"Trump Talks Peace While the CIA
Is Fueling the War in Ukraine"
by Larry C. Johnson
"I spent enough years at the Central Intelligence Agency that I learned how to read the press stories that the agency’s friends place for it. Shane Harris’s new profile of CIA Director John Ratcliffe in The Atlantic, published October 23, is one of those stories. It is written to make Ratcliffe look like the sober professional in a chaotic administration. But read it carefully and it confirms something Washington has spent four years denying: the United States is not merely
supplying Ukraine. Through the CIA, it is fighting Russia.
“The CIA is in the lead”: Harris does not bury the lede. Armed with information the CIA provides, Ukraine’s military has been launching strikes deep inside Russia. American spy satellites give Ukraine early warning of incoming Russian missiles and drones. Among U.S. personnel on the ground in Ukraine, a retired senior officer who travels there frequently told him, “the CIA is in the lead.”
It gets better. A Baltic intelligence officer who works closely with the Americans told Harris that, whatever Donald Trump says in public, the CIA’s operations against Russia are now “much more aggressive” than they were under Joe Biden. Officers in the CIA’s Special Activities Center, the people who run covert and paramilitary operations, are reportedly among the happiest at Langley, because they are so busy. And this is not new. As Harris notes, the CIA helped build Ukraine’s modern intelligence apparatus after Russia took Crimea in 2014. This has been the agency’s war for more than a decade.
Let me translate that from the polite language of a magazine profile. American intelligence is identifying the targets inside Russia, American satellites are running Ukraine’s air-defense warning network, and American officers are “in the lead” on the ground. If Russia were doing that for Mexico against Texas, Washington would call it an act of war. Moscow has said for years that it is fighting NATO, not just Ukraine. Here, courtesy of The Atlantic and its anonymous sources, is the evidence.
Shooting ourselves in the fuel tank Now comes the absurdity. According to Harris, the CIA’s success has become a problem for the President. The refinery strikes the agency helps enable have hobbled Russia’s economy. The International Energy Agency estimates that in the first eight months of this year, Ukraine hit a Russian refinery on average once every three days.
Those refineries make diesel. The world is short of diesel. The International Energy Agency says the shortage will run well into 2027. And Trump, according to Harris, blames the attacks on Russian refineries for the spike in prices and wants them to stop. He has threatened to cut off intelligence support to Ukraine unless Kyiv halts the refinery strikes.
Think about that. The CIA helps Ukraine knock out Russian refining capacity. Diesel prices soar. Then on October 9, in the middle of peace talks in Miami, the President announces a deal for Russia to sell its diesel on the world market, boasting on Truth Social that prices would be “COMING DOWN… AND FAST!” Harris reports that the announcement caught the negotiators by surprise, and that Putin made no reciprocal commitment. So the United States is simultaneously paying to destroy Russian diesel production and begging Russia to sell it more diesel. You could not design a more incoherent policy if you tried.
The spy channel: The most revealing passage in the piece concerns Ratcliffe’s trip to Moscow in August. Trump sent him to meet his counterparts in the Russian security services through what is informally called the “spy channel.” His message, Harris writes, was that nobody was winning: Russia had failed to make meaningful advances, and Ukraine could not expel Russian forces. The hope was that Ratcliffe could convince Putin he was pursuing a lost cause.
I have two problems with that. The first is the claim itself. Russia’s General Staff reported to Putin on October 16 that its forces had taken roughly 6,500 square kilometers and 310 settlements since January. You can argue the Russian figure is inflated, and I have. But even DeepState, the Ukrainian mapping project, counts about 1,300 square kilometers. Russia is advancing. It is not doing so as fast as Moscow claims, but “failed to make meaningful advances” is wishful thinking dressed up as intelligence.
The second problem is the messenger. Imagine you are the head of the SVR or the FSB. The director of the CIA flies into Moscow to tell you, spy to spy, that your war is a stalemate and you should give it up. You know perfectly well that his agency is the one feeding Ukraine the targeting data for the drones hitting your refineries. That is not a peace overture. That is a threat with a diplomatic passport. If Ratcliffe expected the Russians to take his assessment as neutral advice, he does not understand the people he was talking to.
Not what Truman built: Ratcliffe likes to talk about returning the CIA to its “roots.” He has the roots wrong. Harry Truman did not create the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947 to run paramilitary campaigns. He created it to collect and analyze intelligence from foreign sources and tell the President the truth, so that he would never again be blindsided the way Franklin Roosevelt was at Pearl Harbor. Covert action came in through the back door. Within a year, the National Security Council’s directive NSC 10/2 authorized covert operations, and the clandestine tail has been wagging the analytic dog ever since.
