The CIA helped build 12 secret spy bases in Ukraine along the Russian border as part of the agency’s support for Ukrainian intelligence that started in 2014, The New York Times reported on Sunday.
The report described one of the CIA-built spy bases as an underground bunker used by Ukrainian soldiers to “track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on conversations between Russian commanders.”
The Times report sheds new light on the CIA’s involvement in Ukraine, which played a major role in provoking the Russian invasion. A European official told the paper that when Russian President Vladimir Putin was considering invading Ukraine toward the end of 2021, the head of one of Russia’s main spy services told him that the CIA and Britain’s MI6 were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Moscow.
The report said the CIA’s relationship with Ukrainian intelligence could be traced back to February 24, 2014, right after former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in a US-backed coup. On that day, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, the new head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), called the CIA and asked for help in rebuilding Ukraine’s intelligence capabilities.
The CIA agreed to help as it saw an opportunity to collect more intelligence on Russia. The US spy agency helped form the Fifth Directorate in the SBU, which consisted of young Ukrainians who were born after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The idea was to assuage CIA concerns about the Ukrainian spy agency being full of older, more Russian-sympathetic Ukrainians.
The Washington Post first reported on the CIA’s creation of the Fifth Directorate back in October 2023. The Post report said that the CIA had spent tens of millions of dollars “to transform Ukraine’s Soviet-formed services into potent allies against Moscow.”
The CIA has also supported Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, known as the GUR. The GUR provided an opportunity for the US since it was allowed to collect intelligence outside of Ukraine, meaning it could be used inside Russia. A former US intelligence official speaking to the Post described the GUR as “our little baby.”
The Times report said the CIA started training Ukrainian spies who have operated inside Russia, across Europe, in Cuba, and other places where the Russians have a large presence. The CIA also helped create an elite commando unit known as Unit 2245, which collected Russian drones and other technology so the US could reverse-engineer them. One member of Unit 2245 was Kyrylo Budanov, who now heads the GUR.
Ukrainian intelligence services began assassinating separatist leaders in the Donbas in 2016 and has been credited with several killings inside Russia, including the car bombing that killed Darya Dugina, daughter of the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. US officials insist the CIA isn’t involved in the assassinations, but the killings have not impacted the CIA’s support
The CIA’s and overall US intelligence support has significantly increased since Russia launched its invasion on February 24, 2022. Most US personnel were evacuated from Ukraine right before the invasion, but a group of CIA officers remained in a remote location in western Ukraine and provided intelligence support for the first weeks of fighting.
Ivan Bakanov, who was the head of the SBU when Russia invaded, told the Times that without the CIA, “there would have been no way for us to resist the Russians or to beat them.”
Confirming that Putin was 100% correct about Ukraine, 100% correct about NATO/US intentions vis-a-vis Russia, and 100% correct to go into Ukraine.
What makes me laugh is how despite this massive investment by the CIA, the imbeciles were unable to penetrate Russia’s hypersonic weapons program, unable to weaken Putin or his government, taken by complete surprise when Russia annexed Crimea, and ditto when Russia rolled over the border in February 2022.
It reveals what many of us already knew – stunning levels of incompetence by the CIA. Hopeless.
The entire Western intelligence structure was also taken by surprise when the Soviet Union fell apart.. Incredible..
That’s because Mother Russia kicked all the now sufficiently grown and very expensive baby countries out of her nest. A politically planned contraction is completely outside of totalitarian CIA and US hegemonic reasons for existence.
The US governmental single purpose is world domination and the US population is no more valuable to it than Ukrainians, Koreans, Iranians or Palestinians.
Less important. Like the late western Roman Empire, Washington is encouraging a flood of immigrants to fill the ranks.
Yes. Latinos are driven north from destabilized countries and right-wing fundamentalists are propagandized into believing the border needs Berlin wall and Zionist apartheid wall methods of control.
Reality is the US government drive immigration to hold down US wages.
Agreed, swelling the ranks of both the army of surplus labor, and the military.
