Nestled in dense forest, the Ukrainian military base looks abandoned and ruined, its command center a charred shard, the victim of a Russian missile barrage early in the war.
But this is what it looks like on the ground.
Not far away, a secret passage leads down to an underground bunker where teams of Ukrainian soldiers track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on conversations between Russian commanders. On one screen, a red line follows the path of an explosive drone that passed through Russian air defenses from a point in central Ukraine to a target in the Russian city of Rostov.
The underground bunker, built to replace the command center destroyed in the months after the Russian invasion, is a secret center of the Ukrainian military.
There is another secret: The base is almost entirely funded, and partly equipped, by the CIA
"One hundred and ten percent," said General Serhii Dvoretskiy, a senior intelligence commander, in an interview at the base.
Now in the third year of a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, intelligence cooperation between Washington and Kiev is a key point of Ukraine's ability to defend itself. The CIA and other US intelligence agencies provide intelligence on missile strikes, track Russian troop movements and help support espionage networks.
But the partnership is not a wartime creation, nor is Ukraine the only beneficiary.
It took root ten years ago, started under three very different US presidents, pushed forward by key individuals who often took bold risks. He has transformed Ukraine, whose intelligence agencies were long seen as thoroughly compromised by Russia, into one of Washington's most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.
Part of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which crashed over Ukraine in 2014, killing nearly 300 people.
The observation site in the Ukrainian forest is part of a network of CIA-backed spy bases built over the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border. Before the war, Ukrainians showed Americans collecting wiretapping that helped prove Russian involvement in the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
The Ukrainians also helped the Americans track down Russian operatives in alleged interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
Around 2016, the CIA began training an elite Ukrainian commando force – known as Unit 2245 – that intercepted Russian drones and communications equipment so that CIA technicians could reconstruct them and crack encryption systems of Moscow. (One officer in the unit was Kyrylo Budanov, now the General who heads Ukraine's military intelligence.)
The CIA also helped train a new generation of Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, across Europe, and in Cuba and other countries where the Russians have a large presence.
The relationship is so entrenched that CIA officers remained at a remote site in western Ukraine when the Biden administration evacuated American personnel in the weeks before Russia invaded the country in February 2022. During the invasion, the officers relayed important intelligence, including the country where Russia was planning attacks and what weapons systems they would use.
"Without them, there would be no way for us to resist the Russians, or defeat them," said Ivan Bakanov, who at the time was head of Ukraine's domestic intelligence agency, the SBU.
The details of this intelligence relationship, many of which are being revealed for the first time by The New York Times, have been a closely guarded secret for about 10 years.
In more than 200 interviews, current and former officials in Ukraine, the United States and Europe describe a cooperation that was almost founded on mutual distrust before steadily expanding, turning Ukraine into a center of intelligence gathering that intercepted more Russian communications than the CIA station in Kiev could initially handle. Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity.
Now these intelligence networks are more important than ever, as Russia is on the offensive and Ukraine is more dependent on sabotage and long-range missile attacks that seek out spies far behind enemy lines. And they are increasingly at risk: If Republicans in Congress end military funding for Kiev, the CIA may have to scale back.
In an effort to reassure Ukrainian leaders, William J. Burns, CIA director, made a secret visit to Ukraine last Thursday, his 10th visit since the invasion.
From the beginning, a common adversary, President Putin of Russia, brought the CIA and its Ukrainian partners together. Obsessed with Ukraine's "loss" to the West, Putin had regularly intervened in Ukraine's political system, choosing leaders he believed would keep Ukraine within Russia's orbit.
Putin has long blamed Western intelligence agencies for manipulating Kiev and sowing anti-Russian sentiment in Ukraine.
Towards the end of 2021, according to a senior European official, Putin was weighing whether to launch his full-scale invasion when he met with the head of one of Russia's main spy services, who told him that the CIA, along with Britain's MI6 was controlling Ukraine and turning it into a base for operations against Moscow.
But the Times investigation found that Putin and his advisers misunderstood a critical dynamic. The CIA did not open the way to Ukraine by force. American officials were often reluctant to get fully involved, fearing that Ukrainian officials could not be trusted and worrying about provoking the Kremlin.
