How U.S. Intelligence Knew So Much About The Russian Plans

The US has issued two warnings to the Russian government that it ignored:  take a different course of action than the one it was planning to take in Ukraine, and watch out for a terrorist attack.

The first time, the US foresaw with accuracy Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine – even though Putin’s own generals did not.  In the days leading up to the invasion, during a conference with Xi, Putin did not even tell his new best friend the Chinese president that an invasion was coming.

The second time, the US warned Putin about the coming terrorist attack on the Moscow concert hall in March.  Again, Putin angrily dismissed the warning, but the US was so certain that it warned its own citizens in Moscow to avoid large gatherings.  Putin ignored the gravity of that signal as well.

The US, BTW, issues these terrorist warnings to everyone – friend or foe -  as part of its policy of openness in the cause of saving lives.  This is a concept that would be totally alien to Putin’s Russia.  It dates back to a U.S. executive order in 2015 that 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.

But how did American Intelligence know with such accuracy what was going to happen in a country where its agents could not operate?

Politico put out a lengthy article on what Washington did when it became convinced that Putin was about to invade: 

“For nearly a year prior, U.S. and Western officials had signs of what was coming: a suspicious buildup of Russian troops, intelligence about the Kremlin’s plans, statements from President Vladimir Putin himself. Those officials raised increasingly specific public alarms, some of which were based on a novel new strategy of rapidly declassifying and publicizing intelligence in near real-time, and made desperate attempts to avert a war, even as it became more and more clear that Putin was determined to invade.”

As background to the invasion, we have to remember that Russia was on a high: it had just captured Crimea in an almost bloodless coup involving unmarked troops.  The US was in a low position, having just pulled out of Afghanistan in a haphazard scramble.

The CIA began seeing developments that suggested Russia was planning an invasion of Ukraine.  So in November, President Biden sent William Burns to Moscow to speak with Putin.  Burns had been U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008.

Burns said he was troubled by what he heard from Putin. While it did not yet seem that Putin had made an irreversible decision to invade Ukraine, he was defiantly leaning in that direction, apparently convinced that his window was closing for shaping Ukraine's orientation.

Putin by this time was only taking selected advice from his own Intelligence services about Ukraine.  This move was to lead him to make some very bad decisions.  His circle of advisers had narrowed, and in that small circle, it has never been career-enhancing to question the Supreme Leader’s judgment.

The US, by contrast, was pulling in all the Intelligence it could gather.  It was using new technology like the “LAPIS time-series video”,  which is a closely guarded satellite system for imaging objects on the ground.  It  compares land cover dynamics, including short-term trends, to make an analysis of changes made by ground movements.

A multitude of US agencies focused on Russian intentions.  While the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Defence Intelligence Agency are well known to the public, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is not.  It is arguably the most secretive intelligence agency in the government, responsible for a multibillion dollar constellation of spy satellites.  It collects its own data and compares it with “commercial imagery,” a new generation of infrared satellites, signals intelligence and “liaison reporting,” a reference to intelligence from a friendly government.

The NRO announced in 2023 that it plans within the following decade to quadruple the number of satellites it operates and increase the number of signals and images it delivers by a factor of ten.

The NRO has by far the largest budget of any intelligence agency, and "virtually no federal workforce", accomplishing most of its work through "tens of thousands" of defense contractor personnel.   It is funded through the National Reconnaissance Program.

Part of the reason for the US success lies in the surge of open-source intelligence gathering by public-interest groups that has accompanied the near-ubiquity of the Net.  Private soldiers, contractors, and logistics operators communicated over the Internet, often revealing far more than they intended.

Bellingcat is one such group. Its method is to focus on a mystery and then milk every source of information in the public online flow for clues about the solution.  They will find locations from shared photographs taken by Russian soldiers, for example, by comparing background landmarks with the known locations of identical images taken by others. 

This is part of an explosion in citizen journalism and the use of social media to show in real time what people were actually seeing.  Platforms like Twitter and Tik Tok spread the knowledge instantly to a global audience.

It’s like everyone can be a spy agency with their own publishing house.

When satellite photos showed 175,000 Russian troops gathering on the borders of Ukraine, there was a world of amateur observers watching, sharing notes and getting increasingly alarmed. 

So were the professionals.

Formal Washington-based think tanks, like the Institute for the Study of War or the Russia Studies program at CNA, also examine various threads of information to examine Russia’s movements.  They deliberations are aided by images from commercial satellites as well as reports from Russian bloggers and social media posts analyzing weapons found in Ukraine. 

In the Obama administration a cautious approach was taken to sharing defence information, so Europe and other allies were left without persuasive evidence that Putin was planning on doing anything wrong when he first invaded Crimea.  Biden officials learned from that and decided to line up all the support they could get; to do so, they would have to disclose previously-secret information.

