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02-09-2024
MOSCOW: In early August, Pablo Gonzalez was taken from a prison in Poland and flown to Moscow on a plane carrying Russian deep-cover agents, hackers and a hitman for the FSB intelligence service.
The group was met at the airport by a military guard, red carpet and Vladimir Putin thanking them for their loyal service to the country.
Video footage from that night in Moscow shows Gonzalez smiling as he shakes hands with President Putin at the foot of the plane steps. Black-bearded, with a shaven and shiny head, he’s wearing a Star Wars T-shirt that declares “Your Empire Needs You”.
Known by his Russian friends as “Pablo, the Basque journalist”, the 42-year-old was part of a major prisoner swap for Westerners held in Russian jails and Russian dissidents.
In the group freed by Vladimir Putin were two opposition activists González was accused of spying on.
He’d been arrested in Poland in 2022 for alleged espionage.
“I got my first suspicions in 2019. It just dawned on me,” Zhanna Nemtsova tells me, in the first interview she’s given about the man who spied on her.
The two met in 2016 at an event about the investigation into her father’s murder. Boris Nemtsov, a staunch opponent of Vladimir Putin, had been assassinated a year earlier, right beside the Kremlin.
His daughter herself a vocal Putin critic eventually moved to Europe for safety.
That day in Strasbourg, Pablo González asked Nemtsova for an interview for a newspaper in the Basque region. She refused, at first but the journalist, Spanish, with Russian roots gradually became something of a fixture in her circle: attending events, taping interviews, mingling.
Looking back, Nemtsova remembers becoming wary.
“I shared my suspicions with a couple of people and they were like, ‘No, this is nonsense!’ People regard you as crazy if you bring up some things. They can think you paranoid but “I was absolutely right.”
That’s why she’s decided to speak out openly now.
“I want other people to be very careful,” Zhanna Nemtsova explains. “The threat is not something you can just read in books or watch at the movies. It’s very close.”
González was only formally charged with espionage a week after he left Poland, flown to Moscow as part of the August prisoner swap. By then, he’d spent well over two years locked up, awaiting trial.
All along, Polish prosecutors have deflected questions about the case and the process. Intelligence sources remain tight-lipped. The Polish lawyer who first represented González says he can’t comment.
By the time of his arrest, González had been living in Warsaw for at least three years, much of that time with his Polish girlfriend. He was a freelance journalist, working mostly for Spanish-language press.
He reported from the war in Nagorno-Karabakh and travelled to Ukraine. At some point, he joined a media trip to Syria run by the Russian defence ministry, always very selective about who it takes.
It was in 2022 that he was detained, briefly, in Ukraine, though the SBU security service there won’t divulge any details. Then, on 28 February, Gonzalez was arrested in Przemysl, eastern Poland, where he was part of the media pack covering the start of Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine. The trigger for the arrest has not been made public. Last year, Zhanna Nemtsova was shown evidence of Gonzalez’s activity as part of the criminal investigation. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
