The Rest Is Classified - 26. The Intelligence War: Trump and the End of American Support for Ukraine

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Donald Trump has paused all intelligence sharing with Ukraine. What does this mean? What intelligence was being shared? How dependent are Ukraine on this? And what impact will this have on the war? Listen as Gordon Corera and David McCloskey discuss the latest developments in Ukraine. ------------------- Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, via this link. ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @triclassified Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I've got this condition where I don't feel pain. You're a superhero. No, I'm not. This is how intense Nova Kane sounds. Oh, wow. Imagine how it looks. Same one? Yeah, big time.

Nova Kane, only in theaters March 14th. At Desjardins, we speak business. We speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans. We've mastered made to measure growthmeasure growth and expansion advice. And we can talk your ear off about transferring your business when the time comes. Because at Desjardins Business, we speak the same language you do. Business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardins

today. We'd love to talk. Business. We'd love to talk business. Welcome to the Rest is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. I'm David McCloskey. And this is an emergency pod. We're doing a special, aren't we, David? That's right. We've got the Rest is classified, siren blaring above us. For those not watching, it's silent. The bat signal has gone out to look at this subject of intelligence sharing with Ukraine

because it's in the news at the moment and we thought it's worth taking a look at this a kind of rest is classified look, not necessarily chasing today's headline, but trying to understand what lies behind those headlines when it comes to the intelligence side of the relationship. Because David, the reports are that your country, the United States may have paused, whatever that means, its intelligence sharing with Ukraine. Yeah, Gordon. So I think we'll get into this, but we should sort of set the table here that this is, of course, a very fast moving story that will doubtless

change even over the course of the next day or so. So we're going into this, I think, trying to help listeners understand maybe the mechanics of what the U.S.-Ukraine intelligence sharing relationship looks like and why is it important for the U. the US and Ukraine? How much does it really matter? What impact does it have on the battlefield? Questions like that. But we are hearing, as you mentioned, Gordon, that John Radcliffe, the CIA director, actually

provided a statement to the press today, basically saying, I'm looking at it now in quite kind of vague terms, that there's a pause on military and intelligence support to Ukraine. Essentially, it seems until, and a bit reading between the lines here, until President Trump feels that President Zelensky of Ukraine sort of committed himself to the sort of peace process that Trump himself is trying to sort of facilitate and broker. That's right. And it sounds like, I mean, we should say we're recording this on Wednesday evening, things are moving fast, and they could change quickly, because it sounds like this pause has been in place already. We'd already heard about the pause in military supplies to Ukraine in the last couple of days.

It also obviously comes after last Friday's dramatic Oval Office meeting between the two presidents which led to that breakdown of relations. I think there is that sense that this could change quite fast, that the pause could be unpaused if relations improve. We might come a bit to what's going on with that and some of the diplomacy and the way intelligence is being used maybe a bit later. But it's probably worth talking a bit about what that intelligence might be. And I guess the first thing to say is, in line with the title of our podcast, the rest is classified to some extent because the exact details of what the intelligence sharing is are classified.

But I do think we have some sense, don't we David, about both what it is and how important it is from a lot of material that we've seen over the last few years. Yeah, certainly. And I mean, there have been a number of pieces, including one last year done by the New York Times on how the US-Ukraine intelligence sharing relationship

sort of been built and deepened over the past decade that I would definitely commend to listeners because they do give some of this kind of granular detail which can be quite rare when you're talking about security relationship between two spy agencies, but we have some sense from this reporting on What exactly this relationship looks like. And I think, you know, it's probably worth just kind of listing out what sort of forms the Intel sharing relationship between CIA and Ukraine. And, you know, this has developed, as I said,

over the past decade and it's gotten a lot deeper, of course, over the past few years, but listeners should not think that this relationship is the creation of the invasion in 2022, right? This is a relationship that I think really goes back to 2014 when Viktor Yanukovych, the prior president of Ukraine, fled. The security agencies that he left agencies that he left sort of in in place in Ukraine were, I think, in CIA's estimation, basically rotten with Russian agents and spies and just compromised, right? And sort of a reflection of this ebb and flow that Ukrainian politics had

taken up to that point over like really the past 25 years of, you know, history going back to the end of the Cold War, where you had pro Russian factions in the politics, you had pro Western factions in the politics. And so the intel agencies were sort of whipsawed between these. And so CIA didn't really have effective partners. And that starts to change in 2014. And so what the CIA starts to do is, they provide things right off the get go that are to change in 2014. And so what the CIA starts to do is they provide things right

off the get-go that are non-lethal in those years. And this is, of course, you read these articles, tremendous amount of consternation on the part of the Ukrainians at these limitations. But in that second half of the second Obama administration, you had the CIA providing secure communications gear, conducting training, paramilitary training kind of in one category, and then kind of regular, I guess, Intel collection training. How do you conduct human intelligence operations? How do you manage the tradecraft and denied environments?

