Don't search match with Indeed. Use Indeed for scheduling, screening and messaging so you can connect with candidates faster. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@ Indeed.com journal. Terms and conditions apply.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

Before Boyan heard about the plot to set fires on airplanes, he'd been reporting on strange events happening across Europe.

[Bojan Panczewski]

One early incident was a fishing thrower in the Arctic Sea. It cut a vital Internet cable.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

The captain in Germany, sabotage knocked out a railway network in the Baltic Sea. A gas pipeline was damaged in Prague, for example.

[Bojan Panczewski]

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.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

All of these disparate events, from infrastructure attacks to things that looked like mindless vandalism. Boyan's sources said they were connected.

[Bojan Panczewski]

Russia 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.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

Who is carrying out these attacks.

[Bojan Panczewski]

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.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

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 Leha. He's now serving a six year sentence in Poland on espionage charges. He 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.

[Bojan Panczewski]

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.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

Through his reporting, Boyan estimates that around 500 Russian spies were expelled from Europe.

[Bojan Panczewski]

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. They simply threw the kitchen sink at it. They started using civilians. They just used everyone they could get.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

So what did your sources say about how Russia is recruiting people?

[Bojan Panczewski]

They use the telegram channel quite a lot, but also other channels, other social media. And basically they offer them money, they wire the money, sometimes in Bitcoin, and the person doesn't really know who's at the other end.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

What's the strategy? What's the goal?

[Bojan Panczewski]

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. Create 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, et cetera, into investigating these cases that happen in their waters or in their soil.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

Do you have a sense of whether these attacks go all the way up to Vladimir Putin?

[Bojan Panczewski]

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.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

When 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 and charge some of the individuals involved. But Boyan says the European public generally isn't aware of this shadow war.

[Bojan Panczewski]

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 and Ukraine receives from these European countries enormous financial, political and military support.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

But that stance shifted after a brazen attempt to start fires on airplanes. That's next. This episode is brought to you by aws. Amazon Q Business is the new generative AI Assistant from aws. Many tasks can make business slow, like wading through mud. Help. Luckily, there's a faster, easier, less messy choice. Amazon Q can securely understand your business data to help you streamline tasks like summarizing quarterly results or doing complex analyses in no time. Q got this. Learn what Amazon Q Business can do for [e-mail] learnmore this episode is brought.

[Advertisement Speaker]

To you by Lifelock. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online and more personal info in places that could expose you to identity theft. That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second. If your identity is stolen, their US based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with Lifelock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast termsapply.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

Following that tip Bojan 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 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 uk, packages destined for North America caught on fire. Boyan watched a video showing a forklift moving one of these crates.

[Bojan Panczewski]

First it's a tiny little fire. The thing goes off and then literally two seconds later, the entire thing is set alight. The entire forklift.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

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?

[Bojan Panczewski]

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 exists on commercial airliners, because magnesium can even burn underwater and it develops incredibly high temperatures. It 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.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

Is there any way to detect these devices?

[Bojan Panczewski]

They're set alight 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.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

After these incendiary devices caught fire, a multinational investigation was launched in Europe.

[Bojan Panczewski]

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.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

What did DHL say about your story?

[Bojan Panczewski]

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.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

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. And 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.

[Bojan Panczewski]

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 we shouldn't be kind of sweeping this under the carpet now.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

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 UK's MI5 spy agency talked about the threat of Russian backed criminals.

[Bojan Panczewski]

The UK'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. Poland 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.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

And this DHL plot feels like it's raising the stakes.

[Bojan Panczewski]

It's the most frightening, 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. There might be other things like that out there that we don't know about.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

What's next in this?

[Bojan Panczewski]

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 has been going on. And unlike during the Cold War when there were 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.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

That seems to show that there is much more aggression, at least coming from Russia toward the west than perhaps citizens of the west realize.

[Bojan Panczewski]

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. You 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 are 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.

[Kate Lymbaugh]

That'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. The show's made by Katherine Brewer, Jonathan Davis, Pia Gadkari, Rachel Humphries, Ryan Knudsen, Matt Kwong, Jessica Mendoza, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez De la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alessandra Rizzo, Alan Rodriguez Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pierce Singh, Jeevika Verma, Lisa Wang, Katherine Whalen, Tatiana Zamis and me, Kate Limebaugh, with help from Trina Menino. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapak 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. Thanks for listening. See you Monday.