Valeriy Kondratiuk, right, a former commander of Ukraine's military intelligence agency
However, a small circle of Ukrainian intelligence officials persevered with the CIA and gradually became vital to the Americans. In 2015, General Valeriy Kondratiuk, then head of Ukraine's military intelligence, arrived at a meeting with the CIA's deputy station chief and unannounced handed over a bundle of top-secret files.
The initial installment contained secrets about the Russian Navy's Northern Fleet, including detailed information about the latest designs of Russian nuclear submarines. Before long, teams of CIA officers were regularly leaving his office with backpacks full of documents.
"We realized that we had to create the conditions of trust," said General Kondratiuk.
As the partnership deepened after 2016, the Ukrainians grew impatient with what they saw as Washington's undue caution and began staging assassinations and other deadly operations that violated the terms the White House believed the Ukrainians had agreed to. Outraged, officials in Washington threatened to cut off support, but they never did.
"The relationship only got stronger because both sides saw value in it, and the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, our base of operations there outside of Ukraine, became the best source of information, signals and everything else, for Russia." said a former senior US official.
"We couldn't get enough of him."
This is the untold story of how it all happened.
A cautious start
The CIA's partnership in Ukraine can be traced back to two phone calls on the night of February 24, 2014, eight years before the full invasion of Russia.
Millions of Ukrainians had just overthrown the country's pro-Kremlin government, and President Viktor Yanukovych and his spy chiefs had fled to Russia. In the turmoil, a fragile pro-Western government quickly took power.
The government's new spy chief, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, arrived at the headquarters of the domestic intelligence agency to find a stack of documents burning in the courtyard. Inside, many of the computers had been wiped or infected with Russian viruses.
"It was empty. There were no lights. No leadership. Nobody was there.", Nalyvaichenko said in an interview.
He went to an office and called the CIA station chief and the local MI6 chief. It was close to midnight, but he called them into the building, asked for help in rebuilding the agency from the ground up, and proposed a tripartite partnership.
"That's how it all started," recalls Nalyvaichenko.
Independence Square in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, in February 2014
The situation quickly became more dangerous. Putin invaded Crimea. His agents incited separatist rebellions that would turn into a war in the east of the country. Ukraine was at risk, and Nalyvaichenko turned to the CIA for aerial views and other intelligence to help protect its territory.
As the violence escalated, an unmarked US government plane landed at an airport in Kiev with John O. Brennan, then the director of the CIA. He told Nalyvaichenko that the CIA was interested in developing a relationship, but only at a pace the agency was comfortable with, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.
For the CIA. the unknown question was how long Nalyvaichenko and the pro-Western government would hold out. The CIA had previously been burned in Ukraine.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine gained independence and then shifted between competing political forces: those who wanted to stay close to Moscow and those who wanted to align with the West. During a previous stint as spy chief, Nalyvaichenko began a similar collaboration with the CIA that fell apart when the country turned back to Russia.
Brennan explained that in order to unlock CIA assistance, the Ukrainians had to prove that they could provide valuable intelligence to the Americans. They also needed to purge Russian spies; The domestic spy agency, the SBU, was full of them.
Brennan returned to Washington, where President Barack Obama's advisers were deeply concerned about Moscow's provocation.
The White House drafted secret rules that outraged Ukrainians and that some inside the CIA thought were shackles. The rules barred intelligence agencies from providing any support to Ukraine that could "reasonably be expected" to have lethal consequences.
Masked Russian soldiers guarding a Ukrainian military base in Perevalnoe, Crimea, in 2014.
The result was a fragile balancing act. The CIA was supposed to strengthen Ukraine's intelligence agencies without provoking the Russians. The red lines were never exactly clear, which created a constant tension in the partnership.
In Kiev, Nalyvaichenko selected an old acquaintance, General Kondratiuk to serve as head of counterintelligence, and they formed a new paramilitary unit that went behind enemy lines to conduct operations and gather intelligence that the CIA or MI6 could not; assured them.
Known as the Fifth Directorate, this unit would be filled with officers born after Ukraine gained independence.
"They had nothing to do with Russia," said General Kondratiuk.
"They didn't even know what the Soviet Union was."
That summer, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, exploded in mid-air and crashed in eastern Ukraine, killing nearly 300 passengers and crew. The Fifth Directorate produced wiretapping and intelligence within hours of the crash, which quickly pinned the blame on Russian-backed separatists.
