32. Putin’s War: The CIA Warn Zelensky (Ep 2)

Summary

The Rest Is Classified: Episode 32 - "Putin’s War: The CIA Warns Zelensky"

Release Date: March 26, 2025
Hosts: David McCloskey & Gordon Corera

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Introduction

In Episode 32 of The Rest Is Classified, hosts David McCloskey and Gordon Corera delve deep into the intricate web of intelligence, diplomacy, and deception surrounding the lead-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Titled "Putin’s War: The CIA Warns Zelensky," this episode unpacks the CIA's efforts to inform Ukrainian leadership about imminent threats, the challenges faced in convincing allies, and the broader implications of intelligence dissemination in international conflicts.

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Context and Background

David McCloskey opens the discussion by referencing Gordon’s earlier article from February 2022, written amidst escalating tensions in Kyiv. He sets the stage by summarizing the critical meeting in the Oval Office where President Joe Biden and his team analyzed intelligence indicating Russia's preparation for an invasion of Ukraine. This meeting culminated in CIA Director Bill Burns’ mission to Moscow to confront Vladimir Putin, where Burns left more concerned than reassured about Putin’s war intentions.

“I think we've got to now break into two parts... how well will the Ukrainians perform? How well will the Russian military perform?”
[03:14] – David McCloskey

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Intelligence Sharing and Diplomatic Efforts

Gordon Corera elaborates on the strategic dissemination of intelligence among Western allies. Beginning with the G20 meeting in Rome, President Biden shared critical intelligence with leaders from the UK, France, and Germany. This included secure briefings led by Avril Haines, then Director of National Intelligence, aimed at unifying allies against potential Russian aggression.

“They're trying to say this is not a political judgment by the United States. You're not being briefed by politicians, you're being briefed by analysts on hard data...”
[06:16] – David McCloskey

The hosts discuss the meticulous efforts to ensure that allies received actionable intelligence without exposing sensitive sources. This balancing act was crucial in maintaining trust while attempting to galvanize a united front against Russia.

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Challenges in Convincing Allies and Ukraine

Despite robust intelligence, skepticism persisted among key allies and within Ukraine itself. McCloskey recounts historical parallels, notably the failed intelligence around Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which sown doubt among European partners. This skepticism extended to Ukraine's leadership, particularly President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who questioned the imminence and scale of the threat.

“The Ukrainians have been penetrated by Russian intelligence... the CIA are not going to give away their sources to Ukraine very easily.”
[13:43] – David McCloskey

Gordon emphasizes the psychological and strategic hurdles in persuading Ukraine's leadership, who were wary of inciting panic and destabilization. Zelenskyy's dual role as a leader with low approval ratings and a public figure wary of mass mobilization added layers of complexity to the CIA's warning efforts.

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Strategic Declassification of Intelligence

A pivotal moment in the episode is the discussion on the Biden administration’s decision to publicly disclose certain intelligence details to preempt Russian false-flag operations. Drawing historical comparisons to the Cuban Missile Crisis, where satellite imagery was used to showcase Soviet missile buildup, McCloskey and Corera explore how strategic declassification serves both as a deterrent and a narrative-shaping tool.

“They want to disrupt it... it's not stopping the invasion, but they are disrupting the effectiveness of the Russian intelligence plans.”
[39:45] – Gordon Corera

The hosts analyze how making intelligence public helps in building a historical record of culpability, ensuring that the origins of the conflict are clearly attributed to Russian actions.

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Historical Comparisons and False-Flag Operations

McCloskey draws parallels between Russia’s planned false-flag justifications for invading Ukraine and Germany’s 1939 Gleiwitz incident used to justify the invasion of Poland. This historical lens underscores the recurring tactic of fabricating pretexts to legitimize aggressive actions.

“The idea was that they were going to create the image that Russian speaking civilians in these areas had been attacked by the Ukrainians...”
[38:34] – David McCloskey

This segment highlights the intricate planning behind such operations and the critical role of intelligence in preempting and countering these narratives.

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Ukrainian Leadership and Response

The episode sheds light on the internal dynamics within Ukraine, particularly the divisions between political leadership and military officials like General Valeri Zaluzhny. McCloskey notes Zaluzhny’s covert preparations to bolster Ukraine’s defenses, reflecting a nuanced understanding of the impending threat despite overarching skepticism from Zelenskyy.

“He was still making preparations and crucially, he will be moving air defences to hiding places...”
[31:40] – Gordon Corera

This internal stratification within Ukrainian leadership emphasizes the complexity of national responses to foreign intelligence and threat assessments.

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Insights into US and UK Policies

Gordon Corera discusses the strategic mindset of US and UK intelligence agencies, which prepared Ukraine primarily for insurgency-style resistance rather than conventional warfare. This approach parallels past CIA operations, such as arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan, and reflects a tactical expectation of the conflict’s nature.

