That night in late January last year, the lights at the CIA station housed in the US Embassy in Moscow remained on for another night in a row, with the stationmaster having an open line to the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Where all the data and information from the CIA agents' classified operations concerning Russia's then imminent invasion of Ukraine were being gathered.
On the other side, their counterparts in the FSB and SVR were doing everything they could to distract Americans from what they themselves knew in detail, namely when their country would invade its neighbors. In a loud brawl, the CIA and NSA were confronted for the umpteenth time by the FSB and SVR, protagonists in an undeclared war that dates back to the 1950s.
The former clearly feel vindicated after passing on to the White House accurate information about Putin's strike, such as the concentration of blood creatures on the Ukrainian border and others that will probably never be made public. Their opponents did their job too, trying to channel fake news through dozens of channels to the others, knowing that if they managed to catch them asleep, even a little bit, they would have every reason to be satisfied.
Hardcore spy poker
On February 21, according to the New Yorker, Russia's Security Council held a choreographed and highly dramatized meeting in which the most hardline members of the country's war cabinet alternately begged, pleaded and kneeled before Vladimir Putin. The overriding thunderbolt was the question of recognizing the would-be separatist republics in Donetsk and Luhansk.
The meeting ended with a false sense of drama as Putin promised to reveal his choice soon, which he did just before 10 p.m. in Moscow in a televised address: the US and its allies, he said, had used Ukraine "as a means of confrontation" with Russia and this posed "a serious, very big threat to us."
At the end of this angry and confused speech, he signed a decree recognising the separatist territories and hedged: Russia would take "full responsibility for the possibility of continued bloodshed" in Ukraine.[BR]At the same time a senior Biden administration official said: "This was a speech to the Russian people to justify a war."[BR]The mood had been building for months and tensions had been leading in that direction. Since the fall, U.S. intelligence had been monitoring preparations for what they correctly assessed would be a major Russian invasion.
[BR][BR]Initially, White House officials briefed by the intelligence community thought the military buildup might be an elaborate Russian ploy designed to pressure Ukraine and the West into concessions.[BR]"We were very concerned about this," said a senior Biden administration official."
The NSA and CIA insisted that the troop buildup was not a bluff based on their assessments from multiple sources. However, the Biden administration immediately ruled out the prospect of sending U.S. troops to Ukraine.
"Our assessment all along was that it's very likely they would do that," the same senior Biden administration official pointed out anonymously to the magazine.
On February 18, President Biden issued his strongest warning yet about the possibility of a pending Russian invasion of Ukraine. "I am convinced that he has made the decision," Biden said of Putin's intentions, having had excellent intelligence from the CIA and NSA.
At the same time, Russian intelligence had gathered, according to SVR staff officials, even the slightest detail concerning the Russian military's objectives in Ukraine.[BR]On February 21, Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security adviser, made the imminent threat clear: the US has information suggesting that "there will be an even greater form of brutality" against the Ukrainians, aimed at "suppressing and crushing them."
How they shared the information
The Biden administration's decision, along with other states notably the UK, to make public what they know about these war plans is a rather unprecedented strategy. In previous crises, Putin has been able to exploit differences of opinion within the European Union and NATO to deflect US and British efforts to build a unified campaign to counter Russia's moves. These differences, at least in part, were exacerbated by differing levels of access to the intelligence on which the US assessments were based, the prestigious magazine points out in its report.
To ensure that the United States and its partners were "operating from the same set of facts," according to a US official, the Biden administration moved to expedite the process by which US intelligence could be shared with European and NATO counterparts. (In the US intelligence community, this process is known as "declassification.")
In some cases, White House officials have pushed hard for top-secret intelligence to be declassified in order to expose Russian plots and complicate Putin's apparent invasion plans.
A senior US official said: "One of the big lessons we've learned-arguably we should have known-is that shedding light on Russia's nefarious activities is the best antidote to their plots."[BR]It's rare in politics to have a second chance with the same policy problem, but that's essentially what's happening with the current invasion threat.
After all, many of the top national security officials in the Biden administration were in the administration in 2014 when Putin annexed Crimea.
Some of these officials felt that the Obama administration's responses to these events and subsequent Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election were inadequate. "We've learned a lot about how Russia uses the intelligence space," one White House official said. "It's an area of war for them and, for many years, we as a country, and NATO as a whole, have struggled to catch up."[BR]The official continued: "I would like to think that we have been able to use the intelligence space in new ways. Our goal was to make it much more difficult for the Russians to play their destabilizing games."
Green Berets and the barriers
Eight years ago, Russia used secret forces, quickly dubbed "green berets," to take over Crimea, and sent weapons, intelligence and sometimes active Russian soldiers to support would-be separatists in Donbass. "We could see the flow of Russian materiel into Donbass, for example, and we would ask that aerial imagery showing that be declassified," said Ben Rhodes, Obama's former deputy national security adviser. "It might take a few days to declassify some slides."
Senior officials at the CIA, the National Security Agency and other spy agencies have traditionally been reluctant to share classified information, which often can be a raw product of best guesses. "Intelligence is imperfect and merely a snapshot in time," said Douglas London, a former CIA staffer, in a recent article published in Foreign Affairs. Intelligence abuses are intense and, when proven wrong, can have long-lasting effects on institutional credibility the specter of false U.S. claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq continues to haunt the imagination of policymakers and intelligence officers.
Intelligence agencies always have their own operational interests in keeping classified information sealed.
"By revealing what they know, the United States risks providing information that adversaries can use to improve their defenses."[BR]Eight years ago many of Russia's military tactics - provocative military operations combined with a coordinated propaganda campaign - appeared to be fiction, or at least not as well known and readable to U.S. officials as they would become in later years.
The latter acknowledge that they underestimated Russian capabilities in 2014 and were caught unprepared to respond in a coordinated and forceful manner. As former White House National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes explained, public dissemination of information was not seen as a potential means of driving or shaping events, but rather as a matter of messaging and public relations.
"The US government saw it as a secondary, rather than primary, concern - and it drove me crazy," he pointed out.
The modern Russian information strategy aims not so much to make its narrative dominant or convincing, but to create such a cacophony that the very perspective of knowledge is called into question.[BR]This approach reached its apotheosis with flight MH17, which was shot down in July 2014, killing nearly three hundred people.
Russian media and social media accounts circulated a barrage of often contradictory theories, which served to downplay and drown out the real one, later proven by independent reports prepared by Bellingcat and a Dutch-led investigation.[IT WAS A RUSSIAN MISSILE FIRED FROM SEPARATIST-CONTROLLED TERRITORY THAT SHOT DOWN THE 298-SOUL MALAYSIAN AIRLINES PLANE TRAVELING FROM AMSTERDAM TO KUALA LUMPUR.
Source: protothema.gr
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