Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gerskovich, who spent more than a year detained in Russia on false espionage charges, opened up about his concern over the Kremlin’s “most elite security force” that he saw firsthand. Gerskovich and his colleagues at the Wall Street Journal discovered that at the core of Vladimir Putin’s regime is the Department for Counterintelligence Operations (DKRO) and the responsible party behind Gershkovich’s arrest.
The DKRO is not well-known outside of Russia, not even having a Wikipedia page, Gershkovich said, but its work and influence in Russia is strong.
“DKRO has played an enormous and unreported role in plunging Russia into its biggest wave of repression since the demise of Joseph Stalin, including a purge of the Defense Ministry after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine faltered,” The Journal writes.
A significant part of the DKRO’s mission was to arrest American citizens on Russian soil in an effort to secure the release of Russian hitman Vadim Krasikov, who was convicted in 2019 for the assassination of an enemy of Putin in a Berlin park. Krasikov was exchanged in the prisoner swap made with Gershkovich in August of 2024.
Additionally, the DKRO harassed and surveilled Western diplomats in Russia, “even pressuring students in the U.S. Embassy high school to spy on their classmates.”
The Journal reports, “Though it numbers only about 2,000 officers, according to U.S. and European officials, DKRO is the Kremlin’s most elite security force. It wields the power to compel hundreds of thousands of personnel across Russia into surveilling, intimidating, or arresting foreigners and the Russians it suspects of working with them. DKRO officers are generously paid, even by the standards of Russia’s powerful and sprawling Federal Security Service, or FSB, of which it is part.”
The DKRO is what is holding Putin’s operation all together. United States and European officials report that members of the DKRO enjoy special treatment and no one has been known to have defected to the West.
The Wall Street Journal spoke with Russians and Westerners who have been targeted by the DKRO for trying to learn the elite spy organization’s secrets. Two reporters from The Journal shared that they were “openly followed through the streets of Vienna and Washington in acts of surveillance apparently designed to intimidate.” The two were later labeled in Russia as “persona non grata,” or a person who is not welcome.
In Russia, the DKRO arrests those suspected of spying, collaborating, or treason. Part of the Federal Security Service (FSB), it is interesting, Gershkovich noted, to see how the small group of officers have managed to “help turn the world’s largest country into a tightly controlled police state.”
The DKRO’s operations in Russia itself is concerning as is its influence on foreign soil.
“DKRO’s officers also increasingly operate on foreign soil, recruiting spies and conducting sabotage operations in Eastern Europe. In former Soviet states, DKRO has organized kidnappings, Eastern European officials say. When foreigners cross key border points…DKRO has local FSB officers systematically interrogate them, hoping to recruit or threaten visitors into spying on their homelands.”
“As part of Russia’s campaign in Ukraine, DKRO is sabotaging railroads and gathering intelligence on high-ranking officials, likely to prepare assassination attempts or targeted acts of violence, a Western intelligence official said,” The Journal adds.
Gershkovich and the Wall Street Journal’s report has shed light on the agency in Russia, operating in an eerily similar fashion to the former KGB and its predecessor Smert’ Shpionam (SMERSH), that is using intimidation tactics to stoke fear into anyone suspected of undermining Putin’s regime. A deep look into the DKRO’s organization has led a U.N. special rapporteur on human rights to call the “atmosphere of political persecution” in Russia “unprecedented in recent history.”