The CIA was impressed and made the first significant involvement by providing secure communications equipment and specialized training to members of the Fifth Directorate and two other elite units.
"Ukrainians wanted 'fish' and we, for political reasons, could not deliver it", a former US official said, referring to intelligence that could help them fight the Russians.
"But we were happy to teach them how to fish and send fishing gear with the right bait."
A secret Santa Claus
In the summer of 2015, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko shook up the domestic service and installed an ally to replace Nalyvaichenko, the CIA's trusted partner. But the change created an opportunity elsewhere.
In the reshuffle, General Kondratiuk was named head of the country's military intelligence agency, known as HUR, where he had started his career years earlier. It would be an early example of how personal connections, more than policy changes, would deepen the CIA's involvement in Ukraine.
Unlike the domestic agency, HUR had the authority to gather intelligence abroad, including Russia. But the Americans had seen little value in cultivating the agency because it was not producing any valuable intelligence on the Russians and because it was seen as a bastion of Russian sympathizers.
In an effort to build trust, General Kondratiuk arranged a meeting with his American counterpart at the Defense Intelligence Agency and handed him a bundle of classified Russian documents. But senior DIA officials were suspicious and had no intention of building closer ties.
The general had to find a more willing partner.
Months earlier, while still at the domestic agency, General Kondratiuk visited CIA headquarters in Langley. In those meetings, he met a CIA officer with a pleasant demeanor and a large beard who was being groomed to become the next station chief in Kiev.
CIA headquarters in Langley
After a long day of meetings, the CIA took General Kondratiuk to a Washington Capitals hockey game, where he and the to-be-named station chief in Kiev sat in a luxury box and loudly cheered on Alex Ovechkin, the team's star player. from Russia.
The station chief had not yet arrived when General Kondratiuk handed the secret documents about the Russian navy to the CIA.
"There's more to it," he promised, and the documents were sent to the analysts at Langley.
Analysts concluded that the documents were authentic, and after the station chief arrived in Kiev, the CIA became General Kondratiuk's main partner.
General Kondratiuk knew he needed the CIA to strengthen his agency. The CIA thought the general might be able to help Langley as well. It struggled to recruit spies inside Russia because its ordinary officers were under heavy surveillance.
"For a Russian to allow himself to be recruited by an American is to commit absolute, high treason" said General Kondratiuk.
"But for a Russian to be recruited by a Ukrainian, it's just a beer between friends."
The new station chief began regularly visiting General Kondratiuk, whose office was decorated with an aquarium where yellow and blue fish – Ukraine's national colors – swam around a model of a sunken Russian submarine. The two men became close, which led to the relationship between the two agencies, and the Ukrainians gave the new station chief an affectionate nickname: Santa Claus.
Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, a former deputy foreign minister and commander for the Security Service of Ukraine in Kiev, this month
In January 2016, General Kondratiuk flew to Washington for meetings at Scattergood, a CIA property in Virginia where the agency often hosts visiting dignitaries. The agency agreed to help HUR modernize it and improve its ability to intercept Russian military communications. In return, General Kondratiuk agreed to share all raw information with the Americans.
Now the partnership was real.
Operation "Red Fish"
Today, the narrow road leading to the secret base is surrounded by minefields, planted as a line of defense in the weeks following the Russian invasion. Russian missiles that hit the base had seemingly shut it down, but just weeks later the Ukrainians returned.
With money and equipment provided by the CIA, teams under the command of General Dvoretskiy began to rebuild, this time underground. To avoid detection, they worked only at night and when Russian spy satellites were not overhead. Workers also parked their cars a block away from the construction site.
In the bunker, General Dvoretskiy showed off the communications equipment and huge computer servers, some of which were funded by the CIA. He said his teams were using the base to hack into the Russian military's secure communications networks.
"This is the thing that penetrates satellites and decodes secret conversations," General Dvoretskiy told a Times reporter on a tour, adding that they were also hacking spy satellites from China and Belarus.
Another officer placed two recently produced maps on a table as evidence of how Ukraine is tracking Russian activity around the world.
The first showed the air routes of Russian spy satellites traveling over central Ukraine. The second showed Russian satellites passing over strategic military installations, including a nuclear weapons facility, in the eastern and central United States.
