February, 2024 - JOSSICA - jossica.com

For more than a decade, the United States has nurtured a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both countries in countering Russia. Now entering the third year of a war, the intelligence partnership between the US and Ukraine is a linchpin of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. But the partnership is no wartime creation, nor is Ukraine the only beneficiary. It took root a decade ago, coming together in fits and starts under three very different US presidents, pushed forward by key individuals who often took daring risks. It has transformed Ukraine, whose intelligence agencies were long seen as thoroughly compromised by Russia, into one of US most important intelligence partners against Russia today. A partnership that nearly foundered from mutual distrust before it steadily expanded turned Ukraine into an intelligence-gathering hub that intercepted more Russian communications than the CIA station in Kyiv could initially handle.

The details of this intelligence partnership have been a closely guarded secret for a decade. Ukraine has deployed 12 secret listening post in the Ukrainian forest along the Russian border as a part of a CIA-supported network of spy bases constructed in the past eight years. Before the war, the Ukrainians proved themselves to the Americans by collecting intercepts that helped prove Russia’s involvement in the 2014 downing of a commercial jetliner, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The Ukrainians also helped the US officials go after the Russian operatives who meddled in the 2016 US presidential election between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Around 2016, the CIA began training an elite Ukrainian commando force—known as Unit 2245—which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that CIA technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems. One officer in the unit was Kyrylo Budanov, now the general leading Ukraine’s military intelligence. 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. The relationship is so ingrained that CIA officers remained at a remote location in western Ukraine when the Biden administration evacuated US personnel in the weeks before Russia invaded in February 2022. During the invasion, the officers relayed critical intelligence, including where Russia was planning strikes and which weapons systems they would use. The CIA and other US intelligence agencies provide intelligence for targeted missile strikes, track Russian troop movements and help support spy networks. The relationships only got stronger and stronger because both sides saw value in it, and the US Embassy in Kyiv—the CIA station in Ukraine—became the best source of information, signals and everything else, on Russia.

From the outset, a shared adversary—Russian President Putin—brought the CIA and its Ukrainian partners together. Putin has long blamed Western intelligence agencies for manipulating Kyiv and sowing anti-Russia sentiment in Ukraine. Toward the end of 2021, Putin was weighing whether to launch his full-scale invasion when he met with the head of one of Russia’s main spy services, who told him that the CIA, together with Britain’s MI6, were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Moscow. But Putin and his advisers misread a critical dynamic. The CIA didn’t push its way into Ukraine. US officials were often reluctant to fully engage, fearing that Ukrainian officials could not be trusted, and worrying about provoking the Kremlin. The CIA had been burned before in Ukraine. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine gained independence and then veered between competing political forces: those that wanted to remain close to Moscow and those that wanted to align with the West. During his first stint as head of the Security Service of Ukraine, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, started a partnership with the CIA, which dissolved when the country swung back toward Russia. Yet a tight circle of Ukrainian intelligence officials assiduously courted the CIA and gradually made themselves vital to the Americans.

The CIA’s partnership in Ukraine can be traced back to two phone calls on the night of February 24, 2014, as Ukrainians had just overrun the country’s pro-Kremlin government and the president Yanukovych, and his spy chiefs had fled to Russia followed by a fragile pro-Western government quickly took power. The secondly appointed spy chief, Nalyvaichenko, arrived at the empty headquarters of the domestic intelligence agency (SBU) and found a pile of smouldering documents in the courtyard. Inside, many of the computers had been wiped or were infected with Russian malware. No leadership. Nobody was there. He went to an office and called the CIA station chief and the local head of MI6. It was near midnight, but he summoned them to the building, asked for help in rebuilding the agency from the ground up, and proposed a three-way partnership. The situation quickly became more dangerous after Putin seized Crimea. His agents fomented separatist rebellions that would become a war in the country’s east. Ukraine was on war footing, and Nalyvaichenko appealed to the CIA for overhead imagery and other intelligence to help defend its territory. With violence escalating, an unmarked US government plane touched down at an airport in Kyiv carrying John O. Brennan, then the director of the CIA. The Russians quickly learned about Brennan’s supposedly secret visit. The Kremlin’s propaganda outlets published a photoshopped image of the CIA director wearing a clown wig and makeup. Brennan told Nalyvaichenko that the CIA was interested in developing a relationship but only at a pace the agency was comfortable with. To the CIA, the unknown question was how long Nalyvaichenko and the pro-Western government would be around. Now Mr. Brennan explained that to unlock CIA assistance the Ukrainians had to prove that they could provide intelligence of value to the Americans. They also needed to purge Russian spies which the domestic spy agency (SBU) was riddled with. Brennan returned to Washington, where advisers to President Obama were deeply concerned about provoking Moscow. The White House crafted secret rules that infuriated the Ukrainians and that some inside the CIA thought of as handcuffs. The rules barred intelligence agencies from providing any support to Ukraine that could be “reasonably expected” to have lethal consequences. The result was a delicate balancing act. The CIA was supposed to strengthen Ukraine’s intelligence agencies without provoking the Russians. The red lines were never precisely clear, which created a persistent tension in the partnership. In Kyiv, Nalyvaichenko picked a longtime aide, General Kondratiuk, to serve as head of counterintelligence, and they created a new paramilitary unit that was deployed behind enemy lines to conduct operations and gather intelligence that the CIA or MI6 would not provide to them. Known as the Fifth Directorate, this unit would be filled with officers born after Ukraine gained independence and who had no connection with Russia or didn’t even know what the Soviet Union was. That summer, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, blew up in midair and crashed in eastern Ukraine, killing nearly 300 passengers and crew. The Fifth Directorate produced telephone intercepts and other intelligence within hours of the crash that quickly placed responsibility on Russian-backed separatists. The CIA was impressed, and made its first meaningful commitment by providing secure communications gear and specialized training to members of the Fifth Directorate and two other elite units.

