Alexander Zorin’s desire to make himself larger than life inadvertently exposes Moscow’s lies about how the war in Syria was waged

Before the Russians conquered Mariupol, they annihilated it. In the center of this city in southeastern Ukraine, more than half the buildings were damaged, and almost every high-rise was destroyed. The Russians bombed 86 out of 89 educational facilities, a maternity ward and a pediatric hospital. Their missiles and artillery collapsed ceilings onto Ukrainian families as they slept in their apartments. Death “was everywhere … with bodies scattered in the streets, alone in apartments, and buried in shallow graves,” according to a February 2024 report issued by Human Rights Watch, SITU Research and Truth Hounds.

The siege of Mariupol took three months, and the last redoubt of Ukrainian defenders was the Azovstal Metallurgical Combine, a sprawling industrial facility that encompassed a tenth of the city’s real estate. Over 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers spent 82 days resisting the Russians from the combine’s underground honeycomb network of tunnels. By May 2022, their fight was over. As the invaders closed in, a last-minute deal was brokered between Kyiv and Moscow to allow the defenders to be evacuated to Russian-occupied territories in eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine’s ICTV aired footage of the negotiated surrender on its “Facts” program, showing a tall man in a military baseball cap and black fleece escorting the soldiers down a blasted strip of road. This was Gen. Alexander Zorin, a senior officer in Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s envoy to Syria, Zorin negotiated directly with the Americans from 2016 to 2017 in Geneva as part of a joint diplomatic mechanism for responding to ceasefire violations between the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian opposition. He was subsequently stationed in Syria, where he spearheaded similar evacuations, this time of Islamist rebels around Damascus in 2018, leading to the tactical victories that allowed the imperiled Assad regime to reestablish its control over the Syrian capital, and then over most of that war-ravaged country. That same year, Putin personally bestowed on Zorin the Hero of the Russian Federation medal, the highest state decoration.

Public biographical details of Zorin are vague or fragmentary, confined to the usual resume bullet points of a camera-friendly Russian spy, who isn’t averse to seeing his true name in the paper. “Alexander Zorin, Putin’s Man for Difficult Missions, in Syria” read a headline from the London-based Arabic daily Asharq Al-Awsat from August 2021.

“When dealing with the opposition, he often adopts their rhetoric, surprising politicians and civil society figures,” the article stated. “Behind closed doors, Zorin often complains of the regime’s stances and stubbornness. Openly, he animatedly explains the Russian position, while also presenting a more congenial image of Moscow.”

Such observations are true, but hardly the whole story.

CNN mentioned Zorin in March 2023 as one of two prime movers on the Russian side who lifted the Mariupol siege, the other being his better-known superior, Lt. Gen. Vladimir Alekseyev, the deputy head of the GRU. Unlike Alekseyev, however, Zorin is now the subject of a major motion picture in Russia.

Zorin’s life as a spy is about to become famous with the debut of “Porcelain Soldier,” a Russian film fictionalizing the GRU general’s extraordinary feats over the last decade, with Zorin rendered as the protagonist, Andrey Zabrodin. Ostensibly rooted in actual events from Zorin’s transcontinental operations, the project is clearly envisaged along the lines of “Seventeen Moments of Spring,” the celebrated Brezhnev-era TV miniseries about Max Otto von Stierlitz, a Soviet deep-cover mole who burrowed into the Nazi foreign intelligence service and whom Josef Stalin tasked with uncovering a duplicitous — and wholly apocryphal — American plot to strike a separate peace with the Third Reich at the end of World War II. (Putin is an enormous fan of the miniseries.)

“Porcelain Soldier” is no less propagandistic — or casual with the truth.

“There are people in our Armed Forces whose professional activities are not advertised,” Evgeniy Sokurov, the film’s screenwriter and a former Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) commando turned bit actor and stunt coordinator, said in a statement about the film obtained by New Lines. “Their faces are hidden from the eyes of the broad masses of the population, and they are even awarded government medals with secret Presidential orders. But the results of their work can turn the globe in one direction or the other. They are the strategic intelligence officers of the Main Directorate (GRU) of the General Staff of the Russian Federation Armed Forces, true heroes of our time.”

New Lines has exclusively acquired a tranche of documents about the making of “Porcelain Soldier,” totaling over a thousand pages. These include five iterations of Sokurov’s screenplay, which show a notable decline in nuance, subtlety and plausibility. The first draft was written in 2020, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and dealt entirely with Zorin’s role in Syria. The final draft, written in 2024, opens with his more recent tenure in Mariupol.

That said, each and every version of the movie centers on Zorin’s efforts to negotiate rebel withdrawals. The different iterations sometimes conflate or confuse actual rebel commanders he claims to have parlayed with, though. In four of the versions, Zorin’s stand-in is racing against the clock because the celluloid-rendered rebels are preparing a chemical attack they plan to blame on the Assad regime, and he must exfiltrate a Russian asset in their midst to expose the whole operation before the international community. The movie then capitalizes on counterfactual claims popular in Russian state media and the conjoined circles of the Western far left and far right: that Assad never perpetrated chemical attacks; his opponents did.

Here and there, too, character development of our protagonist is either treated as a priority of storytelling or simply a distraction from the cartoonish plot of showing how evil and determined Russia’s enemies are. Zorin’s stand-in sometimes has a deteriorating homelife in Moscow, married to a shrewish wife who hates his dedication to his work above all else and seeks a divorce. In another draft, he’s a widower who, while being held captive by armed jihadists, recalls the fatal car crash that killed his beloved wife.

The film, as it was developed, reads like a self-mythologizing narrative crafted out of and on top of the fake history already cooked up by the Russian government. The closer to the present day the screenplays get, the worse they read. The third draft, dated 2022, attempts to not only blame the Syrian opposition for a chemical atrocity, but to depict the CIA as complicit in it.

“Porcelain Soldier” is currently wrapping production at the Black Sea Film Studio in Gelendzhik, a resort town in the region of Krasnodar, in southwestern Russia. Its director is Stanislav Sapachev, a little-known filmmaker with a single crime drama credit to his filmography. A letter seen by New Lines from the film’s producers to Russia’s then-defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, explains that the project was greenlit in November 2023 by the Russian Ministry of Culture after winning a contest of “more than 230 applications” for its “relevance, powerful patriotic orientation, psychologism of drama, and realism of the plot.”

Shoigu was evidently sold on Zorin’s story and permitted the crew to shoot on location at various Russian facilities in Syria, such as Hmeimim Air Base in Latakia province, which was expanded and modernized with long runways and refueling infrastructure in advance of Russia’s direct intervention in the civil war in 2015. Or, at least, that was the plan until December 2024, when the Assad regime evaporated within days of a stunning and unexpected offensive by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the former al Qaeda franchise in Syria, whose leader now rules the country. Today, much of Russia’s military infrastructure in Syria has been drawn down.

Though this strategic defeat might have hampered some of the better scouting locations for the film, the GRU’s plans to immortalize Zorin as a 21st-century Stierlitz remain very much in place. “Porcelain Soldier” is slated for release in November 2025, according to the Russian press.

The final cut of the film, which is unlikely to become an international blockbuster or a viral sensation on Netflix, is probably the least interesting thing about this project. The real prize is Zorin’s 186-page memoir, titled “The Negotiator,” which stands as a unique testament of an active-duty GRU officer. Embedded throughout the memoir are visual receipts corroborating many of his tales, or some version of them: selfies of the GRU operative in the field in Syria, here smoking cigars and shisha (water pipes) with his fixers, there parlaying with the rough militants he’s meant to disarm.

“I am a Negotiator and this ’opus’ is about me,” Zorin writes in the introduction to his memoir. “It would be wrong to call it ’literature.’ It is difficult to interpret the text as a certain literary genre. It was formed from about a dozen real stories about my almost year-long assignment in Syria.”

Blending an occasionally soul-searching memoir with a carefully calibrated after-action memo intended for his higher-ups in the GRU and Russian General Staff, Zorin is self-conscious about the weighty cultural assignment he’s been given — that of becoming a living ornament of national valor and pride.

The memoir was written, he tells us, at his mother’s dacha (country cottage), located somewhere within Russia, at some point in the last five years. Scattershot and disjointed, it is divided into several thematic “essays,” devoid of any chronological linearity. Its stream-of-consciousness style suggests he sought no outside editor or peer reviewer.

This document was never intended for broad readership — it wasn’t meant to be published at all, only to be seen by the filmmakers and their government patrons. It also has an exceptionally loose relationship with facts. Some events he describes did happen, in one way or another, and are independently verifiable, though his first-person depiction of the details is always unverifiable, and often flagrantly false. At other times, Zorin portrays set pieces and exchanges he himself was not privy to, as if imagining them from whole cloth or basing his recollections on unnamed third-party sources.

Then there are moments hitherto unreported or known to anyone outside of Zorin and those he claims were present. Very often, however, his depiction of these incidents strains credulity. He claims to have drunkenly and single-handedly saved more than 200 Syrian “hostages” held captive in a dungeon in Douma by one of the most formidable rebel groups — a “Mission: Impossible”-style rescue operation that has somehow never been reported or discussed in the seven years since it happened, despite scores of alleged eyewitnesses.

Zorin’s unreliability as the narrator of his own drama is proudly advertised in his job description. He is, after all, a professional intelligence officer who, by his own frequent admission throughout the memoir, specializes in lies and obfuscation, manipulating those on the other side of a negotiating table into doing what most serves his and Russia’s interests. He wants his reader to see him as a likeable character, but also as a Janus-faced study in duality. He is boastful, but contrite. He is well-meaning, but not naive. He is dutiful, but not blind to the vices and deficiencies of his own side. He is genuinely concerned with winning the trust and goodwill of those who might otherwise kill him, but he is not above betraying them to complete the task at hand.