Ukrainian police officers set up a checkpoint in Ukraine's Kharkiv region near the Russian border in December
The CIA began sending the equipment in 2016, after the key meeting at Scattergood, General Dvoretskiy said, providing radios and coded equipment for intercepting secret enemy communications.
Beyond the base, the CIA also oversaw a training program, conducted in two European cities, to teach Ukrainian intelligence officers how to disguise themselves and steal secrets in Russia and other countries capable of detecting spies. The program was called Operation Goldfish, derived from a joke about a Russian-speaking goldfish who grants two Estonians wishes in exchange for his freedom.
The sticking point was that one of the Estonians hit the fish's head with a rock, explaining that anything that spoke Russian could not be trusted.
Officers of Operation Goldfish were quickly deployed to 12 newly constructed operational bases built along the Russian border. From each base, General Kondratiuk said, Ukrainian officers ran networks of agents gathering intelligence inside Russia.
CIA officers installed equipment at the bases to help gather intelligence and also identified some of the most skilled Ukrainian graduates of the Operation Goldfish program, working with them to approach potential Russian sources. These graduates then trained "sleeper" agents on Ukrainian soil to launch guerrilla operations in the event of an invasion.
It can often take years for the CIA to develop enough trust in a foreign agency to begin conducting joint operations. With the Ukrainians, it took less than six months. The new partnership began producing so much raw intelligence about Russia that it had to be sent to Langley for processing.
But the CIA had red lines. This would not help the Ukrainians to carry out deadly offensive operations.
"We made a distinction between intelligence-gathering operations and things that explode," said a former senior US official.
"This is our country"
It was a change that weighed on the Ukrainians.
First, General Kondratiuk was upset when the Americans objected to providing satellite images from inside Russia. Shortly thereafter, he asked the CIA for help in planning a clandestine mission to send HUR commandos into Russia to plant explosive devices in train depots used by the Russian military. If the Russian military sought to take more Ukrainian territory, the Ukrainians could detonate explosives to slow the Russian advance.
When the station chief informed his superiors, they "went out of their minds," as one former official put it.
Brennan, the CIA director, called General Kondratiuk to ensure that the mission was canceled and that Ukraine respected the red lines prohibiting lethal operations.
General Kondratiuk canceled the mission, but he learned another lesson.
"Going forward, we have worked to avoid discussing these things with your sons," he said.
Late that summer, Ukrainian spies discovered that Russian forces were deploying attack helicopters to an airfield in the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula, possibly to stage a surprise attack.
General Kondratiuk decided to send a team to Crimea to plant explosives at the airport so they could detonate if Russia moved to attack.
This time, he didn't ask the CIA for permission. He turned to Unit 2245, the commando force that received specialized military training from the CIA's elite paramilitary group known as the Ground Department. The purpose of the training was to teach defensive techniques, but CIA officers realized that without their knowledge, the Ukrainians could use the same techniques in deadly offensive operations.
Petro Poroshenko, then president of Ukraine, and Joe Biden, then vice president of the USA, during a meeting in Kiev in 2015
At the time, the future head of Ukraine's military intelligence agency, General Budanov, was a rising star in Unit 2245.
He was known for daring operations behind enemy lines and had deep connections with the CIA. The agency had trained him and also taken the extraordinary step of sending him for rehabilitation at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland after he was shot in the right arm during the fighting in Donbas.
Disguised in a Russian uniform, then Lieutenant Colonel Budanov led the commandos across a narrow bay by speedboat, landing at night in Crimea.
But an elite unit of Russian commandos was waiting for them. The Ukrainians fought back, killing several Russian fighters, including the son of a general, before retreating to the coast, diving into the sea and swimming for hours toward Ukrainian-controlled territory.
It was a disaster. In a public address, President Putin accused Ukrainians of plotting a terrorist attack and promised to avenge the deaths of Russian fighters.
"There is no doubt that we will not let these things pass," he said.
Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine's military intelligence agency in Kiev, this month.
In Washington, the Obama White House reacted strongly. Joe Biden, then vice president and a champion of aid to Ukraine, called Ukraine's president to complain angrily.
"This causes a huge problem," Biden said during the call, a recording of which was leaked and posted online.