In the summer of 2015, Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, shook up the domestic service and installed an ally to replace Nalyvaichenko, the C.I.A.’s trusted partner. But the change created an opportunity elsewhere. In the reshuffle, General Kondratiuk was appointed as the head of the Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, known as the GUR, where years earlier he had started his career. It would be an early example of how personal ties, more than policy shifts, would deepen the CIA’s involvement in Ukraine. Unlike the domestic agency, the GUR had the authority to collect intelligence outside the country, including in Russia. But the Americans had seen little value in cultivating the agency because it wasn’t producing any intelligence of value on the Russians — and because it was seen as a bastion of Russian sympathizers. Trying to build trust, General Kondratiuk arranged a meeting with his American counterpart at the Defense Intelligence Agency and handed over a stack of secret Russian documents. But senior DIA officials were suspicious and discouraged building closer ties. The general needed to find a more willing partner. Months earlier, while still with the domestic agency, General Kondratiuk visited the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. In those meetings, he met a CIA officer with a jolly demeanour and a bushy beard who had been tapped to become the next station chief in Kyiv. After a long day of meetings, the CIA took General Kondratiuk to a Washington Capitals hockey match, where he and the incoming station chief sat in a luxury box and loudly booed Alex Ovechkin, the team’s star player from Russia. The station chief had not yet arrived when General Kondratiuk arrived at a meeting with the CIA’s deputy station chief and without warning handed over a stack of top-secret files to create the conditions of trust. That initial tranche contained secrets about the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet, including detailed information about the latest Russian nuclear submarine designs. He promised that there’s more where this came from, and the documents were sent off to analysts in Langley. The analysts concluded the documents were authentic, and after the station chief arrived in Kyiv, the CIA became General Kondratiuk’s primary partner. Before long, teams of CIA officers were regularly leaving his office with backpacks full of documents. General Kondratiuk knew he needed the CIA to strengthen his own agency. The CIA thought the general might be able to help Langley, too. It struggled to recruit spies inside Russia because its case officers were under heavy surveillance. For a Russian, allowing oneself to be recruited by an American is to commit the absolute, ultimate in treachery and treason. But for a Russian to be recruited by a Ukrainian, it’s just friends talking over a beer. The new station chief began regularly visiting General Kondratiuk, whose office was decorated with an aquarium where yellow and blue fish — the national colors of Ukraine — swam circles around a model of a sunken Russian submarine. The two men became close, which drove the relationship between the two agencies, and the Ukrainians gave the new station chief an affectionate nickname: Santa Claus. In January 2016, General Kondratiuk flew to Washington for meetings at Scattergood, an estate on the CIA campus in Virginia where the agency often fetes visiting dignitaries. The agency agreed to help the GUR to modernize, and to improve its ability to intercept Russian military communications. In exchange, General Kondratiuk agreed to share all of the raw intelligence with the Americans. Now the partnership was real.

The CIA began sending equipment in 2016, after the pivotal meeting at Scattergood, providing encrypted radios and devices for intercepting secret enemy communications. The program was called Operation Goldfish. The Operation Goldfish officers were soon deployed to 12 newly-built, forward operating bases constructed along the Russian border. With money and equipment provided by the CIA to help gather intelligence, crews under a top intelligence commander General Dvoretskiy’s command were using bases, equipped with communications equipment and large computer servers which were financed by the CIA, to hack into the Russian military’s secure communications networks, to eavesdrop on conversations between Russian commanders as well as hack into spy satellites from China and Belarus. They break into satellites and decode secret conversations. Ukraine is tracking Russian activity around the world including the overhead routes of Russian spy satellites traveling over Ukraine and over strategic military installations — including a nuclear weapons facility — in the United States. Beyond the base, the CIA also 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. From each base the Ukrainian officers ran networks of agents who gathered intelligence inside Russia. CIA officers identified some of the most skilled Ukrainian graduates of the Operation Goldfish program, working with them to approach potential Russian sources. These graduates then trained sleeper agents on Ukrainian territory meant to launch guerrilla operations in case of occupation. It can often take years for the CIA to develop enough trust in a foreign agency to begin conducting joint operations. With the Ukrainians it had taken less than six months.

