The Pentagon's leaked battle plans for Ukraine may be an elaborate fake designed to feed misinformation to Russia, says a former CIA agent.
The trove of leaked situation reports on preparations for Ukraine's long-advertised spring counter-offensive has dominated the headlines in the US for the past week.
"I think they're real," former CIA officer John Kiriakou told Sputnik — but cautioned that they might contain subtle attempts at misdirection.
"I think there is an intel shadow play at work here. See, for a disinformation campaign to be believable, it has to be mostly real," Kiriakou said. "And then they slip in something that's fake just to try to change public opinion or to throw off the enemy"
The documents certainly look genuine, with the correct formatting, headers and fonts, he noted, but argued that none of the documents leaked so far are "particularly sensitive" since they do not detail "sources and methods."
"It's already been out there. It's mildly embarrassing for the government, but it doesn't cause a problem in national security," Kiriakou pointed out. "A whistleblower or even a leaker from government would have leaked these to a news outlet or to WikiLeaks," whereas the Pentagon documents were stored on a server for the online game Minecraft and then circulated on four Telegram channels for a month before they were reported by mainstream media.
The former CIA insider highlighted two points that struck him among the information from the leaks.
"Number one was this insinuation that the US has intelligence sources all over Russia," Kiriakou said. "I think that's nonsense. Both the Russians and the Americans have very robust counterintelligence operations, so they're constantly trying to root out moles in their own organizations."
The other was the "silliness" that Israeli foreign intelligence service Mossad was supporting domestic protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's attempts to curb the power of the country's supreme court.
"In Israel, it would be Shin Bet instead of the Mossad. The Mossad is a foreign intelligence collection organization," Kiriakou stressed. "Even if the leadership of Mossad was supportive of the demonstrations in Israel, they wouldn't tell the Americans and certainly they wouldn't tell the American military. They don't liaise with the military."
A new leak indicated that intelligence services in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a close ally of Washington, were now working with their Russian counterparts.
But Kiriakou said it was "completely normal for every country to have an intelligence liaison relationship with every other country" — recalling that he once got into an argument with his KGB counterpart on an overseas assignment over park spaces at their office.
"This is what people do. They play these baby games. The UAE is joined at the hip with the United States to the point where we've given them F-35s. We only give F-35s to our the closest of our allies in the world," he said.
Independent journalist Chris Helali told Sputnik the leaks "paint a very bleak picture" of the conflict.
"They showed that, in fact, we are entering into a phase of, at best, a prolonged stalemate between both sides," he argued, highlighting the assesment that Kiev's forces will see "the collapse of their air defense capabilities come May if they are not resupplied."
"It's fascinating to see why they were leaked," whether the sources is "trying to garner more support or somebody is trying to paint a much bleaker picture of the war," Helali said. "But overall, it's a very bleak picture going forward for this war"
But the US intelligence 'community' is busily "spinning this as disinformation once again," he said, claiming that "it's coming from Russian backed telegram, chat rooms and things like that."
"There's been a lot of back and forth, now, whether these numbers are accurate," Helali pointed out. "A lot of the intelligence and Pentagon officials and government spokespeople are now saying that these documents were edited for that number."
That showed that the conflict was "not only a war on the ground, but a much larger information and ideological war as to the information that's coming out," he argued. "Even just something as basic as statistics and how many soldiers have been killed on both sides has proven to be very political and very charged."
But crucially, the analyst said the West's denial of Moscow's assertion that it is fighting against all of NATO via its "proxy" Ukraine "has been absolutely obliterated by these leaks."
"Not only do we now have information that there are US and NATO personnel on the ground within the borders of Ukraine," but that 12 Ukrainian combat brigades have been assembled for the offensive, "nine of which are trained by U.S. forces and equipped by US forces."
NATO is "escalating the war," which is "not only dangerous, but reveals the full extent of the imperialist propaganda," Helali warned. "The people suffering in the middle are innocent civilians who are caught between two powers moving in Eastern Europe."
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