Lost in translation: How Russia's new elite hit squad was compromised by an idiotic lapse in tradecraft

[Nevilledog]

https://theins.ru/en/inv/290235


When Denis Alimov passed through the arrivals hall of El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá on the morning of February 24, 2026, he had the outward appearance of a middle-aged Russian tourist escaping Moscow's harsh winter: a salt-and-pepper goatee, a light travel bag, a connecting flight from Istanbul, and a reservation at a Cartagena beach resort.

Within minutes, Colombian migration officers had him in handcuffs. The Interpol Red Notice — activated as he flew in at the request of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York — had been waiting at the gate. Alimov stood accused of orchestrating the attempted assassination of two prominent Chechen dissidents based in Europe, having offered a bounty of $1.5 million on each of their heads — payable whether the target arrived in Russia dead or merely, in the deadpan vocabulary of Russian intelligence, “legally deported.”

Despite his appearance, Alimov, 42, was no ordinary tourist. A decorated veteran of the FSB's elite Alfa special forces unit, since 2023 he had served as a senior operative in Center 795, Russia's newest and most secretive assassination directorate, designed, according to leaked Russian intelligence documents, to be impossible to detect. Alimov was one of its star hires, and for two years he had run a global network of agents tasked with organizing the murder of political enemies of the Russian regime. But now the agents had failed to deliver, and one had been arrested. It was time for Alimov to take matters into his own hands.

Armed with a freshly issued non-biometric passport in a false identity, he had chosen the date revered by Russian spies and soldiers — Defender of the Fatherland Day — for his maiden undercover trip abroad. Around eight in the evening, as his comrades were raising toasts to an elusive victory, he was checking in for his flight to Istanbul at Vnukovo airport. Back at his apartment, his iPhone 16 sat on the desk buzzing with unanswered greetings.

*snip*

[unc70]

1. Very long and detailed, but worth the time and effort to read

A lot of details to process.

[dalton99a]

2. Yeah, Google is our friend

Center 795 had been designed, at considerable institutional expense, to be “air-gapped” — sealed against the kind of electronic penetration that had compromised previous Russian intelligence operations. Its commanders had taken precautions: encrypted messaging applications, pseudonymous identities, compartmentalized communications. What they had not accounted for was the linguistic incompatibility of their own operatives.

Alimov spoke Russian. Durovic spoke Serbian. Neither commanded the other's native tongue at the level sufficient for operational communication. Their solution was straightforward and, as it turned out, catastrophic: they used Google Translate, converting Durovic's Serbian field reports into Russian for his handler, and Alimov's Russian instructions back into Serbian for his agent.

The messages themselves were transmitted through encrypted applications that the men believed to be secure. But Google operates through servers in the United States, which fall squarely within the reach of an FBI surveillance warrant. Armed with a court order, investigators were able to access the logs of these translations directly from the service provider, reading the clear-text content of the entire operational communications thread in real time, even as Alimov and Durovic believed themselves protected by end-to-end encryption.

The surveillance logs, portions of which have been quoted in a newly unsealed U.S. grand jury indictment, read at times like an absurdist document: two operatives of Russia's most secretive assassination unit conducting a murder-for-hire plot through a consumer translation tool, their every instruction and status report preserved in legible, timestamped entries on an American company's servers. It was, as a source close to the investigation later noted, even better than a wiretap because it arrived transcribed.