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1. Looking forward to catching up with @allinwithchris, to discuss the @nytimes reporting identifying the Taliban middlemen who conspired with Russia and the financial transaction traced by American officials which convinced them that GRU had paid a bounty to kill US troops.
2. One of the middlemen, Rahmatullah Azizi, was at one point a contractor who got a slice of the billions in funding that the American-led Coalition funneled into Afghanistan, as reported by @MujMash @EricSchmittNYT @NajimRah and I: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/world/asia/afghan-russia-bounty-middleman.html
3. Neighbors noticed the fancy cars Azizi began driving in recent years, after returning from trips to Russia. He built a four-story villa. US officials say he is one of two middlemen they identified between the Taliban and the GRU, Russia's military intelligence wing
4. Officials who are familiar with the intelligence explain that it was "SIGINT," or signals intelligence, specifically electronic data showing the financial transfers of cash from a Russia-controlled account to one linked to the Taliban that convinced them of Russia's plot.
5. What I find particularly interesting is that officials told us that the GRU unit linked to the plan to pay the Taliban to kill US troops is believed to be the same one that carried out the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in London in 2018 with a powerful nerve agent