Although their warnings produced no hard results among Western allies, the shocking news that they had made the right call  -  Putin DID invade  -  was a persuasive weight for coming intelligence warnings. 

The capper has been the news that the US Intelligence community has “penetrated the Russian military and its commanders so deeply that it can warn Ukraine in advance of attacks and reliably assess the strengths and weaknesses of Russian forces,” says the Washington Post.

The U.S. intelligence community for example knew the Russian Ministry of Defense had transmitted plans to strike Ukrainian troop positions in two locations on a certain date in February and that Russian military planners were preparing strikes on a dozen energy facilities and an equal number of bridges in Ukraine.

They were also aware of internal planning by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. One document describes the GRU planning a propaganda campaign in African countries with the goal of turning public support against leaders who support assistance to Ukraine and discrediting the United States and France, in particular. The Russian campaign, the report states, would try to plant stories in African media, including ones that tried to discredit Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

The Russians, however, seemed more inclined to plant stories about their own intentions – unintentionally.

During the summer before the invasion, Putin published a long article about Ukraine. His rhetoric began to change quite markedly in public.  At that point, the antenna of the Intelligence community went up higher. Something was shifting in his mindset. 

General Mark Milley, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, stated that  “We’re out of Afghanistan by 31 August, and there was a planned Russian exercise called Zapad, and they started marshaling the troops for the exercise in the September time frame. Right about then we realized this is odd; it was much bigger in scale and scope than the previous year’s exercise.”

When you see the amount of stuff that the Russians moved towards Ukraine, added a colleague, “that’s a pretty significant tell.”

General Milley added:  “In September, they came to me with this map, and laid it out on my table; they explained, this was different, sir, this looks different, this is bigger in size and scale and scope, the disposition, composition of the force, etc. We talked for maybe an hour. I gave them a bunch of questions — next day they come back. They drilled down in a lot of detail. I say, “OK, let’s see what the rest of the intel community has to say.””

Bill Burns, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said “We had begun to see across the U.S. intelligence community, including CIA, what were unmistakable signs of a serious Russian buildup along Ukraine’s borders, and picking up intelligence that they’re planning for what seemed to be a major new invasion of Ukraine.”

They gave an incredible four-month warning to US forces.

Overall, the clarity that the Intelligence community had in its assessment gave Biden all the confidence he needed to forecast a Russian invasion. 

Never before had the Intelligence community mobilized like this for a geopolitical crisis.  It reflects the extent to which “cyber” was now a mainstream national security tool.  It’s a very rare thing in international affairs that you get such a clear, unmistakable and advanced warning of a major geopolitical event. 

Biden had his chance to speak directly to Russian leaders.  At the G-20 Summit in Rome, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov attended.  Biden said: “We’re at this inflection point, history is going to judge whether democracies could come together and defend core principles that underpin peace and security.”  He was looking right at Lavrov when he said that, and he said defending freedom is not costless.

Burns made a call to Putin, and laid out the US knowledge of his plans.  Putin just seemed happy that he could enforce his will on Ukraine.  Without controlling Ukraine, he said, Russia could not be a great power.

Putin was wrong on everything he counted on:  Europe was not distracted, the cold winter did not force Europe to stand on the sidelines waiting for Russian gas, and the Americans were willing to move…which they had not done during Crimea. 

Everybody at the beginning was relatively skeptical — with the exception of the Canadians and the U.K., who were seeing the same intelligence that the US was seeing.  They were in an organization called the Five Eyes, the oldest intelligence collaboration network America has, comprising Canada, Australia, Great Britain and New Zealand.

The French and Germans had the same reports that America had but insisted that Putin would not invade.

In their defence, the invasion was a highly illogical and irrational thing for the Russians to do.  He was invading and trying to occupy a country of 44 million people, with whom he was at war for many, many years, who had no love lost for Russia, and who were facing a Russian army smaller than their own.

The real benefit of downgrading intelligence and making it public is that one can affect the decision-making process of a potential adversary. The US beat Putin’s lie to the punch. 

By making Putin claim that he would not invade, and then watching the invasion happen, they deflated the Russian leader’s gravitas and his reputation.  His condemnation by the world community started immediately -  and Putin was never able to recover.

When he invaded, the US was ready with its sanctions and arms for Ukraine.  They had gotten inside his decision-making loop.

And it came just 30 days after the pull-out from Afghanistan.

It was an incredible turn-around for the US.

And it was a total disaster for Putin.

Sadly for Russia, the pattern repeated itself later.  The US Intelligence was not enough to convince them that the CIA’s news was real about Islamic terrorist organizations planning a big attack on a public space near Moscow.

Hundreds died.

Putin blamed everyone but himself.

He was supposed to be a spy by training. 

One more fail, in a life that will be a definition of Failure.

It is horrific that so many have died as the price of such failure.