The confrontation between the American and Russian intelligence services... when the shadow war takes place in broad daylight

The French newspaper Le Figaro said that the confrontation between Russian and American intelligence this time is taking place in an unusual way, so that what was happening in secret is taking place in broad daylight, amid a major global media battle.

And the newspaper's correspondent in Washington, Adrian Golems, explained that the Americans are facing the Russian hybrid war in a new way based on reviewing counter-information, as US President Joe Biden or one of the main officials in his administration has been publicly publishing since the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis and sometimes in almost real time secret information about upcoming Russian moves. They pre-empt events in a tactic aimed at depriving their opponent of the element of surprise that Moscow benefited from when it seized Crimea in 2014 and attacked Georgia in 2008.

covert operations

Thus - the reporter says in his report - after Biden's statements last Friday that Russian forces intend to attack Ukraine in the coming days, his National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan made it clear yesterday, Monday, in an interview with CBS, that the Americans are keen to inform the world about Russia's plans, intentions and how it will implement them "What we did was to explain to the world that this conflict was not a crisis that (Moscow) was drawn into, but a brutal war of choice."

It appears that some of the intelligence revealed by the Americans and the British, who cooperate closely with them within the "Five Eyes" alliance between English-speaking intelligence, is - as the reporter explains - nothing but traditional raw information gathered through satellite imagery and electronic eavesdropping.

The photos include gatherings of Russian forces along the borders of Ukraine, and some of them appear to be of a different nature, as they were collected through covert operations likely taken from high-ranking sources in the Russian intelligence, and possibly directly from the Kremlin.

The source of this information remains secret, because this part of the intelligence war between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other American intelligence agencies on the one hand, and the Federal Intelligence Agency and Russian Military Intelligence on the other, remains ambiguous in nature, as remains the hypothesis that the Americans have A high-ranking agent in the Russian state apparatus is possible because that has a precedent.

Cold War lessons

The newspaper reviewed a series of events, including the Russian media leaking in September 2019 the name of a senior Russian official, Oleg Smolenkov, who is suspected of being a CIA agent, after he fled Russia with his family in 2017 on a yacht during an alleged vacation in Russia. the black Mountain.

CNN confirmed that the United States welcomed the alleged agent who worked for 10 years by providing information directly from the Kremlin. She ran away, fearing that his identity would be revealed - inadvertently - by former President Donald Trump, who deals with great carelessness with classified information during his meetings with the Russians.

In this context, the newspaper recalled the expulsion of the Russians last week, Bart Gorman, the second man in the American embassy in Moscow, without any explanation. The United States only said that it considers this expulsion an "escalation" and "is studying a response to it."

The truth - as the reporter says - is that all the heroes with experience in this hidden game know each other personally, giving the example of the current head of the "CIA" William Burns, who was a professional Russian-speaking diplomat and served as the US ambassador to Moscow between 2005 and 2008, and Biden sent him to Moscow in November 2021, and spoke directly with Putin, and met with many senior Russian intelligence men.

Despite all this, it is not excluded - according to the reporter - that all this is a Russian disinformation campaign directed against Washington, because Russia is one of the few countries in the world led by a professional former intelligence officer trained in the powerful Soviet intelligence at the time, the KGB. He showed regularly that he had not forgotten the lessons of the Cold War era.

Despite initial skepticism about the reports Americans refuse to cite, most of the intelligence Washington has provided so far has proven accurate, with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken saying that everything is happening in Ukraine "according to the expected scenario."