Russia’s Foreign Ministry has dissected Sunday’s NYT story on the CIA’s operations in Ukraine, challenging the newspaper’s assertion that Western intel services’ active involvement in the country began only after the February 2014 Euromaidan coup.
“The CIA has helped Kiev to train its spies, and not just spies, but outright militants, extremists, terrorists, thugs. Everyone. And one of the most striking examples of this chain being set in motion occurred in 2013-2014. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, reacting to the NYT’s reporting. “Under the guise of democratic forces and civilians, those which took part in the Maidan were primarily trained at bases in Poland and the Baltic states. And we have spoken about this,” she said.
NATO countries’ intelligence services worked to establish bases and other infrastructure in Ukraine long before the 2022 escalation, the spokeswoman said, and not only on the border with Russia, but across the country.
“This begs the question: why is the New York Times only now raising concerns about this? We have provided all the information publicly. Why was the American press silent for many years?” she asked.
According to the Times’ account, the CIA created a dozen secret spy bases in Ukraine near Russia over an eight year period going back to 2016, with the intelligence “partnership” supposedly taking “root a decade ago,” after Maidan-appointed spy chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko contacted then-CIA director John Brennan and the MI6 asking them to help rebuild the Security Service of Ukraine (Ukrainian acronym SBU) “from the ground up.”
Lies to Build a Narrative
“They’re lying about the US role in those early stages,” says former CIA analyst and State Department Office of Counterterrorism expert Larry Johnson.
“They’re lying about the US and British role in helping create the coup and what happened in the Maidan. They’re acting like ‘oh, you know, the Maidan happened and then the CIA was contacted, after the fact’. Well that’s not true,” Johnson told Sputnik, suggesting that the NYT is looking to create a narrative on the coup, the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 incident, the ‘Russia the aggressor’ story which ignores Ukraine’s punitive ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’ in the Donbass starting in 2014, etc.
“You’ve got once piece of disinformation after another” in the story, according to the observer.
“And then, they’re saying that it was the United States trying to rein in Ukraine from carrying out all these terrorist attacks. So it’s really like we’re trying to send the message that ‘these attacks on Russia were not the fault of the United States, it was the Ukrainians acting on their own,’” which is another patent falsehood, Johnson said.
“We’ve had connections [with Ukrainian anti-Soviet and anti-Russian elements] going back to 1955. I mean the CIA’s role in dealing with the Banderites goes back into the late 1940s and early 1950s. They’re trying to portray that this is like some new relationship or just over the last 10-15 years. That’s nonsense,” the former CIA analyst emphasized.
‘Rats Starting to Leave the Sinking Ship’
Asked about the likely motivations to publish the expose at this stage of the proxy war in Ukraine, while Russia is advancing through the Donbass and US and European arms assistance to Kiev is under threat, Johnson suggested it may be a signal that Washington has decided to wrap up its Ukrainian project.
“I think this is a sign that the end is near for Ukraine. That’s the only reason they’re leaking it now. Because the Ukrainians themselves are putting that information out,” Johnson said. “It’s a sign that the rats are starting to leave the sinking ship. This is their way to say that it’s not the fault of the United States. You know, ‘we did everything we could, it’s these crazy Ukrainians.’ This is part of a ‘blame Ukraine’ [narrative],” the observer noted.
As for the dozen clandestine bases mentioned in the piece, Johnson expressed confidence that Russia knew about these facilities, and likely has taken or will take action to eliminate them.
“If I’m Russian intelligence, you’re going to blow those sites up,” he said. “The bases are not going to be that close to Russian territory because the Russians can easily take them out. And they almost exaggerate the kind of intelligence that’s collected. Again, if the CIA was really operating like the CIA is supposed to, that means they would have recruited human sources in the SBU already. That would have been passing them information without admitting or acknowledging it. But that’s not what was going on. This is what they call an open liaison service, so the information is being passed freely.”
Bases No Surprise for Russia
The CIA “sets up bases in every friendly territory. These are bases for facilitating the work of the CIA,” including technical, operational and human intelligence, says Rustem Klupov, a Russian reserve colonel, Hero of Russia and veteran of military intelligence.
“For a military specialist in the areas of intelligence and counterintelligence [details on the 12 secret CIA bases in Ukraine] aren’t any sort of sensational or incredible news,” Klupov told Sputnik, pointing out that similar facilities exist in Georgia and other post-Soviet republics into which US spies have been invited. “The bases are needed to place their laboratories, their technical intelligence equipment, to have facilities for stationing agents or special intelligence forces,” so as not to have to drag all this infrastructure across the ocean.
“The CIA is a spy organization, it is a military-political organization whose main goals are ensuring the creation of favorable conditions for US soft power or with the help of special operations, including special espionage and sabotage operations. For this reason, wherever the CIA trail is found, rotten, foul-smelling activities and events take place,” the observer noted.
Similar bases were created ahead of the so-called Arab Spring protests in 2011, the veteran Russian officer said, noting that the CIA “trained itself on the Arabs” for the coming conflict in Eastern Europe, with the aims of the latter project including driving a wedge between neighbors and brotherly peoples.
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Americans Play the Long Game
“The Americans play the long game,” Klupov emphasized, saying Washington has been doing this as far back as the First World War in Europe, “first supplying them with weapons and then extracting dividends. They played the long game in all theaters of war, and where it was not possible to seize power quickly, created long-term projects. And Ukraine as part of the USSR and the Soviet Union as a whole was a program in which they played the long game.”
“It was not difficult to guess that officers of the Ukrainian army, trying to curry favor with the CIA, provided them with all manner of secret documents from the Soviet period to the period of Russia’s peaceful interaction with Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR. It’s just now this has been said officially,” the retired officer said of the NYT piece and its ‘revelations’.
“The main goal is the collapse of Russia. They do not need Russia itself, but the natural resources it possesses," Klupov emphasized, pointing out that the proxy war in Ukraine, like any modern conflict, has economics at its core.
“During the Soviet period we put political antagonisms, class antagonisms at the forefront. Now we have outlived these class antagonisms [with the United States, ed.]. But the contradictions remain,” and have now been reformulated as “geopolitics.”
Ultimately, Klupov believes that if Russia did not kick off its military operation in Ukraine two years ago, it would have been forced to witness firsthand “the trampling of Russian residents of the Donbass and the turning of the territory into scorched earth. And there we would have American bases, with all their latest weaponry, right next door to us.”