The new partnership started producing so much raw intelligence about Russia that it had to be shipped to Langley for processing. But the CIA did have red lines. First, General Kondratiuk was annoyed when the Americans refused to provide satellite images from inside Russia. Soon after, he requested CIA assistance in planning a clandestine mission to send GUR commandos into Russia to plant explosive devices at train depots used by the Russian military. If the Russian military sought to take more Ukrainian territory, Ukrainians could detonate the explosives to slow the Russian advance. When the station chief briefed his superiors, they “lost their minds.” It wouldn’t help the Ukrainians conduct offensive lethal operations, making a distinction between intelligence collection operations and things that go boom. The CIA director, Brennan called General Kondratiuk to make certain that mission was cancelled and that Ukraine abided by the red lines forbidding lethal operations. General Kondratiuk canceled the mission, but he also took a different lesson. As the partnership deepened after 2016, the Ukrainians became impatient with what they considered Washington’s undue caution, and began staging assassinations and other lethal operations, which violated the terms the White House thought the Ukrainians had agreed to. Late in 2016, Ukrainian spies discovered that Russian forces were deploying attack helicopters at an airfield on the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula, possibly to stage a surprise attack. General Kondratiuk decided to send a team into Crimea to plant explosives at the airfield so they could be detonated if Russia moved to attack. This time, he didn’t ask the CIA for permission. He turned to Unit 2245, the commando force that received specialized military training from the CIA’s elite paramilitary group, known as the Ground Department. The intent of the training was to teach defensive techniques, but CIA officers understood that without their knowledge the Ukrainians could use the same techniques in offensive lethal operations. At the time, the future head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, General Kyrylo Budanov, was a rising star in Unit 2245. He was known for daring operations behind enemy lines and had deep ties to the CIA. The agency had trained him and also taken the extraordinary step of sending him for rehabilitation to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland after he was shot in the right arm during fighting in the Donbas. Disguised in Russian uniforms, then-Lt. Col. Budanov led commandos across a narrow gulf in inflatable speedboats, landing at night in Crimea. But an elite Russian commando unit was waiting for them. The Ukrainians fought back, killing several Russian fighters, including the son of a general, before retreating to the shoreline, plunging into the sea and swimming for hours to Ukrainian-controlled territory. It was a disaster. In a public address, President Putin accused the Ukrainians of plotting a terrorist attack and promised to avenge the deaths of the Russian fighters.

In Washington, the Obama White House was livid. Joseph R. Biden Jr., then the vice president, called Ukraine’s president to angrily complain. Infuriated, officials in Washington threatened to cut off support and to shut the CIA program down, but Brennan persuaded them that doing so would be self-defeating, given the relationship was starting to produce intelligence on the Russians as the CIA was investigating Russian election meddling. Brennan got on the phone with General Kondratiuk to again emphasize the red lines. The blowback from Washington cost General Kondratiuk his job. One day after General Kondratiuk was removed, a mysterious explosion in the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk ripped through an elevator carrying a senior Russian separatist commander named Arsen Pavlov, known by his nom de guerre, Motorola. The CIA soon learned that the assassins were members of the Fifth Directorate, the spy group that received CIA training. Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency had even handed out commemorative patches to those involved, each one stitched with the word “Lift,” the British term for an elevator. Again, some of US President’s advisers were furious, but they were lame ducks — the presidential election pitting Donald J. Trump against Hillary Rodham Clinton was three weeks away — and the assassinations continued. A team of Ukrainian agents set up an unmanned, shoulder-fired rocket launcher in a building in the occupied territories. It was directly across from the office of a rebel commander named Mikhail Tolstykh, better known as Givi. Using a remote trigger, they fired the launcher as soon as Givi entered his office, killing him. A shadow war was now in overdrive. The Russians used a car bomb to assassinate the head of Unit 2245, the elite Ukrainian commando force, Col. Maksim Shapoval, on his way to meeting with CIA officers in Kyiv.

