The intelligence community has received extraordinary praise for its work on the Russia-Ukraine crisis. I rarely saw this offering of credit in my many decades of work as a CIA officer.
Yet the praise is absolutely deserved.
The Biden administration is also entitled to some applause. It “flooded the zone” with authorized disclosures of intelligence prior to the Russian invasion. This was a most welcome revolution in recent thinking about how to handle sensitive intelligence material. The deliberate disclosures were designed to stop a war, not to promote one. In that sense, these disclosures represented a huge difference with the 2003 buildup to the war in Iraq. Back then, the Bush administration unfortunately used faulty intelligence to bolster its case for the invasion of Iraq.
The more recent disclosures were also designed as a deterrent, to get inside Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision-making process and perhaps cause him to think twice before hitting the “go” button. That deterrent interest did not succeed, but it was worth the effort. Regardless, the disclosures had an enormously positive secondary effect. They helped rally America’s NATO allies by exposing Russian malfeasance. The disclosures also helped to deter and dilute the prospective impact of Russian “false flag” attacks designed to provide a pretext for Putin’s invasion.
Of course, the biggest win here is also the saddest. Russia actually invaded, as the intelligence community predicted.
Predicting the time and nature of an invasion isn’t normally the intelligence community’s job. That’s normally near impossible. Instead, when done right, intelligence collection and analysis are mostly designed to avoid strategic surprise. In this case, the intelligence community fulfilled that objective by very early providing policymakers with an assessment that Putin may invade Ukraine and was readying the means to do so. That, in turn, gave senior officials the time and information to enable their proper planning and preparatory diplomacy.
Where does the intelligence community go from here?
No one can rest on their laurels, as a major land war rages in Europe. The intelligence community along with U.S. military special operations forces must prepare to conduct and/or support a Ukrainian insurgency campaign. The model should be Afghanistan in 1980, just after the Soviet invasion. I think back to my first day at the CIA in January 1993, when I walked into the Langley, Virginia, headquarters and was shown my desk. There was the grip stock of a Stinger missile hanging from the ceiling.
A grizzled old CIA veteran still supporting a beard similar to those of the Afghan mujahedeen he once supported said to me, “Son, you see that weapon system? It won the cold war.” Time to take the missile off the wall.
Fortunately, the CIA is built for providing this type of assistance. We already support our Ukrainian friends via training and material assistance from neighboring states. This allows them to continue the fight and hopefully, one day, to secure victory. And don’t forget that the U.S. military’s Special Operations Command-Europe was created nearly seven decades ago for just this moment, countering a Russian invasion in Europe. Sanctions have been a good first step in countering Putin. But the real metric that matters will be the number of body bags that return to Russia.
At the same time, the intelligence community must — and will — look for and encourage diplomats and intelligence officers serving at Russian embassies abroad who are making the decision whether or not to jump from Putin’s ship. The U.S. government should hang a “Welcome, walk-ins” shingle on every U.S. embassy in the world. After all, think about the Russian officials who are rotating back home this summer. Ordinarily, Russian spies and diplomats enjoy the trappings of overseas life, benefiting from higher salaries and better schools for their children. But now, they are faced with a return not to the Moscow they once knew but essentially to a situation more akin to life in North Korea. The Russian economy is in free fall, and Russia’s isolation is only growing. This hasn’t gone unnoticed. Just look at the statement earlier this week by former Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, who served for six years under Boris Yeltsin. He pleaded for all Russian diplomats to quit. No doubt his old colleagues are listening. We must grasp the intelligence-gathering opportunity this presents.
The intelligence community will also look for signs that the Russian super-rich, the oligarchs who provide critical support to the Putin regime, are jumping ship. We’ve seen the highly amusing but still relevant social media tracking of the location of the oligarchs’ superyachts. The oligarchs have lived a rich life in Miami, Monaco, Nice, the Swiss Alps, New York City, and, most of all, London. But now, it seems that their gravy train is over. Will this undercut Putin’s patronage networks in Moscow?
The intelligence community will also watch to see signs that tens of thousands, or perhaps more, brave Russians are getting ready to take to their streets. Organic protests inside Russia are often met with a brutal crackdown by security forces. That is happening already. But how much will the Russian people, particularly young Russians, be willing to take as their nation becomes a pariah state? How many of their dead brothers, fathers, and sons will they tolerate returning home?
Finally, there’s the intelligence community’s support of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky’s evolution has been extraordinary. From the voice of the Ukrainian version of Paddington Bear to his current state as a Churchillian figure, well, what a journey he has had! Wearing a T-shirt, using social media to talk to his people and the world, Zelensky’s defiant statements are slogans for the ages. “Send ammo, not a ride” is a Madison Avenue public relations executive’s dream! I teach and often speak on leadership and wrote a book on it. I always have believed that leaders are not born, they are made, and Zelensky has proven this point in spades. He has become a global force, unifying not only his people but the world as well. He deserves relentless intelligence community support.
And what a stark difference Zelensky offers to Putin. The former KGB officer now hides isolated in his palace, rigid in his fancy suits, sitting at his bizarre elongated table seemingly miles away from his visiting national security team. Using our tools of information operations, the intelligence community must help promulgate Ukraine’s defiant stance to Russia. The Ukrainians have provided the world with a graduate-level class on information operations. The intelligence community can help them by making sure that the Russian people, oligarchs, and officials see that they are on the wrong side of history. There can be no neutrality in this conflict.
As we ponder the pending siege of Kyiv, massive casualties, and perhaps even the fall of the Ukrainian government, I think of Zelensky more akin to King Leonidas, the leader of several thousand Spartan and Greek warriors who, in 480 B.C., held off millions of Persian invaders in the legendary battle of Thermopylae. Zelensky last week rejected that comparison. Yet Thermopylae is often seen as the greatest example of heroism, brotherhood, stoicism, sacrifice, and courage in military history. The famed book about the battle, Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire is taught at U.S. military service academies. As a senior CIA official covering Europe and Eurasia, I would often give this book to our European liaison partners as a gift. King Leonidas and his Spartans famously died at this battle, but they inspired free Greeks to eventually defeat the Persian King Xerxes, once and for all.
Zelensky vs. Putin. Leonidas vs. Xerxes. Will history repeat itself? Perhaps. But let’s hope that the new Leonidas lives this time to tell the tale. And that his people triumph in sovereign democracy alongside him. America has a stake in this fight. It’s time to make some history. It’s time to help Ukraine win.
Marc Polymeropoulos is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. A former CIA senior operations officer, he retired in 2019 after a 26-year career serving in the Near East and South Asia. His book Clarity in Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the CIA was published in June 2021 by Harper Collins.
