Ukraine's Spies Touting Their Worth
With US Aid in Peril, Kyiv's intelligence agencies open up to the Times
In the summer of 1967 I spent hours roaming Baltimore looking for dead drop sites, practicing brush passes and learning how to chat up a stranger who might make a good spy. It was all part of the U.S. Army’s attempt to turn me into a case officer, aka spy recruiter and handler. It was all very hush-hush, but it was a course not much different than what’s been taught forever at the CIA’s “farm” in Virginia—as well by any intelligence outfit worth a name.
Or as retired former CIA operations officer Douglas London put it to me, “The tradecraft, principles and core training is largely the same, only the equipment evolves with technology.” Thus beginning a few years back, according to a fascinating story this week in the New York Times, the CIA “oversaw a training program, carried out in two European cities, to teach Ukrainian intelligence officers how to convincingly assume fake personas and steal secrets in Russia and other countries that are adept at rooting out spies.”
Plus ça change.
You wouldn’t think the Ukrainian spy services, longtime vassals of the KGB, would need much training, but of course that was a generation ago and a lot has changed since then. A major task of Volodymyr Zelensky and his elected government has been to root out Russian agents in the woodwork—if only to prove that they were worthy partners of the CIA. By all accounts, it’s worked out well, especially since the Russian invasion two years ago this month, during which Kyiv was expected to quickly fall. The partnership had grown so trusting that the CIA’s station merely moved west of Kyiv while the rest of the U.S. embassy evacuated when Russian troops threatened to take the capital.
“But the partnership is no wartime creation, nor is Ukraine the only beneficiary,” wrote Times reporters Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz. It’s gone global.
Beginning a decade ago, “the CIA also helped train a new generation of Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, across Europe, and in Cuba and other places where the Russians have a large presence,” they wrote. The relationship “has transformed Ukraine, whose intelligence agencies were long seen as thoroughly compromised by Russia, into one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.”
And that seemed the major message behind the Ukrainians’ decision to give Entous and Schwirtz extraordinary access to its subterranean spy bunkers, all financed and partly equipped by the CIA, “where teams of Ukrainian soldiers track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on conversations between Russian commanders.” That capability was aided by a CIA-trained “elite Ukrainian commando force—known as Unit 2245—which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that C.I.A. technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems,” their story said.
Ukrainian agents also had far better chances of persuading a Russian to spy for them than a CIA officer could, General Valeriy Kondratiuk, a former commander of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, told the Times. “For a Russian, allowing oneself to be recruited by an American is to commit the absolute, ultimate in treachery and treason,” he said. “But for a Russian to be recruited by a Ukrainian, it’s just friends talking over a beer.”
It was Kondratiuk who helped sealed the deal with the CIA back in 2015, when he handed the agency’s deputy station chief a stack of intelligence reports, which included “secrets about the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet, including detailed information about the latest Russian nuclear submarine designs. Before long,” the Times reported, “teams of CIA officers were regularly leaving his office with backpacks full of documents.”
Caution: Of course the Ukrainian spooks want to trumpet their value, especially with U.S. aid to Kyiv in peril, thanks to Putin fan Donald Trump and his GOP bootlickers in Congress. So it’s prudent to be on guard for exaggeration in the accounts they and their CIA supporters gave to the Times. But there’s also good reason to believe that, dollar for dollar, there’s no more efficient a weapon against Vladimir Putin, in Ukraine and beyond, than the aid pipeline from the CIA down to Kviv’s spies.
When I was a civilian contract worker with the CIA in Vietnam, we had a time in 1971 when they wanted us to support the Phoenix Program (or it's current form) and help round up VC. So, our person in Da Lat turned in all his agents. I did not. For a while I had the only "authenticated agent" in II Corps. And there is always a question about our agents and their agents. Do we expose an agent if it will let them know who is reporting to us?
So, my question is "If we know that Members of Congress or the Administration are "Russian Spies" recruited and paid for, do we expose them if this will betray our agents in high level positions in Russia or even start a hunt for them. I suspect it depends on who we are talking about. But right now any mention that Trump "works for Russia" is called "fake news."
Is it?