The double reverse triple salchow intelligence backchannel wangdoodle

The back and forth between the Pentagon and the Kremlin over Vladimir Putin’s knowledge about his war in Ukraine has gotten very confusing, so I thought I would take a shot at figuring out what’s going on.

You will no doubt recall that old chestnut about the business of intelligence being a wilderness of mirrors: what you think you see is a reflection of a reflection of an illusion or even of yourself.  That has remained true, and as long as the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. and now Russia have been adversaries, intelligence has been a battle waged with facts, disinformation, and pure propaganda. Yes, it’s done by both sides.

The most recent issue, if it can be called that, is what does Putin know about the facts on the ground in Ukraine.  The Pentagon came out on Wednesday with an astounding allegation that Putin’s defense chiefs, generals, and so-called inner circle have kept him in the dark about how badly the war has been going for Russian forces in Ukraine.  The White House echoed the Pentagon later that day with a statement by Communications Director Kate Bedingfield: “We believe that Putin is being misinformed by his advisers about how badly the Russian military is performing and how the Russian economy is being crippled by sanctions, because his senior advisers are too afraid to tell him the truth.”  Later, an unnamed White House official told NBC News that “Putin didn’t even know his military was using and losing conscripts in Ukraine.”

The New York Times followed the next day with a Pentagon leak that “Russia is running its military campaign against Ukraine out of Moscow, with no central war commander on the ground to call the shots, according to American officials who have studied the five-week-old war.”  The Times went on to report that “the deaths of at least seven Russian generals” can be attributed to the lack of a coordinated battlefield command, “as high-ranking officers are pushed to the front lines to untangle tactical problems that Western militaries would leave to more junior officers or senior enlisted personnel.” 

When the Pentagon and the White House come out with the same information on the same day in television appearances and emphasize their point with leaks the following day, that’s what is called a full court press.  The administration has been releasing classified intelligence since before the war began and let it be known that this was part of a new “hybrid war” the U.S. is waging against Russia.  

This raises multiple questions:  is the intelligence being gleaned from reliable sources?  In other words, is it accurate, or is it disinformation warfare, a form of U.S. propaganda?  And if so, why the big push all of a sudden to portray Putin as out of touch and his senior military commanders in disarray?  The facts on the ground in Ukraine support the idea that the Russian military isn’t doing a very good job of fighting the war they started, but why has the Pentagon and the White House chosen to point it out at this time? 

This gets to the “wilderness of mirrors” aspect of intelligence, especially when it’s being revealed on purpose by one side.  Under normal circumstances during a war, both sides would try their best to keep secrets from each other.  If we thought the other side was in disarray because knowledge about what was happening on the ground wasn’t reaching top commanders, we would usually simply exploit that fact without making a big thing about it.  The Pentagon and White House are not in the business of making excuses for Kremlin missteps, so there has to be some other strategy at work.

There are at least a couple of possibilities.  One is that the whole thing about Putin being locked in a bubble is completely accurate and is based on real information we have gathered with really, really top secret methods.  If so, what does the White House think it will gain by pointing this out?  It could be an attempt to destabilize him within Russia.  To the extent that U.S. information about Kremlin failures penetrates Russia, they may be seeking to portray Putin as functionally inept as a leader of his war effort.  This couldn’t be good for him if the Russian populace could be made aware of it.

The other possibility is that it’s all a gigantic lie, a propaganda campaign designed to destabilize Putin and the upper reaches of his government by creating disputes where there really are none.  Suppose Putin isn’t in the dark.  Suppose that instead of being out of touch, he is well-informed by his defense leaders about the war in Ukraine. Suppose that rather than being in an information vacuum, Putin gets regular updates about the latest Pentagon briefings by having the transcripts translated for him by his embassy in Washington and sent directly to him.  Suppose he has arranged pirated broadcasts of the major cable networks like CNN and BBC and MSNBC, and he and his top people have been watching the war just like we have. 

The Pentagon may be saying just the opposite, that he has been kept in the dark by his own paranoia about COVID and by top aides too frightened to give him bad news, so that he and his military can be made to look even more incompetent than they are.  Look at it this way:  if you are Putin and you are fully informed about how badly things are going on the ground, why haven’t you done something about it?

This raises the possibility that he and his senior military commanders are well informed and they are doing everything they can do, and still their war against a much weaker and less well-equipped opponent is going very, very badly.  Which makes the point that Russia is truly a pitiful helpless giant at least when it comes to waging conventional warfare.  (Their nuclear capabilities are a separate and much darker issue.)

I contacted my friend Jeff Stein in Washington D.C. who writes Spytalk on Substack and has been a keen observer of the intelligence business for decades.  I asked him what his best guess is about the theory that Putin is being kept in the dark by an inner circle too frightened to give him the bad news about his war.  “It’s psywar messaging. I’m sure embassy DC sends him press summaries, maybe including screenshots of NYT, WaPo, WSJ front pages every midnight,” Jeff quickly replied.

Of course, Jeff and I are both throwing darts in the dark when it comes to this entire subject.  But I don’t think so.  I think the Pentagon and the White House are playing a very clever game with Putin and the Kremlin.  We aren’t combatants on the battlefield in Ukraine, but we are definitely fighting the information war, and I am certain we’re using every arrow in our quiver of intelligence, disinformation, propaganda and everything else at our disposal. 

What I think is going on is captured in the title of this column:  it’s almost impossible to make sense of what we’re doing and why because the CIA, NSA and the Pentagon have decided to engage Putin and his Kremlin cohorts right where they live:  in a propaganda war.  We are throwing a blizzard of falsehoods mixed with very accurate top-secret stuff we have gathered from Putin’s inner circle in the Kremlin to drive a wedge between him and his senior officials.  The whole thing is intended to drive him further up a wall he’s already scratching at with his fingernails as he tries to unwind himself and his military from a nightmare of losses on the battlefield compounded by sanctions that are strangling his economy and driving Russia into a hole he knows it’s going to take him years to dig out of.  

We may not have boots on the ground in Ukraine, but I think we are using our technological and public relations superiority as a weapon of war to great effect.  Look for more double reverse triple salchow leaps of American intelligence in the future.  You can count on it being as close as you can get to a sure thing that it’s driving Putin crazy.