How the CIA's Hunt for a Russian Mole Blinded It To Putin's Rise

If you enjoy spy thrillers, as I do, this rather long, and detailed article (long and detailed is a good thing) is well worth the read.

For those who are interested, Yahoo has added a new reader comment feature on its news page. MSN.com has had this feature available for months now.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/cias-hunt-russian-mole-blinded-103000064.html

Time
How the CIA's Hunt for a Russian Mole Blinded It To Putin's Rise
Robert Baer
Sat, May 21, 2022, 3:30 AM

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The CIA, along with other American intelligence agencies, has dazzled the world over the past several months. First, in the months leading up to the invasion, the U.S. used satellite imagery to continually insist Putin was planning an invasion, even when he denied it. Now, stories are emerging of Ukraine using U.S. intelligence to target Russian generals and warships. There are even suggestions that the U.S. has flexed its muscles by intentionally leaking its involvement.

But we shouldn’t let our pride over what we do know drown out of concern for what we don’t know. For example, we had we had no idea how weak Russia’s military actually was, that it had become a Potemkin village that couldn’t fight its way out of a Ukrainian paper bag. Consider General Milley’s prediction that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours. We didn’t know just for example, that thanks to corruption the Russian army relied on faulty Chinese tires.

And yet, what we don’t know about Putin and Russia goes so much deeper than that. In the 90s, the CIA completely missed KGB hardliners plotting against Gorbachev, then Yeltsin. And then, most importantly, it missed the rise of Putin.

Although Putin has become one of the most powerful men in the world, to this day we still don’t have an authoritative, firsthand account of how he got to where he did. We don’t know, for example, who in the KGB backed Putin and what was expected of him after he got to the Kremlin. Without even these most basic facts, how can we expect to have any sense of whether his fascist rhetoric about nuclear weapons or further territorial expansions is real or just bluster?
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