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

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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.

And I'm Gordon Carrera.

And that listeners to the pod will, of course, recognize as Carrerin 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 quite quite a bit above the fact it was written by me i think that was 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.

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.

So, 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, had 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, isn't 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 for war yeah that's right it's a it's a really interesting case study of what can be done with intelligence that the us has clearly gathered from and the uk from some very secret sources but it's 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 the 17th when President Biden sends his director of national intelligence Avril Haynes, 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 Haynes takes with her not policymakers, but analysts.

Minnie McCloskey.

I love that.

Yes.

Some Minnie McCloskeys packed in the trunk, taken to Brussels.

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 seeing.

That's right.

Yeah, we've got another

sun-deprived person here

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 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.

They did not believe us.

We all went out for pizza.

We flew home.

And it was, you're reading through this story again.

It's kind of the same thing because the Brits get on board pretty quickly.

They've seen the intelligence.

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, 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.

Yeah.

They just don't think it makes sense that Putin would be willing to do this.

Why would he do it?

It doesn't make sense.

It's not rational.

Why would he risk 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 is 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 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 yeah if the other side just thinks your your assessment is is bonkers 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 U.S.

Secretary of State Anthony 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 Zelensky 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 on an anti-corruption platform.

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?

Well, I'll put it this way: I haven't seen the clip.

I'm aware of the clip, but

it's not what I've Googled or searched for on the internet.

And I think I might not right now.

My search history in preparation for this episode

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 of things.

But by this stage, he's been elected, but 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 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.

Well, and Zelensky 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 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 information provided to the Ukrainians would get leaked back to the Russians.

Because the 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.

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.

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 Advisor 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.

That's not encouraging.

You don't find that encouraging.

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

encouraging and it is a great scene it's it's the bit where you see uh character shouting no because a steamroller is approaching them which is being driven by austin powers 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 Powers reference bizarrely, that the US wants to use the intelligence publicly to basically go, the steamroller is approaching in the coming months.

I mean, the clip is hilarious, and everyone should watch it.

If you type in Austin Power Steamroller, 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 steamroller.

Yeah, you can't escape 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't.

You're welcome.

It doesn't make sense to me.

And the way they do it in that classic US way, how do you make intelligence public?

Well, the answer is you brief the Washington Post.

I mean, often it's the New York Times, but in this case, it's the Washington Post.

Because on December the 3rd, there is 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 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 build-up.

And this is all ahead of a Biden-Putin phone call on December the 7th to try and put some pressure on Russia, still trying to show we know what you're doing.

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, Adli 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 U.S.

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 U.S.

There were questions about how much in sort of the 9-11 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.

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 continued 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.

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.

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.

As we come to the end of 2021, we're about to move to the last weeks before the war itself starts.

Let's take a break and we'll look at how intelligence is used in that final crucial period.

Well, welcome back.

It is January the 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.

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 Donbass, but they plan to take Kyiv, the capital where he's going.

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 details of assassination plots against the man he's meeting, President Zelensky.

Burns is trying to persuade Zelensky to take these plots seriously and boost his security.

There might even be teams already in Kiev, sleeper cells, waiting to carry out that kind of assassination.

And yet Zelensky is still not convinced.

He asks 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.

You know, Zelensky is saying he never got detailed intelligence of the invasion, even though US 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 Zelensky 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'd need to fight them off.

If this is for real, and the U.S.

isn't doing that.

It's sort of a fascinating window, I think, into a couple of things here.

One is the extent to which Russian kind of mind games have just permeated.

the way that the Ukrainian leadership 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 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.

Yeah, and I think it is worth exploring that question of why the U.S.

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 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.

Yeah, and we talked in our emergency episode that we did on the U.S.

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 Hurr.

I mean, the CIA had trained Ukrainian commandos, they had provided secure como gear, they'd done kind of tradecraft training in how 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 DC perspective and say, all of those kind of assets that we've 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 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 are fighting off the Russians, but we're going to lose Kiev.

We're going to lose most of the East.

That's just just done.

Yeah, 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 for that again.

And I think, you know, I spoke to some people who may have been involved in some of this and knew quite a bit.

And

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.

That does sound just about right.

Yeah.

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.

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 skinning elk out in Utah or something like that, and who, you know, has is now in Ukraine 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.

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, Valery Zeluzhny, 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 mobilization, 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 defenses 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 says 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 the Donbass as you get into kind of January and even February.

But at this point, the intelligence picture is growing and the U.S.

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.

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 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.

I mean, I think this originally came from the CIA or from the U.S.

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?

Yeah.

So this gets into slightly difficult territory as a journalist because you can't reveal as a journalist your sources or what you were told.

But it's definitely the case that I had conversations with people at that 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, at 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, it's a 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 trying 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 know, you read from that story I wrote in the run-up to the war about credible information that Russian forces, you know, had a 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 Donets 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 Zelensky and his fascist regime, as they put it, and to use the intelligence terminology of a false flag, which we should explain is when one state does something but making it look 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 Gleivitz 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, 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.

Well, and I guess, you know, 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 Kyiv.

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 U.S.

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 not a vague high-level judgment.

It's very specific kind of operational plans around this false flag.

And so the U.S.

has learnt 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 our Russian-speaking neighbours 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.

You know, 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.

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 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, 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 they're with us now, just on the brink of war.

Let's end.

And when we come back next week, we are 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.

That's right.

And just a reminder that if you want to get in touch with us, the email is therestisclassified at goalhanger.com.

The restisclassified at goalhanger.com.

See you next time.

See you next time.