If, as President Putin claimed on Sunday, the CIA provided Russia with intelligence about an imminent Islamic State attack on St. Petersburg, the Trump administration has nothing to be embarrassed about. Rather, they should be proud of the CIA’s great work.
This intelligence apparently allowed Russia’s domestic spy agency, the FSB, to arrest seven suspected members of an ISIS terrorist cell. The terrorists were apparently planning to use explosives and firearms to attack civilians at various tourist sites in St. Petersburg, Putin’s home city.
Trump was right to provide any intelligence that helped save innocent lives.
Don’t get me wrong, I recognize that Russia is a determined foreign adversary of the United States. And in the dark world of covert intelligence and its polonium-irradiated victims, Russian intelligence services retain a mission focused on hurting American interests. This is the case in Europe, the Middle East, and America, but it’s most obvious in Moscow, where the FSB regularly harasses and sometimes even attacks suspected CIA officers.
And while the U.S. sometimes responds in kind, the reality is that we too often accept Russian intelligence aggression by turning the other cheek. This matters in that the absence of aggressive American intelligence activity informs Russian policy as much as its practice. Putin only understands power through the practice of its harder elements: The U.S. must never be reluctant to meet risk with risk and ferocity with ferocity.
All that said, we have a solemn moral concern in protecting innocent life from terrorist murder. And to be fair to the Russians, they share this agenda. In 2011, for example, Russia shared intelligence indicating Islamic extremist concerns over the Tsarnaev brothers. In April 2013, those brothers set off explosives at the Boston marathon.
The realist nature of the intelligence world is that sometimes national interests intersect.
Still, that the U.S. and not Russia detected this ISIS cell on Russian soil is indicative of a deeper American success, because it proves that the U.S. intelligence community continues to retain capabilities that no other nation possesses. More to the point, how did the U.S. detect the ISIS cell?
I have a good idea, but in the interests of keeping other ISIS cells vulnerable, I’m going to simply say that many thousands of foreigners have also been saved by the skill of American intelligence.
Again, it’s true that the FSB and U.S. intelligence services are ardent adversaries. But we should save innocent lives wherever possible.