"All I'm telling you as a friend is that justifying that is a lot harder now."
Some of Obama's advisers wanted to shut down the CIA program, but Brennan convinced them that doing so would be self-defeating, since the relationship had begun to produce intelligence on the Russians while the CIA was investigating Russian interference in the election. presidential year 2-16.
Brennan called General Kondratiuk to re-emphasize the red lines.
The general was upset.
"This is our country," he replied, according to a colleague.
"It is our fight and we must fight."
Washington's strike cost General Kondratiuk his job. But Ukraine did not back down.
Pro-Russian rebel commander Arseny Pavlov, known as "Motorola", salutes as he takes part in a military parade in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine in 2016
A day after General Kondratiuk was removed, a mysterious explosion in the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine ripped through an elevator carrying a senior Russian separatist commander named Arsen Pavlov, known by his nom de guerre. 'Motorola'.
The CIA soon learned that the assassins were members of the Fifth Directorate, the spy group that trained with the CIA. Ukraine's domestic intelligence agency had even distributed medals to those involved, each with the word "Lift" stitched on it, the British term for an elevator.
Again, some of US President Obama's advisers were angry, but they were blocked, the presidential election between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton was three weeks away, and the assassinations continued.
A team of Ukrainian agents directed a rocket launcher at a building in the occupied territories. It was directly opposite the office of a rebel commander named Mikhail Tolstykh, better known as Givi. Using a remote control, they fired the missile as soon as Givi entered his office, killing him, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.
A shadow war was now raging. The Russians used a car bomb to kill the head of Unit 2245, the elite Ukrainian commando force. The commander, Colonel Maksim Shapoval, was on his way to meet CIA officers in Kiev when his car exploded.
After the assassination of the colonel, the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, stood by the CIA station chief in Kiev. Later, CIA officers and their Ukrainian counterparts remembered Colonel Shapoval with a whiskey toast.
"For all of us," said General Kondratiuk, "It was a heavy blow."
Trump's careful tread
The election of Donald Trump in November 2016 put the Ukrainians and their CIA partners on edge.
Trump praised Putin and denied Russia's role in election meddling. He was suspicious of Ukraine and later tried to pressure its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate his Democratic rival, Biden, leading to Trump's first impeachment.
But whatever Trump said and did, his administration often went the other way. That's because Trump had placed Russia 'hawks' in key positions, including Mike Pompeo as CIA director and John Bolton as national security adviser. They visited Kiev to underline their full support for covert cooperation, which has expanded to include more specialized training programs and the construction of additional secret bases.
The base in the forest was expanded to include a new command center and barracks, and increased from 80 to 800 Ukrainian intelligence officers. Preventing Russian interference in future US elections was one of the CIA's priorities during this period, and Ukrainian and US intelligence officers joined forces to probe the computer systems of Russian intelligence agencies to identify operatives trying to manipulate voters. .
Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, talking with Donald Trump, then President of the United States, speaking in 2017
In a joint operation, a HUR team tricked an officer from Russia's military intelligence service into providing information that allowed the CIA to link the Russian government to the so-called 'Fancy Bear' hacking group, which had been linked to attempts to interfere in elections in a number of countries.
General Budanov, whom Zelensky appointed to lead the HUR in 2020, said of the partnership: "He just got stronger. It grew systematically. Cooperation expanded into additional spheres and became wider.
The relationship was so successful that the CIA used its model with other European intelligence services that had their own focus against Russia.
The head of the Congress on Russia, the CIA's anti-Russian operations surveillance department, organized a secret meeting in The Hague. There, representatives from the CIA, Britain's MI6, HUR, the Dutch service and other agencies agreed to begin pooling together more of their intelligence on Russia.
The result was a secret coalition against Russia, and Ukrainians were vital members of it.
Mike Pompeo, then US Secretary of State, laying flowers at a memorial to Ukrainian soldiers in Kiev in 2020
The march to war
In March 2021, the Russian military began massing troops along the border with Ukraine. As more troops surrounded the country over the months, the question was whether Putin was making a deceptive move or preparing for war.
That November and in the weeks that followed, the CIA and MI6 delivered a unified message to their Ukrainian partners: Russia was preparing for an all-out invasion to 'cut off' the heads of the government and install a puppet leader in Kiev who would fill the demands of the Kremlin.
