Pablo González
Pablo González is a Russian-Spanish journalist and an alleged agent of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. As a journalist, González collaborated with several European and U.S. media outlets, including Deutsche Welle, Voice of America, Publico, and laSexta. But when González was arrested in Poland in February 2022, following a tip from MI6, the authorities issued a brief statement saying he was suspected of “participation in the activities of a foreign intelligence service.” A week after his arrest, Voice of America scrubbed González’s work from its website “out of an abundance of caution.” A 2024 article for The Guardian by Shaun Walker describes him as “a passionate and funny storyteller.” Walker first met González on a “training course for reporters who work in conflict zones” in 2011. In “Swap: A Secret History of the New Cold War,” Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson write that González “appeared to be everywhere and know everyone” and would “charm everyone from activists to riot police.” He once “braved shell fire to save two gravely wounded French war journalists” in Nagorno-Karabakh. According to Hinshaw and Parkinson, González “began to file reports to the GRU” sometime in 2010. In the years that followed, he would send “his handlers detailed reports on the journalists he was befriending, their sources, and the officials from Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and army he was meeting over expensive dinners.” González spent years building connections with activists and journalists in Europe, from Bellingcat to the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom. Two years after his arrest in Poland, González was sent back to Moscow in what Walker describes as “the biggest prisoner exchange between Russia and the west since the end of the cold war.” On the tarmac, wearing a Star Wars T-shirt emblazoned with “Your Empire Needs You,” González firmly shook Putin’s hand. Russian TV footage, analyzed by prolific spy hunter Christo Grozev and his colleagues, later showed González hug three men “like they’re known colleagues or old friends or bosses.” Their investigation found that one of the men is on the FBI’s most wanted list for a number of international hacking and related influence and disinformation operations. In a video on YouTube, Grozev says he now feels “completely confident that Pablo González was an agent for the GRU, not the harmless Spanish journalist he had so many people convinced he was.” Though as Walker notes in his article, “without looking into the GRU archives, it is impossible to know just how useful González’s alleged spying on the Russian opposition may have been for Moscow.”