So nothing that's really designed to be lethal. But of course, you know, behind the scenes, the Ukrainians can, for example, use paramilitary training that they're being trained in and defensive techniques to sort of conduct offensive operations if they want to. So there's this sort of beginning groundswell that's like technical equipment and training that starts about 10 years ago when Putin takes Crimea. And then it grows over time. And by the time you get to the period just before the invasion, the US is supplying quite a lot of intelligence to Ukraine,

partly to persuade it that the Russian invasion in February 2022 is going to happen. I should say, we're working on a series on the invasion of what happened in February 22, which will come out in a few weeks or a month or so, which is going to look into that in a bit more detail. And what you see there is very detailed intelligence, including in some cases, tactical intelligence being shared with the Ukrainians. So yes, you see this kind of trajectory of an ever-closening intelligence relationship until you get to this point where we might have a pause on it now. And it's interesting, you talk a lot about the CIA's role and the paramilitary training, but from my understanding, a lot of what's been important for the Ukrainians in the last couple of years has actually been more of the technical intelligence,

the stuff that's coming from satellite imagery and other forms of collection that the US particularly can do and provide them with kind of battlefield assistance out there. And someone said to me, you know, there are these things that only the US can basically do, you know, that no other country, including the UK, actually has the kind of technical collection capabilities the US has to combine satellite imagery with things like launch detection imagery of when Russian

missiles are being launched or moved to bases or Russian bombers are being launched or moved to bases. That kind of really intense technical intelligence has been vital for the Ukrainians in order to help them know when a Russian bombing raid is on its way so that they can put out air alerts or know where a particular Russian troop formation is building up or a Russian command and control center is so that then they can go and bomb it. Look, I think from the standpoint of, okay, so how should you as a listener here construct a mental model of what this relationship looks like? There is one piece of this, which is the outgrowth of the past 10 years of cooperation that in some respects, in particular, if the pause is not particularly

long lived, probably doesn't matter all that much practically on the ground. I mean, of course, there's the broader question around sort of trust and the politics of the relationship and all of that. But if you put that aside for a second, units that have been trained, well maybe the training cycle has been quote unquote pause right now. But if it's paused for 48 hours, 72 hours, two weeks, it probably doesn't matter all that much, right? Technical equipment, combo gear that's been provided, that's already been provided, right? The CIA has sort of financed the construction of a string of bases along the Russian border

inside Ukraine that basically serve as SIGINT collection platforms. Signals intelligence, yeah. That kind of stuff, that infrastructure. My sense on this pause is that that is in Ukraine. The Ukrainians jointly run that with CIA and in fact, probably most of the personnel there are Ukrainian, so that stuff is probably still operating. probably most of the personnel there are Ukrainian. So that stuff is probably still operating. So there's a cluster of kind of jointly constructed stuff or things that have already

been provided that, of course, the pause probably has very little impact on. But as you mentioned, Gordon, there are streams of data, be they from satellites, drones, US-funded and centric signals intelligence platforms run by the NSA that are not directly run by the Ukrainians or with the Ukrainians. All of that information together is, I think, the critical piece here because the pause affects that. And interestingly enough, unlike the military equipment, the dial you turn on these streams of information is pretty immediate. If you're a Ukrainian operator of like a high Mars rocket system, and you were getting coordinates from the US, or getting stuff from the US that confirmed your coordinates two days ago, you might not be getting that right now. Yeah. And that that means you effectively can't launch those highmars, which

are the very effective rockets that they were firing. But I mean, to take one more example, there was a lot of debate about the use of the British Storm Shadow missile, which had been provided to the Ukrainians by the Brits, and this question about where they could fire it. Could they fire it, for instance, into Russia to hit Russian troop formations, commander controls, bunkers, arms depots in Russia? And the problem partly came that Britain

didn't have, if you like, the ability to decide on its own what the Ukrainians could do. Well, why? Because actually, even those missiles, the targeting data they require to skim along the surface, find out where to go. The mapping data they relied on was American intelligence. So without the kind of go ahead from the US. That's being cleared by us to release to the Ukrainians through you effectively. To fire a British missile that the Brits had given to the Ukrainians. So even a British missile system given to the Ukrainians often relied on US intelligence data and mapping data, which they needed to fire it. So you can see with some of those kind of technically complex systems,

the intelligence sharing is actually integral to their use. And then on the other hand, just the kind of ability to know where the Russians are and what they're planning and where they're moving. That's the kind of intelligence which the US I think has been vital in giving the Ukrainians. And you kind of intelligence which the US, I think, has been vital in giving the Ukrainians. You hear stories, hard to validate them, but when you hear about a Russian general being killed by a Ukrainian drone or a Ukrainian missile, the question has always been, was that based on US targeting and US intelligence data that have been supplied to the Ukrainians? Obviously, people won't confirm that, but that's the kind of level of really

tactical intelligence that I think the US has been supplying and why if it is paused for any lengthy period, I think that does start to degrade the Ukrainians' ability to fight as effectively as before. There's basically two lines of uncertainty. One One is how long will this pause go on, right? And if it goes on for about a day or two or three or a week, you know, I think you'd probably have to say the actual battlefield effect would be pretty limited. So that's one is sort of the duration. I mean, the second one is, well, which of these streams are truly being cut off? Because in some of the reporting, it makes it sound like the data that the US is passing to Ukraine that enables the Ukrainians to strike or to conduct lethal operations against Russians in Russian occupied parts of Ukraine, that that tap is still going

and that this is more about preventing the Ukrainians from having targeting information to hit inside Russia. So there's a sort of scope question here of how much of it is actually being cut off, and really hear the devil's in the details, right? Because if it's long range stuff inside Russia, again, you'd say, well, with the Ukrainians sort of on the back foot here, maybe reliant on those kind of strikes to continue generating pressure, it could have a very significant impact if this goes on for too long.

