War, by nature, tends to have winners and losers. The war in Ukraine, a universal disaster, seems to have more losers than winners, though. But before this conflict, few might have expected one of its few winners to be a much tarnished organization thousands of miles away.
The CIA, along with other American intelligence agencies, has dazzled the world over the past several months. First, in the months leading up to the invasion, the U.S. used satellite imagery to continually insist Putin was planning an invasion, even when he denied it. Now, stories are emerging of Ukraine using U.S. intelligence to target Russian generals and warships. There are even suggestions that the U.S. has flexed its muscles by intentionally leaking its involvement.
But we shouldn’t let our pride over what we do know drown out of concern for what we don’t know. For example, we had we had no idea how weak Russia’s military actually was, that it had become a Potemkin village that couldn’t fight its way out of a Ukrainian paper bag. Consider General Milley’s prediction that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours. We didn’t know just for example, that thanks to corruption the Russian army relied on faulty Chinese tires.
And yet, what we don’t know about Putin and Russia goes so much deeper than that. In the 90s, the CIA completely missed KGB hardliners plotting against Gorbachev, then Yeltsin. And then, most importantly, it missed the rise of Putin....
English (US) ·