We are winning the two-front information war.

Let’s get this out of the way upfront:  The information in this story was not leaked to me from within the intelligence community, nor did I speak to a source or sources with inside access to the CIA, NSA, nor did anyone close to someone working for any of the nation’s intelligence agencies talk to me.

There.  See how easy that was?  All I had to do was give you a list of precut denials, and I had you!  I could be lying through my teeth, but at first blush, you believed me, didn’t you?  

This kind of double and triple blind dealing in the release of top-secret information, or a version of it, has been happening all week on the front page of the New York Times and in reports on NBC News.  First, the Times reported on Thursday that the U.S. has provided Ukraine with intelligence that has “helped to target and kill many of the Russian generals who have died in action in the Ukraine war, according to senior American officials.”

The next day, the Times reported that the U.S. “provided intelligence that helped Ukrainian forces locate and strike the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet last month.”  And then in the third paragraph comes this: “The administration has sought to keep much of the battlefield and maritime intelligence it is sharing with the Ukrainians secret out of fear it will be seen as an escalation and provoke President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia into a wider war.”

See what I mean about the double game they’re playing? One story is printed that says senior American officials leaked the closely guarded secret that we’re helping Ukraine target Russian generals, and the next day they turn around and say we’ve been keeping knowledge about the sharing of  “battlefield and maritime intelligence” secret. You read this stuff, and you want to say, which is it, goddamnit?

The answer is, it’s both.  They’re leaking like sieves to the point it sounds like bragging and then claiming they’ve been trying to keep all this stuff secret because they’re so afraid of the big bad wolf over there in Moscow – all while waving a great big red flag at him with big shit-eating grins on their faces, like, look what we did, Vlad, and what are you going to do about it?

It's the way the intelligence game is played – doing it (whispering secret stuff to the Ukrainians), then denying it, then admitting it but claiming the secret of what they did is out only because it was leaked by some blabbermouth unnamed “senior official.”  The world of intelligence is the world of keeping them guessing, keeping the enemy always on his back foot, and most of all, it’s the world of paranoia creation, making Putin wonder, how did they know where my generals were?  Do we have traitors in the ranks telling the Americans where they are?  Where are these leaks coming from – not the leaks within the CIA or NSA talking to the New York Times, but the leaks within his own military sharing with the enemy the location of top secret stuff like generals and flagships?

Sometimes the best way to keep secrets is by letting them out.  The way you get them to constantly be looking over their shoulders is to confirm the Russians’ suspicions.  Of course the Russians know the location of their generals had become known to the Ukrainians or they wouldn’t have been able take hem out.  Of course the Americans had told the Ukrainians where the warship Moskva was, because Ukraine doesn’t have satellite surveillance over every square inch of the earth…the U.S. does.

The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies are playing Putin from about three directions at once.  They know that Putin does not have the comparative luxury of testing leaks to a free press like we do, because he doesn’t have a free press that intelligence agencies could leak to.  His own authoritarian system keeps Putin constantly in the dark because everyone is too afraid to say anything that might piss him off even if it means generals are out there on the front lines getting shot like they’re targets in a carnival sideshow. 

Think of it this way:  if Putin had a free press, there would be a place where somebody down there in the ranks could have leaked the information that Russian generals in Ukraine were talking “in the clear” on cellphones.  If that information had reached the Kremlin, Putin could have done something about it, like outlawing cellphones in his army, and the lives of some of his generals would have been saved, and maybe with those important tacticians still alive, his campaign against Kyiv would not have collapsed the way it did.

That is the dangerous pit of an authoritarian system:  real information has no place to go.  Only approved information like propaganda and fake news and lies has an outlet.  It’s the Russian officials themselves who are in need of real information about the way the war is going, and it doesn’t come because there is no way to get it to them.  Putin with his stranglehold on the Russian government at every level has established a system that denies to himself truths he needs to hear.  The only thing he’s really good at is spreading bullshit propaganda to the waiting eyes and ears of his Russian public, telling them he didn’t invade Ukraine, it was just a “special operation” to protect Russian speaking people there, and when the war started to go bad, lying to them by denying his state-owned media the right to report accurately about the war.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., the Pentagon can feed the press accurate information about the war and how it’s going, and they’re free to admit they’re helping the Ukrainians and then deny everything they admitted.  We’ve got the Russians coming and going, and that’s the very definition of keeping them guessing.  That’s why we’re winning the intelligence war, and we’re not doing a bad job in the second front of the information war, either, which is the propaganda battle.  Putin can control what information the Russian public sees, but he can’t control what the public sees in, say, India or Africa or the rest of the nations in the world that haven’t taken sides because…internet.  You don’t think they’re not seeing the scenes of horror from Bucha, with the bodies lined up in ditches, shot in the backs of the head?  And how well do you figure Putin’s propaganda is playing against those images – that the Ukrainians killed their own people in such horrible ways so they could accuse Russia of war crimes?  Who do you think wins that one – the side showing the horrors live on television and leading prominent figures from the U.N. and other international organizations through Bucha to see it in person?  Or Putin sitting in the Kremlin pointing his finger and saying, they did it themselves! 

One of the great problems with authoritarian systems is that the rot is always there inside, but it’s unseen until things really start to go wrong, like a dozen generals getting killed on the battlefield or the biggest ship in your navy sinking to the bottom of the sea while you have your factotums going around saying it was a fire onboard that sunk it.

That’s why we can supply top secret battlefield information to Ukraine and then claim we didn’t do it and then leak it to the New York Times so they can run it on their front page.  We get to play both ends against the middle while all Putin can do is sit in his dacha and tell lies.  It doesn’t even seem like it’s a fair fight, does it?