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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March
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The New York Times on February 25 published an explosive story of what purports to be the history of the CIA in Ukraine from the Maidan coup of 2014 to the present.
The story, “The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin,” written by Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz, is one of initial distrust, but a mutual fear and hatred of Russia that progresses to a relationship so close that Ukraine is now one of the CIA’s closest intelligence partners in the world.
At the same time, the Times’s publication of the piece, which relied on more than 200 interviews in Ukraine, the U.S., and “several other European countries,” raises several questions:
Why did the CIA not object to the article’s publication, especially coming in one of the Agency’s preferred outlets?
When the CIA approaches a newspaper to complain about the classified information it contains, the piece is almost always killed or severely edited. Newspaper publishers are patriots, after all. Right?
Was the article published because the CIA wanted the news out there?
Perhaps more importantly, was the point of the article to influence the congressional budget deliberations on aid to Ukraine? After all, was the article really just meant to brag about how great the CIA is?
Or was it to warn congressional appropriators, “Look how much we’ve accomplished to confront the Russian bear. You wouldn’t really let it all go to waste, would you?”
The Times’s article has all the hallmarks of a deep, inside look at a sensitive—possibly classified—subject. It goes in depth into one of the Intelligence Community’s Holy of Holies, an intelligence liaison relationship. But in the end, it really is not. It does not tell us anything that every American has not already assumed. Maybe we had not had it spelled out in print before, but we all believed that the CIA was helping Ukraine fight the Russians.
We had already seen reporting that the CIA had “boots on the ground” in Ukraine and that the U.S. government was training Ukrainian special forces and Ukrainian pilots, and was running a shadow war with the Ukrainian intelligence services that involved targeted assassinations, so there is nothing new there.
The article does go a little further in detail from past reports although, again, without providing anything that might endanger sources and methods. For example, we have learned that:
Elite Ukrainian commandos trained by the CIA to carry out often deadly clandestine operations. [Source: thescottishsun.com]
It is at this point in the article that the Times reveals what I believe to be the buried lead: “Now these intelligence networks are more important than ever, as Russia is on the offensive and Ukraine is more dependent on sabotage and long-range missile strikes that require spies far behind enemy lines. And they are increasingly at risk: “If Republicans in Congress end military funding to Kyiv, the CIA may have to scale back.” (Emphasis added.)
The authors go on to write that “the question that some Ukrainian intelligence officers are now asking their American counterparts—as Republicans in the House weigh whether to cut off billions of dollars in aid—is whether the C.I.A. will abandon them. ‘It happened in Afghanistan before and now it’s going to happen in Ukraine,’ a senior Ukrainian officer said.”
These comments make clear that the CIA leaked the story to the Times as part of a political scheme to try to sustain military aid to Ukraine and boost congressional funding for the CIA.
The article seeks to convey the impression that the CIA is needed now more than ever to prevent Ukraine from becoming another Afghanistan—or Vietnam, where the Ford administration was also accused of abandoning a U.S. ally, and allowing, in that case, the communists to take over.
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John Kiriakou was a CIA analyst and case officer from 1990 to 2004. In December 2007, John was the first U.S. government official to confirm that waterboarding was used to interrogate al-Qaeda prisoners, a practice he described as torture. Kiriakou was a former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a former counter-terrorism consultant. John can be reached at: [email protected].
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