Wednesday marks six months since Russia launched its
invasion of Ukraine,
and it’s safe to say it is one of the most disastrous military campaigns in modern history.
Russia
is losing on all fronts. The conflict has reinvigorated the concept of European collective security, including an expanded
NATO
— Moscow’s worst nightmare. It has pushed Russia into a pariah-state status once held only for totalitarian regimes such as North Korea. And it has resulted in staggering Russian military casualties, estimated by some at more than 80,000 Russians killed or wounded in action. It will take decades for the country to recover.
Given the gravity of this geopolitical earthquake, and the staggering political, economic, military, and reputational losses that Russia has suffered, it is appropriate to look at lessons learned from the perspective of the intelligence profession. Intelligence, after all, is every country’s first line of defense. And in this conflict, Russian intelligence has performed miserably, while the success of
Ukrainian
and NATO intelligence services has helped write this David vs. Goliath story.
The once-vaunted Russian intelligence apparatus has performed in an epically poor fashion. We once considered the CIA’s flawed call that Iraq possessed a weapon of mass destruction as one of the great analytic intelligence failures of our time. Russian intelligence has taken this failure and eclipsed it by leaps and bounds.
A recent Washington Post expose noted the catastrophic errors that the Federal Security Service, in particular, has made. Full of hubris, corruption, and incompetence, one could argue that the FSB encouraged Russian President
Vladimir Putin
to do what he’s always wanted: invade Ukraine. This makes their conduct even more egregious, as the fundamental responsibility of an intelligence service is to tell truth to power. FSB Chief Alexander Bortnikov continues to have his job, but only because the Russian security services are the bedrock of regime stability and Putin surely fears removing him. That said, Bortnikov will forever be disgraced — and for good reason.
After the invasion, Russian intelligence suffered significant losses, with more than 400 Russian officials declared persona non grata from NATO countries. During my time at the CIA, I always worried that Europe was Russia’s playground, from election interference in European countries via their active measures campaigns to assassination operations, such as in England and Germany. And for a long time, Russia was winning this covert war. But the Ukraine invasion and the subsequent PNG of Russian intelligence officers caused Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service and the Main Directorate of the General Staff’s overseas presence to take very significant hits, which will degrade their ability to recruit and handle agents in the West.
Overall grade for Russian intelligence: F
As for Ukraine’s intelligence services, much has been written about the potential for Russian penetrations of the Security Service of Ukraine, the civilian service. In fact, President
Volodymyr Zelensky
was somewhat embarrassingly forced to sack the SBU chief earlier this month.
Fortunately, the SBU is not the top dog inside the Ukrainian intelligence community. Instead, the Ukrainian military intelligence service, the HUR, has the lead in the war effort. And reportedly, they have performed in fine fashion. From targeting operations that aid Ukrainian special operations forces to liaison with NATO allowing for the ingest of billions of dollars of critical military equipment, the HUR has proved its mettle under fire. Remember that U.S. and U.K. intelligence and special operations forces have worked with the HUR since 2014 — this long-term relationship no doubt has proven to be of extraordinary value.
Finally, one must laud Ukraine’s growing expertise in information operations. Russian intelligence succeeded in the past in this sphere mainly because they operated without pushback. No longer. Ukraine is on the offensive and now appears one step ahead of the Russians at every turn. After the destruction of Russian aircraft at a military base deep in Crimea, reportedly by Ukrainian special operations forces, the Ukrainians quite brilliantly released on social media a brutally effective trolling video. It showed Russian tourists in Crimea fleeing the beach, complete with a soundtrack from a 1980s Banarama song “Cruel Summer.” How times have changed. Ukraine trolling Russia — not vice versa.
Overall grade for Ukrainian intelligence: A-
In regards to NATO and its efforts in the war: U.S. intelligence reportedly stole the Russian war plans. That’s a hell of a statement to stand on. While details are not publicly available, this surely will go down as one of the most extraordinary collection operations in intelligence history. My old colleagues in the CIA’s operations directorate, if responsible for this boon, should be proud, as should our British colleagues as well, who I imagine had something to do with the collect.
Unfortunately, the analytic side of the house across the NATO intelligence services did not perform as well. Some of our allies, in particular German and French intelligence, did not believe that Russia would invade, despite the evidence. They let down their policymakers, who could have taken a tougher stand pre-invasion. In addition, NATO military analysts almost universally judged the Russian military to be a competent fighting force. “Kyiv will fall in 36 hours” was the conventional wisdom in late February. Instead, the Russian military proved to be a Potemkin village. This analytic failure probably led to the initial hesitation of the West to provide sufficient military assistance to Kyiv. Not the finest moment in analytic tradecraft, and in the case of the U.S. intelligence community, the Director of National Intelligence is apparently already reviewing what went wrong.
Finally, I am confident that a great deal of NATO intelligence support remains in the shadows, where, quite frankly, it belongs. I ran covert action for the majority of my career, so I find it quite probable that much is unseen by design. From potential targeting assistance to perhaps arranging clandestine logistic chains to the likely provision of advanced weapons systems on an unattributable basis, we will learn of the true extent of NATO’s intelligence-related support to Ukraine in the years to come. Safe to say, my old colleagues at the CIA and the Special Operations Forces community in Special Operations Command, Europe must be quite busy.
Overall grade for NATO intelligence: A-
So what is the overall takeaway at the six-month mark? In my view, it is that Russian intelligence is not 10 feet tall. Incompetent, inept, corrupt, lazy — the rot of the kleptocratic state has seeped deep into the supposed vanguard of the Russian nation. Working together, Ukrainian and NATO intelligence has bested the Russians at every turn. And nothing leads me to believe this will change, which bodes well for Ukraine’s fight for survival.
In the words of Sun Tzu, “Military intelligence is the key to war; without it, you cannot win.” As Ukraine is winning, let’s thank those practitioners of the dark arts for what they do.
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.