According to US officials, US and British intelligence agencies had intercepts that Ukrainian intelligence agencies did not have access to. The new intelligence listed the names of Ukrainian officials the Russians were planning to kill or capture, as well as Ukrainians the Kremlin hoped to put in power.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine at a press conference in Kiev in March 2022
President Zelensky and some of his top advisers were not convinced, even after Burns, the CIA director, rushed to Kiev in January 2022 to brief them.
As the Russian invasion loomed, CIA and MI6 officers made final visits to Kiev with their Ukrainian counterparts. One of the M16 officers broke down in tears in front of the Ukrainians, worried that the Russians would kill them.
At Burns' urging, a small group of CIA officers were excluded from the wider US evacuation and moved to a hotel complex in western Ukraine. They did not want to abandon their partners.
Endless game
After Putin launched the invasion on February 24, 2022, CIA officers at the hotel were the only US government presence on the ground. Every day at the hotel they met with their Ukrainian contacts to provide information. The 'handcuffs' had been lifted and the Biden White House authorized spy agencies to provide intelligence support for lethal operations against Russian forces on Ukrainian soil.
Often, CIA records contained shockingly specific details.
On March 3, 2022 – the eighth day of the war – the CIA team provided an accurate overview of Russian plans for the next two weeks. The Russians would open a humanitarian corridor from the besieged city of Mariupol that same day and then open fire on Ukrainians using it.
The Russians planned to besiege the strategic port city of Odessa, according to the CIA, but a storm delayed the attack and the Russians never took the city. Then, on March 10, the Russians intended to bomb six Ukrainian cities and had already entered the coordinates into the missiles for those attacks.
The Russians were also trying to kill senior Ukrainian officials, including President Zelensky. In at least one case, the CIA shared intelligence with Ukraine's domestic agency that helped foil a plot against the president, according to a senior Ukrainian official.
When the Russian attack on Kiev stalled, the CIA station chief in Kiev gloated and told his Ukrainian counterparts that they were "punching the Russians in the face," according to a Ukrainian officer who was in the room.
Ukrainian soldiers preparing defenses at a seaside position in Odesa in 2022
Within weeks, the CIA was back in Kiev, and the agency sent many new officers to help the Ukrainians. A senior US official said of the CIA's significant presence: “Are they pulling the trigger? No. Are they helping with targeting? Absolutely.”
Some of the CIA officers were stationed at Ukrainian bases. They reviewed lists of potential Russian targets the Ukrainians were preparing to strike, comparing the information the Ukrainians had with US intelligence to ensure it was accurate.
Before the invasion, the CIA and MI6 had trained their Ukrainian counterparts in recruiting resources and building clandestine and partisan networks. In the southern Kherson region, which was captured by Russia in the first weeks of the war, those partisan networks sprung into action, according to General Kondratiuk, killing local collaborators and helping Ukrainian forces target Russian positions.
In July 2022, Ukrainian spies spotted Russian convoys preparing to cross a strategic bridge over the Dnipro River and notified MI6. British and American intelligence officers then quickly verified Ukrainian intelligence, using real-time satellite imagery. MI6 relayed the confirmation and the Ukrainian military opened fire with rockets, destroying the convoys.
In the underground bunker, General Dvoretskiy said that a German anti-aircraft system now protects the base from Russian attacks. An air filtration system protects against chemical weapons and a dedicated power system is available if the power grid goes out.
The question some Ukrainian intelligence officers are now asking their American counterparts — as Republicans in Congress weigh whether to cut off billions of dollars in aid — is whether the CIA will abandon them.
"This has happened in Afghanistan before and now it will happen in Ukraine," said a senior Ukrainian officer.
Referring to Burns' visit to Kiev last week, the CIA official said. "We have shown a clear commitment to Ukraine over many years, and this visit was another strong signal that the US commitment will continue."
The CIA and HUR have built two more secret bases to intercept Russian communications, and combined with the 12 forward operating bases that General Kondratiuk says are still operational, HUR now collects and produces more intelligence than at any time. war – much of which she shares with the CIA.
“You can't get that kind of information anywhere but here and now,” said General Dvoretskiy.
NOTE: This material is the intellectual property of NY Times
Prepare for Hashtag.al, Klodian Manjani
