Sergei Beseda has been dismissed from his post.
No, sorry, he has ‘resigned’.
Sergei was head of the 5th Service of Russia’s Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSB). He was one of the ones who gave an enthusiastic “thumbs up” to the boss’s brilliant idea to invade Ukraine.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, everything. List follows. The FSB security service had allegedly handed Putin intelligence that went along with his own desired outcome: that Ukraine was weak, riddled with neo-Nazi groups, and would give up easily if attacked.
Ironically, it is on the one-year anniversary of the day when Putin’s friend Yevgeny Prigozhin let his boss know he was a ‘former friend’ by leading his Wagner Group in a drive on Moscow to unseat Putin. Yes, that was one of the things that could go wrong. Coup against incompetence.
The 5th Service is in charge of intelligence gathering in former Soviet countries, including Ukraine. It provided Putin with the insightful intelligence about political developments in Ukraine on the eve of his full-scale invasion. Based on its appraisal, the Russians were confident that their army would not meet serious resistance in Ukraine.
The Washington Post notes: “So certain were FSB operatives that they would soon control the levers of power in Kyiv, according to Ukrainian and Western security officials, that they spent the waning days before the war arranging safe houses or accommodations in informants’ apartments and other locations for the planned influx of personnel.”
The FSB had spent decades spying on Ukraine, attempting to co-opt its institutions, paying off officials and working to impede any perceived drift toward the West. And yet, it analysts either did not fathom how forcefully Ukraine would respond, nor would they have been able to convey such sobering news assessments to a gleeful Putin.
His misconceptions about Ukraine were rooted in Moscow’s colonial past. Ukrainians were looked down on dismissively. There has not been expertise on Ukraine in Russia since the time of Catherine The Great. Stalin overlooked four million Ukrainian deaths in the famine he caused.
The ill-conceived invasion bears the fingerprints of Putin himself. “It’s clear this was a military operation designed by spooks, not generals,” said Mark Galeotti, an honorary professor at University College London. “It makes no sense in purely military terms.”
This in in fact what led me astray originally, when I was in denial that Putin would invade. Based on what I knew about the First and Second World Wars, I knew that Russia would need an army of four million soldiers to conquer Ukraine. It had 250,000…less than the Ukrainian army!
What kind of wing-nut would invade a tough country with an army that the Ukrainian police could arrest on sight?
But of course, the bad call had to be someone else’s fault…not Putin.
Beseda was replaced by Alexey Komkov and was appointed as an aide to Alexander Bortnikov, head of the FSB. Komkov had previously worked as deputy head of the counterintelligence service.
Beseda's formal reason for resigning was that he had turned 70. The director of the FSB, by contrast, Sergei Korolev, is 73. Korolev is known for his ties to influential figures in the Russian underworld, including crime boss Aslan Gagiev.
Beseda has previously been under House Arrest for giving the misleading information about Ukrainian strength, but got clearance in time to be transferred out. His deputy head, Anatoly Bolyukh, had also reportedly been arrested.
His dismissal will no doubt be a blow to the flow of corruption in Russia…
Ukraine's military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov had seen this coming, stating earlier that Beseda was "very problematic" for Ukraine.
There is very little the new man can do to fix what his predecessor screwed up. It has to be one of the worst intelligence mistakes of all time. But in a dictatorship, where your job relies on parroting the genius ideas of your boss, your role in Intelligence merely consists of reinforcing the desire that your boss has already expressed.
"When the invasion started, they really thought it would be quick and easy," said an officer from a Russian special forces unit.
"You've seen those images of burned-out trucks. They thought they'd be able to disperse any resistance with batons."
As noted, not only did the FSB come up totally wrong on the strength of Ukrainian resistance, but it kept resolutely rejecting incoming information – even information from its own commanders.
Prigozhin, for example, gave plenty of warning that he was angry and about to mutiny before he marched on Moscow. He had issued a scathing attack on the invasion strategy, claiming that Russia could face a revolution similar to 1917 and lose the war in Ukraine unless changes are made.
The Wagner chief said Moscow’s invasion instead triggered Ukraine to amass “one of the world’s strongest armies” with Western support.
“We made Ukraine a nation, known to everyone around the globe,” Prigozhin said. “They are like Greeks at their peak, or Romans.”
He stated before his revolt that Ukraine had more tanks and more troops than it did at the start of the war. “We militarised it up to the brim…I think Ukrainians today are one of the world’s strongest armies. They have high levels of organisation, training, and military intelligence.”
He wanted the Russian leadership – the generals and intelligence staff, without naming Putin – to be hanged in Red Square.
He criticized elites in Russia for living comfortably while troops are dying on the front lines.
He forecast that Ukraine “will restore the borders to [the way they were in] 2014,” meaning before Moscow annexed the region of Crimea. “And this can easily happen. They will attack Crimea, will try to blow up the Crimean bridge, cut off the supply routes.”
He saw all of this, and the FSB did not.
Of course, he was an amateur and not a professional soldier, so he saw things differently.