The election of Trump in November 2016 put the Ukrainians and their CIA partners on edge. Trump praised Putin and dismissed Russia’s role in election interference. He was suspicious of Ukraine and later tried to pressure its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate his Democratic rival, Biden, resulting in Trump’s first impeachment. But whatever Trump said and did, his administration often went in the other direction. This is because Trump had put Russia hawks in key positions, including Mike Pompeo as CIA director and John Bolton as national security adviser. They visited Kyiv to underline their full support for the secret partnership, which expanded to include more specialized training programs and the building of additional secret bases. The base in the forest grew to include a new command center and barracks and swelled from 80 to 800 Ukrainian intelligence officers. Preventing Russia from interfering in future US elections was a top CIA priority during this period, and Ukrainian and American intelligence officers joined forces to probe the computer systems of Russia’s intelligence agencies to identify operatives trying to manipulate voters. In one joint operation, a GUR team duped an officer from Russia’s military intelligence service into providing information that allowed the CIA to connect Russia’s government to the so-called Fancy Bear hacking group, which had been linked to election interference efforts in a number of countries. While the cooperation strengthened and expanded to additional spheres and became more large-scale, President of Ukraine Zelensky tapped General Budanov to lead the GUR in 2020. The relationship was so successful that the CIA wanted to replicate it with other European intelligence services that shared a focus in countering Russia. The head of Russia House, the CIA department overseeing operations against Russia, organized a secret meeting at The Hague. There, representatives from the CIA, Britain’s MI6, the GUR, the Dutch service (a critical intelligence ally) and other agencies agreed to start pooling together more of their intelligence on Russia. The result was a secret coalition against Russia — and the Ukrainians were vital members of it.

In March 2021, the Russian military started massing troops along the border with Ukraine. That November, and in the weeks that followed, the CIA and MI6 delivered a unified message to their Ukrainian partners: Russia was preparing for a full-scale invasion to decapitate the government and install a puppet in Kyiv who would do the Kremlin’s bidding. US and British intelligence agencies had intercepts that Ukrainian intelligence agencies did not have access to. The new intelligence listed the names of Ukrainian officials whom the Russians were planning to kill or capture, as well as the Ukrainians the Kremlin hoped to install in power. President Zelensky and some of his top advisers appeared unconvinced, even after the CIA director, Burns, rushed to Kyiv in January 2022 to brief them. As the Russian invasion neared, CIA and MI6 officers made final visits in Kyiv with their Ukrainian peers. One of the MI6 officers teared up in front of the Ukrainians, out of concern that the Russians would kill them. At Burns’s urging, a small group of CIA officers were exempted from the broader US evacuation and were relocated to a hotel complex in western Ukraine. They didn’t want to desert their partners. After Putin launched the invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the CIA officers at the hotel were the only US government presence on the ground. Every day at the hotel, they met with their Ukrainian contacts to pass information. The old handcuffs were off, and the Biden White House authorized spy agencies to provide intelligence support for lethal operations against Russian forces on Ukrainian soil. Often, the CIA briefings contained shockingly specific details. Within weeks after the Russian assault on Kyiv had stalled, the CIA had returned to Kyiv, and the agency sent in scores of new officers to help the Ukrainians. The Russian missiles that hit the bases had seemingly shut it down, but just weeks later the Ukrainians returned and began to rebuild, but underground. To avoid detection, they only worked at night and when Russian spy satellites were not overhead. Workers also parked their cars a distance away from the construction site. German antiaircraft systems now defend underground bunkers against Russian attacks. An air-filtration system guards against chemical weapons and a dedicated power system is available, if the power grid goes down. Some of the CIA officers were deployed to Ukrainian bases. The CIA and the GUR have built two other secret bases to intercept Russian communications, and combined with the 12 forward operating bases, which are still operational, the GUR now collects and produces more intelligence than at any time in the war — much of which it shares with the CIA. CIA officers reviewed lists of potential Russian targets that the Ukrainians were preparing to strike, comparing the information that the Ukrainians had with US intelligence to ensure that it was accurate. Before the invasion, the CIA and MI6 had trained their Ukrainian counterparts on recruiting sources and building clandestine and partisan networks. In Kherson region, which was occupied by Russia in the first weeks of the war, those partisan networks sprang into action, assassinating local collaborators and helping Ukrainian forces target Russian positions. In July 2022, Ukrainian spies saw Russian convoys preparing to cross a strategic bridge across the Dnipro River and notified MI6. British and American intelligence officers then quickly verified the Ukrainian intelligence, using real-time satellite imagery. MI6 relayed the confirmation, and the Ukrainian military opened fire with rockets, destroying the convoys.

Now 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 these intelligence networks are increasingly at risk: If Republicans in Congress end military funding to Kyiv, the CIA may have to scale back. The question that some Ukrainian intelligence officers are now asking their American counterparts is whether the CIA will abandon them as it happened in Afghanistan before. (By Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz | The New York Times, 2024)

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The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin

www.nytimes.com

For more than a decade, the United States has nurtured a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both countries in countering Russia.