“The best thing they can do is support effectively resistance insurgency rather than an actual full out armed conflict.”
[26:03] – Gordon Corera

McCloskey adds that this policy might have underestimated the scale and nature of Russia’s military capabilities, leading to misaligned support strategies for Ukraine.

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Implications of Intelligence Dissemination

The conversation shifts to the broader implications of declassifying and publicly sharing intelligence. McCloskey expresses concerns about the potential erosion of trust among intelligence assets and the chilling effect on future recruitment if sources and methods are exposed or compromised.

“You can imagine a world where there's a chilling effect on recruitment way down the line...”
[20:05] – David McCloskey

Corera concurs, noting the delicate balance between transparent intelligence sharing and safeguarding operational integrity.

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Conclusion and Teasers for Next Episode

As the episode draws to a close, McCloskey and Corera reflect on the effectiveness of intelligence strategies in the lead-up to the invasion. They ponder whether the public dissemination of intelligence successfully disrupted Russian plans and maintained international support.

“It makes it much harder for Putin to sell this outside of Russia or even inside Ukraine.”
[38:34] – David McCloskey

They tease the next episode, which will explore how intelligence and strategic disclosures influenced the initial battles of the war in Ukraine, setting the stage for the conflict’s unfolding dynamics.

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Notable Quotes

• “It's time to bring it into the light.”
  – David McCloskey, reflecting the podcast’s mission to illuminate the shadowy world of espionage.
  [02:13]

• “Oh sheet, Arm and Hammer. More power to you.”
  – Gordon Corera, humorously dismissing an advertisement segment.
  [00:53]

• “You can get Disney plus and Hulu together for just 2.99a month.”
  – David McCloskey, highlighting the episode's initial advertising content which is later omitted from the summary.
  [00:00]

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Key Takeaways

1. Intelligence as a Diplomatic Tool: The CIA and Western allies utilized detailed intelligence to diplomatically warn and prepare Ukraine for possible Russian aggression, though skepticism among allies and in Ukraine complicated these efforts.

2. Strategic Declassification: Publicly disclosing certain intelligence details served as both a deterrent and a means to control the narrative, aiming to prevent false-flag justifications for Russian invasion.

3. Historical Parallels: The episode draws significant parallels between current intelligence strategies and historical events like the Cuban Missile Crisis and Germany’s Gleiwitz incident, emphasizing recurring tactics in statecraft and war justification.

4. Internal Ukrainian Dynamics: Divergent responses within Ukrainian leadership, particularly between Zelenskyy and military officials like General Zaluzhny, highlight the complexities in national responses to intelligence warnings.

5. Long-term Implications: The episode underscores the delicate balance between effective intelligence dissemination and the safeguarding of sources and methods, with potential long-term impacts on trust and recruitment within intelligence communities.

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Final Thoughts

Through a comprehensive exploration of intelligence operations, diplomatic maneuvers, and historical analogies, Episode 32 of The Rest Is Classified provides an insightful analysis of the CIA's efforts to preemptively warn Ukraine of Russian invasion plans. Hosts McCloskey and Corera adeptly navigate the multifaceted challenges of intelligence work in a high-stakes geopolitical landscape, offering listeners a nuanced understanding of the shadowy interplay between espionage and international conflict.

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Stay tuned for the next episode, where the hosts will examine how intelligence and strategic disclosures shaped the initial battles of the war in Ukraine, further unraveling the complexities of modern espionage and warfare.

Transcript

[David McCloskey]

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[David McCloskey]

Russia has established networks of agents within Ukraine and has been preparing to activate them in the event of conflict. Western intelligence sources say the aim will be to limit resistance and ensure control if there is an attempt to remove the government in Kyiv. That could involve senior figures working in key institutions and industries being approached and instructed to work with Russia or else face the consequences. It's claimed there could even be public executions to deter protesters, one Western intelligence source claims. Welcome to the rest is classified. I'm David McCloskey.

[Gordon Carrera]

And I'm Gordon Carrera.

[David McCloskey]

And that listeners to the POD will of course recognize as Carreran Prose. Gordon, that's an article written by you. It comes from February of 2022 and it was written on a set of cocktail napkins and receipts from the front lines in Kyiv, no doubt on the eve of the war. Is that right, Gordon? What did I get wrong in that synopsis?

[Gordon Carrera]

Quite a bit. Apart from the fact it was written by me, I think that was the accurate bit of it. But it was a piece I wrote in that very memorable, very intense period which we're going to look at of January, February 2022, as war approaches, as people are talking about it, as we learned last time, the intelligence agencies are believing it's going to be happening. But a lot of people, as we'll learn, didn't believe it was going to happen. It was just unimaginable, the idea that this intelligence could be true, that Russia was going to launch a full scale invasion of Ukraine.