Anyone might overindulge a narcissistic tendency under these circumstances. The difference is that Zorin is currently operating as a Russian intelligence officer and cannot veer too wildly from the “official” state version, at least not without incurring suspicion or worse from the higher-ups in the Kremlin. Zorin thus faces two problems as a storyteller. The first is that a good spy yarn requires going off script. The second is that Russian disinformation is as illogical as it is lazy, so it’s tricky to keep track of all the red herrings and fake alibis in pursuit of screen-worthy pulp fiction. Zorin’s desire to make himself larger than life inadvertently exposes the lies by which Putin’s authoritarianism is governed and Russia’s war in Syria was waged.

Propaganda wants you to believe in something that is not true: “We have completed our Five-Year Plan for industrialization in just two years.” “We have abolished all class divisions.” “We are invading Czechoslovakia to provide fraternal assistance.”

Disinformation works differently, in that its goal isn’t to make you believe something is true, but to make you doubt everything. Propaganda propounds the one uplifting lie until it is assimilated into one’s consciousness and regurgitated perfunctorily, like a muscle spasm. Disinformation wants not to uplift but to tear down. It is oppositional in nature and relies on many different lies, sometimes lazily or indifferently told, sometimes intricately woven and sometimes entirely contradictory to the lie told yesterday. It floods the zone with shit. Its simple but cynical psychological premise is that the mental energy required to pick apart and overturn so many lies is exhausting and demoralizing, and so who cares anyway? What does it even matter what the truth is in a world where everyone is selling something? Disinformation is where skepticism becomes credulity: The “question everything” posture suggests being wised-up and immune to being fooled, yet fooled is exactly what its purveyors are.

Zorin’s story is unique in that it seeks to make propaganda out of disinformation: What is being uplifted, what we are meant to believe in, is Zorin himself, his preternatural ability to get American spies and murderous religious fanatics and intractable Middle Eastern despots to do his bidding, however much the odds are stacked against him. He gives us an antihistory of Syria, relying on the disinformation spread by his government, but filtered through the lens of Hollywood-style mythmaking. It’s as if Michael Bay were asked to make a movie out of so many disposable articles from Sputnik, an English-language Kremlin mouthpiece.

Alexander Sergeevich Zorin was born on Aug. 11, 1968, in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine. Like many Russian intelligence officers, he joined the family business. His father, he writes offhandedly, was a “Chekist,” or servant of the KGB, the civilian sister agency to military intelligence. Zorin spent 12 years as a “military diplomat” in Tokyo, where he learned flawless Japanese. This posting prompts an inevitable comparison with Richard Sorge, the womanizing German communist turned GRU spy who slept with his own recruits, adroitly insinuated himself into Nazi circles in Japan, befriended Hitler’s ambassador to Tokyo in the late 1930s and tried to warn Stalin of the Wehrmacht’s coming invasion of the USSR. (Stalin ignored the warning, believing his agents were peddling disinformation.)

“Liva Alexander,” as Zorin’s Syrian confidants affectionately dub him (using an approximation of the Arabic word for “general”), leans into the comparison with the legendary Soviet operative. Like Sorge, his principal talents are for manipulating people inclined to mistrust him and for insinuating himself into dangerous circumstances, armed chiefly with the force of his personality. The difference is that Zorin is no pretender to enemy causes. He comes exactly as he is, a high-level Russian intelligence officer, somehow leveraging that uninviting credential to convince those suspicious of him that he’s a man of his word. Perhaps for that reason he compares himself favorably to the legendary agent Ramsay, as Sorge was codenamed: “He was [in Japan] much less and ended badly, unlike me,” Zorin writes in the memoir. Sorge got a posthumous Soviet postage stamp; Zorin got his own spy thriller.

Not that he hasn’t got difficulties of his own. Zorin’s marriage, he writes in his memoir, is in tatters: His spouse (we never learn her name, although in the screenplays she’s sometimes “Olga,” “Lena” or “Natasha”) expected all the perks of a decorated general’s wife but is left alone at long intervals to raise their 6-year-old son and two daughters. When the decorated Zorin returns home to Moscow with the latest bauble, an Order of Courage medal, he is met with cold congratulations and even colder soup — his bride tells him to warm it up if he’s hungry. (The porcelain soldier of the film’s title refers to a toy belonging to his fictional 6-year-old son, which Zabrodin takes with him to Syria and stares at pensively, at poignant intervals.) That Zorin’s wife is so miserable in real life may account for why he killed her off in one version of the movie.

“I had neither the strength, nor the desire, and especially the time to solve my own problems,” Zorin confesses. “And soon I began to notice that I was experiencing great joy from business trips that brought separation. Separation from a resentful wife and from family problems. These problems were replaced on business trips by others, problems much more interesting than trying to salvage my family in Moscow.”

One problem he did delight in solving is that of “Masha,” Zorin’s informal adviser and lover in Geneva and Damascus. Included in the tranche of documents New Lines has examined — a document not meant for the “Porcelain Soldier” film crew — is a card Zorin wrote to his coy mistress, amid a rosy bouquet he mailed her at the Ritz-Carlton Moscow on the occasion of Japanese Lovers’ Day. “Your horned piglet,” he signs it.

Masha, it turns out, is Maria Khodynskaya-Golenishcheva, a young second secretary at Russia’s United Nations mission in Geneva in 2015 and today a professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, the Harvard of Russia. Her scholarly contributions include book-length studies such as “The Libyan Lesson: Does the End Justify the Means?” and “Syria: The Hard Road From War to Peace,” which carries no mention of Zorin — a curious omission given his outsize role in her subject matter.

In one of the film scripts, dated summer 2021, Masha’s character is described as the daughter of a Chechen “black widow” suicide bomber, who detonated her bomb-vest aboard a bus in 1997. Masha, the attacker’s child, is lured off the bus by an unnamed Caucasian Special Forces captain, who offers her a gold chain with a pendant with a Quranic sura (chapter) apparently short enough to be inscribed in Arabic, just before the bomb detonates. Masha still wears the pendant as an adult. The father goes on to become deputy chief of the Russian general staff.

The real Masha was born in Ryazan, southeast of Moscow, to Sergei Konovalov, who today serves as the deputy chair of a pro-government veterans’ group known as Combat Brotherhood. A former lieutenant in the Russian army, Konovalov served in the Caucasus in the early ’90s. His postretirement stints have included so-called “humanitarian” missions to Syria and the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine.

Masha is also a GRU agent, though she answers to a different case officer, Sergei Zavidov, as The Insider reported in 2023. On top of that, she is a Bentley-driving millionaire who, per one well-placed source in the Russian Duma, owes her success and fortune to a third man, Leonid Slutsky, the leader of the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party, whose fondness for younger women has yielded two prominent sexual harassment complaints from well-known Russian journalists.

Masha’s presence as a diplomatic-intelligence helpmeet is captured in photographs showing her sitting next to Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s fossilized foreign minister. During Zorin’s deployment to Geneva, Masha is stationed there under her own diplomatic cover as the second secretary of the Russian mission. She plays an offstage role, at least according to her horned piglet’s memoir, in egging on Zorin to go rogue whenever diplomacy gets boring and static. “Fuck the rules!” she tells him, by way of explaining that a GRU spymaster shouldn’t have to waste his time in carousel arguments with flunkies from the Russian Foreign Ministry and the U.S. State Department. She convinces Zorin to go straight to where the real power lies in America, as it does in Russia: the special services.

The United States is rendered throughout the memoir as the chief adversary of Zorin’s saga — and Russia’s. Its diplomats and generals are sanctimonious and self-righteous but hapless, lecturing the Russians about human rights abuses and war crimes. Whatever “congenial image of Moscow” Zorin cultivates in public, in private he’s cynical and scornful of the American negotiators.

New Lines acquired a transcript of Zorin talking to his counterpart in Hmeimim, Col. Maksim Kosilin, on Sept. 26, 2016. Zorin, then still in Geneva, mocks U.S. Ambassador Robert Wood, one of the American representatives, for demanding “eleven times” that Russia stop its attack on opposition-held Aleppo, a campaign that featured notorious bombing raids on hospitals, bakeries and apartment blocks.

“What you’re doing in Aleppo is a betrayal of our agreements,” Zorin derisively recounts Wood telling him. “I say: ’The betrayal is that you bombed everything in Deir ez-Zor, killing people, and supported ISIS,” referring to the Islamic State group, a common refrain of the Kremlin at the time, even as the U.S. was then leading a coalition of more than 80 countries to destroy the terror network. Zorin assures Kosilin the Americans may “squeak,” but they’ll never walk away from dealing with the Russians.

He was right.

In the memoir, Zorin is telling his story years down the line from that rather manic-depressive period in U.S.-Russian relations that followed the short-lived “reset” of President Barack Obama’s first term, meant to improve Washington’s engagement with the Kremlin. In 2011, a peaceful protest movement exploded across Syria, taking its inspiration from the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. The loudest demonstrations were in the southern city of Daraa that March, where 15 schoolchildren were arrested and tortured for splattering calls for the “downfall of the regime” on a local wall. Protests turned revolutionary. Ordinary civilians took up arms, and soldiers from Assad’s army defected to their side once Assad’s security services, army and paramilitary death squads, known as “shabiha” (derived from the Arabic word for “ghosts”), started killing men, women and children in the streets. In August 2011, Obama called on Assad to “step aside” and warned that the use of chemical weapons would cross an American “red line” and possibly trigger U.S. intervention. Instead, it seemed to trigger a unique instance of U.S.-Russian collaboration in the Middle East.

