U.S. battles Putin by revealing vital intel
After decades of getting schooled in information warfare by President Vladimir Putin of Russia, the United States is trying to beat the master at his own game.
In recent weeks, the Biden administration has detailed the movement of Russian special operation forces to Ukraine's borders, exposed a Russian plan to create a video of a faked atrocity as a pretext for an invasion, outlined Moscow's war plans, warned that an invasion would result in possibly thousands of deaths and hinted that Russian officers had doubts about Putin.
Then, on Friday, Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden's national security adviser, told reporters at the White House that the United States was seeing signs of Russian escalation and that there was a “credible prospect” of immediate military action. Other officials said the announcement was prompted by new intelligence that signaled an invasion could begin as soon as Wednesday.
All told, the extraordinary series of disclosures — unfolding almost as quickly as information is collected and assessed — has amounted to one of the most aggressive releases of intelligence by the United States since the Cuban missile crisis, current and former officials say.
It is an unusual gambit, in part because Biden has repeatedly made clear that he has no intention of sending U.S. troops to defend Ukraine. In effect, the administration is warning the world of an urgent threat — not to make the case for a war, but to try to prevent one.
The hope is that disclosing Putin's plans will disrupt them, perhaps delaying an invasion and buying more time for diplomacy or even giving Putin a chance to reconsider the political, economic and human costs of an invasion.
At the same time, Biden administration officials said they had a narrower and more realistic goal: They want to make it more difficult for Putin to justify an invasion with lies, undercutting his standing on the global stage and building support for a tougher response.
Intelligence agencies, prodded by the White House, have declassified information, which in turn has been briefed to Congress, shared with reporters and discussed by Pentagon and State Department spokespeople.
But the disclosures are complicated by history. Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the George W. Bush administration released intelligence that officials said justified preemptive action, including purported intercepts of Iraqi military conversations, photos of mobile biological weapons labs and statements accusing Baghdad of building a fleet of drones to launch a chemical attack on the United States. The material was all wrong, reliant on sources who lied, incorrect interpretations of Iraq's actions and senior officials who looked at raw intelligence and saw what they wanted to see.
But this situation, U.S. officials say, is different. Washington's claims about Russia's troop buildup have been confirmed by commercial satellite imagery of a quality previously unavailable. The details of Moscow's secret disinformation plots are in line with the Kremlin's propaganda campaigns that play out on social media platforms and have been tracked by independent researchers.
Most importantly, the officials said, there is a fundamental distinction between Iraq in 2003 and Ukraine in 2022. “In Iraq, intelligence was used and deployed from this very podium to start a war,” Sullivan said Friday. “We are trying to stop a war.”