[David McCloskey]

And so maybe a word for those who did not listen to the last episode or just a brief reminder of where we're at here. Last time we covered this sort of monumental meeting in the Oval Office. Joe Biden and his senior team are looking at a really varied picture of intelligence that has been gathered that shows the Russians are preparing for an invasion of Ukraine. Now, Bill Burns, the CIA director, have been sent to Russia to talk to Putin and some of his senior advisors to basically say, we know what you're about to do and there will be consequences if you do it. Bill Burns has come away from that set of meetings more concerned, in his words, not less, that Putin is actually gearing up for war. And so we're sort of, I guess, at a point here, Gordon, where we're not sure, we, meaning the CIA, the United States, not sure that the Russians can be dissuaded from taking this step. So what now? And this next phase is really interesting. Is it? And we'll talk about some of the historical kind of comparisons here, but it's a phase of using intelligence as the fuel for diplomacy with allies, including the Ukrainians, to kind of prepare everybody for war.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, that's right. It's a really interesting case study of what can be done with intelligence that the US has clearly gathered and the UK from some very secret sources, but it wants to use it. First stage is President Biden shares some of those details with the Brits, the French and German leaders at a G20 meeting in Rome in late October, they sweep the room for bugs beforehand in a private room. So that's the initial conversation. There's another one. Then on November 17, when President Biden sends his Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, former deputy director of the CIA, senior national security official, to NATO in Brussels to brief NATO leaders. And she's going to lead on a lot of these NATO briefings, and she does a series of these multilateral briefings. And the idea is to Create a common picture for the allies about what's happening and to convince them Putin is calculating that the west is weak and divided and won't respond. And I guess the hope is by briefing them they can unite allies and perhaps either deter Putin by showing a united front or at the very least prepare everybody for the possibility of invasion. It's interesting because Avril Haines takes with her not policymakers, but analysts. Minnie McCloskey.

[David McCloskey]

I love that. Yes, some Minnie McCloskey is packed in the trunk, taken to Brussels.

[Gordon Carrera]

She wants to take the analysts who know the detail with her because I suppose the point is she's trying to say this is not a political judgment by the United States. You're not being briefed by politicians, you're being briefed by analysts on hard data of what they're saying.

[David McCloskey]

That's right, yeah. We've got another, you know, sun deprived person here who couldn't, who couldn't possibly be a political mind. Right. Just briefing you the facts. We've dredged them out of the Langley basement just for you. I mean, there is something to that. I mean, having more working level people brought to these meetings, it does warm my heart. It gives me great cheer, Gordon, as a former analyst, to have a sort of walk on role for other Minnie McCloskeys in this story. And it does remind me actually of a time when, when I was trotted over to Europe along with a bunch of other people from my team for a similar situation. This is about 15 years ago. It was a judgment on a Middle Eastern country that was based on really the best possible information that we had. And it was also a judgment that if you had written it a year prior, you would have said this is nuts. Sort of like invading Ukraine. And we went to Berlin and we briefed it and the Germans told us we were nuts. They did not buy really, they did not believe us. We all went out for pizza, we flew home and it was, you know, reading through this story again, it's kind of the same thing because the Brits get on board pretty quickly.

[Gordon Carrera]

They've seen the intelligence.

[David McCloskey]

You've actually seen the raw intelligence. The Poles and the Balts believe it because they live right next to Russia and are terrified of Russian expansionism. But of course, you know, if you sort of get a Gallic shrug from the French and the Germans don't buy it. It's just, it's classic. They think it's a bluff.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah. They just don't think it makes sense that Putin would willing to do this. Why would he do. It doesn't make sense. It's not rational. Why would he risk his. His economy? I think it's also worth saying that one of the things in the background here is Iraq. And Iraq WMD and the intelligence over that, and the French and the Germans refer to it privately. They go, yeah, you know, this intelligence you've got about Russia and Ukraine, that's great. But we remember the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. You were wrong that time. It gives them an excuse basically to say, we're not sure about this. And of course, they're not seeing the raw intelligence. They're not seeing the actual detail. They're being briefed on the kind of analytical conclusions. So they're skeptical. I mean, they're very skeptical. And that's going to have consequences.

[David McCloskey]

Well, and yeah, just to kind of, I mean, get a little into the sausage making here, because you make the point that the French and the Germans, I mean, in particular here, would probably not have been briefed on the most sensitive raw intelligence. Like that would not have been actually passed to them. And I'm speculating a bit here based on how these liaison kind of conversations have tended to go. There's probably cleared talking points that have gone through a formal process of being essentially declassified for the French intelligence services or for the Germans. Right. It's not the raw stuff. And so there is an element here, and this is exactly what happened to me when I and a few others went to Germany 15 years ago, was you pass the judgment, you tell the Germans, it's based on the best possible information we have. And they sort of look at you and say, well, what is it? And you say, I can't tell you. And you go round and round like that until, you know, they send you out for pizza and then you go home. Like, that's kind of how these things can go. If the other side just thinks your assessment is. Is bonkers.

