Given Trump’s skyrocketing hostility towards Ukraine – and especially in light of his Oval Office ambush of Volodymyr Zelensky last Friday — we should be gravely worried about the intelligence fallout for Kyiv, and for ourselves.
A compelling piece in the latest edition of The New Yorker by Joshua Yaffa reveals how Ukraine’s CIA equivalent, the SBU, has helped the US improve its own intelligence operations against Russia, particularly cyber ones.
“In one case, the SBU passed along the source code used in a Russian hacking attack, allowing US agencies to build their own defenses,” Yaffa reported, based on inside sources.
A former U.S. intelligence officer told him the SBU-CIA partnership had “doubled” the US intelligence take on Russia. “That’s tens of millions of dollars in value right there,” he said.
Consider that in the context of Pete Hegseth’s decision, apparently handed down just prior to Trump-Zelensky slugfest, to suspend US cyber ops of the offensive variety against Putin’s spooks and military commanders.
Was the appallingly inadequate Defense Secretary also signaling a cutback in our intelligence cooperation with Ukraine itself?
According to The New York Times exclusive about the cyber moratorium, it “is apparently part of a broader effort to draw President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia into talks on Ukraine and a new relationship with the United States.”
Sabotaging Ukraine’s intelligence capabilities is one execrable way of tipping the scales, of course. But why not just open the vaults at the CIA and NSA and let Putin forage? The upshot could well be the same.
And how ready will other US allies be to keep on sharing secrets with us if Trump seems prepared to shaft Ukraine’s spy agencies for purposes of political blackmail and to Putin’s benefit.
Don’t’ be surprised if more than one of our partners in the “Five Eyes”
international spy community blinks.
Think about that: England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will every reason to view us as a potential hostile.
Welcome to Home Alone, the Trump remake.