Dubbed the “White Swan” in Russia and christened “Blackjack” by NATO nations, the Eastern answer to the American Rockwell-built B-1B Lancer, the Tu-160 supersonic heavy strategic bomber is undoubtedly one of the hearts of Muscovites Air (and nuclear) arsenal.
If the Tu-160, not the youngest but recently modernized and relaunched with great fanfare, is already fairly well known to the American services and their allies, the latter no doubt jumped for joy upon learning that a Russian engineer had been working on the plane , otherwise widely used to bomb Ukraine from afar, recently defected to seek asylum in the United States.
As reported by Yahoo News, the man and his family turned up in an SUV on the southwestern border of the country. Fearing for his life after taking part in demonstrations against Vladimir Putin’s regime and in support of political prisoner Alexei Navalny, the man asked Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to be received and protected in the United States, saying, that he has information that could be of great interest to the Pentagon.
Yahoo News was able to get the CBP report of that first encounter. It said that “his previous jobs include working between 2018 and 2021 on the manufacture of a specific type of aircraft at the Tupolev factories in Kazan, in west-central Russia.”
“He described the aircraft as ‘an offensive aircraft’ and said it was called ‘White Swan-TU160’, the largest Russian military aircraft,” the CBP officer noted during that first statement. That report was then sent to another entity called the National Border Security Intelligence Watch, which is responsible for reviewing these CBP reports and identifying “interesting” cases and highlights. Bingo: Obviously, this might have been a hell of a catch.
The Center for Naval Analyzes’ Russia specialist, analyst Michael Kofman, told Yahoo News that he was unaware of the history of this particular engineer, but acknowledged the keen interest the information he is able to present holds.
“A person working in a military factory like Tupolev can have access to a whole range of information about industrial defense production, about the specifications of the Tu-160 and its recently developed modernized variants, about their manufacturing process, their needs and limitations.” said Kofman.
An American official also assures that the crucial question is whether or not the device can fire hypersonic projectiles, these weapons that are considered invincible and against which defenses are currently only in the development phase. “Could the manager of an industrial site know if he modified the bombers to fire hypersonic missiles? It’s possible,” he says.
In secret
In a very odd way, Jana Winter of Yahoo News explains that the report she had access to contained the defector’s full identity. Which seems a bit problematic given a Kremlin that doesn’t hesitate to poison its opponents anywhere in the world or cause timely bursts of collapsing windows or strange deaths in its former allies.
It appears that after a week of verifying his identity and history, the man and his information were deemed credible and taken into custody by the FBI, who then isolated him from his family.
As another American official explained to Yahoo News, the information he has is not only about the Tu-160 “Blackjack”, but everything related to the organization of the factory where he worked. Methods of communication, computer and messaging systems, human resource management and identity: everything, really everything can be useful, especially in the case of – who knows? – a cyber attack on the structure.
Daniel Hoffman, a veteran of the CIA and its covert operations, thinks the event isn’t really one thing: the man the United States has gotten its hands on is just one person among many, certainly valuable. “These things happen every day,” he comments wearily, as if it were just a bad Hollywood script.