Why the Continued Silence on Evan Gershkovich’s Arrest?
Last August, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was freed by Russian authorities in a prisoner exchange with the United States. Russian national-security state officials had arrested Gershkovich on March 29, 2023, on charges of espionage on behalf of the CIA. In a secret trial, he was found guilty and later sentenced to 16 years in prison.
During the entire ordeal, I wrote several articles about the case:
https://www.fff.org/?s=Gershkovich
Since the time of Gershovich’s arrest, both the Journal and U.S. officials have fiercely denied that Geshkovich was a spy. That’s probably true but the problem is that their denials are rather worthless because if he was a spy, they would deny it anyway. Moreover, given Operation Mockingbird, the program in which the CIA employs assets in the mainstream press, it would not be beyond the realm of reasonable possibility that Gershkovich was a CIA asset. Moreover, if he was, it is not unreasonable to assume that he would have kept that fact secret from the Journal.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris greet Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, Alsu Kurmasheva and Vladimir Kara-Murza at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, Thursday, August 1, 2024, after the men’s release in a prisoner swap with Russia. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
Nonetheless, it is more likely than not that Gershkovich was arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced for simply writing articles that were critical of Russian president Vladimir Putin and his war in Ukraine. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that an authoritarian ruler would not take kindly to an American journalist writing critical stories in a conservative U.S. newspaper about a war that was provoked by the U.S. government and that was now resulting in the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers.
One of the aspects of the case that mystified me was the Journal’s failure to describe the events surrounding Gershkovich’s arrest. Surely Gershovich shared those matters with his Russian lawyers, who could then have shared them with Journal officials. Why wouldn’t the Journal and U.S. officials want to get Gershkovich’s side of the story out to the world before his trial or even after it?
Once Gershkovich got released, I figure that he would explain the events leading up to and surrounding his arrest. Did the arrest come up completely out of the blue? Or was there more to what happened when he got arrested?
According to a July 19, 2024, article in the Wall Street Journal, the Journal reported that “Evan was arrested in a restaurant while on a reporting trip for the Wall Street Journal.” An article dated July 18, 2024, on wmtw.com, stated “The Russian Prosecutor General’s office said last month that the journalist is accused of ‘gathering secret information’ on orders from the CIA about Uralvagonzavod, a plant about 150 kilometers (90 miles) north of Yekaterinburg that produces and repairs tanks and other military equipment.” According to that wmtw.com article, “Gershkovich’s employer a
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