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Exclusive: Ex-Russian military bomber engineer seeks asylum at U.S. border, offers military secrets
Government officials told Yahoo News that the man was deemed credible and potentially of interest to the U.S.
A Russian military bomber engineer drove up to the U.S. Southwest border in late December, asking for asylum and offering to reveal some of Russia’s most closely guarded military secrets, according to an unclassified Customs and Border Protection report obtained by Yahoo News.
The man and his family arrived in an armored SUV and asked to be admitted into the U.S. because he feared persecution for participating in anti-Putin protests in support of Alexei Navalny, an imprisoned Russian dissident. He then told CBP officials that he had information wanted by the U.S. government.
He said he was a civil engineer and that “his past employment had included working … from 2018 to 2021 in the making of a particular type of military airplane at the Tupolev aircraft production facility in the city of Kazan in west-central Russia,” according to a Jan. 11 unclassified CBP report obtained by Yahoo News.
“He described the aircraft type as ‘an attack jet’ and said it ‘was called White Swan-TU160, the largest military aircraft.’”
The CBP report is a daily roundup of items compiled by the agency’s National Border Security Intelligence Watch and is produced to highlight emerging trends or notable events for leadership. The center added a comment in bold italics after the paragraph detailing the engineer’s arrival and employment and explaining why his information could be valuable.
“The TU-160 White Swan, also known by the NATO reporting name ‘Blackjack,’ is reportedly the most advanced strategic bomber in the Russian inventory and has been also used in a tactical airstrike role in the Ukraine war. According to open-source reporting, a major new construction program of an improved version of the aircraft as well as an upgrade program of existing aircraft got underway at the Tupolev facility during the past few years,” according to the unclassified “CBP Indications and Warnings Daily.”
CBP declined to answer Yahoo News’ questions or otherwise comment, citing agency policy “to neither confirm nor speak to potentially improperly disclosed internal documents marked as law enforcement sensitive or for official use only.”
Russian military expert Michael Kofman said he had no independent knowledge of this Russian engineer but spoke generally about the kind of information someone in his position could provide.
“An individual working at a defense industrial facility such as Tuplov could have access to a range of information on defense industrial production, specifications related to the Tu-160 bomber and its more recently developed modernized variant, various production processes, dependencies and where their limitations lie,” said Kofman, director of the Russia studies program at the Center for Naval Analyses.
“Someone in such a position could accumulate knowledge by virtue of the types of information they’re exposed to on the job, some of which could prove valuable,” he told Yahoo News.
As the U.S. continues to lobby allies to send military equipment to Ukraine, details about this particular fighter jet, which underwent reproduction and upgrades during the time of the engineer’s stated employment, would constitute valuable information, said a senior military intelligence official.
“Would a site manager know if they modified the remodeled bombers to shoot hypersonic missiles? He might. And that would be a really big deal, if the White Swan was retrofitted to fire hypersonic missiles. They are fast and launched from much farther away,” the official explained. “We don’t have anything that can defend against hypersonic missiles — meaning, Patriot systems and all the rest of what we are supplying Ukraine, it’s useless.” 1/2
https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-ex-russian-military-bomber-engineer-seeks-asylum-at-us-border-offers-military-secrets-220728915.html