A war foretold: how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them
The Phone Call
William Burns had travelled halfway around the world to speak with Vladimir Putin, but in the end he had to make do with a phone call. It was November 2021, and US intelligence agencies had been picking up signals in the preceding weeks that Putin could be planning to invade Ukraine. President Joe Biden dispatched Burns, his CIA director, to warn Putin that the economic and political consequences if he did so would be disastrous.
Fifteen years earlier, when Burns was US ambassador in Moscow, Putin had been relatively accessible. The intervening years had concentrated the Russian leader’s power and deepened his paranoia. Since Covid had emerged, few had been granted face time. Putin was squirrelled away at his lavish residence on the Black Sea coast, Burns and his delegation learned, and only phone contact would be possible.
A secure line was ready in an office at the presidential administration building on Moscow’s Old Square, and Putin’s familiar voice came through the receiver. Burns laid out the US belief that Russia was readying an invasion of Ukraine, but Putin ignored him and ploughed on with his own talking points. His intelligence agencies had informed him, he said, that there was an American warship lurking over the Black Sea horizon, equipped with missiles that could reach his location in just a few minutes. It was evidence, he suggested, of Russia’s strategic vulnerability in a unipolar world dominated by the US.
The conversation, as well as three combative face-to-face discussions with Putin’s top security officials, seemed extremely ominous to Burns. He left Moscow far more concerned about the prospect of war than he had been before the trip, and he relayed his gut feeling to the president.
“Biden often asked yes/no questions, and when I got back, he asked if I thought Putin was going to do it,” Burns recalled. “I said: ‘Yes’.”
Three and a half months later, Putin ordered his army into Ukraine, in the most dramatic breach of the European security order since the second world war. The story of the intelligence backdrop to those months – how Washington and London garnered such detailed and accurate insight into the Kremlin’s war plans, and why the intelligence services of other countries did not believe them – has never before been told in full.
This account is based on interviews conducted over the past year with more than 100 intelligence, military, diplomatic and political insiders in Ukraine, Russia, the US and Europe. Many spoke without attribution to discuss events that are still sensitive or classified; those quoted by name are referred to by their job titles at that time.
It is the story of a spectacular intelligence success, but also one of several intelligence failures. First, for the CIA and MI6, who got the invasion scenario right but failed to accurately predict the outcome, assuming a swift Russian takeover was a foregone conclusion. More profoundly, for European services, who refused to believe a full-scale war in Europe was possible in the 21st century. They remembered the dubious intelligence case presented to justify the invasion of Iraq two decades previously, and were wary of trusting the Americans on what seemed like a fantastical prediction.
Most crucially, the Ukrainian government was thoroughly unprepared for the oncoming assault, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spending months dismissing increasingly urgent American warnings as scaremongering, and quashing last-minute concerns among his own military and intelligence elite, who eventually made limited attempts to prepare behind his back.
“In the final weeks, the intelligence leaders were starting to get it, the mood was different. But the political leadership just refused to accept it until right at the end,” said one US intelligence official.
Four years on, there are many lessons to be drawn from these events about how intelligence is collected and analysed. Perhaps the most pertinent, as the world appears more unpredictable than at any time in recent history, is that it is dangerous to dismiss a scenario because it seems to fit outside the realm of what is rational or possible.
“I felt the evidence we presented to them was overwhelming. It’s not like we held back something that, if only they had seen it, would have made all the difference,” said Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, on why European allies did not believe the Americans.
Putin starts planning
The CIA discovered an awful lot about Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine, but one thing they never worked out for sure is when he first made up his mind to go all-in. Sifting through the evidence later, like detectives at a crime scene, some of the agency’s analysts pinpointed the first half of 2020 as the most likely moment.
During those months, Putin passed constitutional amendments to ensure he could stay in power beyond 2024. Then, locked away in isolation for months during Covid, he devoured books on Russian history and pondered his own place in it. Over the summer, the violent crushing of a protest movement in neighbouring Belarus left President Alexander Lukashenko weaker and more reliant on the Kremlin than ever. It opened up the possibility of forcing Lukashenko to allow the use of Belarusian territory as an invasion launchpad.
Around the same time, a team of FSB poisoners slipped novichok nerve agent into the underpants of Alexei Navalny, the one opposition politician with the potential to command mass public support, sending him into a coma. Back then, these all seemed like discrete events. Later, they started to look like Putin getting his ducks in a row before implementing the big Ukraine gambit he felt would cement his role in history as a great Russian leader.
Hints of that plan first came into focus in the spring of 2021, when Russian troops began building up along Ukraine’s borders and in occupied Crimea, supposedly for training exercises. The US received intelligence suggesting Putin could use an annual set-piece speech, due on 21 April, to lay out the case for military action in Ukraine. When Biden was briefed on the intelligence, a week before the speech, he was so alarmed he called Putin directly. “He raised concerns about the buildup and called for a de-escalation, as well as proposing a summit in the coming months, which we knew would be of interest to Putin,” said Avril Haines, Biden’s director of national intelligence.