More like the baby satellite countries fell out of the basket, knowing no more about the collapse than the Western intelligence community..
The CIA is good at murdering people. Really, really good.
… the Obama-Brennan Tues morn kill list decision of the day.
Vlad is better at it, though.
… an no slouch at enhanced interogation either … Bloody Gina’s 83 waterboardings of Abu Zubaydah.
Good? They kill, but rarely well enough to win. They only bring down disaster where they do it, and finally onto us as well.
Yes, at bottom. But lots of whiz-bang gadgets.
The tone of the NYT piece is largely approving. And most Americans will approve of US operations to promote spying on Russia and covert attacks on the evil Russkis.
Few of them will consider how their own country would react if an adversary fomented a coup in Canada or Mexico and then ran operations like the ones described in the linked piece.
President Truman started the CIA out of the old OSS after WW2 as an intelligence service with no operational capacity. Allen Dulles changed that and ran with the ball being replaced with other like minded people. Tghe history of killing and subverting legitimate Governments is shocking and horrible.
The CIA itself helpfully makes available Truman’s op-ed in the Washington Post, published one month after the Kennedy assassination:
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP75-00149R000700550045-9.pdf
If anyone is up for a long, meticulously-crafted and thoroughly-documented read, here’s a suggestion:
The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government
Thanks read it. Absolutely devastating and incriminating.
Holy cow dancing on the moon!!!!!! I am shocked!!!!!!!
Didn’t the cow jump *over* the moon? 🙂
2022: Yahoo News, as usual NYT was late to the party and came with spinning dishes for empire
The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials….
While the covert program, run by paramilitaries working for the CIA’s Ground Branch — now officially known as Ground Department — was established by the Obama administration after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and expanded under the Trump administration, the Biden administration has further augmented it, said a former senior intelligence official in touch with colleagues in government….
By 2015, as part of this expanded anti-Russia effort, CIA Ground Branch paramilitaries also started traveling to the front in eastern Ukraine to advise their counterparts there, according to a half-dozen former officials.
The multiweek, U.S.-based CIA program has included training in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, tactics like “cover and move,” intelligence and other areas, according to former officials.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/cia-trained-ukrainian-paramilitaries-may-take-central-role-if-russia-invades-185258008.html
Just as they guided and orchestrated Croatia’s Operation Storm (Aluja) in Krajina against the Serb population. Just a bit of ethnic cleansing that went on there.
I have been telling you repeatedly that Russia is stupid and evil. (How am I doing so far, Thomas?) They provoked and justified a war that we actually already provoked and justified. Which means it was unprovoked and unjustified, right? It’s like in math multiplying a positive number by a positive number, the outcome would be a negative number, right? …Oh, Hell, who cares. Justified, unjustified, we don’t care!
Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and numerous US-engineered regime changes.
If you’re right, you’re right. You can’t be wrong if you’re right. Doesn’t matter right or wrong if you’re right, right? M’kay?
Let’s not forget about the Yellow Bus, m’kay?
And why am I not surprised? We all know that Ukraine has been part of an”Intelligence Community” 30 year project to bring down and break up Russia. It is simply a matter of an imperial rival having the land and resources that Russia has. Russia is the biggest country on Earth and has the most of everything. As such, it is the most able to be self-sufficient and to give the middle finger to foreign powers that wish to constrain it. Therefore, it has to be broken up.
And it has the world’s largest nuclear weapons arsenal.
An obvious candidate for regional power and therefore the perfect — the original — target of the Wolfowitz Doctrine.
30 year project? A bit longer than that, the CIA started working with the Banderites shortly after its creation, and Ukraine was one of the primary sources of spies and saboteurs in the USSR throughout the Cold War.
There are two governments in Washington DC, one relatively open and one nearly totally secret with close to a $100 billion budget yearly.
The former lies most of the time, while the later goes around the world to overthrow governments and assassinate people.
Not secret any longer…! They’ll be destroyed if not already…!
