On September 15 the Justice Department charged five men working for Russian intelligence. In late August two of them paid a Venezuelan living in the United States about $1,500 to film a Kremlin critic’s home near Washington from his car. Then they offered him $40,000 to kill the man. When he said no, they said they had people in Mexico.
The instructions were plain. Airplane mode, start recording before the neighborhood, slow as you pass the house, delete the messages after. The killing was called construction and the surveillance was called measuring a plot of land. All five are at large, so the hiring shop is still open.
Iran ran the shop first. The IRGC offered a Russian mob boss $500,000 for Masih Alinejad, and the man they sent sat outside her Brooklyn home with an AK-47. The cartels run it on TikTok, and one Arizona county caught over a hundred juveniles smuggling in eighteen months. One method: a local face, a small first job, a bigger one after.
Tonight’s SITREP covers the three early warning signs, a small paid job that starts with airplane mode, your county name in a federal complaint, and a buyer whose language does not match the flag, and gives Guardians the three moves that keep a foreign service from renting someone in your family or your street: teach the offer to every teenager in the house, take your home off the internet map, and start a street log for the slow car. 📋