THE GROWING LIST OF assassinations of prominent Russians and Ukrainian separatists shows that the Ukrainian intelligence services are using “liquidations” as a weapon of war, according to The Washington Post.
Citing
“current and former Ukrainian and United States officials”, the paper
said on Monday that funding and training by the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) explains much of the success of Ukraine’s
covert operations against Russia. However, the CIA is not involved in Ukraine’s
state-sponsored assassination efforts at the operational level, and some US
officials are uneasy about these activities.
A CIA Spy
Directorate in Ukraine
In 2014,
when Russia invaded Crimea, Ukrainian intelligence services were in an almost
paralytic state. Like most of Ukraine’s state sector, the intelligence agencies
were endemically bloated and closely resembled Soviet-style bureaucracies in
sluggishness and corruption. More importantly, they were “riddled with Russian
spies, sympathizers and turncoats”, according to observers. Few were surprised
when, almost as soon as Russia annexed Crimea, the local head of the domestic
security agency, the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) defected to Russia.
According
to The Washington Post, immediately after the Russian invasion of
Crimea, the CIA sought to prevent further Russian encroachment in Ukraine. That
is why in 2015 it built the SBU’s Fifth Directorate. That entirely new
directorate was —and today remains— insulated from the rest of the SBU. The CIA
also reportedly built a new division, complete with a brand-new headquarters
building, inside Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (GUR), which
operates as the intelligence wing of the Ministry of Defense.
Active-Measures
Training
Seeing the
GUR as a more agile and flexible agency than the SBU, the CIA began to train
GUR paramilitary “spetsnaz” divisions in “active measures” —a term that
describes methods of political warfare, ranging from propaganda, sabotage
operations, and even assassinations. However, The Washington Post claims
that the CIA training focused on “secure communications and tradecraft” with an
eye to enabling GUR teams to operate covertly behind enemy lines using
clandestine maneuvers. Targeted assassinations were not included in the
training.
In the
meantime, the CIA retained a significant presence on the ground Kyiv. As the
SBU’s Fifth Directorate and the GUR’s paramilitary division became more
skilled, the CIA began to receive troves of data from them. The grateful
Ukrainians even allowed CIA case officers direct access to Russian assets they
had recruited. That essentially amounted to a co-handling arrangement, which is
something that rarely occurs, even among friendly intelligence services.
Liquidation
as a Weapon of War
However,
even before February 2022, when Russia attempted to invade all of Ukraine, Kyiv
began to adopt a policy of “liquidation” as a
weapon of war. In what The Washington Post refers to as a “raging shadow
war”, SBU and GUR operatives have been carrying out “dozens of assassinations” against pro-Russian Ukrainian
separatists and prominent pro-Kremlin Russians —some of them deep inside Russia. The paper claims that
every assassination carried out by the SBU and the GUR has been directly
approved by the Ukrainian President, Volodimir Zelensky.
In every
operation, the Ukrainians ensured that they used no CIA-provided equipment or
weapons, so as not to implicate the US in the assassinations. Even the funding
used for the operations came from what The Washington Post calls
“segregated covert funding streams” that did not involve CIA resources. The
paper cites US intelligence officials who “stressed that the [CIA] has had no
involvement in targeted killing operations by Ukrainian agencies”. According to
those officials, the CIA trained the Ukrainian spy agencies on how to collect
intelligence behind enemy lines, not on how to carry out targeted killings.
Unease at
the CIA
Despite the
segregation of resources, the Ukrainians’ decision to pursue an aggressive
campaign of assassinations behind enemy lines has caused unease inside the CIA.
The Washington Post suggests that the US is concerned about being
accused by Russia of complicity in these unconventional acts. The possibility
that the Russians may eventually respond in kind must also be of some concern
to the CIA. The use of assassinations as part of active measures is not typical
of the CIA’s operational style. The paper quotes one unnamed former CIA
official, who says that “we are seeing the birth of a set of intelligence
services that are like Mossad in the 1970s”. The statement refers to the covert
assassination war that raged between Israel and the
Palestinians following the Munich massacre of 1972.
https://intelnews.org/2023/10/25/01-3314/
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