… And how the secret bases were revealed…?! From one of the young recruits…?!
An admission that US weapons sucks…?!
“CIA Built 12 Spy Bases in Ukraine Near the Russian Border Over Past Decade”
let’s not forget the numerous bioweapon labs that uncle sam had also set-up in the Ukraine.
but Russia waited until uncle sam was about to set-up missiles there before they “invaded” Crimea and rescued them from US clutches.
Let’s not forget that the evidence thus far produced for the “weapon” part of “bioweapon” is zero, zip, zilch, nada.
Is that you, Toria? Just kidding. I know it’s not her. It was a “research” facility. I swear.
dude. i knew this whole time that you know WTF is going on.
edit) = now i owe you an entire 12-pack of beers
LOL. I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but as my Dad used to tell me, “Liquor is quicker, son!” What does a man have to do to deserve a glass of Vodka around here?
You mean like WMDs in Iraq? 😉
No. WMDs in Iraq were found and disposed of by inspectors over the course of more than a decade. Lying warmongers continued to insist there were more.
In the case of bioweapons labs in Ukraine, there is no credible, publicly available evidence that they ever existed.
I forgot to include a ‘wink’ (sarcasm alert) at the end of my post. Corrected. I am aware and agree with what you say.
Sort of. There are SOME differences.
One difference is that WMDs in Iraq were used as a casus belli, while bioweapons labs in Ukraine were used as a post-hoc justification.
Another is that there were actual attempts to prove the WMDs in Iraq story or make least make it seem plausible , while the bioweapons labs in Ukraine story had a lot less work put into it. It was just released into the wild so that whoever wants to believe it can believe it.
Just like the Nordstream sabotage?
And boy was that ever released into the wild with V 1.0 being “the Russians did it!”
I have to admit that it’s difficult to figure out what the hell else was going to be developed in labs directly funded by the Pentagon, especially since they hired some of the ex-Soviet bio-weaponeers to work there. Of course that’s strictly circumstantial, but people have been put on Death Row here in the US on less.
ok moderator man…. here is what happened =
Victoria Nuland was forced to admit that uncle sam was running a number of bioweapons labs in the Ukraine.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/victoria-nuland-ukraine-has-biological
of course that was totally down-played the very instant that it came to light.
but i guess that you are correct in assuming that since the word “weapon” was never bandied about, then all of the bio-labs in Ukraine were benign and not malign.
“hey we are just trying to save humanity from the evil flu-virus”
what
Victoria Nuland was forced to admit that Uncle Sam was running a number of biolabs in Ukraine.
Admitting you own a car is not the same thing as admitting that the car is a Ferrari.
I don’t assume that none of those labs were weapons labs, or that some were, or that all were. In the absence of any publicly presented evidence whatsoever, I feel no need to just make shit up.
Hopefully those CIA “operatives” are, or will be, part of the casualty list. I despise them all; a pack of cockroaches, crying “national security!” while literally getting EVERYTHING wrong, accomplishing nothing useful, and causing nothing but trouble. Just look at the cretins that have headed the CIA; a pack of evil, loathsome bureaucratic toads.
I always remember the fuss when Yuri Adropov, former head of the KGB, became the leader of the Soviet Union. It was described as horrible, dangerous, unprecedented, and pretty much every other negative adjective in the book. Who was the next leader of the US? George Bush the Not Stupid, former head of our CIA.
The “leaders” of our “Intelligence Services” make me ashamed of America. It would be bad enough if they were Evil but Brilliant; however, over and over again they prove themselves Evil and Utterly Incompetent.
Russia will never forgive or forget American evil!
The CIA has done more harm to America worldwide than any other group in America.
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA Paperback – May 20, 2008
“With shocking revelations that made headlines in papers across the country, Pulitzer-Prize-winner Tim Weiner gets at the truth behind the CIA and uncovers here why nearly every CIA Director has left the agency in worse shape than when he found it; and how these profound failures jeopardize our national security.”
Russia knows the true source of evil is and was in London.