The deadliest chemical weapon attack of the war was perpetrated on Aug. 21, 2013, on the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta. It killed 1,144 people, of whom 1,119 were civilians (including 194 women and 99 children). This was yet another atrocity for which Russia came up with different counterfactual explanations. Either it never took place, or it was the handiwork of Syrian rebels, or it was “staged” by anti-Assad crisis actors to try to draw America directly into the fight. The Russian government claimed that video evidence of the attack showing asphyxiated victims with dilated pupils — a telltale symptom of exposure to organophosphates — had been uploaded before the event, neglecting to realize or acknowledge that YouTube, the platform which hosted most documentary footage from Syria, runs on Pacific Standard Time, not Arabia Standard Time, so the timestamps were 10 hours behind. Putin himself took to the op-ed page of The New York Times to deter U.S. intervention, writing, “No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons.”

The U.N. investigated the Eastern Ghouta attack, drawing on the expertise of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the international watchdog based in The Hague. The U.N.’s final report found “clear and convincing evidence” that sarin, a highly volatile nerve agent, was used on Aug. 21 in the Damascus suburb. Other nongovernmental organizations noted that the only party known to have stockpiles of sarin was the Syrian military under the control of the Assad regime. Human Rights Watch, for instance, showed that the nerve agent was disbursed via 140 mm and 330 mm surface-to-surface rockets that were “known and documented to be only in the possession of, and used by, Syrian government armed forces.”

Instead of striking Assad’s military infrastructure in retaliation for crossing his one red line, Obama cut a deal with Putin to allow the OPCW to remove all of Assad’s chemical weapons — at the time, these were believed to consist of around 1,000 tons of sarin, VX and mustard munitions. Under this agreement, Syria became a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention in 2013. Hailed as a diplomatic breakthrough, the compromise didn’t end the war — or chemical weapons attacks. According to the OPCW, at least 20 more chemical weapons attacks followed from April 2014, when the watchdog’s fact-finding mission was established, 14 of them using chlorine — an industrial cleaning product that can be legally obtained but also weaponized as a poison, in violation of the convention.

Further complicating matters was Obama’s muddled broader policy on Syria. He refused to go to war over chemical weapons. But he did authorize the CIA to covertly back a consortium of mainstream Syrian rebel groups under the operational codename “Timber Sycamore.” American case officers procured light weapons for the rebels, though nothing more sophisticated than an anti-tank missile system known as the TOW. Portable air defense platforms, which would have been extremely useful in knocking out the Assad regime helicopters dropping heavily destructive barrel bombs on rebel-held territories, were ruled out due to fears of proliferation. Even still, the TOW, an American-made weapon, became the signature munition of a new American proxy war, what the Stinger air defense missile was to the covert CIA program in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.

Washington’s intent in Syria was never regime change, but rather coercion. The Obama administration hoped that by applying enough military pressure on Assad, good-faith negotiations with Syria’s fractious political opposition in Geneva — the negotiations Zorin was party to — would lead Damascus into a sort of epiphany whereby Assad would agree to soften his iron rule, if not share power. It didn’t.

The Islamic State’s staggering conquest of a third of Syria and a third of Iraq in June 2014, and the gruesome on-camera beheadings of American journalists taken hostage by the group, altered the West’s approach. The strategy for Syria was brought more in line with the objectives of the “global war on terror.” The empowering of a dissident movement was now, at most, a second-order priority.

The U.S. assembled a coalition of over 80 countries (but not Russia) to go to war with the militant army of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a doctorate-holding Islamic cleric and former detainee of Camp Bucca, the American-run prison facility stationed in a forward operating base in Iraq.

The Islamic State’s goal was fundamentally at odds with the first principles of the Syrian revolution. It wasn’t interested in fashioning a modern democratic state out of a moldering totalitarianism. Instead, it wanted to do away with the very notion of the modern nation-state, superimposing a medieval theocracy upon its ruins. But strange times made for strange bedfellows, since both the Islamic State and the mainstream Syrian opposition shared the same proximate interest: eliminating Assad.

As the CIA’s “Timber Sycamore” continued humming along, the Pentagon simultaneously inaugurated its own rebel proxy program to “train and equip” new Syrian factions, which would now be tasked with fighting the Islamic State exclusively. Washington thus found itself recruiting two sets of Syrian fighters for two different, occasionally contradictory, purposes — using one to defeat transnational jihadists who had sometimes fought alongside, and sometimes against, the other.

America’s role in Syria was complex, to say the least. That made it easy to exploit by Russian propaganda and intelligence services, which were keen to render Washington’s ambiguity and confusion in the region as hypocrisy and deceitfulness.

The Kremlin’s English-language media outlets, such as RT and Sputnik, characterized all Syrian oppositionists as obscurantist “terrorists,” either secret members of al Qaeda or the Islamic State, or no different from those extremist organizations. Special defamatory attention was devoted to the White Helmets, a network — funded in part by U.S. and U.K aid agencies — whose rescue workers recorded themselves pulling civilians, some of them infants, from the rubble of buildings Russian jets had just leveled.

The Islamic State, meanwhile, was portrayed not as it was — a monster unwittingly unleashed by the American invasion and occupation of Iraq — but as a creature specially designed by the United States to destabilize hostile regimes in the Middle East, even as U.S. jets were nightly pounding Islamic State targets across Syria and Iraq.

And yet, for all its anti-American messaging, Moscow still sought an accommodation with Washington.

At the U.N. General Assembly in September 2015, weeks before Russian jets started running sorties from Hmeimim, Putin characterized his intervention in Syria as not only a war against terrorism but as the second coming of the Great Patriotic War against Nazism, best waged with “a broad range of parties willing to stand firm against those who, just like the Nazis, sow evil and hatred of humankind.” (Putin alluded to the World War II alliance between the U.S. and USSR in his New York Times op-ed, too.)

For Zorin, as for all Russian spy-diplomats, Russia’s direct intervention in Syria required a psychological double game. First, he wanted to justify Moscow’s war as righteous and necessary, brought about by another foolhardy American attempt at regime change in the Middle East. Second, he wanted the Americans to realize that their strategic interest lay in abandoning support for Syria’s rebels and calls for Assad to step down, and instead openly aligning with Russia in a joint “counterterrorism campaign.” At the diplomatic missions in Geneva, this required a careful carrot-and-stick approach, outmaneuvering the Americans at the negotiating table, albeit in a manner that would not preclude teaming up with them later, wherever and whenever possible.

“In addition to my ’propaganda’ function — which was my and Masha’s words ’burning the hearts of foreign diplomats’ during UN meetings on Syria, I also solved other ’intimate’ tasks in the line of my service,” Zorin writes in his memoir. “I acquired a circle of friends and acquaintances among Westerners.”

Two of these “friends and acquaintances,” he writes, were CIA officers.

Zorin’s account of his entanglements with his American counterparts in Geneva bears a passing resemblance to the truth, as several former CIA officers told New Lines that Zorin did indeed meet with their colleagues in Switzerland between 2016 and 2017. One ex-officer, who asked to remain anonymous, corroborated at least one aspect of Zorin’s character as relayed in the memoir: his firm conviction that matters of statecraft and war were too important to be left to diplomats and army officers; instead, they should be the exclusive purview of spies. (That belief isn’t necessarily at odds with the Russian government; Putin has long emphasized the role of longtime intelligence professionals in managing Russia’s domestic and foreign policy.) But even in this hubristic esteem for his own trade, Zorin veers into crudely rendered fan fiction. His machinations are either instantaneously implemented into problem-solving policies in Syria, overcoming the skepticism of U.S. and Russian higher-ups, or they’re scuttled by shortsighted politicians in Washington stuck in their Cold War mentalities and inveigled by fake news of Russian meddling in U.S. elections. Either way, the effect is always the same: Zorin is the smartest man in any room, and he twice gets the better of the boys from Langley.

His first target — or mark — in this respect is a senior CIA officer in Geneva, whom he calls “Ted,” a “whitish man in glasses with powerful diopters, behind which were hidden the intelligent but faded eyes” of a senior American intelligence officer. In the memoir, Masha and Zorin approach Ted in the hallway after one of the many fruitless U.S.-Russian debates at the President Wilson Hotel in Geneva. Masha ingratiates herself with Ted right away by noting that neither of them was given much time to speak at their delegations’ proceedings, which have anyway devolved into “public propaganda slogans.” She makes a play for Ted’s cooperation: “Hey guys, wake up. It’s time to come out of the shadows. We need your help!”

Confident that she has Ted’s attention, Masha introduces herself and Zorin to Ted, whereupon Zorin lays out his grand design in the hope that Ted kicks it up the chain of command to the policymakers in the Obama administration. The Russians will agree to ground the Syrian Air Force, which the Americans hold responsible for violating tenuous ceasefires. Instead, Russia’s air force will neatly divide Syria’s airspace with U.S. Central Command — two Cold War opponents negotiating new spheres of influence, this time in the skies above.