When Putin gave the speech, it was much less bellicose than expected, and a day later the Russian army announced its military exercises at the border were over. It seemed the summit offer had successfully defused the threat, and when the two leaders met in Geneva in June, Putin hardly mentioned Ukraine.
It was only in hindsight that it became clear why: he had already decided on a non-diplomatic solution.
Raising the alarm
Four weeks after the Geneva summit, Putin published a lengthy, rambling essay about the history of Ukraine, in which he went back as far as the ninth century to make the argument that “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia”.
The screed raised eyebrows, but attention in London and Washington was soon diverted by the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. In September, Russian troops began another buildup along Ukraine’s borders; within a month it had reached a mass that was hard to ignore. Washington collected new intelligence about Russian plans, more detailed and much more shocking than in spring. Back then, the assumption had been that Russia could attempt a formal annexation of the Donbas region, or in a maximalist scenario, might try to hack a land corridor through southern Ukraine, linking Donbas to occupied Crimea. Now, it looked as if Putin could be planning something bigger. He wanted Kyiv.
Many in the US political elite were highly sceptical, but the intelligence analysts were worked up over what they were seeing. “There was enough information coming in that made it clear this was no longer a remote possibility,” said Haines. When Burns came back from Moscow, the alarm bells rang even louder. Whether or not the intelligence was right, Biden said, it was time to start planning.
In mid-November, he dispatched Haines to Brussels. There, at the annual meeting of Nato-member intelligence heads, she presented the US belief that there was now a real chance of a massive Russian invasion of Ukraine. Richard Moore, the head of Britain’s MI6, backed her up. As part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance, Britain had seen most of what the US had collected, and also had its own intelligence channels that pointed towards the possibility of an invasion. The primary response in the room, however, was scepticism. Some dismissed the idea of an invasion out of hand. Others expressed a fear that if Nato adopted a strong posture in response, it could prove counterproductive, provoking exactly the scenario the US claimed to be concerned about.
Managing that perception would be in the back of US and British minds over the next months. “We had to make sure we weren’t going to do anything that gave them an excuse to invade,” said Chris Ordway, a senior official working on the region at Britain’s Ministry of Defence. At the same time, London and Washington believed Russia needed only two more months to be ready for an invasion, and they wanted to raise the alarm.
Biden ordered his team to share as much intelligence with allies as possible, to help them understand why Washington was so worried. He also suggested a declassification push to get some of the information into the public domain. This had to be done carefully, to avoid exposing how Washington had obtained the evidence. “These are sources and methods that we put our blood and sweat and tears into obtaining, and they can put people’s lives at risk if lost,” said Haines.
A system was implemented whereby officials from different intelligence agencies would have “an opportunity to weigh in on anything before it went out the door”, she said, to make sure nothing slipped through that could give away a source. Over the next weeks, the US downgraded more sensitive intelligence than at any time in recent memory for allies and often for the general public, too. “We were getting classified briefings from the Americans, and then a few hours later you’d read the exact same information in the New York Times,” said one European official.
The view from Kyiv
At the end of October, the CIA and MI6 sent memos to Kyiv outlining their alarming new intelligence assessments. The next week, after Burns visited Moscow, two US officials on the trip peeled away from the delegation and flew to Kyiv where they briefed two senior Ukrainian officials on the US fears and the CIA director’s conversations in Moscow. “We basically said: ‘We will follow up. You’ll see the intel. This is not a normal warning, this is really serious. Trust us,’” said Eric Green, one of the US officials. The Ukrainians looked sceptical.
In mid-November, the British defence secretary, Ben Wallace, visited Kyiv and told Zelenskyy London believed a Russian invasion was now a matter of “when”, not “if”. He urged Zelenskyy to start preparing the country for war. “You can’t fatten up a pig on market day,” Wallace told the Ukrainian president, according to a source briefed on the meeting. Zelenskyy appeared to be in passive listening mode.
Zelenskyy had been elected in 2019 on a platform of pursuing peace negotiations to end the conflict Russia had launched in eastern Ukraine in 2014. He no longer believed he could do a deal with Putin, but he feared that public talk of an even bigger war would prompt panic in Ukraine. This could lead to an economic and political crisis, collapsing the country without Russia needing to send a single soldier across the border. This, he suspected, was Putin’s plan all along. He grew increasingly irritated at the Americans and British, who alongside the private warnings were starting to talk about the invasion threat in public. In November, he dispatched one of his most senior security officials on a top-secret mission to a European capital to deliver a message to political leaders via intelligence channels: the war scare is fake, and is all about the US trying to leverage pressure on Russia.
Few in Ukraine believed a full-scale invasion was likely, but the country’s intelligence agencies had been picking up worrying signs of increasing Russian activity. Ivan Bakanov, the head of the SBU domestic agency, recalled that while Russian spy services had traditionally focused on trying to recruit high-level Ukrainian sources, in the year prior to the invasion “they were going after everyone”, including chauffeurs and low-level functionaries. Often, these pitches were “false flag”: the Russian recruiters would pretend to be from one of Ukraine’s own intelligence agencies.
