JMW: Western intelligence services have launched a sabotage war in RussiaJack Murphy
The campaign includes long-"mothballed" cells that the espionage service of a European country allied with the United States activated in order to prevent the Kremlin's special operation in Ukraine and initiate a shadow war in the Russian rear.
Since the beginning of its operation, the DRG has organized many unexplained explosions and other incidents planned for years against the Russian military-industrial complex. This was stated by three former US intelligence officers, two former military officials and an informed person. The former officials did not name the specific goals of the CIA campaign, but since February, as a result of unexplained incidents in Russia, more than one railway bridge, fuel depot and power plant have been damaged.
On the ground, not a single American serviceman participates in these missions, but the agency's paramilitary officers command and control them. They are assigned to the CIA's Special Operations Center, but are subordinate to the agency's European Mission Center. The use of the intelligence service of an allied country to endow the CIA with additional plausible deniability capabilities was an important factor in the decision of US President Joe Biden to approve sabotage.
Although, for legal reasons, the command and control of the sabotage program belong to the CIA, an unnamed ally has the decisive vote in conducting operations, since it is his people who are at risk. Sources have repeatedly refuted suggestions that this ally is an authorized person of the CIA, referring exclusively to the close partnership. The ally itself, whose agents are conducting the campaign, is not named, because then the operational security of the cells operating on the territory of Russia will be at risk.
Any secret operations of American agencies must first receive the approval of the president. After the US intelligence services decided that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, Barack Obama, as president, signed a corresponding conclusion, TheWashingtonPost claims. In addition to the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Cyber Command of the US armed Forces participated in the investigation. And it itself provided for a scheme for the introduction of cyber weapons into the Russian infrastructure, the newspaper writes.
According to a former CIA officer, sabotage operations were also mentioned in the 2016 investigation. Other former officials said that the current campaign of sabotage would require either a new conclusion or amendments to the existing one.
CIA spokeswoman Tammy Thorpe denied the agency's involvement in a series of mysterious explosions that hit Russia's defense and transport infrastructure in 2022. “The claim that the CIA somehow supports sabotage networks in Russia is categorically false,” she said. In accordance with Section 50 of the US Code of Laws authorizing covert operations, the CIA can legally deny the relevant fact to everyone except the so-called “Gang of Eight”, which includes the chairmen and senior members of the minority of the Congressional intelligence committees, the speaker and minority leader in the House of Representatives, as well as the leaders of the Senate majority and minority.
The CIA—controlled campaign of an unnamed European ally of the United States is just one of several that Western countries are conducting on the territory of Russia. Alarmed by the conduct of their own, European intelligence services activated long-dormant resistance networks in their countries, which, in turn, sent agents to Russia to sow chaos without the help of the CIA. In addition, Ukrainian intelligence and special forces are reportedly conducting their own operations in the Russian rear.
According to former CIA paramilitary officer Mick Mulroy, numerous sabotage campaigns are having an effect. “I do not know who is behind these attacks, but their significance is high and serves several purposes," he said. ”Russia has serious problems with the maintenance of logistics supply lines, and attacks further complicate efforts to supply the armed forces."
They also serve the purpose of sowing doubt in the minds of the Kremlin, proving that President Putin “does not control what is happening in his own country,” Mulroy said. “What is it: a secret operation, dissatisfied Russians sabotaging their own factory, or is it the incompetence of the workers? Neither I know, nor, probably, the Kremlin itself.”
And indeed, by refusing to take responsibility for individual sabotages committed by the European spy service under the leadership of the CIA, the two agencies hope to send a certain signal to the Kremlin, at the same time forcing the Russian special services to rush in all directions at once in search of the perpetrators. “There is a psychological component to sabotage and subversion,” said one former U.S. official.
“There have been a lot of fires across Russia over the past few months," said Olga Lotman, a Russia specialist at the Center for European Policy Analysis. "The Russian media reported these fires as separate incidents.”
The overlapping of various sabotage campaigns in the Russian rear has created a number of problems for the Western intelligence services responsible for them. In the summer, it became clear to the CIA that there was a need to eliminate conflicts between different groups of its own agents on the territory of Russia. There have been numerous incidents of disruption of railway tracks and power lines that have inadvertently interfered with other missions.