[Gordon Carrera]

What's so interesting is you've got this skepticism from the French and Germans. You've also got skepticism. And the US is struggling with the Ukrainians. And this is a really important part of the story, is that the Ukrainians are not buying the fact that they're going to be invaded. So at the same time, in the last episode, we looked at CIA Director Burns being in Moscow. There's a meeting at the same time, literally at the same time, where US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Glasgow for a COP climate change summit. And he talks to President Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, and the Two of them are sitting there in a room just feet from each other, really close to each other. Blinken recalls it as being a very difficult conversation because he is basically saying to the Ukrainian leader, you're going to be invaded. And Zelensky is skeptical. His attitude seems to be, well, we've seen Russian feints in the past worth maybe painting a picture of Zelenskyy here. Clearly he's going to be a very important character in our story. Such an interesting background. He's a comedian and actor, most famous for a show called Servant of the People, which he wrote, starred in, produced, in which someone who's a schoolteacher accidentally gets elected president on an anti corruption platform and then Zelensky really does get elected president onto, on an anti corruption platform.

[David McCloskey]

Life imitating art there. Is that the show where he plays the piano with his penis? Have you seen that clip? Was that on Servant of the People or is that another one this way?

[Gordon Carrera]

I haven't seen the clip. I'm aware, I'm aware of the clip, but it's not what I've, it's not what I've Googled or searched for on the Internet. And I think I might not right.

[David McCloskey]

Now, but my search history in preparation for this episode was, was, is frowned upon. No, you don't actually see anything. It's kind of, I think it might have been a bit done on like a sort of variety, but by this.

[Gordon Carrera]

Stage he's been elected, but he's, he's slightly struggling. You know, his, his approval ratings are down to about 25%, so he's in a slightly difficult position back home as well. Two weeks after that meeting in Glasgow, his foreign minister and his chief of staff go to Washington. And there a senior State Department official greets them with a cup of coffee, I think, and the words guys dig the trenches. And they smile back, thinking it's a joke. And this is a. From an excellent Washington Post deep dive called the Road to War, a series on this. So the State Department official says, guys dig the trenches. They smile and the official goes, I'm serious, start digging trenches, you're going to be attacked. There's going to be a large scale attack and you have to prepare for it. And you can see that they just don't buy it. They also are frustrated because a bit like the Europeans, they're not seeing the raw intelligence, maybe inevitably, but I think they're also conditioned not to believe it. They are convinced that this is all about Russia putting pressure on Ukraine, trying to disrupt and destabilize Ukraine by threatening an invasion. But they don't buy that there's actually going to be the kind of massive invasion which the CIA and the US Government is warning about.

[David McCloskey]

Well, and Zelenskyy is in a, he's in a really tough spot here, right? I mean, not only, as you mentioned, his approval rating is down, his political footing isn't as sure, but he also, even if he did believe it, he's in this weird situation where he doesn't want to incite panic in the country either. Right? So that's a concern. You don't want vast amounts of your potential manpower, if this is true, up and fleeing the country potentially if given warning of the Russian invasion. And on the other side of it, as you said, it seems now it's a fascinating question of exactly what specific information they were provided by the CIA or by other Western intelligence services because it feels to me like given the skepticism, and by the way, we should say at this point there was a real concern at the CIA that that information provided to the Ukrainians would get leaked back to the Russians because the.

[Gordon Carrera]

Ukrainians have been penetrated by Russian intelligence. The two sides were close because of the history and there's evidence of Russian penetration of Ukrainian intelligence. You can also see why the CIA are not going to give away their sources to Ukraine very easily.

[David McCloskey]

And especially if we're talking about stuff that is coming off of really sensitive SIGINT platforms or from very well placed and thus very sensitive human sources, the people in this sort of chain of command with declassification authority are going to have to be really, really, really careful about how detailed this stuff is because the last thing you want to do is in some bid to convince the Ukrainians that their country is about to be attacked, you imperil the very sources and methods you're going to need to continue collecting intelligence on the Russians going forward.

[Gordon Carrera]

So the Ukrainian view seems to be we've seen these threats before. At the very worst, some of them think there might be a push in the Donbass where there's been a low level conflict already in the east of the country. But they just don't buy the idea of a full scale invasion. So the US Is struggling to some extent with some of its allies with the Ukrainians. What next? Well, interestingly enough, the next stage is to go public. And in late 2021, there's this decision to use the intelligence publicly. The phrase, I guess, is to downgrade the intelligence from being highly classified to less classified. The reasons for doing this, Jake Sullivan, who's The national security adviser at the time describes to David Ignatius of the Washington Post that the inspiration for doing something was, in his words, a scene from Austin Powers.

[David McCloskey]

That's not encouraging.

[Gordon Carrera]

You don't find that encouraging?

[David McCloskey]

I don't find that bit about the policy making process to be highly encouraging.

[Gordon Carrera]

And it is a great scene. It's bit where you see character shouting no, because a steam roller is approaching.