The SBU also tracked clandestine meetings between officers from Russia’s FSB and Ukrainian civil servants or politicians. These meetings often took place in luxury hotels in Turkey or Egypt, where the Ukrainians travelled under the guise of tourism. Russia hoped these people, motivated variously by ideology, ego or money, would act as a fifth column inside Ukraine when the time came.
“Before I came to the SBU, I also thought we could do a deal with the Russians,” said Bakanov, who was an old business partner of Zelenskyy’s and had no intelligence background when appointed in 2019. “But when you see every day how they are trying to kill and recruit people, you understand that they have a different plan, that they are saying one thing and doing another.”
Still, the prevailing mood in Kyiv was that the US warnings were overegged. Ukraine had been fighting Russian proxy forces in the Donbas for eight years, but the idea of a full-fledged war – with missile attacks, tank columns and a march on Kyiv – seemed unimaginable.
A European intelligence official said this line of thought remained fairly constant in briefings from Ukrainian counterparts in the months leading up to the invasion. “The message was: ‘Nothing is going to happen, it’s all sabre-rattling,’” said the official. “They thought the absolute maximum possible was a skirmish in the Donbas.”
The intelligence
Later, when it turned out that the US and Britain had it right all along, many wondered what it was that had allowed them to be so sure. Was there a mole in Putin’s inner circle, passing on the war plans to their CIA or MI6 handlers?
“Often, it’s presented as ‘we found the plans’ but it definitely was not that simple,” said Haines. The most obvious indicator was partly visible on commercial satellite imagery: tens of thousands of Russian troops moving into positions close to the border with Ukraine.
“These troop movements were unexpected and you had to work really quite hard to come up with explanations for why you’d do this, other than that you want to use them,” said a senior official at DI, the British military intelligence service.
There were also intercepted military communications: none of them mentioned an invasion, but they sometimes involved actions that would make little sense if no invasion were in the works. There was other information from various sources that pointed in the same direction: pro-Russian groups doing groundwork in Ukraine that might support military action, and the establishment of a programme to boost the ranks of reservists inside Russia. “For the first time, we saw information indicating the potential for action west of the Dnipro,” Haines said, referencing the river that splits Ukraine in two.
Most of those interviewed declined to expand on what exact intelligence was collected, citing the importance of safeguarding sources and methods. But interviews with dozens of people who saw some or all of the evidence provided plenty of clues.
Two sources pointed to intercepts from the Russian army’s Main Operations Directorate as a likely source of information about the invasion. The department is run by Colonel General Sergei Rudskoi, a well-respected military planner who has long been “the best-informed person inside the general staff,” according to a former Russian military insider who knew him personally. All strategic planning goes through his close-knit unit, based inside the general staff headquarters in central Moscow, and it was the place where war plans were drafted and refined, even as other top army commanders were left in the dark.
Preparations could be discerned in other parts of the military and intelligence services too, even if the people carrying them out did not know the end goal. “Most people in Russia did not know about the plan,” said one US official. “But to make it possible, enough things had to happen that it was very difficult to hide.”
The veteran journalist Bob Woodward, in his book War, referenced a “human source in the Kremlin”, without giving further detail. This is certainly possible – back in 2017, the CIA had exfiltrated a long-standing source who worked for Putin’s foreign policy chief and had been passing the agency secrets for years. There may be others still in place.
But Putin went to great lengths to hide his intentions even from most of his inner circle, and only a handful of people in the Russian system knew of the invasion plans until a couple of weeks before it began. It could be that the CIA or MI6 had recruited a super-mole right by the president’s side, but it seems more likely that human sources in Russia provided tangential or corroborating evidence, rather than the core details. Much of the key intelligence could be sourced to satellite imagery, or to intercepts collected by the NSA and GCHQ - the US and British signals intelligence agencies - said people who saw it. “No human source detected,” said one.
Ten weeks before the invasion
By December 2021, the US and Britain had obtained reasonable clarity on what Putin’s war plan might look like. In Washington, a cross-agency “tiger team” began meeting three times weekly, to discuss how the US would prepare for and respond to the worst-case scenario: an attack on the whole country with the goal of regime change. But there was no solid evidence that Putin had taken a political decision to put his plan into action. And this was where everyone else had a problem.
In Paris and Berlin, just as in Kyiv, intelligence agencies interpreted the military buildup not as a war plan, but as a bluff to put pressure on Ukraine. The British defence intelligence official said “huge amounts of effort” were invested to bring the French and Germans around, including several briefing trips by various delegations. But the conversations were largely met with resistance. “I think they took as a starting point: ‘Why would he?’ And we took as a starting point: ‘Why wouldn’t he?’ And that simple semantic difference can lead you to wildly different conclusions,” said the official.
For some Europeans, memories of the twisted intelligence backdrop to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 fuelled scepticism of this new war scare. One European foreign minister, who asked not to specify their country, recalled a discussion with Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, that became heated: “I’m old enough to remember 2003, and back then I was one of those who believed you,” the minister told Blinken. While the British and
