Navalny Couldn’t Be Freed Until Gershkovich Was Kidnapped

Grozev moved in and spent the next couple of months explaining Secret Project Silver Lake, which Rubin would eventually take to his boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

On Feb. 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Pevchikh and her colleagues were alarmed for Navalny: The F.S.B. had already tried to kill him at least once. Whatever was preventing the Kremlin from having him killed in prison — some remnant of concern for Russia’s standing in the world, some semblance of regard for legitimacy — would be gone now.

“If they were bombing Kyiv,” she told me, recounting her thoughts at the time, “if they were killing tens of thousands of civilians, then murdering Aleksei had gone from being a very big thing to being a very small thing.” Secret Project Silver Lake was more urgent than ever.

In the summer of 2022, Pevchikh landed a meeting with Hillary Clinton. Grozev and Pevchikh were impressed — Clinton was, they thought, the first person who really got it. She warned that a plan like this would take years to pull off, but she took the idea to the White House. President Biden, Blinken and the White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, eventually came on board.

They weren’t primarily in it for Navalny, however. They were in it for a former Marine named Paul Whelan, who had gone to Moscow in search of adventure and business opportunities and ended up arrested and sentenced to 16 years for what the Russians called espionage.

In April 2022, Russia had swapped another former Marine, Trevor Reed (sentenced to nine years for supposedly attacking Moscow police officers), for a Russian pilot the United States had convicted of drug smuggling. In December 2022, Russia traded the W.N.B.A. player Brittney Griner (sentenced to nine years for bringing a vaping pen with marijuana into the country) for the arms dealer Viktor Bout. Whelan, who had been in custody longer than Reed or Griner, fell by the wayside both times.

To give up someone accused of espionage, the Russians would need a bigger reward. Someone like Krasikov, a Russian who was serving a life sentence in Germany for carrying out a political assassination in the middle of the day in a Berlin park.

Americans had previously gauged German interest in releasing Krasikov in exchange for Whelan. Germany had said no — a rare and painful rejection for the White House, and one that made it all that more unlikely that Secret Project Silver Lake could succeed.

But in March 2023, the terrain shifted again.

Russian authorities arrested Evan Gershkovich, a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, and charged him with espionage.

The last time Russia had arrested an American journalist was in 1986, when it accused the U.S. News & World Report   correspondent Nicholas Daniloff of espionage. It was an obvious response to the U.S. arrest of a Russian employee of the United Nations a few days earlier, and it took only a few more weeks for the two of them to be exchanged, with two Soviet dissidents thrown in.

For Secret Project Silver Lake, Gershkovich’s arrest presented an opportunity of sorts — for the White House to approach Germany again. Grozev kept telling any official who would listen that Germany would be more receptive if Navalny, a hero in that country, were also part of the package. Grozev had another card to play: His own investigative work had played a crucial role in identifying Krasikov as the man who conducted that assassination in the Berlin park. Grozev’s own testimony had helped put him behind bars. If Grozev signaled that he was in favor of the swap — despite the possibility that Krasikov, once released, might retaliate — the Germans might be more willing to consider it.

Rubin summed up the German dilemma as “moral imperative versus moral hazard.” The moral imperative was to save hostages. The moral hazard was the danger of establishing precedent by releasing an assassin, one who had acted brazenly on German soil. Even inside the German cabinet, there was no agreement.

Then there was the question of how to conduct the negotiations. Standard diplomatic channels are too inflexible for such a complicated deal. The Russian government is a black box. Everyone knows that President Vladimir Putin personally makes all important decisions, but no one knows who has enough access to him to pose the questions. So Grozev tried to find his own ways in, through Russian intelligence contacts he had developed while attempting to find his would-be assassins.

In the summer of 2023, Grozev reached out to a spy — someone who he says was trained from childhood for a career in espionage. Grozev suspected the man of being one of his potential assassins but also of being able to help negotiate a swap.

Pevchikh wouldn’t hear of Grozev meeting with the spy directly. So they dispatched Ms. Rae, the producer of “Navalny,” an American former actress who has never met an adventure that scares her.