[David McCloskey]

Them, which is being driven by Austin Powers.

[Gordon Carrera]

But the reality is when you pull back, you see the steamroller is actually going really slowly. So slowly there's enough time for the character to get out the way. But it's this idea that you can see the steamroller coming slowly but inexorably towards you and you're trying to find a way to say to someone, get out of the way of it. And it seems like that with that Austin Bowers reference, bizarrely, that the US wants to use the intelligence publicly to basically go, the steamroller is, is approaching in the coming months.

[David McCloskey]

I mean, the clip is hilarious and everyone should watch it. If you type in Austin Power steamroller, you will, you will see it. It's good fun. But this analogy makes no sense, right? Unless I'm missing something, because there's no time for the Ukrainians to actually get away from the. Steve, you can't.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, you can't escape.

[David McCloskey]

If you're in Ukraine, you can't escape. So I don't buy it. Jake Sullivan, if you want to come on the pod and defend yourself in this analogy, you can.

[Gordon Carrera]

You're welcome.

[David McCloskey]

It doesn't make sense to me.

[Gordon Carrera]

And the way they do it, in that classic US way, how do you make intelligence public? Well, the answer is you. You brief the Washington Post. I mean, often it's at the New York Times, but in this case it's the Washington post. Because on December 3, there was this bombshell of a report in the Washington Post newspaper in which the previously secret fact that Russia has 175,000 troops on its border with Ukraine and in Belarus, that fact is now being made public. And I went back to the piece and it sources it to satellite imagery showing the buildup as well as this intelligence analysis. And of course, this is one of the great advantages you have now is that you can get open source, in other words, commercially publicly available satellite imagery to back up that fact. And obviously the US have it from their own satellites, but you can use commercially available material to show that something is happening there and to brief about the intelligence, suggesting that this is a very real buildup and this is all ahead of a Biden Putin phone call on December 7th to try and put some pressure on Russia. Still trying to show we know what you're doing.

[David McCloskey]

We should say that there is, I guess, precedent for these kind of strategic declassifications or strategic downgrades of intelligence. Right. I think you could probably start the story on these. Back in the Cuban missile crisis when, you know, Adlai Stevenson, who's the ambassador to the UN famously has these satellite photos that show the missile buildup in Cuba. He puts them up really on the floor of the UN and sort of calling attention to what the Soviet Union is up to. And this sort of strategic downgrade strategy has been used at various points ever since by most US Administrations to pressure adversaries, gain backing for something. Frankly, in some cases, it's to protect an administration's reputation. So, for example, the Famous August of 2001 PDB, President's Daily Brief, bin Laden determined to strike in the US There were questions about how much in sort of the 911 Commission work after the attacks, you know, how much did the Bush administration really know? Was there warning? And the administration declassified pretty much the entirety of that PDB for the commission to show, hey, this was a general warning. This wasn't very specific. There was no sort of actionable way for us to stop anything based on this pdb. And. But I think in this case, Gordon, what is fascinating about the way the Biden administration used the intel in the run up to Ukraine is that I argue that they've used it more and they've sort of continue to use it beyond trying to convince the Russians, beyond trying to convince the public. It's kind of a consistent almost spigot that gets turned on to shape the narrative around the conflict and to affect the decision making of friend and foe alike.

[Gordon Carrera]

Having spoken to some people on the inside, for some of the people in the intelligence world, it was a bit uncomfortable to some extent. But I also think they could recognize someone put it, I think Jake Sullivan put it that when it came to Iraq wmd, it was using intelligence to justify a war. In this case, you're trying to stop a war, and that seems something worth doing. Even if there is some risk to the kind of sources and the access you might have built up because the stakes are that high in this case to try and stop that possibility of a land war in Europe.

[David McCloskey]

I think it is worth saying that there are, you know, sort of real risks to this. Right. I mean, you mentioned sources and methods. Right. I mean, that's an obvious one, there's a more subtle angle there, which is if you turn the spigot on more frequently, and the Biden administration continued to use this even in other theaters like vis a vis the Chinese, you do send a message, I think to your human assets in particular, that, hey, your stuff might get out there and you're trusting us, and frankly, not just trusting us as the intelligence agency, but trusting the policymakers and the communications people to be smart about how we declassify it. So you can kind of imagine a world where there's a chilling effect on recruitment way down the line, right? And also, I mean, there's frankly, and this is the Iraq WMD example, there's the risk that you declassify intel. That's wrong and it blows up in your face.

[Gordon Carrera]

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[David McCloskey]

Well, welcome back. It is January 12th of 2022 and CIA Director Bill Burns mild Bill Burns is flying to Kyiv with more startling information in this kind of, I guess, last ditch attempt to see if he can convince the Ukrainians that the Russians are about to invade.

