A big question for the U.S. intelligence community.
Has China learned lessons from Russia’s debacle in Ukraine? Has China learned from Russia’s experience in order to improve its own intelligence game in anticipation of a future military move on Taiwan?
Certainly, the war in Ukraine has been an abject failure for Russian intelligence. The foreign policy community once considered the CIA’s call in 2002 that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction as one of the most significant intelligence failures in modern history. Russia’s intelligence community took this failure and surpassed it in leaps and bounds. Chock full of hubris, corruption, and incompetence, the domestic FSB service, in particular, committed the cardinal sin in the intelligence world: reinforcing what Russian President Vladimir Putin always wanted, which was to invade Ukraine on a cost-free basis. One wonders how the FSB, GRU military intelligence and SVR foreign intelligence chiefs have kept their jobs.
China has more to learn.
After all, even after the invasion began and Ukraine showed great resilience, Russian intelligence has continued to perform poorly. Western intelligence services have gone on the offensive, expelling over 400 Russian officials serving in their countries. This campaign clearly damaged the SVR and GRU overseas presence, severely degrading their ability to recruit and handle agents and conduct active measures campaigns in the West. No, Russian intelligence is not totally defeated. But, their reputation is in tatters; they must no longer be considered a first-rate intelligence service. There was always a perception that Russian intelligence was not only competent, but some thought even “10 feet tall.” No longer.
So, as China eyes Taiwan, Beijing must consider three fundamental missteps on the part of its Russian intelligence friends.
1) Operational Preparation of the Environment.
The FSB leadership thought they had Ukraine wired for a quick and decisive move on Kyiv. Yet Russian intelligence was wrong on nearly every facet of its operational preparation of the environment. Russian agents in Ukraine did not perform — if they even existed at all. The money allocated to these agents seems to have disappeared, perhaps stolen by FSB members themselves. So also were Moscow’s assumptions of Ukrainian compliance wildly off. One would think that China takes notice of this Russian intelligence debacle. Is Beijing ensuring its agents in Taiwan are fully vetted and reliable? Have they rooted out corruption within the intelligence services? Operational preparation of the environment is key to any successful military operation.
2) Anticipated Foreign Reaction.
After decades of appeasement by the West, Putin and his intelligence community fell into a trap of conventional thinking. They looked at Western reactions to the invasion of Crimea and other outrages and noted little pushback. Why would Putin think 2022 would be any different than 2014? Looking at China and Taiwan, one wonders if our current policy of strategic ambiguity is enough to deter Beijing. Are we forceful enough in our messaging to Beijing that the U.S. would come to Taiwan’s aid if attacked? China certainly watches for all signs regarding the degree of U.S. resolve.
3) Speaking Truth to Power
What if things go wrong? There is no history of free speech among Putin’s national security team. Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin appears to be the only Russian national security figure willing to tell Putin that the war in Ukraine is a mess. Previously, a note of dissent could cause someone to “fall out of their apartment window.” Strategists in Beijing must ponder whether they have a system in place where Chinese intelligence has the ability and courage to speak truth to power. I imagine that the jury is out on this, as China is an autocratic system.
Top line: we must be cognizant that China is almost certainly conducting a dynamic after-action review of Russian intelligence failures in Ukraine. Beijing may not make similar mistakes regarding an invasion of Taiwan. The U.S. must get our assessments right on Chinese intelligence capabilities and the degree to which Beijing learned from Russia’s debacle.
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Marc Polymeropoulos is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. A former CIA senior operations officer, he retired in 2019 after a 26-year career serving in the Near East and South Asia. His book Clarity in Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the CIA was published in June 2021 by HarperCollins.
