Earlier this week, the Washington Times reported that Georgian officials had identified the culprit behind a bomb blast near the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi as Russian. The report was treated with a lot of skepticism, including from this blog, because it relied only on Georgian sources which, to put it mildly, tend to blame Russia first and ask questions later.
But now the Times has taken another crack at the story and reports that a U.S. intelligence report on the event corroborates the Georgian one:
The highly classified report about the Sept. 22 incident was described to The Washington Times by two U.S. officials who have read it. They said the report supports the findings of the Georgian Interior Ministry, which traced the bombing to a Russian military intelligence officer....
“It is written without hedges, and it confirms the Georgian account,” said one U.S. official familiar with the U.S. intelligence report.
This official added that it specifically says the Russian military intelligence, or GRU, coordinated the bombings.
And the State Department has been pressing the Russian Foreign Ministry about the attack:
“Those events — the embassy bombing and other alleged bombings — have been raised with the Russians at a high level and they have been raised with the Georgians at a high level,” one administration official said. “It’s not necessarily pointing a finger, but part of a dialogue expressing our deep concerns.”
Now, US intelligence reports aren't necessarily to be treated as infallible (see: Iraqi weapons of mass destruction) but this allegation now at least needs to be taken seriously. So, assuming it's trustworthy, there are a lot of questions that the Times report on the intelligence report doesn't answer: at what level was this approved? Was this a rogue agent? Or a rogue agency? (One could imagine that the intelligence agencies would have a vested interest in harming the improving Washington-Moscow relations.) Or did this come from the Kremlin? And what was the goal of the attack? And if they wanted to carry out an attack, why do it in this half-hearted fashion, with the apparent goal of keeping its origins secret? And why in Georgia? U.S. intelligence officials who want to leak more info: email me here!
Joshua Kucera, a senior correspondent, is Eurasianet's former Turkey/Caucasus editor and has written for the site since 2007.
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