[Gordon Carrera]

That's right. He's going with some really specific details now. He's saying there are close to 200,000 Russian troops on the border of Ukraine. He says intelligence on the plans for invasion is detailed. He says the Russians are not just after the Donbas, but they plan to take Kyiv, the capital where he's going. Importantly, he says they will do this by first taking Hostomel Airport just outside the city. Now, don't forget that name, because we'll come back to it in a later episode. But also, the intelligence is showing that the Russians have a list of people to be killed or sent to filtration camps. People like officials, journalists, activists. You work out who are loyal and who are not loyal to the. The new and the old regime, and then dispose of those or get rid of those who are not going to be loyal to Moscow. He even says that there are details of assassination plots against the man he's meeting, President Zelenskyy. Burns is trying to persuade Zelenskyy to take these plots seriously and boost his security. There might even be teams already in Kyiv, sleeper cells waiting to carry out that kind of assassination. And yet Zelenskyy is still not convinced. He asked Burns not to talk about this stuff publicly. He won't talk about it publicly either. He still thinks this is part of a Russian plan to destabilize Ukraine by spreading fear and panic. Doesn't want to panic the markets. His Defense minister, Reznikov, is saying, don't worry, sleep well. No need to have your bags packed. Zelenskyy is saying he never got detailed intelligence of the invasion, even though U.S. officials suggest it was pretty detailed. They're also saying, well, look, 200,000 troops is a lot, but it's not enough to occupy Ukraine. There are all these reasons why Zelenskyy is saying this doesn't feel right. And he's also saying to the Americans, interestingly enough, if this is for real, then give us heavy weaponry, give us fighter jets, give us NATO membership, give us the things we need to fight them off. If this is for real and the US isn't doing that, it's sort of.

[David McCloskey]

A fascinating window, I think, into a couple things here. One is the extent to which Russian kind of mind games have just permeated the way that the Ukrainian leadership is, is thinking about this. I mean, the fact that the Russians could have 200,000 troops on the border. The Americans are saying, we have really, really, really good information to suggest this is coming. And you still have this kind of disbelief. I mean, it's, it's a remarkable picture of human psychology in many respects. And you do have to also, I think, admit that Zelensky's logic, which is if you guys really believe this is happening and you want to stop it, help us arm ourselves and defend ourselves by giving us the good stuff. It's got a certain logic to it, doesn't it? But again, I mean, we talked in the last episode about, you know, Biden's somewhat sensible policy directive to help the Ukrainians and avoid a direct shooting war with the Russians. It gets complicated quickly.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah. And I think it is worth exploring that question of why the US has been supplying weaponry but not that kind of heavy weaponry. I guess there's a couple of reasons. One is they do worry that if they open up NATO membership too quickly and suggest it's going to happen, or promise to give weaponry that will just incite the Russians to move even faster and to act before that kind of weaponry kicks in. And, and there's that fear of escalation. But there is also this view which is there in Washington and London, which is the Ukrainians are overmatched anyway by the Russian military. They're massively outnumbered. So giving them some more heavy weaponries, a few extra tanks, the view is they're going to lose anyway if a war starts. So it's really interesting, it is a misjudgment by Western intelligence about that and it does shape how they act in this period. Because what they think is going to happen is that if a war is going to start, the best thing they can do is support effectively resistance insurgency rather than an actual full out armed conflict. The best thing they can do is provide the kind of weapons and training which will allow the Ukrainians to do almost partisan style attacks like in World War II. A bit like the CIA arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s after the Soviet invaded, to do hit and run attacks rather than fight a full scale war. And it's right, isn't it, that the US and UK have actually been preparing the Ukrainians for that, at least the Ukrainian special forces and the Ukrainian intelligence for years. Because that they think is the most likely outcome.

[David McCloskey]

Yeah. And we talked in our emergency episode that we did on the US cutting off intelligence support to the Ukrainians about what had become by the start of the war, a very significant intelligence sharing partnership between the CIA, and in particular Ukraine's military intelligence service. The horror. I mean, the CIA had trained Ukrainian commandos. They had provided secure Commodore gear. They'd done kind of tradecraft training, and how do Ukrainians go out and recruit Russians? And they were running joint SIGINT platforms, signals intelligence platforms, with the Ukrainians intercepting Russian military comms. So there was a really robust intelligence partnership that on the eve of the war had already sort of budded and bloomed. But it's all to your point, Gordon. You kind of look at this from Langley's perspective or from the D.C. perspective and say all of those kind of assets that we built up will be useful in helping the Ukrainians fight an insurgency in maybe the west of the country once they lose to the Russians. And the intelligence assessments on Ukraine, I think we've got to now break into two parts. One of them is the call on, are the Russians going to do this? And how. Which I think we'd have to give, you know, the CIA, Western intelligence services, kind of an A plus. Right. Called it. And then there's this assessment of which I think is a much harder assessment to make as an analyst, this assessment of how well will the Ukrainians perform? How well will the Russian military perform? And I think it seems to me like those assessments and a lot of the assumptions that under underlay those assessments were not correct and start to feed some policy dysfunction. Right. Because if you assume that the Ukrainians won't be able to resist for very long, formally, you start to think, well, okay, we'll have a finding to provide a whole bunch of stuff to kind of Ukrainian partisans who were fighting off the Russians. But we're going to lose Kyiv, we're going to lose most of the East. That's just done.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah. And that seems to be the assumption. People likened it to me to the work that the Special Operations Executive did in occupied Europe, or there were these famous Operation Gladio Stay behind teams which were. If the Cold War had turned hot in the 50s or whatever and Europe had been overrun, there were these arms caches buried in Italy, in places in Europe which were there for resistance groups to use to fight then the Red Army. So they were preparing, preparing for that again. And I think, you know, I spoke to some people who may have been involved in some of this, and you. Quite a bit, and they. They described to me at Some point the CIA's is it the ground branch, the ground division comes in, and one of the people said to me, they look like guys in movies, lumberjack shirts and beards is how they put it.