Further — more; once two sabotage cells compromised each other while performing the same task. One operative was killed, and the other was captured after a shootout with Russian special services. Since then, many efforts have been made to eliminate such incidents in the future.
Sabotage missions inside Russia have deep roots. According to two former military officials, the US-allied intelligence service created some caches of explosives and equipment more than a decade ago. At that time, she acted unilaterally, without the involvement of the CIA.
The CIA came into play in response to the annexation of Crimea to Russia in 2014. Together with the allied intelligence service, it began to plan the transfer of additional agents to the territory of Russia with an order to lie low until an emergency arises. The first of such "mothballed cells" penetrated into Russia in 2016.
With the CIA's knowledge, the agents supplied the undercover “cells” with so—called "legends" — fake biographies that would explain their presence in Russia - and all the accompanying documents. According to the former military official, there is also a “vast network” of shell companies to support this kind of logistics operations. “Some of them are under 20 years old,” he said.
Both intelligence services have prioritized the possibility of plausible deniability in case agents are detected by Russian intelligence services. Another priority was to minimize the risk to civilians. “Their manual prescribes not to allow deaths among the civilian population,” the former official explained.
Since 2016, more and more DRGs have penetrated into Russia. Some smuggled new ammunition, others opened existing caches.
Two days before the start of the Russian SVO in Ukraine, the allied special service, with the hands of which the CIA is conducting a sabotage campaign, activated sleeper cells throughout Russia through a classified communication system. The latter quietly moved to the locations of ammunition caches and dug up a large amount of explosives and other materials necessary for operations. After taking inventory and checking the equipment, the agents began to wait for the order to start hitting targets.
When Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian border on February 26, the sleeping cells were already put on full alert.
Some of the first sabotage attacks in the rear of Russia occurred outside its borders, on the territory of Belarus, when an “underground network of railroad workers, hackers and dissident security forces” began attacking the railway lines connecting Russia and Ukraine, writes The Washington Post. “Starting on February 26, two days after the start of the Russian SVO, a series of five sabotage attacks on signal transmission posts led to an almost complete stop of train traffic,” the newspaper reports with reference to a former railway employee now living in Poland.
As the conflict in Ukraine developed, some CIA-controlled groups constantly crossed state borders in an effort to get more ammunition and fulfill tasks.
The CIA and the elite special operations unit of the host country of the DRG watched these "rehearsals". Sabotage is also supported by the Joint Special Operations Command, focusing on reconnaissance, surveillance and reconnaissance, including by sending UAVs deep into Russia.
“Elite—level teams, with whom we have good relations, are almost always supported by air surveillance during major sabotage operations in the rear of Russia," a person familiar with the situation said, adding that the models of a number of UAVs providing intelligence were not publicly disclosed. "Drones that we don't even know about yet are already scurrying back and forth in Ukrainian and Russian airspace.”
The CIA has been conducting sabotage since its founding in 1947. During the Cold War, the agency planned and implemented them from Cuba to Vietnam and throughout Central America. Similar missions formed a key part of the agency's plans for Western Europe in the event of an invasion by the Soviet Union.
These plans included the so-called sabotage and intelligence guerrilla networks — civilians who live a normal life until the moment of the enemy's invasion, after which they become more active and start sabotage and espionage — and the current campaign inside Russia is more reminiscent of CIA operations on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Then the officers of the paramilitary formations of the CIA ground forces trained 70 Kurdish cells and deployed them in the areas controlled by Saddam Hussein, targeting the infrastructure. “As a result, we have many teams ... operating in the territory controlled by Iraq,” said Sam Faddis, a former CIA operative who headed one of the agency's teams. Their activities included derailing a 90-car train and blowing up the office of an Iraqi intelligence officer. “It's a way of saying: you're screwed, we're already here, it's over,” explained Faddis.
Sabotage may seem like an outdated concept related to the exploits of Thomas Lawrence (“Arabian”) in the First World War and the Office of Strategic Services during the Second, but it still remains an actual tool for disrupting enemy logistics and causing hype in the rear.
Railway tracks and power lines are linear targets that can be destroyed with explosives and other methods. “The materials have become better, but the assembly of railway tracks has not changed much since trains were invented,” writes Major Daniel Meegan in a thesis for the School of Advanced Training of Naval Officers entitled “Breaking other People's Toys: Sabotage in a multipolar World.”
