Secret intelligence has unusually public role in Ukraine war
>> The war in Ukraine is the conflict where spies came in from the cold and took center stage.
Since Russia invaded its neighbor in late February, intelligence agencies in the U.S. and Britain have been remarkably willing to go public with their secret intelligence assessments of what is happening on the battlefield — and inside the Kremlin.
The U.S. this week de- classified intelligence find- ings claiming Russian Pres- ident Vladimir Putin is being misinformed about his military's poor performance in Ukraine by advisers scared to tell him the truth. On Thursday a British spy chief said demoralized Russian troops were refusing to carry out orders and sabotaging their own equipment.
Jeremy Fleming, who heads Britain's electronic intelligence agency GCHQ, made the comments in a public speech where he said the “pace and scale” at which secret intelligence is being released “really is unprecedented.”
Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert at University College London, agreed that the very public intelligence campaign “reflects the fact that we now live in a different age, politically and internationally. And this is a different kind of war.”
Officials say the stream of declassified intelligence — which includes regular briefings to journalists in Washington and London and daily Twitter updates from Britain's defense ministry — has several aims. Partly it's to let Putin know he is being watched, and to make him question what he's being told. It's also designed to embolden the Russian military to tell Putin the truth, and to convey to the Russian public that they have been lied to about the war.
The U.S. and Britain also have released intelligence assessments in a bid to deter Russian actions. That was the case with recent warnings Russia might be preparing to use chemical weapons in Ukraine.
It's all part of a closely coordinated trans-Atlantic strategy that has been in the works for months.
Biden administration officials say they decided to aggressively share intelligence and coordinate messaging with key allies, including Britain, as U.S. concerns about Russian troop movements in autumn 2021 put the intelligence community on high alert.
In early November, President Joe Biden dispatched CIA director William Burns to Moscow to warn that the U.S. was fully aware of Russian troop movements. The White House has typically been tight-lipped about the director's travels, but the Biden administration calculated that in this situation they needed to advertise the visit far and wide. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow announced that Burns had met with top Kremlin officials shortly after his trip was over.
Soon after Burns' Moscow mission, U.S. officials decided they needed to accelerate intelligence sharing.
Officials shared sensitive intelligence with other members of the Five Eyes alliance — Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — and also with Ukraine. Director of national intelligence Avril Haines was dispatched to Brussels to brief NATO members on intelligence underlying growing American concerns that Russia seemed intent on invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue.
Some allies and analysts were skeptical, with memories lingering of past intelligence failings, like the false claim Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that was used to justify the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Late last year, France and Germany led a group of European countries that appeared to be seeing similar military intelligence as the U.S. and Britain, but were less convinced that an invasion of Ukraine was imminent. At NATO, Germany initially blocked the use of a system for helping Ukraine to acquire certain military equipment. France and Germany also blocked NATO from launching an early crisis planning system in response to the buildup, before relenting in December.