Ted is favorably disposed to the idea of keeping Assad’s planes and helicopters on the tarmac. Here, Zorin leans into his one-upmanship of his American interlocutors, inviting the reader to see the man from Langley as all too eager to do business with the man from Moscow: “As I spoke, Ted’s faded eyes turned blue and the American pseudo-smile that had been glued to his face (since birth) turned into the predatory professional grin of a man who had felt the thrill.” Instantly, the acrimony and pointlessness around the negotiating table at the Geneva hotel are lifted, and Moscow agrees to a deconfliction mechanism with the United States.

Zorin’s second mark in Switzerland is “Mike,” another CIA officer seconded to the American delegation, clearly junior to Ted and introduced as a Syria expert. The Russian and the American have a sort of spooks’ meet-cute at the exit of the hotel, exchanging pleasantries. “Oh, these fucking diplomats,” Zorin says to Mike, “Blah, blah blah. While they’ve been arguing for three days, we could have sent a dozen bad guys from al Qaeda to the next world. As for me, I know exactly how to do it.”

Zorin takes his leave, proceeding along the banks of Lake Geneva, where he sits on a parapet “in a not at all diplomatic manner,” removes his tie and lights a cigar. Zorin calculates that if Mike is a “simple specialist on Syria” (in other words, a spy) he’ll hang around to get to know his fellow practitioner. What follows is a plausible yet unverifiable exchange between two case officers.

Mike asks Zorin what kind of cigar he’s smoking. It’s a Cuban, Zorin says, a gift from his “friend,” Gen. Ali Mamlouk, Assad’s head of counterintelligence and one of his closest confidants — the “Syrian Beria,” as Zorin calls him. Mike politely declines Zorin’s offer of an extra Habano, but now it’s his turn to establish his bona fides. Mike admits to having worked in the U.S. Embassy in Damascus before the war (itself a hint as to what he really does for a living). He vets Zorin with pointed questions about Mamlouk’s habits. Zorin mentions that Mamlouk is a pack-a-day Pall Mall man, successfully passing Mike’s test, allowing the two intelligence officers to get down to business.

Mike asks what Zorin means by wiping out al Qaeda fighters. The Russian begins with flattery, praising the Americans’ R9X Hellfire missile, also known as the “Ginsu” because the warhead is a series of blades that pop out in the missile’s terminal phase, dicing to ribbons the intended human target while restricting collateral damage to next to zero. The U.S. had reportedly first used the Ginsu in assassinating Abu al-Kheir al-Masri, a top al Qaeda leader, in Syria in March 2017, cutting a hole through the roof of the jihadist’s car and then through the jihadist himself, leaving the rest of the vehicle completely intact.

“I even took one of those blades as a souvenir,” Zorin says. “Excellent work, Mike. I understand, however, that this is very difficult work. Our skies over Syria are not your skies over Afghanistan [emphasis in the original]. And finding these bastards in the areas where we and the Syrians are in charge is not an easy task, I think. So here are the conditions for my ’startup.’ You have a hammer. I have nails and a board. America is a country of businessmen, you figure out the rest yourself.”

The two men agree to communicate remotely on Telegram, the Russian-owned social media app, which Zorin jokes that the GRU and “all the villains of the world” use “because even the FSB doesn’t read it,” referring to the KGB’s successor agency, and throwing in a snarky aside about WhatsApp’s vaunted “end-to-end encryption.” (This is lame even by Zorin’s standards: Telegram isn’t just read by the FSB, it’s used by Russia’s domestic security organ to monitor the activities of its users, as Oleg Matveychev, deputy chair of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, has acknowledged.)

A week later, Mike calls on Telegram and proposes a meeting at a “summer cafe near a large, beautiful park.” Geneva is a spies’ paradise, and Zorin engages in countersurveillance to ensure he’s not being shadowed. When he gets to the cafe, Mike tells him, “Alex, my lawyers are interested in your ’startup.’ However, they want to choose the targets for the strikes and the places themselves, that is, nails and boards. Your part of the business is simply not to interfere and sit. The goods will thus come into your hands themselves.”

Zorin objects to this arrangement, insisting that he has his own targets, or “nails,” for the Americans to use and anything short of that makes Russia the junior partner in this unprecedented collaboration. Zorin is still acting alone at this point and incurring enormous risk in proposing a joint counterterrorism operation that the Kremlin has not yet signed off on. When Mike explains that his government isn’t too keen on partnering with Russia to kill terrorists, Zorin replies that neither are the generals in Moscow eager to partner with the Americans. But Zorin exists at a 45-degree angle to his own system; he’s more creative and forward-thinking than the Cold War-minded reactionaries in either capital. He now tries to seduce Mike into a mutual deception in how to sell it to “your lawyers and my Moscow buyers. Together. Now. Two of us. It all depends on us.”

Zorin casts his approach to Mike as a form of cultivation, like one might do of a potential asset. “I call this personalization of the project,” he writes. “When a person becomes a member of your team, even if he is an enemy or competitor.” Mike, he writes, looks as if he badly wants to work with Zorin but is held back by some undisclosed reservation, which means he betrays a secret vulnerability, adding to this recruiter-agent dynamic. The implication is that Zorin could enlist Mike into betraying his country if he wanted to — a rather bold self-appraisal, but one entirely in keeping with Zorin’s megalomaniacal modus operandi throughout the memoir.

To lure Mike further into connivance, Zorin flatters him. He sells the joint counterterrorism program as “our” idea rather than his alone. He teases the American spy about how to characterize their rather bizarre and awkward exchange in Mike’s cables back to Langley: “By the way, you can pay for the coffee. Write in your report that I gratefully accepted your treat. The bosses like that.”

Mike comes away convinced that Zorin is serious about collaborating with the CIA to kill what he sees as actual terrorists in Syria — those defined as such by the United States, not Russia. Moscow will provide the targets and allow American manned and unmanned aircraft to fly into Russian-controlled airspace to wipe them out. Mike agrees to take this offer back to his higher-ups.

Zorin goes on to claim that a trial run of this pilot project was eventually agreed upon. “For the first ’hunt’ I was sent to Syria to Hmeimim as a back-up. Everything went according to plan: at the appointed time a dot appeared on the radar, which entered the designated area and made several circles. But the long-awaited ’hammer blow’ never happened.” The U.S. aircraft doesn’t bomb whatever high-value target was provided.

Zorin is left perplexed. He meets Mike again three days later in Geneva. Mike is visibly upset. Zorin explains his side’s frustration, and the CIA officer apologizes meekly:

“Alex. It’s politics. Sorry. Your meddling in the elections…”

I lost my temper.

“What? What are you talking about, Mike? Don’t tell me that your Senate hearings on this fake meddling caused the cancellation of a critical operation!”

“Exactly. In such conditions, even noble deeds together with Russia will discredit the president. At the last moment, Washington decided not to take risks. We are also upset. But there is an order. And we must carry it out.”

I sat silently for quite a long time. I needed to live with this crap in my soul. Then I said calmly: “That asshole in the car who survived, thanks to your Senate, should learn the U.S. anthem… Okay, Mike. I hope someday we’ll get out of the scenery of Orwell’s 1984. You remember my Telegram. It’s good that you look unhappy too. At least in my life ’collection’ there is one more sane American. Thanks for that too.”

Too perfectly, then, a potentially momentous bilateral alliance is undermined by politicized fake news in Washington. The U.S. political system, which was at that same moment investigating the GRU’s very real meddling in an American presidential contest, is so self-righteous and solipsistic that it allows a high-level militant target to escape. Only Russia is serious about the global war on terror — or so it would appear.

Zorin’s depiction of Mike as a well-meaning but ineffectual spook doesn’t seem to accord very neatly with reality, however. “Mike,” according to several former CIA officers New Lines has spoken to, bears a striking resemblance to Tom Sylvester, the chief of station in Damascus from 2005 to 2006 who, up until recently, was deputy director of operations at the CIA, and then acting director for three days into Donald Trump’s second term.

Sylvester was earmarked for the plum gig of station chief in London for the period before his retirement, but the assignment was unexpectedly eliminated in July 2025 because of an interview he gave to the reporter and author Tim Weiner about the CIA’s role in bolstering Ukraine’s defensive capability and countermanding Russian operations — operations Zorin claims Mike was enabling in Syria.

“When we talk about human intelligence,” Sylvester told Weiner, “it really is the collection of everything that goes into how our adversaries are thinking, acting, and the context in which those decisions are being made.” Kremlin assets the agency recruited, he continued, “are not case numbers. … They’re human beings who’ve decided to make some incredibly bold and courageous things to try and change the world around them.”

Countenancing the humanity of a target for recruitment or manipulation and using it to advance one’s agenda is a method Zorin would recognize and affirm. But he’d also delight in Mike/Sylvester’s denouement, brought about by the very presidency the GRU worked to facilitate into being almost a decade ago. According to the former CIA officers, Sylvester’s 33-year service is now winding down due to political pressure from the president’s office. (Sylvester declined to comment for this article.)

Zorin regards espionage as a priesthood, a special calling, which exists at a rarefied remove from the mere mortals of elected officialdom or unelected bureaucracy. As such, he can render a future director of the CIA and fellow “Syria specialist” in a somewhat laudatory light. Mike is well-meaning and pragmatic but hamstrung by the rigidities of geopolitics — just like Zorin. If only spies were left to run the world, Zorin seems to be saying, all these conflicts could be set right. Yet even in this air of professional courtesy, the Russian still wants us to know who the better intelligence officer is. Zorin manages to do what Mike cannot: master his own system through cunning and persuasion, even disinformation. The CIA man remains a servant of American democracy. The GRU is the deep state.

