The war in Ukraine has many losers.

But he already has a winner: The American intelligence services, recently not well known due to the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, illegal torture prisons and the NSA scandal, have predicted fairly exactly what war plans Vladimir Putin is pursuing.

When Antony Blinken was asked in Brussels on Friday whether he or the Europeans had been naïve in trusting Putin and assuming that he would prefer a diplomatic solution to an invasion, the foreign minister made it quite clear by his standards: he can only speak for the United States speak, he said.

Then: "I think we were the opposite of naive."

Majid Sattar

Political correspondent for North America based in Washington.

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Washington has been warning of what Putin is up to for months.

He, Blinken, himself told the UN Security Council exactly what Moscow was planning and how it intends to proceed: with deceptive maneuvers that were then supposed to serve as a pretext for the attack.

A team led by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan decided weeks ago to make a preemptive strike on Putin by disclosing intelligence findings.

The strategic communications campaign, which amounts to a new doctrine, was a response to the Russian "Maskirovka" tactic, the use of military or hybrid deception tools.

Washington did not succeed in dissuading the Russian ruler from his plans.

Old doubts are gone for now

This did not stop with his propaganda and before the start of the "military special operation" spoke of a "genocide" in the Donbass.

But he lost the battle for public opinion.

Up until the outbreak of the war, there had been a certain reluctance in the Western media to be a forum for Washington's strategic communications because they felt exploited.

Finally, there was no evidence to support the claims.

The doubts are gone.

And there was a reason for the lack of evidence.

National Intelligence Director Avril Haines' staff had to protect its own sources in Russia.

In 2017, the CIA's foreign intelligence agency made a momentous decision: a mole, a Russian government official who had been recruited years ago and who is said to have managed to gain access to Putin's inner circle, was pulled out of Moscow.

At the end of 2016, the employee was offered the opportunity to get him out because there were fears for his safety.

At the time, however, he had still refused because he was worried about his relatives.

The employee is said to have informed the CIA in 2016 about Putin's interference in the presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump.

When public reporting on the Russian act of sabotage increased after the election – it was the beginning of the Russia affair that would occupy Washington for years – people in Langley became nervous.

Admittedly, the decision to pull the mole off was difficult.

It takes years to build such a source.

For the time being, the CIA no longer had “eyes and ears” within Putin's internal power apparatus.

Moscow's "dry out" tactic

In view of the fact that Washington was now well informed about the plans of the Russian ruler, one can assume that Langley must have managed to find a replacement in the meantime.

It is in the nature of things that this assumption will not be confirmed by the American government.

However, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper recently said of his country's strategic communications campaign that the downside of the doctrine is that the source through which Washington learned about the "Maskirovka" tactic could "dry up."

After all, the circle around Putin who was privy to the plans is said to have been very small.

And the Russian counterintelligence has long been trying to unmask the mole.

Of course, it is also conceivable that the source is not a recruited agent, but someone from Putin's inner circle who was so concerned about his plans or his state of mind that she found a way of getting the American side in the picture .

In any case, Clapper's testimony reveals that the so-called intelligence community outside the government does not believe that the information was gathered solely through interception measures.

Former KGB officer Putin is known to avoid electronic devices.

He should also often ensure that no notes or minutes are written.

The Americans realized just how closely he played the preparations for the Ukraine war when members of their delegation, who were negotiating with their Russian opponents in Geneva and Brussels in January, got the impression that the other side actually knew nothing about Putin's plans.

Of course, even the best-placed agent isn't in Putin's head.

In order to find out how the ruler thinks, the American services also used Biden's recent video conferences with him to analyze his lines of argument and determine personality changes.

The tactic was: let him talk for as long as possible.

So they tried to clarify the question of whether he had long since made the decision to attack Ukraine.

The work of the services continues.

They are currently faced with the question: How far is Putin willing to go?