A New York Times Reporter Revisits Earlier Interview With Suspect at Trump Golf Course

Ryan Wesley Routh wanted to fly Afghan veterans to fight alongside Ukraine when we met, an endeavor he seemed ill prepared to orchestrate.

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F.B.I. agents outside the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Sunday evening.

Last year I was working on an article about foreign fighters and volunteers in Ukraine. The piece focused on people who were not qualified to be allowed anywhere near the battlefield in a U.S.-led war and yet were fighting on the front against Russia, with access to weapons and military equipment.

Among the people I interviewed: Ryan Wesley Routh, the 58-year-old man that the F.B.I. is investigating in what it is calling an assassination attempt against President J. Trump on Sunday.

I was put in touch with Mr. Routh through my old colleague and friend from Kabul, Najim Rahim. Through the strange nexus of combatants as one war ended and another began, he had learned of Mr. Routh through a source of his in Iran, a former Afghan special operations soldier who was trying to get out of Iran and fight in Ukraine.

Mr. Routh, who had spent some time in Ukraine trying to raise support for the war, was seeking recruits from among Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban. And so the former Afghan soldier reckoned Mr. Routh could get him to the Ukrainian front. (Anything, even war, was better than the conditions in Iran for Afghans after the Taliban retook Kabul in August of 2021).

There were a few complications. Mr. Routh, a former construction worker from Greensboro, N. C., said he never fought in Ukraine himself — he was too old and he had no military experience.

But like many foreign volunteers who showed up at Ukraine’s border in the war’s early months, he was eager to cast aside his former life for something far more exciting and make a name for himself.

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