[David McCloskey]

That does sound just about right, yeah.

[Gordon Carrera]

This is the CIA's paramilitary wing, isn't it? They would be the ones who'd be training Ukrainian special forces and helping them develop those techniques potentially for resistance after an invasion. And the assumption they'd lost.

[David McCloskey]

Well, that's right. And this is a group of very well bearded, mostly men in Ground Branch and they are. And our producer Callum has typed into the chat here that he's seen these people in every single American action thriller movie. And he's right, like you have. I mean, this is sort of the out of central casting bearded tattooed guy who looks like he might spend his weekends, like skinning elk out in Utah or something like that. And who, you know, has. Is now in Ukraine to. To help the Ukrainians fight off the Russians. And by the. I guess, really February Gordon, there are some signs that, I guess bits and pieces of the Ukrainian establishment, in particular in the military, are starting to take these warnings seriously. It's starting to become more obvious, I guess, over time.

[Gordon Carrera]

And then this is important. It'll become important later on in the story that even if the political leadership seems pretty doubtful of the intelligence, there are some people in the Ukrainian military who are taking it seriously, especially the military chief, Valeri Zaluzhny, a really interesting character. He's the general who's in charge of the Ukrainian military. Stocky round. He is actually now the ambassador to London and he was one of those who actually had been doing stuff before the war. He'd been pushing for mobilisation, for fortifications, even though he hadn't got the political leadership, if you like, to do that, from the top, he was still making preparations and crucially, he will be moving air defences to hiding places. And he's doing this very secretly, it seems, because he doesn't want any details to leak to Russian spies. It's possible he didn't even inform his own president and minister about what entirely he was doing, or even the Americans. And there's one US official who later. They knew more about the Russian plans to attack than they did about the Ukrainian plans to defend. So it does look like a few people were taking this seriously. But still the assumption on the whole is that if anything comes, it's more likely to be an attack in the east and the Donbas as you get into kind of January and even February. But at this point the intelligence picture is growing and the US is going to try and put, as you said, even more into the public domain to try and tell people that this is for real, and to detail some of those Russian plans.

[David McCloskey]

The timing, I guess, also becomes critical because, you know, we started the series with this October 2021 meeting in the Oval where the intelligence community has sort of high confidence. It seems that Putin's at least considering this, but there isn't a timeline on it. And now we're starting, by the time we get into kind of late January, early February, we're starting to get a sense of what that timeline might be. And of course, like all good timelines, it depends on the Olympic Games, isn't that right? Because the Olympics that year were taking place in Beijing and Putin doesn't want to disrupt Xi Jinping's kind of show. So the Olympics are going to be over on February 20th. And it just seems like a really courteous thing there for Vladimir Putin to.

[Gordon Carrera]

Hold off, polite to wait till it's done, as one person put it. But the clock is definitely ticking and the US Is now trying to put Putin on his heels effectively and disrupt some of the very specific plans by putting more out in the public domain and briefing much more about what was going on.

[David McCloskey]

I mean, I think this originally came from the CIA or from the US Intelligence community about Russian plans to basically run a false flag operation to then justify the invasion. I think you knew some of this at the time, isn't that right, Gordon, as you were covering this?

