Four senior ex-CIA officers claimed today that Russia used counterterrorism cooperation to learn the identities of CIA officers and then shared that information with hostile governments.
The effort allegedly took place in the days following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, when the U.S. government sought to work more closely with Moscow, hoping to learn from the Soviets’ deep (and troubled) experience in Afghanistan.
But the ex-officers said that pretty quickly the Russians turned the cooperation into an information-gathering exercise for their own domestic terrorism concerns.
“Worse than the failure to share insights, the Russian intelligence service used the pretext of counterterrorism cooperation to undermine U.S. relationships with other services around the world, even sharing the identities of CIA officers with hostile countries,” the former officers write in an Op-Ed in The Washington Post. “Despite the sharing of intelligence, the Russian services treated their CIA counterparts as adversaries rather than partners.”
The overall thrust of the Op-Ed was to argue that Russia can never be trusted to cooperate in good faith with the U.S. on counterterrorism despite efforts spanning multiple U.S. presidential administrations. The issue has most recently been raised following a report in Just Security that President Donald Trump has told the CIA to share intelligence with Russia, and in the wake of reports that Russia offered cash bounties to the Taliban in Afghanistan to kill U.S. troops. The Russian government has dismissed the bounty claims.
“Inside the CIA, we often joke that, to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, win-win means I beat you twice,” the Op-Ed says. “Good intentions from the U.S. side have proved time and again to have been futile in improving relations.”
While the Op-Ed did not offer specifics on the alleged post-9/11 unmasking of CIA officers, it is somewhat buttressed by the lengthy intelligence careers of the authors — John Sipher, Steven Hall, Douglas Wise and Marc Polymeropoulos — who between them have more than a century’s worth of espionage experience, much of it dealing directly with Russia.
The Op-Ed does overlook at least one instance in which Russia did share critical counterterrorism information with the U.S.: In 2011 Russian intelligence warned the FBI and CIA that one Tamerlan Tsarnaev might have extremist ties to militants in the Russian Caucasus. The FBI investigated, but found no links to terrorism and closed the case. Two years later, Tsarnaev and his brother detonated explosives at the Boston Marathon, killing three people, including an 8-year-old boy.
In another wrinkle, as I reported for ABC News, there was time when the U.S. was little help to Russia’s counterterrorism campaign. An FBI cable obtained by ABC News and written in 2011 said Russia had for years been seeking information on Doku Umarov, the now-deceased leader of a Chechen Islamist movement that had allegedly been responsible for several terrorist attacks in Russia. Despite Umarov’s inclusion on the U.S. government’s terror list, the FBI said they couldn’t help the Russians because they didn’t have a file on the guy themselves.
Around the time of that report, ahead of the 2014 Olympics in Sochi in southern Russia, two American security experts wrote in an analysis for ABC News that Russian and American counterterrorism cooperation “could be better.”
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