Zorin’s memoir isn’t merely a soft-power exercise in lionizing the GRU and diminishing the CIA. He can be quite nuanced when he wants to be, including about the Syrian rebels his government is at war with. He is unflinching about the rot at the heart of the Russian military, in spite of its much-touted reforms, an assessment that looks particularly prescient in light of how that military later performed in Ukraine. And he is downright dripping with contempt for Assad’s army, a view common to all the Russians who came into contact with it over the past decade.

Neither does Zorin hold back criticism of Russian backwardness. We are shown a dogmatic and trigger-happy Russian commander inveighing against any attempts at diplomacy. One unnamed colonel general condemns Zorin’s plan to set up a deconfliction hotline with Israel in 2015, the better to avoid midair collision or accidental shootdowns with another air force routinely targeting and destroying Iranian and Hezbollah materiel and assets in Syria. “Listen, you cardboard dummy,” thunders the commander, “I have been tasked to destroy terrorists and those who will help them too. And I will grind into powder those who interfere with me, including you and your Jews.” The only thing that gets him to relent is Zorin’s hotline plan, vouchsafed by Gen. Valery Gerasimov, then Russia’s chief of the general staff, and a looming portrait of Putin hanging over the commander’s head, to which Zorin points ominously; the Russian president has agreed to share the skies of Syria with the Israelis and tasked Zorin with the assignment of setting up this mechanism.

Zorin discloses perhaps a bit more than he should about the dilapidated state of the Russian Air Force in Syria. Fewer than two squadrons of MiGs and Sukhois helped beat back the insurgents at Assad’s doorstep, a feat somewhat tempered by the Syrian opposition’s lack of any sophisticated air defense systems.

In Zorin’s telling, the fleet of the Russian Aerospace Forces is antiquated and barely airworthy. The Ilyushin transport plane that brings him to Syria, for instance, has a piss bucket in the tail — the first passenger to void his bladder has the job of emptying the bucket upon landing. And to test his deconfliction mechanism with Israel, Zorin boards an Antonov An-30, “a tram with wings,” the obnoxious commander terms it, to simulate an airspace violation and communicate in code with the intercepting Israeli F-16s. The plane’s trajectory is charted using a store-bought Garmin GPS tablet, “more fun and more convenient,” according to the winsome navigator, who informs Zorin that these are easily procured at a radio market in Mitino, outside Moscow, and are “rock ’n’ roll” compared to the “deaf Beethoven” of the Antonov’s dated and dial-laden navigation system.

Advanced though it may be, the Garmin is nonetheless an American-made civilian gadget that doesn’t monitor air defense zones and is highly susceptible to enemy electronic warfare. Zorin is very nearly flown straight into Cypriot airspace, where he might have been shot down. Not that such a near miss in the Mediterranean served as a teachable moment for Russia’s war of conquest in Europe: Garmins have been regularly recovered from the wreckage of many downed Russian fighter jets in Ukraine.

“Zorin comes across as courageous, larger than life,” Filip Kovacevic, a scholar of Soviet intelligence services who specializes in how their work has been enshrined in Russian art and culture, told New Lines. “But this type of character rarely ends well in the annals of Russian espionage.” Indeed, being a man apart has already come with its share of career liabilities.

In Syria, Zorin was closest to Gen. Alexander Zhuravlyov, the commander of all the Russian forces in the country from July to December 2016, then again from January to November 2018. Zhuravlyov, whom Zorin describes as “some kind of benign neoplasm on my battered soul,” playfully mocks Zorin for his seemingly insane desire to parlay with the murderous rebels, but ends up consenting to these excursions anyway. “You, Sanya, go, go,” Zhuravlyov says, “but if anything happens, remember: I’ll bomb your ISIS almshouse so that no one would have to look for your corpse!”

A fellow recipient of the Hero of the Russian Federation medal, Zhuravlyov was later promoted to commander of Russia’s Western Military District, in which capacity he oversaw the faltering invasion of northern Ukraine in February 2022. He was dismissed in September that year. “In Zorin’s recollections,” Kovacevic said, “Zhuravlyov is spoken of as a great commander, a great person. Now he’s an un-person. It’s quite dangerous to have real connections to those who have fallen afoul of Putin, but Zorin doesn’t seem to mind memorializing someone now out of favor.”

Then again, Zorin wants the filmmakers to be impressed by his propensity for flouting the rules and taking his life into his own hands.

Like a retired mobster who’s being paid by the hour to consult on a gangster flick, Zorin has an inexhaustible reserve of cock-and-bull yarns, principally about himself. He is perpetually at odds with his arrogant and bureaucratic superiors. He is brave and heedless, almost to the point of insanity — but he always wins. He drinks too much whiskey, vodka and Remy Martin cognac, shirking the protocol and tradecraft of overseas assignments whenever it suits him, or whenever he intends to burnish his image as a fearless and hard-charging operative. All that’s missing is a catchphrase like “I’ll be back” or “I’m too old for this shit.”

Zorin horrifies his put-upon adjutant, Zhenya, and exasperates his Syrian fixer, Kinana Allouche, a pretty ex-journalist prone to bartering with insurgents when not scandalizing her profession by posting selfies of herself with their slain corpses. And he violates protocol as if for sport, taking a personal smartphone into a military dormitory at the Damascus Officers’ Club, where the top three floors have been commandeered by the Russians. This would be a major violation for any ordinary conscript or officer, but not for a senior GRU officer, one who wears American-style desert camouflage and a lazily tied keffiyeh and carries a foreign-made Glock pistol.

Leaning into this roguish self-portrait, Zorin goes out of his way to show that not all his opponents are bearded fanatics out of central casting. Abu Yusef, for instance, is an “amazing terrorist,” a 35-year-old Saudi-born commander of an Islamist militant group (Zorin doesn’t name the group, but describes it as “one of the most brutal,” which “successfully controlled a huge territory”). Educated in philosophy and law at the University of Rome and fluent in Italian and English, he’s a Juventus soccer fan, which lends itself to all sorts of rapport-building chitchat with Zorin. “My genuine benevolent calm in a situation that would seem absurd to others,” Zorin writes, in his characteristically self-regarding fashion, is what earned Abu Yusef’s respect. “[A]n unarmed Russian general comes to the jihadist killers’ den” and thus becomes “a kind of unique jihadist — just like him — a fighter going to his death with a calm smile, only for other ideals.”

Tracing the lineaments of their shared “jihad,” Zorin tells Abu Yusef that the Russians’ war is not with Syrians but with death itself. “[W]hen you say that you are not fighting us but death, then I begin to doubt that you are my real enemy,” Abu Yusef responds, later offering to give the Russian a gun as a token of his respect. Zorin declines, asking instead to learn how to properly tie his keffiyeh in the Saudi fashion. Abu Yusef then proffers two more valuable gifts.

The first are the bodies of two young Alawite sisters, whose capture by the rebels became a symbol of the opposition’s savagery in Syrian state propaganda. Abu Yusef insists the sisters were killed in battle, and he only found them that way — a claim Zorin professes to believe. Next is the surrender of Abu Yusef’s forces, large enough to fill 100 buses, arranged by Zorin and the Syrian regime for their transfer out of the combat zone and into Idlib province, which is out of Assad’s reach and steadily becoming a Turkish protectorate.

After Abu Yusef and Zorin negotiate the terms of how far the buses can travel inside this safe zone, 10 buses disappear, prompting a great deal of panic and uncertainty as to their whereabouts. Turns out the drivers got greedy for some duty-free shopping across the border with Turkey. Shared laughter over the situation concludes the transaction, with Abu Yusef declaring Zorin a “strong warrior” whose truth is reflected in word and deed.

Zorin claims he was unaware that Russian Special Forces were simultaneously affixing a magnetic sensor to the bottom of Abu Yusef’s pickup truck before it departed, the better to track his movement and guide a possible missile strike. Yet Abu Yusef is still alive, according to Zorin, allowing the Russian negotiator’s trustworthiness to remain unassailed.

Zorin’s antagonists are the “bandits” and “terrorists” hunkered down in the Damascus neighborhoods of Douma and Eastern Ghouta, threatening a client state’s hold on power. One of his main goals in Syria is not only to get the rebels to leave their positions and give up the hundreds of hostages they’ve taken, but also to exfiltrate an unnamed Syrian doctor who is working for Russian intelligence in Douma and who warns of an impending rebel chlorine gas attack.

The doctor’s value to Moscow is presented as that of a secret eyewitness to a perfidious rebel plot, making his rescue paramount to convince the world of who the real villains in Syria are.

Large yellow cylinders of the weaponized industrial cleaning agent, the doctor says, are lined up alongside the wall of a rebel prison. Abu Qusay, a hardcore jihadist attached to the Saudi-backed Jaysh al-Islam (“Army of Islam”) rebel group, describes the cylinders as his faction’s “trump card” and instructs the doctor to film as many deaths by asphyxiation as possible when the time for playing that card arrives. But it never does.

Zorin’s main foil in Syria is Abu Hammam Bouwaidani, also of Jaysh al-Islam, albeit a more moderate member than Abu Qusay. A defector from Assad’s Syrian Arab Army, Abu Hammam is a professional soldier who spent time in Russia, speaks the language fluently and graduated “with honors” from the Frunze Military Academy, the elite military academy founded in 1918 to train the nascent Red Army.

