President Joe Biden on Wednesday pledged an additional $800 million in aid to Ukraine, following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s calls for a U.S. or NATO-led no-fly zone. It would be understandable, but a mistake, to think American support is limited to what we can see. Ukraine playing the role of David against Russia’s Goliath is impressive optics, but it’s not happening in a vacuum.
It would be understandable, but a mistake, to think American support is limited to what we can see.
From my experience as head of counterintelligence at the FBI, I know that it’s likely that U.S. spies and spy-catchers have been hard at work providing Zelenskyy with advantages that may never see the light of day. We may never know the secrets regarding this silent war for Ukraine, and I’m OK with that.
Here’s what we know, and what we don’t know, about what lies beneath the battle for Ukraine.
First, here at home, we’ve learned that 12 officials assigned to the Russian mission to the United Nations were expelled from the U.S. for conduct outside the scope of their diplomatic duties, which means they were likely intelligence officers previously identified by the FBI as spying for Russian President Vladimir Putin. What we don’t know is the story behind the decision to expel them, or, more interestingly, to not expel the multiple Russian intelligence officers working here under both diplomatic and nonofficial cover positions.
At the FBI, decisions to declare foreign intelligence officers “persona non grata” include the need to retain those officers who have been recruited, and are secretly working for the U.S., or those officers whose communications are successfully compromised. In these scenarios, that likely means Putin’s counterintelligence team is working overtime theorizing which spies of theirs in the U.S. haven’t been expelled because their expulsion would constitute a loss for the U.S. intelligence community.
With this in mind, the FBI could also arrest Russians who don’t enjoy diplomatic immunity to try to neutralize any secret work in support of their motherland. We saw an example of this on March 8, with the arrest of a Russian national who was charged with coordinating Russian propaganda here and was accused of being in direct contact with Putin.
Domestically, we know that the FBI’s counterintelligence agents diligently work to identify and counter foreign spies, including Russian intelligence officers. Undoubtedly, there is an all-out effort by U.S. operatives here and throughout the world to recruit Russian officials who can provide timely intelligence on Putin’s plans against Ukraine. Of course, what we don’t know, and may never know, is how many Russian officials are agreeing to play for Team America.
Second, the U.S. appears to be attempting to compromise Putin’s strategy and tactics, including accurately predicting his intentions and timing. While intelligence officials may debate the pros and cons of Biden publicly releasing so much otherwise normally classified intelligence, they should concede that Biden’s certainty and confidence in his available intelligence likely means the U.S. has multiple human and technical sources that have penetrated the Russian government.
What we don’t know, and may never know, is how many Russian officials are agreeing to play for Team America. I interviewed Douglas London, 30-year CIA clandestine service officer and chief of station, on my podcast recently. London agreed that this kind of high degree of confidence can only come from multiple sources of myriad varieties. What we can’t see is Putin’s potential massive mole hunt within his government or the lack of trust he could now have in those around him. According to a report by Washington think tank the Institute for the Study of War, two leaders of the Russian intelligence service were placed under house arrest Friday. Third, we know from history that the U.S. intelligence community is quite capable of supporting a protracted insurgency abroad. Ironically, a recent example of such capability is America’s clandestine efforts in support of Afghanistan’s fight against Russia’s military presence in that country. We also know that an American president has the authority to issue what’s called a “covert action order” that permits U.S. intelligence agencies — mostly the CIA — to engage in activities against an adversary and to do so in a manner that lets our government deny it happened. Such an order is believed to have been issued when the U.S. supported the Taliban against the Russians in Afghanistan. A covert action finding by Biden in the Ukraine battle might allow the U.S. to keep Ukraine supplied with all manner of sensitive resources and supply chains. Still, we may never know whether such a finding exists or what it facilitated. Such is the world of clandestine operations. But what we do know is there’s more to American support of Ukraine than crippling financial and oil sanctions. The U.S. government’s reticence to enforce a no-fly zone or its wariness at supplying Ukraine with Polish fighter jets doesn’t mean there isn’t significant and valuable assistance being provided. It just means we may never know the full extent of such support. And we should be OK with that.