That is why the FSB also did not foresee Prigozhin attacking Moscow.
The blindness continued, long into the Russian night.
On March 22nd of this year, the FSB missed another key event: the terrorist attack on the Moscow concert Hall that left 145 Russians dead and more than 500 injured.
Some 6,200 tickets had been sold for the concert, but security outside the entrance quickly melted away. One of four guards said his colleagues hid behind an advertising board. The four terrorists had rifles, pistol and bombs. How they hid those preparations in a locked-down dictatorship like Russian is something Putin should be asking.
But Putin himself is offering no leadership to the FSB. The U.S. had been warning Moscow for months about the coming attack - a warning they did not have to give.
Perhaps the FSB needs to be asking why the US knew of their plans to invade Ukraine long before Putin announced that war had started. President Biden warned Ukraine and told Russia that it knew about the coming invasion. Both Ukraine and Russia ignored US intelligence.
On March 7th the US issued warnings to its own citizens about reports that "extremists" had "imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow" and specifically mentioned concerts. It advised Americans in the city to avoid large gatherings. The US also said it had communicated with the Russian government directly. "The US government also shared this information with Russian authorities in accordance with its long-standing 'duty to warn' policy," a US official said in a statement after the attack.
A U.S. executive order dating back to 2015 mandates that U.S. intelligence agencies share warnings about possible terror attacks with other nations, even if those nations are adversaries, like Russia or Iran.
For Russia, the US had even singled out Islamic State-Khorasan or IS-K, an offshoot which seeks to establish a Muslim caliphate across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Iran.
If the US could do that from a distance, where was Russia’s own security service?
At a March 19 meeting with security officials, Putin confirmed that Russia had received the intelligence tip -- but in a meeting with his FSD he dismissed it as “outright propaganda” and “blackmail” intended to “intimidate and destabilize our society.”
This is a far cry from seven years earlier when Russia’s main intelligence agency announced it had foiled an Islamic State plot…with information from the US!
Putin’s paranoia had deteriorated so badly that the warnings he used to listen to are now ignored. Russian security services see intelligence sharing as an opportunity for strategic and political gain – not as an avenue for shared security.
According to Douglas London, a retired senior CIA operations officer who was involved in the December 2017 information exchange, Russia’s security services are ““very predatorial. They're not interested in collaboration, but use such engagements to develop targeting information and to harass. That's just the nature of their creed, their business.”
Putin does not run a sharing culture.
That has cost him a war in Ukraine, which he and his FSB did not expect, a nearly-successful mutiny, which he did not foresee, and a mass public bombing, which he dismissed actively despite having detailed information.
The problem is not the watchdog, the problem is its handler.
If the watchdog barks and is ignored by the handler, eventually the watchdog starts losing interest in providing alerts as well.
The bigger question that Beseda’s dismissal raises, is “who is going to eliminate the blind leader?”
It is the blind leader who is responsible for the war and for its continuance.
Steven Hall, who retired in 2015 after running Russian operations at the CIA, said that the Russian leader sees intelligence sharing as a “Trojan horse…Russia understands our Western, optimistic, hope-to-share approach, and will use it to what Putin views as his advantage, in a way the United States and the West would find mind-boggling.”
Putin does not understand “sharing”. He was an FSB officer for more than a dozen years before getting the political gig, and he absorbed its culture. Most FSB agents are brought into the service as legacy hires based on their parents or grandparents being agents and are removed from mainstream schools to be educated in-house.
Everything evil that he can think of to do, he assumes that the West is trying to do to him.
He pushed the lie, for example, that the IS warriors who destroyed the cultural centre were sent by the US.
Because heaven knows what kind of worries would get uncorked if it were revealed that Putin is being led by a pack of dogs who he had blinded years ago.
Wishful thinking isn’t good policy. It is in fact proving to be a deadly policy. So far, it has led to:
- The destruction of one-third of Russia’s navy;
- The loss of a million Russian lives (killed and injured)
- The escape from Russia of another million who did not believe in Putin’s war;
- The destruction of Russia as an economic power;
- The erosion of the Russian military to the point of second-place status; and
- The scramble by Putin for a way out of his war.
In that last regard, I think we can view Putin’s very recent efforts as a frantic search for escape. The public mood in Russia has not seen such a dramatic and swift decline in thirty years of regular polls. Protests by family members about having to serve in the military are preventing Putin form calling up another draft. And if Russia continues to push back against a peace plan, the prognosis for Russia’s economy and society is grim.
One of the men who gave Putin the “all clear” for the invasion is now being punished, but the dog handler is whipping the dog instead of caning himself. Sergei Beseda may have been punished, but his crime was in trying to please a killer clown. If I was him, I’d count myself fortunate to have just been pushed aside.
He could have fallen from one of those windows that seem to litter the premises of Putin’s enemies.
Exit the clowns.
Poor devils.
When Russia implodes, which seems a near certainty, it’s going to be messy. Putin can’t seem to avoid stepping on his own genitalia.