In one section of the memoir, Zorin has arranged for the evacuation of civilians living in rebel territory, relying on Syrian tribal sheikhs as go-betweens. He is expecting the unarmed men, women and children to be released from Douma in a humanitarian corridor where the Jaysh al-Islam position meets the regime’s. An exploded mine turns the handover into chaos, as civilians are blown apart. Believing that the Russians have tricked them, Abu Hammam’s militants open fire, hitting at least one regime soldier. Zorin is shadowed by Zhenya, his aide-de-camp, and Khaled, his Syrian translator, and, in a scene out of “Dances with Wolves,” he stands in the middle of a road amid an intense crossfire, as Zhenya and Khaled duck behind the “slabs of a destroyed house.” Zorin sees a wounded woman with a child in her arms, crawling along the road toward the regime checkpoint. Unarmed and heedless of the bullets whizzing by, he approaches the woman, raising his hand in a nonthreatening gesture. The Jaysh al-Islam jihadists continue firing but not at Zorin.

“Assalam Aleikum!” he shouts in pidgin Arabic. “I am General Alexander. I am General Alexander. I want to speak to Abu Hammam! Abu Hammam! Do you hear? Call on your mobile!”

Zorin helps the woman up and picks up the child, escorting both to the regime checkpoint and comforting his ward in Russian. Once safely behind the line, the bus intended to evacuate the civilians explodes after hitting a mine.

The evacuation fails but, in his telling, it wasn’t entirely a waste. Zorin goes on to describe what then transpires in Abu Hammam’s bunker, a scene that appears imagined, as he wasn’t present to witness any of the dialogue. His act of insanity — walking into a barrage of bullets to save two civilians — goes down well with the rebels. Abu Hammam describes Zorin as a “serious man” and authorizes one of his men to contact him by phone. The intermediary insists that Russian and regime forces cease fire for three days as a precondition for meeting Abu Hammam. Zorin demurs, stating that he “will never promise something I cannot fulfill” — another trust-building exercise that works. A meeting with Abu Hammam is arranged at a gas station the following day, the details of which Zorin declines to provide, offering only this precis: “Personal contact with the bandits took place. From it, as from the starting point, all other events began to unfold, turning me into the most authoritative negotiator in Syria — into ’Liva Alexander.’”

The woman he saved, meanwhile, is interrogated by Syrian counterintelligence, abetted by his Syrian fixer, Allouche. The woman provides a vague and useless overview of the rebel disposition and number of remaining civilians: “maybe a hundred, or maybe a thousand…”

Zorin enters the interrogation and argues with Allouche, who warns him that negotiating with the opposition is a task better left to Syrians. “I have been doing exchanges for six years,” she shouts. “I have sometimes exchanged Russians. But always only dead ones. So — stay in Damascus.”

He refuses because new Russian intelligence, relayed by GRU chief Adm. Igor Kostyukov to Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian General Staff, suggests Jaysh al-Islam is “fully prepared to stage a chemical weapons attack. With civilian casualties.” The attack, Kostyukov claims, will be “portrayed by hostages … they will blame us and the [Syrian] government. … We are working, at the very least, trying to pull out a living witness to the provocation for a hearing in The Hague” — a reference to the doctor, who supposedly knows all about the rebel schemes.

Zorin here is laying the foundation for Russia’s attempted exoneration of Assad: The regime isn’t using chemical weapons — the rebels are, and Russia can prove it because it has an eyewitness embedded in the rebel ranks.

Zorin is Kostyukov’s best chance for exfiltrating this doctor under the cover of a U.N. convoy. But for that to happen, he needs Abu Hammam to agree to another evacuation. That entails convincing both the Assad regime and the Russian Army to hold fire for long enough to let him try. Douma, Zorin explains to Zhuravlyov — the commander of all the Russian forces in the country — is “a densely populated citadel” whose recapture is better left to the GRU than to Russian and Syrian artillery.

Zhuravlyov is skeptical, but not intransigent. Puffing out his chest in front of his Syrian inferiors, he wants Zorin, and everyone else, to know who’s boss. “You’re a tough guy, military intelligence — who’s going to stop you from entering?” he says to Zorin. “But I’m tougher: if you don’t show up an hour after entering the zone, your superiors will find out from the news that the treacherous militants kidnapped a stupid general from the [rebels’] positions and executed him as a showpiece on their own territory. And then I’ll strike a ’retaliatory blow’ to it, leveling the area’s terrain with vegetable beds and mixing your ashes with the dust of Syrian cement. Cheap cement. We’ll then bury this powder in an urn, saving on a coffin!”

Zorin repeats from Zhuravlyov’s colorful threat verbatim a few pages later in the memoir, in the context of first meeting the Russian commander in Syria and Zorin’s asking him for similar permission to liaise with a different rebel group.

Zorin thus has his go-ahead. But for him to have any chance of success, he needs to also convince the Syrian Beria, Mamlouk. Mamlouk agrees right away, explaining that a U.N. convoy is a “normal price” to pay for the release of the hostages, which is Assad’s top priority.

With that vote of confidence, along with Masha’s help in Geneva, Zorin proceeds to arrange a U.N. convoy to evacuate the doctor. He relies on a Russian Dagestani named Eldar, an employee of the WHO, not to mention a “great drinking buddy and known womanizer,” who is desperate to obtain American citizenship and has ably insinuated himself into the American ranks at the U.N. Conveniently, Eldar is also in love with Masha.

Zorin concocts a fiction that the purpose of the convoy is to extract one of Masha’s childhood friends, who was inexplicably stranded within an Arab Islamist stronghold in a Damascus suburb. Zorin suggests to Eldar that once he dispatches the medical supplies he’s ferrying into Douma, they smuggle the doctor out in the empty truck.

Giving the U.N. the authorization to provide humanitarian relief to a besieged neighborhood without seeming as if it were a masquerade for a Russian intelligence operation requires more of Zorin’s charms. At the Four Seasons, he meets with Susan, a Palestinian-American U.N. representative in Damascus, whom he assumes is a CIA agent. “She could not be called a pretty girl, but her open, radiant smile, sense of humor, and status as a bachelorette contributed to her quick convergence with the people the CIA needed,” Zorin writes, continuing his tradition of paying backhanded compliments to his American counterparts. Unlike with Ted and Mike in Geneva, he provides no evidence beyond this gut-check assessment that Susan works for U.S. intelligence. But she nevertheless serves as another pelt on the wall of this master negotiator.

Naturally, Susan is enamored of her Russian general. They met in Geneva when she was “interning” (Zorin’s scare quotes) with the U.N. Special Envoy for Syria. Susan tells Zorin that the U.N. is ready to enter Douma, but the regime won’t allow it to — can the Russians be of any assistance? Zorin pretends this request is “mustahil,” Arabic for “impossible” — a clever feint to make it seem as though he’d be capitulating to, rather than orchestrating, the very thing he needs the U.N.’s authority to pull off.

Zorin insists that he could only be persuaded to help if Susan’s boss at the U.N. issues a statement praising the Russians for their magnanimity. The only way that happens, she responds, is if the regime consents to let the U.N. in, vouchsafed in an official communique from Assad’s mukhabarat (secret police). Mamlouk, who’s already been enlisted in Zorin’s stratagem to hoodwink the U.N., of course consents. Susan thinks she’s the one who worked a miracle, wresting an impossible concession from the Russians.

This is the third instance in the memoir in which Zorin inveigles a supposed CIA asset who quickly and enthusiastically places her trust and faith in a Russian military official. The masculine offer of pricey cigars in moonlit Geneva is here transfigured into a flirtation over shrapnel in Damascus:

Zorin: “Come with a specific plan for the convoy. We’ll decide there. Although I don’t believe in this idea.”

Susan: “I’ll be wearing a U.N. bulletproof vest…” (playfully).

Zorin: “Hopefully, only that?”

Susan: “Depends on your decision regarding the convoy.”

The decision having been already made, the convoy arrives. “The U.N. people, dressed in blue armor vests and white helmets, encouraged themselves and looked in my direction with hope, waiting for me to give the command to start moving. If only they knew what kind of surprise awaited them.”

Zorin’s deception requires an insurance policy: a bombing. In one jaw-droppingly candid disclosure, Zorin admits that Russia bombed a rebel warehouse during the aid delivery to sow panic and confusion, explaining that, by this point, it would be too late for the U.N. to turn back, given how badly needed food and medical supplies were to the residents of Douma. A secondary objective was to force the insurgents’ hand in unloading their human cargo in full view of an arriving convoy, since they wouldn’t be able to confiscate or hide any of the aid in the now-destroyed warehouse.

Zorin insists a “pinpoint strike” with a “special weapon” used in the sortie would ensure zero civilian casualties. That’s a big assumption, and anyway his “surprise” is a clear violation of the agreement he brokered with Jaysh al-Islam to halt all combat during the aid delivery. Moreover, striking a military target in the presence of U.N. personnel without warning them in advance violates the principle of precautions in the law of armed conflict.

But those violations don’t bother Zorin because he’s got a ready-made lie to obfuscate them. A pilot named Sokolov, he writes, flies his jet far from the target “so as not to frighten the bandits. … And he would have only one attempt so that no one would figure out who had struck (disinformation materials about the sabotage of a rival group that blew up a warehouse in order to disrupt the U.N. action had already been prepared for the Internet).”

Rare is the admission by a senior GRU officer that Russian falsehoods about its military operations in Syria, cooked up for online consumption, were as much a strategic feature of its war as the munitions it fired. Zorin invites his readers to see Russia’s activities in Syria as benign and commonsensical. Yet the creation of an information alibi for a Russian atrocity is provided merely as a clear and straightforward further indication of that common sense. As for the absence of civilian casualties, Zorin again calls his own certitude into question by relating what happens next.

