Immersed in the forest, somewhere along the border between Ukraine and Russia, hidden by trees and often built under the rubble of some already bombed military outpost, 12 secret CIA bases are hidden, the best source of information on the Kremlin in disposition of the United States and nerve center for the Kiev army against the Russian advance.
From here, a clandestine war between the White House and Vladimir Putin has been fought for almost ten years, of which we only know some of the excellent victims.
A long-standing partnership
Since 2015, a year after the Euromaidan uprising, the fall of the government of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and the annexation of Crimea by Moscow, the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars in Ukraine, turning local services into Washington's main ally in Europe against Moscow.
Initially, Langley feared that his Ukrainian colleagues were too “compromised” with Russia given their shared Soviet past, but a series of “gifts” from Kiev's intelligence on Moscow's plans and troop movements convinced the US to trust him, so to establish new units within the SBU civil services, build clandestine bases and reform the Gur military services “in its own image”.
Thus the “Fifth” and “Sixth” directorates of the SBU were born, the first formed in collaboration with the CIA and the second with the British MI6, in addition to Unit 2245, an elite military commando trained to steal technology from the Russians and to conduct clandestine operations behind the front lines. Likewise, US intelligence financed the construction of new bases for Kiev's special forces and military services and helped found a directorate at Gur for electronic espionage.
All this, as shown by an investigation published last October from Washington Postallowed the CIA to maintain a “significant presence in Kiev” by obtaining an amount of information “unimaginable” before 2014. In exchange, before the war, Ukraine received surveillance systems, training and training programs, as well as infrastructure and equipment that allowed Kiev not only to collect information from Russia but also to conduct secret operations and a campaign of sabotage and targeted assassinations first in the separatist regions and then in the occupied areas.
The hidden front
The secret partnership – which began with Barack Obama in the White House and continued undisturbed under Donald Trump and Joe Biden – however, as another investigation shows published in February from New York Times, a network of “12 forward operating bases”, financed and equipped by the CIA, along the Russian border. Added to these are two other secret facilities built by American intelligence and Ukrainian military services to intercept Russian communications.
To give you an idea of what we're talking about, the network of underground bunkers in the Ukrainian forests, equipped with cutting-edge technologies, would employ at least 800 local intelligence officers and an unknown number of American 007s, while the two “listening centers” that collaborate with the CIA they could intercept 250,000 to 300,000 communications from Russian military units and personnel inside and outside Ukraine every day.
From here the CIA, with the collaboration of the Pentagon and other agencies such as the NSA, helped the Ukrainians to identify the military targets to hit and to contain the Russian advance. Maybe they don't pull the trigger, a Kiev military official explained to al New York Timesbut they help us aim the weapon.
From these bases, however, the Ukrainian personnel, trained in Europe by US 007s, would also manage various networks of double agents and sleeper cells that collect information inside Russia and in occupied areas. But it's not just about getting information about and from Moscow.
Although American intelligence was initially not supposed to participate in “lethal operations”, the training received allowed the Ukrainian services to conduct a series of actions with a strong symbolic impact, such as the murder of alleged collaborators in Donbas, the attacks on the of Kerch in Crimea and the Russian Black Sea Fleet and perhaps the Nord Stream gas pipeline, the elimination of senior officials, military personnel and supporters of the war (even bloggers) in Russia and the occupied areas and, sometimes, their family members, such as Alexander Dugin's daughter Daria, killed in a car bomb on August 20, 2022.
Despite Washington's protests against this type of operation, the CIA has never stopped supporting its Ukrainian colleagues, on the contrary. In fact, after the invasion began the White House authorized US spy agencies to provide support and intelligence to conduct lethal operations against Russian forces on Ukrainian soil. Simply, for those conducted across the border, Kiev neglects to inform Washington, which can then be said to be surprised by certain actions. Langley would in fact follow “red lines” established by the White House in tacit agreement with the Kremlin.
The rules of the game
It is a “clandestine war”, like the defined last July at Newsweek a senior Biden administration intelligence official directly involved in policy planning in Ukraine. A conflict with its own rules, somehow shared by Washington and Moscow.
Three months before the invasion, the US president sent the director of the CIA, William Burns, to Moscow to warn the Kremlin of the consequences of a possible military aggression in Kiev. The former American ambassador to Russia was unable to meet Putin, who was then on holiday in Sochi on the Black Sea, but the two spoke on the phone and, according to the American magazine, it was in that conversation that the rules of the game were established: in In the event of an invasion, the US would not have deployed its troops in the field or promoted a change of regime in Moscow, while the Kremlin would have limited its attack to Ukraine alone, without attacking other countries in the area and would have refrained from attacking diplomats and the leadership of the United States and its allies.
In this context, the CIA would have had its own role to play as a negotiator, as a provider of intelligence and logistics information and guarantor of relations with European countries and NATO. But, more importantly, it would have been responsible for avoiding a nuclear escalation between the US and Russia. A role that is even more complicated by the latest developments on the front and by the ongoing political stalemate in Washington from which Kiev is not receives more military aid for almost two months.
Afghan syndrome
The question that some Ukrainian intelligence officers are increasingly asking their American colleagues, given the unwillingness of Republicans loyal to Trump to pass a new military aid package in the House of Representatives and the progressive Russian advance in Donbas, is whether the The CIA and the USA will abandon them as already happened in Afghanistan.
A fear that, as recently suggested by former American secret agent John Kiriakou on the portal ScheerPost, would be so shared at Langley that the agency would not even try to prevent media leaks of its involvement in Ukraine. On the contrary, as shown by the availability of intelligence sources in US newspapers and magazines in recent months, the CIA would not want to give up what it has built over the last ten years, on the contrary.
However, the agency could go much further and encourage the rise of the opposition in Russia. On the other hand, how admitted to the Washington Post by former director Robert Gates, dissidents “are already suspected or accused of being supported by the CIA and the USA: they blame them for help they don't receive, perhaps we should give it to them”. In short, the war will not end, not even the clandestine one.
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