Russian Operatives Attacking Putin Critics in the U.S.?
On a Sunday night in February, 2007, “Dateline NBC,” the news show, aired a segment about the strange case of Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident who died under mysterious circumstances in London. On the show, several guests argued that his death was an assassination, carried out on orders from Vladimir Putin. The Russian President denied any involvement in Litvinenko’s death.
Among the “Dateline NBC” guests who accused Putin was Paul Joyal, a former government official and an expert on Russian affairs. On a rainy night, four days later, Joyal pulled up to his house, in Adelphi, Maryland, and was attacked by two men. As he wrestled one of the men to the ground, he heard him say to his partner, “Shoot him.” The second man pulled the trigger on a 9-mm. pistol and hit Joyal in the abdomen, then pointed the gun at Joyal’s head and pulled the trigger. The pistol misfired, and then Joyal’s dog, inside his house, began to bark. His wife, also inside, turned on the lights. The two men ran off.
More than a decade later, with Russia’s covert activities in the United States facing intense scrutiny, it seems appropriate to raise the question: Was Joyal shot on the orders of the Russian state? And, more generally, does the Russian government kill people in the United States?
After months of treatment, Joyal recovered, but the crime has never been solved. The F.B.I. investigated Joyal’s attack, but he declined to share details of what it reported about its findings. Joyal told me that he believes one of Putin’s friends—“an oligarch”— arranged the shooting. Some Russia experts believe that he is right. “I think they were intending to send Joyal a message,” Paul Goble, a former senior analyst with the State Department and a friend of Joyal, told me. Goble noted that Joyal had been working to arrange for a Chechen activist to visit the United States—an effort that would have enraged the Kremlin. “He crossed a line you cannot cross.”
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