The whole mission is nearly aborted when Abu Amin, one of Abu Hammam’s deputies, arrives in a white, bullet-riddled Toyota Land Cruiser and tells Zorin he won’t be allowed into the city center while the aid is being unloaded. Zorin threatens to cancel the convoy entirely. After a panicked phone call back to his commanders, Abu Amin finally relents, and agrees to drive him and his translator, Khaled, at the lead of the convoy, with two WHO trailers, one containing Eldar, “sweaty and pot-bellied, dressed in a bulletproof vest.”

They soon arrive at the main square of rebel-held Douma. Zorin notices that the column of vehicles has fanned out a little too close to where the strike on the warehouse is meant to take place. Thousands of people start swarming the trucks, but machine gun-wielding rebels disperse the screaming women and elderly.

Zorin spots a 7-year-old boy in a yellow sweater sitting on the step of the targeted warehouse:

I had no solution. No fear or excitement either. I just turned around and walked quickly along the houses to the warehouse. As usual, I started a mental countdown of something incomprehensible — either the end of my life or the beginning of my death. For some reason, I smiled at the onlookers running towards me and walked and walked and walked towards that yellow boyish sweater with the football number “48.” “4” — in Japanese “si” — death. “8” — “hachi” — luck, happiness… Japan — Japan… where are you? The closer to the boy, the more excitement. I extinguish it with some stupid thought (it helps): “If I save the boy, I’ll produce another son. If I won’t save him…”

Zorin scoops up the boy and takes him to a nearby alley, his walk turning into a sprint the minute he’s out of sight of the crowd in the main square. He hears the whistle of the incoming munition just as he runs into a building and down the stairs. He’s knocked off his feet by the blast of the airstrike. But the boy is unharmed, and Zorin kisses him on his dusty head.

The warehouse is now reduced to a giant crater. Civilians crowd around it, screaming.

With the distraction in place, the unloading of the convoy proceeds with greater haste. Zorin uses the mayhem around him to locate the doctor, a “short young man wearing glasses and a red crescent vest,” taking photos of the scene and a selfie before jumping into Eldar’s truck. The doctor is hidden within an oblong box. Eldar’s truck, emptied of its supplies but now carrying its human cargo, is sealed and, after three hours of “screaming, panic and confusion,” enters regime territory.

The doctor is real. Zorin includes a photograph of the two men together, with Zorin’s arm around a cherub-faced Syrian with short, graying hair and rectangular glasses and a red vest, in keeping with Zorin’s description of him. The picture is the only documentary proof Zorin provides of the existence of this crucial evidence for the Russian government’s case, that it was in fact the Syrian rebels who really weaponized chlorine.

But the story of the doctor doesn’t end; it stops. Zorin says that the Russian military attache in Damascus told him that after the doctor’s exfiltration he was “already on his way to Moscow. And then to The Hague, I think.” That’s on page 111 of the memoir. We never hear about or from the doctor again.

That may be because our protagonist’s embroidered recollections at this point collide with recent documented history.

According to forensic journalists and the OPCW, on April 7, 2018, Syrian military helicopters dropped two yellow cylinders of chlorine on two residential buildings in Douma, killing 43 civilians. In response, the Trump administration, backed by the U.K. and France, launched a series of airstrikes on Syria’s chemical weapons facilities, earning Russia’s condemnation. The Kremlin alternated, paradoxically, between claiming the event happened but was actually a false-flag attack initiated by the rebels, and insisting the entire thing was nothing more than a crude hoax, stage-managed by the rebels and the White Helmets with the sinister intent of framing the Assad regime and precipitating Western military intervention.

Both conflicting Russian allegations acknowledged the opposition and rescue workers filming people in Douma writhing in pain, frothing at the mouth and being doused with water to treat their exposure to some blistering agent — meaning either they were real victims of a poison gas attack or were made to playact as such. At times, Russian state media even floated the idea that the U.S., U.K. and other Western countries were themselves complicit in a true atrocity or one staged by the rebels, seeking not only a pretext to bomb the Assad regime but also a distraction from international attention that was then being paid to Sergei and Yulia Skripal’s Novichok poisoning in Salisbury, England — a crime which The Insider later proved was itself the work of GRU operatives, a finding ratified by U.S. and U.K. intelligence. (The Russian government has advanced conspiracy theories accounting for that poisoning, too — including blaming the U.K. for the Skripals’ ordeal and darkly suggesting that London’s refusal to let Russian officials meet with the victims, who are now under heightened state protection to avoid a second attempt on their lives, is further evidence of British culpability.)

Moscow came to put greater emphasis on the lie that Douma was a psyop rather than a real attack perpetrated by the rebels. Soon, that emphasis congealed into something approaching a standard narrative.

But Russian officials actually ran a test drive of that narrative even before Syrian helicopters dropped chlorine canisters on Douma. Days before the attack, on April 4, Vassily Nebenzia, Russia’s permanent representative to the U.N., hinted at the hoax accusation. “The authorities in Damascus,” he said, “have repeatedly reported on staged provocations being prepared using professional film equipment and extras selected by the White Helmets.” (“Extras” here implies a simulation.) On April 26 — 19 days after the attack — Alexander Shulgin, Russia’s ambassador to the OPCW, claimed, “as for what happened on the 7th of April in Douma near Damascus, we believe it has been a provocation, and this is something we were certain of since the very start.”

The OPCW later noted that Zorin himself toured the site in Douma along with other Russian officials and dismissed any evidence of the use of poison gas. Yet nowhere in the public record does Zorin claim he had direct evidence that Jaysh al-Islam possessed yellow cylinders of chlorine and had been planning to use them, as per the doctor’s supposed observations.

In the last seven years, no credible information has ever emerged to suggest that Jaysh al-Islam used or was planning to use chlorine as a weapon of war. On the contrary, more damning evidence has come to light implicating the Assad regime following its collapse, including the testimony of eyewitnesses who say they were coerced into lying by Syrian security officials and the Russian government.

In his memoir, Zorin never addresses the April 7 atrocity, even if only to deny or dismiss it as a false-flag or an entire fabrication. He makes a passing reference to the use of “chlorine bombs” in Douma but gives no timeframe for when these were disbursed, or any specific accusations about who was responsible. The yellow cylinders, in other words, are never revisited even as circumstantial evidence to inculpate the armed opposition for a notorious war crime linked to the Assad regime — one which drew an international military reprisal. The real-world climax of everything Zorin has been leading up to is never once countenanced — a Chekhov’s gun that fails to be discharged in the final act.

It’s almost as if the Russian government had originally cast the doctor, an agent it recruited, as a central protagonist in its make-believe version of the Syrian war, only to then leave him on the cutting room floor when the requirements of a fast-moving news cycle made it necessary to invent a different story. Zorin, unconcerned with those requirements years later, then chose to retcon the doctor as a main character in Syria because his fortunes were inextricably bound up with Zorin’s ability to captivate a cinematic audience.

Zorin wrote his memoir in April 2023, after the OPCW’s report on Douma was published in January of that year. He may have opted to simply neglect arguing with the watchdog’s conclusions, or he may have deemed it unnecessary to grapple with the actual Douma attack, given that the readers of his memoir were themselves propagandists who needed no convincing that whatever Moscow says today is correct, even if it’s the opposite of what it said yesterday.

The various iterations of the screenplay for “Porcelain Soldier” hint that the Russians themselves weren’t quite sure which story to go with: Should they maintain that no chemical attack occurred, as their government ended up doing, or that one did occur but was the work of the rebels, as the government seemed prepared to do, a la Zorin? In the first script, dated November 2020, there is no doctor; nor is there any mention of any planned or imminent chlorine attack, or the faking of one by Syrian militants and the White Helmets. In the second and third scripts, the doctor features prominently as a character, and the rebels are planning to release the chlorine. Not only that; they have help.

In those latter drafts, the fictional version of the doctor is Abdelbasset Saad, a 38-year-old graduate of the Kharkiv Medical Institute in Ukraine and a fluent Russian speaker. The Russians have tried unsuccessfully to pull him out of Douma three times before Zorin’s character arrives on the scene. In both scripts two and three, Saad is described as “reliable. Although a bit of a coward. Over the past two years, he has been involved in the work with toxic substances by the militants. He knows everything about their program! Including the participation of Americans in it.”

The real Zorin may accuse the U.S. of lying about Syria’s chemical weapons use, but nowhere does he accuse it of conniving to use chemical weapons. The same is true of the real doctor in the memoir. This bit of creative license by the filmmakers — cartoonish even by the standards of Russian disinformation — also undercuts Zorin’s quixotic thesis that a pathfinding Russian-American counterterrorism partnership was scotched by silly domestic U.S. politics.

Another discrepancy between Zorin’s narrative and his movie’s concerns the White Helmets. This much-maligned organization of first responders features prominently in all Russian government counterclaims about chemical weapons use in Syria: The White Helmets are said to be at the center of a devious conspiracy, backed by their Western sponsors, to dupe the civilized world. So it’s a curious omission indeed that they earn not a single mention of Zorin’s memoir. Russia’s biggest bugbear in Syria simply doesn’t exist to him.

Furthermore, Zorin treats weapons of mass destruction not as the grave national security hazard that motivated so much of the international community’s maneuvering on Syria, but as the stuff of low comedy and cheap irony.

