Moscow – Russian President Vladimir Putin telephoned U.S. President Donald Trump Sunday to thank him for a CIA tip that helped thwart a series of bombings in St. Petersburg, the Kremlin said.
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During the call, the two leaders’ second in three days, Putin expressed gratitude for the CIA information. The Kremlin said it allowed Russia’s top domestic security agency to track down a group of suspects that planned to bomb Kazan Cathedral and other crowded sites this weekend.
“The information received from the CIA proved sufficient to find and detain the criminal suspects,” the Kremlin said.
It added that Putin asked Trump to convey gratitude to the CIA and assured him that “if the Russian intelligence agencies receive information about potential terror threats against the United States and its citizens, they will immediately hand it over to their U.S. counterparts via their communications channels.”
The CIA’s tip to Russia comes even as Russia-U.S. ties have plunged to their lowest level since the Cold War era — first over Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for pro-Russia separatists in Ukraine, more recently over allegations that Moscow interfered in the U.S. presidential election to help Trump.
While Russian officials have said the two countries were continuing to exchange a terror-related intelligence, Sunday’s statement from the Kremlin was Russia’s first public assertion that information from the United States helped prevent an attack.
The conversation was the second between the Russian and U.S. presidents since Thursday, when Trump thanked Putin for his remarks “acknowledging America’s strong economic performance,” according to the White House.
During the first call, they also discussed during ways to work together to address North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic weapons program, the White House said.
The Federal Security Service, or FSB, announced Friday that seven suspected followers of the Islamic State group had been arrested for allegedly planning to carry out terror attacks in St. Petersburg this weekend.
The agency said the suspects were plotting a suicide bombing in a church and a series of other explosions in the city’s busiest areas this coming weekend on IS orders. It said a search of a St. Petersburg apartment found explosives, automatic weapons and extremist literature.
Russian news reports said that Kazan Cathedral, a landmark 19th century Russian Orthodox church on St. Petersburg’s central Nevsky Prospect, was the prime target.
If the suspects succeeded in bombing the cathedral, it would have been the first major attack on a Russian Orthodox Church by Islamic terrorists, who have blown up apartment buildings, passenger planes and transport facilities in Russia.
In April, a suicide bombing in the St. Petersburg’s subway left 16 dead and wounded more than 50.
Russian TV stations have aired footage daily since Friday of the suspects in the foiled attacks being apprehended and questioned. One segment showed FSB operatives outside a St. Petersburg apartment building detaining a suspect, who appeared later saying he was told to prepare homemade bombs rigged with shrapnel.
“My job was to make explosives, put it in bottles and attach pieces of shrapnel,” the suspect, identified by Russian media as 18-year old Yevgeny Yefimov, said in the footage released by the FSB.
Several other suspects came from mostly Muslim regions in Russia’s volatile North Caucasus, and one man was from the ex-Soviet nation of Tajikistan that borders Afghanistan.
The TV reports included footage of a metal container, which the suspects used as a laboratory for making explosives, according to the FSB. Another video showed operatives breaking the doors and raiding an apartment used by other suspects.
Last week, the FSB said it also arrested several IS-linked suspects in Moscow, where they allegedly were plotting a series of suicide bombings to coincide with New Year’s celebrations.
The latest calls between Putin and Trump came after the Russian leader praised his U.S. counterpart during a marathon news conference on Thursday.
Putin hailed Trump’s achievements, saying that global markets have demonstrated investors’ confidence in Trump’s economic policies. He said he hoped the U.S. president would be able to follow through on his campaign promises to improve ties with Russia despite pressure from his political foes at home.
During the news conference, Putin also reaffirmed his multiple denials of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and argued that the U.S. is only hurting itself with investigations of alleged collusion between Trump and Russia.
The Obama administration gave a free pass to Hezbollah’s drug-trafficking and money-laundering operations — some of which were unfolding inside the U.S. — to help ensure the Iran nuclear deal would stay on track, according to a bombshell exposé in Politico Sunday.
An elaborate campaign led by the Drug Enforcement Administration, known as Project Cassandra, reportedly targeted the Lebanese militant group’s criminal activities. But by tossing a string of roadblocks holding back the project, Obama administration officials helped allow the 35-year-old anti-Israel criminal enterprise to evolve into a major global security threat bankrolling terrorist and military operations, the report added.
“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” David Asher, who helped establish Project Cassandra as a Defense Department illicit finance analyst in 2008, told Politico. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”
When Project Cassandra leaders, who were working out of a DEA’s Counter facility in Chantilly, Virginia, sought an OK for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, Justice and Treasury Department officials delayed, hindered or rejected their requests, according to Politico.
Dana Loesch sounds off on allegations that the administration rarely took action on criminals who sought to buy guns illegally.
The red tape halted Project Cassandra’s efforts to curtail top Hezbollah operatives, including one of the world’s biggest cocaine traffickers who was also supplying conventional and chemical weapons used by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad against his own citizens. That operative’s code name: the “Ghost.”
Former Obama administration officials told Politico anonymously that their decisions were guided by improving relations with Iran, stalling its nuclear weapons program and freeing four Americans prisoners held by the country. They also denied they “derailed” actions against Hezbollah out of politics.
“There has been a consistent pattern of actions taken against Hezbollah, both through tough sanctions and law enforcement actions before and after the Iran deal,” Kevin Lewis who worked at both the White House and Justice Department during the Obama administration, responded.
Asher said the closer the U.S. got to finalizing the Iran nuclear deal, the more difficult it was to conduct Hezbollah investigations. After President Obama announced the deal in January 2016, Project Cassandra officials were transferred to other assignments.
“The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away,” Asher 49, who speaks fluent Japanese and earned his Ph.D. in international relations from Oxford University, told Politico. “So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations — even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission — it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama administration.”
Hezbollah was formed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in 1982 to fight Israel’s invasion of Beirut. Under the leadership of Hassan Nasrallah, who took over in 1992 after his predecessor, Abbas Mussawi, was killed in an Israeli airstrike, the group moved from seeking to implement an Iranian-style Islamic republic in Lebanon to focusing on fighting Israel and integration into Lebanon’s sectarian-based politics.
Nasrallah, now 57, has played a key role in ending a feud among Shiites, focusing attention toward fighting Israel and later expanding the group’s regional reach.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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