It is a time of huge strain on the Russian despotism. Drones strike oil refineries with near-clockwork regularity, fuel queues stretch for miles from filling stations, and the leader’s aura of invincibility is under question. So it might seem a curious time for Russia’s guard dogs to be dredging up old conspiracy theories about Osama bin Laden.
Or perhaps not. The security services, always prone to explaining difficulties and failures with reference to the evil intent of the West, are returning to the favored stories of old.
So it was that Nikolay Patrushev, one of Putin’s closest allies and a former FSB chief, claimed that Osama bin Laden, the infamous al-Qaeda leader, was a CIA asset until he began to operate free from its guiding hand.
According to Patrushev, this was the moment when the CIA decided to eliminate him. As evidence, Patrushev referred to a joint Russian-American operation to kill bin Laden, which was supposedly sabotaged by the Americans at the moment when the Russians figured out his whereabouts and told the CIA. “They were supposed to strike and eliminate him. That was the agreement,” he said. The CIA Director never fully explained why the agency failed to act, Patrushev said.
Whatever the exact nature of any FSB-CIA deal (and the Russians offered no detail on the when and where of the supposed arrangement), it was enough for Patrushev to advance his conspiracy theories.
The FSB began playing that game in January 2001, when Patrushev’s service accused the CIA of working with bin Laden. That month, the two national newspapers, Izvestia and Komsomolskaya Pravda, ran front-page stories about a former Russian army non-commissioned officer, Vasily Kalinkin. It sounded like a spin-off from the TV series Homeland, but was made 10 years earlier: the papers claimed that Kalinkin changed sides and was jointly trained in the arts of sabotage by the CIA and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
According to the FSB, Kalinkin deserted the Russian army to join the Chechen rebels in 1991, converted to Islam, moved to Afghanistan, and received terrorist training from an instructor named “Bill.” Upon graduation, Kalinkin, according to the FSB’s version, signed a cooperation agreement with US intelligence bearing an image of the Statue of Liberty in the upper left corner and, in the upper right, the words “Osama bin Laden Sabotage School.” He was then sent back to Russia as a sleeper agent. He spent six years in hiding until he gave himself up to the FSB.
That fantastical story left little doubt about what the FSB was trying to achieve: to blame the CIA for the upsurge of terrorism in Russia, playing on deep-rooted anti-Western feelings and paranoia.
Opportunistic as they were, this didn’t prevent the FSB from changing the narrative after the September 11 attacks. On September 17, just days after al-Qaeda struck the United States, the FSB announced that it had “discovered” a CD containing technical information about Boeing aircraft together with a pilot’s manual — a frankly unsophisticated attempt to tie the Chechens to the attacks.
This time, the objective was to fold the war in Chechnya into the newly declared global war on terror, making it harder for Washington to criticize the bloody and unscrupulous way in which the Russian army and the FSB were fighting the insurgency in the North Caucasus.
That narrative was further elevated in 2004, when Russia felt at its most vulnerable after a series of horrific terrorist attacks, including the hostage takings at a Moscow theater and a school in Beslan, North Ossetia. In October 2004, the FSB spokesman in the North Caucasus claimed that al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood were the main drivers of the hostilities in Chechnya. The same month, Patrushev, then FSB director, described Chechnya as another front against al-Qaeda.
That approach was successful, to a degree. The following year, in October 2005, a group of Russian generals directly involved in conducting the “counterterrorist operation” in the North Caucasus went to the UK to talk to their British counterparts.
It was a very high-level visit: the Russian group, which included Mikhail Belousov, head of the Counter Terrorism and Political Extremism Directorate — the closest thing the FSB had at the time to a secret police — was granted meetings with senior officials at the Northern Ireland Office, the Home Office and the Foreign Office, and went to Belfast to study the delicate history of dialogue between British governments and Sinn Fein in the light of the upcoming elections in Chechnya.
The Russians were cordially invited to return the following year to take part in anti-terrorist exercises on British streets.
The following year — Putin gave Chechnya to the brutal psychopath Ramzan Kadyrov, and the FSB did come to Britain — but not in the manner foreseen by the cordial meetings of the previous year. Instead, they poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with polonium and left a radioactive trail across the British capital.
In 2011, when bin Laden was killed by US troops, the FSB found it suitable to change the narrative again. In May of that year, just a few weeks after US forces raided bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Channel One, Russia’s main television channel, aired a documentary implying that bin Laden was “a link in the chain of monstrous staging operations of the American intelligence services.”
Why make all this effort?
It should be understood that the claim that bin Laden was some sort of CIA asset is not just a conspiracy theory. It establishes a moral equivalence in brutality: it suggests that the 9/11 attacks were organized by the CIA, which, in turn, means that there is no difference between the methods used by American agencies and the services known for committing the most horrible crimes against their own population and anyone else who walks into their crosshairs.
That narrative, promoted by the FSB, did not change in the years to come, although Russian generals continued to be entertained in Western capitals, most spectacularly, in 2017 when the heads of all three major Russian intelligence agencies — the SVR, the foreign intelligence service; the FSB, the domestic security service; and the GRU, military intelligence — flew to Washington for high-level talks with their American counterparts.
And in the meantime, Western counterparts continued to share intelligence on terrorist threats with the FSB, as the Americans did when they warned Moscow about the impending terrorist attack on Crocus City Hall in 2024. The warning was ignored, and the US was thanked by the FSB with allegations that the West was involved in the attack.
It is well understood that Western intelligence services have no choice but to work with the most horrible regimes — because national security demands it, or because the lives of civilians are at stake.
The problem is that while Western agencies make these decisions for practical reasons, Russia’s services use the cooperation to reinforce a carefully constructed narrative that essentially erases any moral distinction between Western intelligence services and the Soviet — and now Russian — security services.
This game is played in the open for everyone to see, and every difficult compromise made by a Western intelligence agency — including intelligence sharing with the FSB — is simply misused to reinforce the FSB’s point.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. Their book , Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation, was published in 2025.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
