WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has warned Russia's foreign minister against Moscow paying bounties to Taliban-linked militants and other Afghan fighters for killing American service members, U.S. officials said.
Pompeo delivered the warning in a call on July 13 with the minister, Sergey Lavrov, choosing to do so during a conversation that, officially, was about an unrelated topic -- the possibility of a meeting of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. officials said in the past week.
The secretary of state did not explicitly point to the covert bounties scheme organized by a Russian military intelligence unit that was first reported in late June by The New York Times, most likely because the details of what U.S. intelligence has learned and how it gathered the information remain classified, one of the officials said.
In public, Pompeo has carefully avoided answering direct questions about U.S. intelligence on the Russian bounties. But late last month in congressional testimony, he said broadly that he had raised with Lavrov "all of the issues" that put U.S. interests at risk.
In the call, Pompeo made it clear to Lavrov in language about payouts and red lines that the United States was strongly opposed to the program, the official said, adding that the secretary of state had been livid about what the intelligence had said about the bounties.
The American officials who spoke about Pompeo's call did so on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. Pompeo and the State Department have been careful not to reveal any details of actions he might have taken based on the intelligence over the bounties.
The Times reported that senior American officials, including some on the White House National Security Council, had debated for months over what to do about the Russian effort. Russian officials have denounced the reports on the bounties as lies.
President Donald Trump said last week that he did not mention U.S. intelligence assessments of the bounties program when he spoke this month with Putin. "That was a phone call to discuss other things, and, frankly, that's an issue that many people said was fake news," he said in an interview with "Axios on HBO." The CIA has placed medium confidence in the assessment.
Trump also brushed off past declarations by his own commanders that Russia had been providing weapons and cash to the Taliban for years, but the commanders did not specifically cite any bounty program.
He later told reporters during a trip to Florida that the intelligence was "another Russia hoax."
"They've been giving me the Russia hoax -- shifty Schiff, all these characters -- from the day I got here," he said, using his nickname for Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, complained on Friday that U.S. intelligence officials had so far failed to provide more detailed information about the suspected Russian payments, as lawmakers were promised in early July. "We have yet to receive this information," Schiff said in a statement.
Since the intelligence on the bounties became public, the White House has been criticized for inaction. Intelligence officers put the information about Russia and the possible bounties in the President's Daily Brief in February, though Trump has said he was never personally told about it.