Two varieties of “nasty” vodkas are available in-country, Stolichnaya and Russian Standard. At best, Zorin observes, drinking these will cause a mercifully fast and easy death; at worst, a prolonged and agonized one, “like the victim of the sarin gas attack in Khan Sheikhoun.” Zorin may only be coarsely mocking the very notion that Assad’s forces used the lethal nerve agent in that town, an attack the Kremlin disclaimed as based on “doubtful evidence.” But one gets the impression that he’s winkingly acknowledging empirical evidence that Khan Sheikhoun happened, albeit in a throwaway allusion he reckons no casual reader (and certainly not semianonymous members of the Russian film industry) will notice.

A similar instance of Zorin’s toying with the truth of WMD arrives in his description of his spartan quarters at the Officers’ Club. Zorin explains that his rooms were cleaned in the early morning, a process “cruel and merciless, like the civil war in Syria. It was based on the main weapon of Syrian terrorists, the Assad regime, and military cleaners — bleach. For some reason, the Arabs call it Detol… but believe the man who sorted out the corpses from the chlorine bomb strikes in Douma: the cleaning soldier’s bucket in the dorm and a cylinder with a toxic substance from Ghouta, sent for examination to the OPCW laboratory in The Hague, clearly contained the same stuff.”

Chlorine gas, stored as a liquid in a cylinder under pressure, is not chlorine bleach such as one might find in a bottle of household cleaner. Zorin’s shoddy chemistry aside, how is it that “bleach” can be the “main weapon” of the Assad regime if the Assad regime, per the Russian government, never used chlorine as a chemical weapon? Is Zorin here satirizing such allegations in the same breath as he earnestly blames the rebels for using this substance? And when do they use it? To what “chlorine bomb strikes in Douma” is Zorin referring? Not the April 7 one, surely, since he told the OPCW no such strike ever took place.

Zorin’s indifference about answering the rather awkward questions he himself raises — questions that complicate or upend the very first-person saga he’s recounting — seems perfectly in keeping with the sensibility of the government he serves. After all, if the Kremlin doesn’t care about consistency or linearity, why should he?

Another wrinkle in time happens off the pages of both the memoir and the screenplays: a sequence of events that Zorin may not have expected his Russian filmmakers to be especially acquainted with (or he may not have cared whether they were).

On April 26, 2018, the Russian government choreographed a press conference at the OPCW featuring 17 alleged eyewitnesses to the April 7 chlorine attack who were featured in viral online videos of the event. The Syrian delegation consisted of townspeople from Douma and medical staff from the lone hospital that treated the victims. Looking nervous in front of their Russian minders, the handful of those made to comment on the matter denied any attack ever happened.

Omar Diab, the father of Hassan Diab, an 11-year-old boy who was brought to the hospital and doused with cold water to treat his chlorine exposure, said at the press conference that his son was taken there without asking Diab’s or his wife’s permission and that there was “absolutely no evidence of chemical weapons, and all of my family, all my family members are feeling well.”

Abdul Rahman Hijazi, another Douma resident, added that the White Helmets were pouring water on people to clean them of smoke and dust caused by a conventional explosion. “I didn’t feel any kind of smell,” Hijazi said. “I didn’t see any kind of evidence for chemical weapons, but what they did, they created this atmosphere of chaos, they shouted, they screamed, but I can say for certain that nothing bad happened there.”

Philippe Lalliot, the then-French envoy to the OPCW, characterized the entire conference as an “obscene masquerade.” The doctor was present at that Russian press conference in The Hague but offered no testimony himself. However, the doctor was interviewed at least twice on two different Russian state-controlled television networks, Channel One and NTV. He told NTV that he briefed OPCW representatives privately but offered no details about what he said happened on April 7, stating only: “We told the truth.”

In neither interview did the doctor so much as hint at any evidence that he personally witnessed Islamist rebels stockpiling chlorine for a false-flag gas attack, as Zorin claims. Maybe doing so would have been irrelevant or inconvenient to the now-official narrative that no attack took place.

The Russians also conveniently neglected to mention at their media op in the Netherlands that their delegation of 17 Syrian eyewitnesses was flown first to Moscow, then on to The Hague. (In the memoir, the Russian military attache in Damascus tells Zorin that the doctor was first flown to Moscow after his exfiltration from Douma, so it seems this was a shared itinerary.)

After the Assad regime fell in December 2024, journalists from United24, a Ukrainian government-linked news platform, went to Douma and interviewed Diab and Hijazi. Now freed from the tight supervision of Assad’s intelligence and security apparatus, both men completely recanted their testimony from seven years earlier.

Diab said that when he reached the Douma hospital and found Hassan lying in a bed, the boy was coughing. “I thought he was dead. There was a strange smell in the air, it was as if you were in a confined space, and someone opened a gas canister.”

Hijazi has an even more thorough accounting of what transpired after the April 7 attack:

After the Assad regime took over Douma, they started to search for me, because I appeared in the video of the chemical attack, washing the kids in the field hospital. They took me from Douma, to the Al-Khatib intelligence branch. We were held for four days, after that, they told us to prepare ourselves for travel.

We asked, “Where are we going?” and they said, “You will find out later.”

All the intel officers asked us what happened that night, we started to tell them what happened and they told us, “No that is not what happened. You should say what we tell you: ’Nothing happened that night.’”

I said, “OK, sir. Nothing happened.”

The officer said: “Nobody died that night.”

I said, “Yes sir, nobody died that night.”

Officer says: “OK, that’s your official story.”

After four days at the al-Khatib intelligence branch, Hijazi was flown from Damascus International Airport to Moscow. He and the other Syrians were checked into a hotel and told to get some rest. They slept for three hours, then were invited for a breakfast with unknown Russian officials. “We told them what the Assad intel services told us to say, and they approved,” Hijazi told United24.

From there, the Syrians were taken to The Hague, where they carried out their scripted performances. The doctor went with them, where he was poised to do what Kostyukov, the director of the GRU, intended for him, only now with greater urgency, given the higher stakes of an accomplished chlorine attack: implicate Jaysh al-Islam in an act of barbarism the West duplicitously maintained was the singular purview of the Assad regime.

Except the doctor never delivered on what Zorin promised. The Kremlin never wheeled this Syrian eyewitness out before the cameras to say he saw Jaysh al-Islam fighters stockpiling chlorine cylinders and was instructed by their commander to film the carnage they unleashed when the time was right. Maybe Moscow decided that the doctor’s testimony would only confuse the testimonies of the others, that no chlorine was used in Douma and that it was all stagecraft. Or maybe the doctor didn’t see what Zorin claims he did. Maybe Zorin retconned the doctor’s role in Douma, giving him far greater importance as a Russian agent than he ever possessed, to justify his “Argo”-esque exfiltration from hostile terrain.

Given that saving the doctor is the plot driver for half of Zorin’s memoir, one might reasonably expect the doctor, once rescued, to become internationally famous, his testimony publicized as compelling evidence against Western allegations that Damascus was to blame for chemical atrocities. But instead, Russia never made use of this supposed ace in the hole, and Zorin never even bothers to address why that is. Like a magician, he goes to great lengths to set up and create anticipation for a trick that never comes off, either because he’s grown bored with his own performance or because the producers of his show decided to run with a different act altogether.

In March 2022, Brig, Gen. Dmytro Usov, the deputy head of HUR, Ukraine’s military intelligence service, was given a Chinese-made Xiaomi phone discovered in the pocket of a dead Russian soldier killed near Kyiv in the early days of the full-scale invasion. Usov had been instructed by his government to figure out a way to liaise with Moscow about the exchange of prisoners of war and the bodies of the war dead. This was no easy task, as diplomatic relations between the two countries were severed. So Usov called a number on the phone belonging to the slain soldier’s commander. “Your officer is dead,” Usov told his interlocutor and texted a photo of the corpse as proof, according to The Wall Street Journal.

A line of communication was opened, the first between the Russian and Ukrainian militaries. It would become one of the only regular back channels between the two combatants, one resulting in the trade of over 10,000 POWs.

Using the call sign “Stayer” (marathon runner), his only means of identification to the enemy, Usov began talking directly to one Russian about the exchanges, a man who “spoke, and discussed things, that corresponded with his general’s rank,” he told the Journal, and was “head and shoulders above the others I had talked to up to this point.” It was Zorin.

The two spies met face-to-face in Mariupol, leading to the surrender of 2,500 Ukrainians at Azovstal to Russian forces. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, three countries in the Middle East with long experience in Syria and dealing with the Russians, would act as intermediaries in the exchanges that followed over the next three years.

In May, just as production on “Porcelain Soldier” was winding down, Ukraine and Russia agreed to their first direct talks since March 2022, weeks into the war, prompted by pressure from the Trump administration. The venue, as before, was Istanbul. The Russian delegation was largely the same as in March 2022, headed by the Putin aide and former Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky. Among the two newcomers were Zorin and his boss, Kostyukov. As anticipated, there were no diplomatic breakthroughs. The one tangible result from that meeting was another prisoner swap.

The Stierlitz of Damascus, dressed in a suit and tie, was still negotiating, but he was no longer working wonders in some desert dystopia, just plugging away at more prosaic wins in NATO territory. Perhaps it will fall to a “Porcelain Soldier” sequel for us to discover what Zorin really got up to during the largest land war in Europe since 1945.

The fundamental belief of totalitarianism, writes Hannah Arendt, is that “everything is possible.” What makes Zorin’s story unique is that his subject matter, the Syrian civil war, is one of the most well-documented and interrogated conflicts of the 21st century. Zorin loses track of his lies about that war, and the lies of his government, because he’s indifferent to both in pursuit of his own delusions of grandeur. They might be all that Zorin and Russia have left.