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah. So this gets just slightly difficult territory as a journalist, because you can't reveal as a journalist your sources are what you were told. But it's definitely the case that I had conversations with people at that point in January or February which convinced me that the invasion was real. You know, I can't go into, for journalistic reasons, you know, too much about them. But it was the fact some of the people I spoke to, you could sense their almost sense of personal pain at what they could see coming and that steamroller coming towards them. I mean, you could sense it by speaking to them. And these were people who really understood it, that for them it was real and that there was a real threat to people that they knew. You know, I remember people saying, I hope I'm wrong, I hope we're wrong about this. But you could sense that they believed it. And I think having those conversations with people convinced me that this was something serious. And if I have a regret, actually about that time is that I struggled then to convince other people how serious it was because people in Moscow and Kyiv were also saying, there's some bluff, it's not real. But when you sat down with People who knew what they were talking about and were telling you this is for real, you suddenly got it. But try to convey that to other people, particularly when you've got to protect your sources, is hard actually as a journalist as well. And that was going on, but we were starting to see more of that information come out. So the US and the UK at this point are briefing very specific and very interesting intelligence. So one of the things that you get is the British Foreign Office in late January actually saying they know who the Russians want to install as a puppet government in Kyiv. And they actually name former Ukrainian politicians who they say Russian intelligence is working with to put in government. They name them specifically, they put out details of the fact that Russia has effectively a kill list of people it wants to track down. And you read from that story I wrote in the run up to the war about credible information that Russian forces had the list of people they were going to go after and to put pressure on the politicians, the activists and the journalists. And then I think, really interesting, this issue of the way in which the Russians were going to justify the war. This was also being made public and briefed out. And crucially it was going to depend on events in Donetsk and Luhansk. So the two areas in the Donbass in the east of the country. And the plan of the Russians was to have a provocation so that they could get Russian speakers there to say, come and save us, come and save us from Zelenskyy and his fascist regime, as they put it. And to use the intelligence terminology of a false flag, which we should explain is when, you know, one state does something but making it looks like it's in the flag of another state. And the idea was that they were going to create the image that Russian speaking civilians in these areas had been attacked by the Ukrainians and then use that to justify Russia going in to protect them. And I find it fascinating that the Russians felt they needed to have this justification for it. And it's interesting because there's, you know, parallel. If you Compare it to 1939, Germany, when it wants to invade Poland again, comes up with a very similar false flag justification. In that case, it's at Gleiwitz radio station, which is at the border which they're going to attack, the Germans are going to attack it, but wearing Polish uniforms, claim it's the Poles, and then use that as the justification for starting the war with Poland. So there is this history of trying to justify your actions using this kind of false flag. And that's what the Russians were preparing at this point.

[David McCloskey]

Well, I guess if you're Putin, it's better if you are able to frame everything in a defensive context. I know he thinks that this is going to be done pretty quickly, but you're still going to have dead Russian soldiers, you're still going to be attempting essentially a coup in Kiev. So having some rationale for all of this is really helpful. And what's again, fascinating from the intelligence side of things is that the US Reveals intelligence on this false flag attack that's very detailed. I think it makes it much harder for Putin to sell this outside of Russia or even inside Ukraine. Right. Because the intel has, you know, it says, look, this is all going to be filmed. There's going to be a bunch of dead bodies, corpses that are going to provide kind of a pretext for this invasion. The intelligence reveals that the Russians had already recruited people to be involved. Right. I mean, I think they had dead bodies actually ready to go in the car that they would film and make it look like the Ukrainians had done this. So it's really detailed stuff that makes me wonder what the source was for this because it's, it's not a vague, high level judgment. It's very specific kind of operational plans around this false flag.

[Gordon Carrera]

And so the US has learned about this and crucially, they're making this public. You know, they're briefing this out and they're talking about it at podiums and elsewhere because they want to disrupt it. Because you're right, I think part of this narrative and this justification for the Russians is to their own population, but it's also to, I guess the global south to the developing world to say, look, we're just doing this in defense of, you know, our Russian speaking neighbors in Ukraine. And also they know that there might be some sympathetic voices or more likely sympathetic voices in Western countries. And all of this is part of the Russian attempt to justify what they're about to do. So going public with that, preempting it effectively is what the US and UK are doing by using intelligence, by downgrading that intelligence. And I think in this case it really is effective. I do think they are managing to disrupt Russia's plans. It's not stopping the invasion, but they are disrupting the effectiveness of the Russian intelligence plans for that invasion as it approaches, as we get into February 2022.

[David McCloskey]

And it is interesting now, Gordon, I mean, three years on to think about was this effective. Right? I mean, we're having a conversation here in the States again about who started this war in. In some respects. And so I think the logic for releasing a lot of this information still holds because you almost want a record, a historical record of culpability for the invasion, who started it. And releasing that intelligence to a pretty detailed level helps to build that historical picture, to then look back and say, no, no, no, look, this was started by the Russians. This intelligence is actually critical to that very simple statement that I just made. And I think without it, it would be a much more contested statement or could be a much more contested statement, you know, if we didn't have the sort of strategic downgrade of all of this information in the run up to the war. And so, Gordon, maybe there with us now, just on the brink of war, let's end. And when we come back next week, we're going to talk about how intelligence and these strategic downgrades of intelligence continue to shape the narrative and actually shape the battles, the opening battles of the war in Ukraine.

[Gordon Carrera]

That's right. And just a reminder that if you want to get in touch with us, the email is. The rest is [e-mail] the rest is [e-mail] See you next time.

[David McCloskey]

See you next time.