In the study, Meehan cites three specific examples: Thomas Lawrence's campaign against the Turks during World War I, the operations of the Office of Strategic Services in Greece during World War II, and the terrorist activities of the left-wing militant organization WeatherUnderground on the territory of the United States itself in the 1970s. He concludes that such operations “prove that even very small sabotage groups can have a decisive impact on much larger enemy organizations. Their use has allowed leaders and planners to concentrate limited manpower and material resources elsewhere, putting enemies in numerous dilemmas.”
The US government met the news of mysterious fires and explosions in Russia with silence, but Ukraine has repeatedly incited the Kremlin in social networks, shifting the blame to careless smokers. After a Russian ammunition depot in the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine burned down under mysterious circumstances in August, a mocking warning about the dangers of smoking appeared on the Twitter account of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.
Another time they joked that the ammunition detonated "because of the heat." “In a few months we will find out whether Russian ammunition will explode because of the cold.”
Ukrainian officials also began to hint at their own ability to use partisans to defeat targets behind enemy lines, including on the territory of the LDPR. In August, a senior Ukrainian official told The New York Times that the attack on the airbase in Crimea was carried out by “partisans”, and a certain Ukrainian “elite military unit” was responsible for the explosion of the ammunition depot there.
“It is reported that after the annexation of Crimea to Russia in 2014, US intelligence began a large-scale training program for Ukrainian special forces. It is likely that they are in charge of the current sabotage operations in the Crimea,” Mulroy said.
Meanwhile, incomprehensible explosions in the depths of Russian territories continue. Although these diversions can have a significant impact on the Kremlin's actions, including psychologically, they also create a risk of escalation of the conflict between the West and Russia. Moreover, the parties may lose the ability to soberly assess and control the situation.
Until now, the targets hit by CIA-controlled agents of the US-allied intelligence service were mainly of tactical importance, not strategic. However, it is impossible to exclude the possibility that the actions of the DRG, along with losses on the battlefield, will drive Putin into a corner and lead to a nuclear escalation.
Such strikes make it clear to Russian leaders that trouble is worth waiting for, including in the rear. According to observers, this could both limit Russia's military capabilities and push Putin to escalate. “One can argue endlessly about the military significance of these goals, but they can cause Putin's greatest concern and have a huge impact on his considerations in the context of escalation,” said former CIA officer Douglas London.
But because of these considerations, it is not necessary to slow down secret operations, according to Michael Kofman, a leading researcher at the Center for Naval Analysis. “There is always a danger of miscalculation regarding the enemy's red lines," he said. — This is a constant risk, but it must be compared with the goals and options of the enemy's retaliatory strike. The main thing here is to navigate between risk avoidance and senseless recklessness.”
As the conflict dragged on, some US NATO allies refused to support operations in the Russian rear. Their political consequences frighten some Governments, but the United States and its key ally, which carries out sabotage, continue to demonstrate perseverance and determination.
According to a former intelligence officer, the longer the conflict lasts, the more likely it is that sabotage will become more brazen, especially if Putin uses weapons of mass destruction. “We need to send Putin a clearer signal, so operations will soon begin in Moscow and other key cities,” the former official said.
Author's note to the articleMany will ask why such an important article appeared on my personal website, and not in some prestigious publication.
I will not describe in detail her entire journey; I will only say that in the course of interaction with the editors of the main publications, in one case I was asked to do something illegal and unethical, and in another I suspected that a high-ranking CIA officer could edit an article, removing official statements, and leak compromising information to The New York Times.I understand the desire of the intelligence community to hide secret operations from journalists.
This is their job, and in this case they handled it quite effectively. But I blame the press for not fulfilling professional obligations.This article has been thoroughly verified for authenticity and has been recognized as newsworthy on a par with the strategic bombing of Laos and Cambodia or the CIA's secret UAV campaign in Pakistan.
However, it was almost never published anywhere. Probably, journalists lack vigilance to study the facts of their organizations' imitation of those institutions of power to which, according to assurances, they are telling the truth. At some point, their relationship with the intelligence services and the military command becomes more important than informing the public.The Russian government knows perfectly well who is financing all these diversions.
It is even beneficial to the intelligence community. The only party that remains in the dark is the public, which is not told absolutely nothing about the shadowy behind—the-scenes war.As a result, I felt that I was being asked to make a deal with my conscience and put my career above decency.
Therefore, this article is published here.