Truman saw it happening and said so publicly. In an op-ed published in the Washington Post on December 22, 1963, a month after John Kennedy’s assassination, he wrote that he had become disturbed by how far the CIA had strayed from “its intended role.” His words are worth quoting: “I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.” The agency, he warned, “has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government.” He said that in creating it, “the most important thing was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions,” and he asked that the CIA be “restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President.” Sixty-three years later, Ratcliffe has turned Truman’s warning into a mission statement.
How covert action corrupts the truth: I want to explain why this matters, because it is not an abstract argument about organization charts. I watched it from the inside.
When an intelligence agency is simply collecting and analyzing information, its only stake in the outcome is getting the answer right. The moment the same agency is running a covert operation, it has a horse in the race. The operation has a budget, a sponsor on the Seventh Floor, careers riding on it and, most important, a President who has already been told it will work. Now the analysts down the hall are being asked to assess whether their own colleagues’ operation is succeeding. Bad news is no longer just bad news. It is an attack on the director’s program and an embarrassment to the man in the Oval Office.
The pressure is rarely an explicit order to change a conclusion. It is subtler and more corrosive than that. The pessimistic assessment gets sent back for more sourcing. The analyst who keeps writing that the operation is failing gets a reputation for not being a team player, and does not get the next promotion. The briefing for the President leads with the success stories and buries the costs in an annex. After a few rounds of that, as Julia Curlee told Harris, officers simply stop telling the hard truths and “learned to avoid” what the White House did not want to hear.
We have seen where this leads. The Bay of Pigs was planned by the clandestine service and kept walled off from the agency’s own analysts, who might have pointed out that there was no evidence the Cuban people were about to rise up against Castro. The operators sold the President the operation they wanted to run, and the analysis that would have stopped it never reached his desk. The pattern repeats whenever the agency becomes both the player and the referee.
Now look at Ukraine. The CIA is, by The Atlantic’s account, “in the lead” on the ground, helping run a campaign of deep strikes inside Russia. The same CIA is responsible for telling the President whether that campaign is working and whether Ukraine can win. Is it any surprise that the agency’s message, the one Ratcliffe carried to Moscow, is that Russia has “failed to make meaningful advances”? An agency that has spent twelve years building Ukraine’s intelligence service and now directs its targeting has every institutional incentive to report that its war is going well, or at least not badly. The negative consequences, Russian advances, Ukrainian casualties, a diesel shortage that is hammering Europe and American consumers, are exactly the things an agency in that position is least likely to put front and center.
That is the corruption Truman feared. Not that the CIA would lie outright, but that it would slowly start serving the operation instead of the President, and the President would make decisions based on intelligence shaped by people who need him to keep going.
An agency that tells the boss what he wants: Harris also reports on the state of the CIA itself, and it isn’t pretty. Ratcliffe pledged at his confirmation hearing to “conduct covert action at the direction of the president, going places no one else can go and doing things no one else can do.” The covert-action side is thriving, from Ukraine to Venezuela to the CIA’s air strikes on suspected drug boats, which legal experts say may violate the laws of armed conflict. One former officer told Harris, “The agency is over its skis right now.”
The analysts, meanwhile, are miserable. More of them report that the objectivity of their work is being undermined. Julia Curlee, a senior analyst who resigned in May, put it bluntly: “Ratcliffe isn’t protecting the CIA from politicization; he’s leading it.” Current and former officers say they have never seen so many retirements and resignations. An agency where the paramilitary officers are thrilled and the analysts are afraid to tell hard truths is an agency built to fight wars, not to understand them. And Harris himself notes that Trump did not heed the intelligence community’s warnings about how Iran would respond to American attacks. We are all paying for that one now.
Pick a policy: So here is where the United States stands. The President calls Zelensky “more difficult to deal with” than Putin and urges Ukrainians to elect someone else. His CIA director is running operations against Russia that are more aggressive than Biden’s. His CIA is helping Ukraine destroy Russian refineries while he cuts deals to sell Russian diesel. His spy chief flies to Moscow to tell the Russians they cannot win, while his agency’s own analysts are afraid to tell him what they think.
That is not a strategy. It is a contradiction that the American people are paying for at the pump, and that the Ukrainians are paying for with their lives. If Washington wants peace, it should stop being a combatant. If it wants to fight Russia, it should have the honesty to say so, to Congress and to the voters, before the midterms rather than after. What it cannot keep doing is both, and pretending it is doing neither."