I think you're right that there is a bit of confusion about exactly the extent to this, whether it's just targeting inside Russia. But worth saying the Ukrainians are having a pretty fierce fight at the moment with the Russians inside Russia in the Kursk region, where they kind of went into last summer, or whether it's a much more broader pause on the intelligence. So just before we came on, I did get hold of someone in Kiev, in Ukraine, who's kind of well connected in that world. I was kind of interested to hear his reaction and he wasn't kind of jumping up and down

in panic. He said, let's wait a few days. His thought was, this is all part of the pressure being put on President Zelensky, you know, to come back to the table. The fact this was public was also part of that pressure. It comes after the military aid. And that already, as I said, we're recording this Wednesday evening, you know, some of the atmospherics have changed between the Trump White House and President Zelensky, you know, President Zelensky reached out on Tuesday and said, we need to talk and President Trump kind of reciprocated in the State of the Union.

So I think there is that possibility that this is a kind of negotiating tactic, which may have already served its worth. But you're right, you know, a lot will depend on the longer term impact and how long it goes on for. And make a couple of points here just about the nature of these types of liaison relationships between spy agencies. I mean, one is that these security relationships are always subordinate to the politics. They can be used. And I mean, I

think the history of this one is a great case in point where because they, by definition happen happen out of public eye for the most part, they are a way for two nations, two groups to sort of build trust kind of slowly and in secret over a shared goal over time. But at the end of the day, it's the political masters who decide the rules. And it's not a case of sort of the tail of the intelligence community or CIA wagging the dog here. I mean, the political masters decide the extent of the sharing, the extent of the relationship, what the red lines are. I mean, prior to 2022, there were pretty stringent red lines on what sort of support the CIA could provide

and a lot of kind of consternation on the part of the Obama administration and the Trump administration when the Ukrainians would conduct lethal operations with units that had been trained by the CIA or to create sort of any sense that the CIA was participating in these kind of lethal operations. My sense, and I'm reading between the lines here, was that there was not a sort of lethal finding in place to enable the CIA to participate in operations where, you know, Russian generals or whomever would be targeted, right, in Crimea or other occupied parts of Ukraine or certainly inside Russia. That changed with the invasion and the Obama administration. So the politics really kind of decide everything, right? And the other bit of this, which is, I think, really critical because we're talking all the

time in these conversations about what the US provides to Ukraine. Intel-sharing relationships are two-way streets, ultimately. They don't always have to be equal. And in fact, they rarely will be. But the Ukrainians have provided really, really helpful information back to us on Russia, on Russian weapons systems, including a lot of the, you know, sort of tech specifications on things like nuclear submarines, which they had collected. The Ukrainians were the ones who provided some of the intercepts that allowed CIA to make the call that had been pro-Russian partisans

that downed Malaysian airlines flight. And the Ukrainians also provided some information on the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency, actually, you know, trying to meddle in the US election in 2016. And some of the CIA officials who have not gone on the record, but who have been quoted anonymously in the press over the past decade would say that the value of the information the Ukrainians have provided is worth billions and would say that the liaison relationship with the Ukrainians and with the HUR, the sort of

military intelligence piece of their security apparatus in particular, is like second only to the liaison relationship with SIS, with the Brits. So it's a really, really important, and now at this point deep, liaison relationship that's gone on for a long time and been really mutually beneficial to both sides. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think the Ukrainians, I think, have been aware of some of their dependencies on the US, though. And I mean, you can see them worrying about the reliance, some it's slightly different from intelligence, but on Starlink, you know, because of links to Elon Musk, and so looking for alternatives. So they've been looking for ways to avoid being

overreliant. And I think their ability to collect with drones and to spot Russian troops with drones, they've certainly pushed that forward. So I think they've tried to reduce some of their dependencies, but I still think there are some absolutely critical capabilities which they can't replicate if they don't get from the US and will have an effect on the battlefield. It's interesting because this is also coming on the heels of the equally potentially contradictory and vague reports, citing rumors about the CIA or sort of the US intelligence community more broadly, and DOD at the Pentagon halting or pausing offensive cyber operations against

Russia, right? And again, a similar situation here where what particular operations have been paused, have they actually been paused, in what stage are the operations that are affected? There's all these still kind of questions that are still out there, but it does seem like there is some rumblings here around the US turning some dials

in order to facilitate this deal between Russia and Ukraine. Yeah, I mean, I found that very interesting. This talk was, it was quite specific that US Cyber Command had paused some of its offensive operations against Russia. So US Cyber Command, we should say is the kind of military bit part of the DoD linked to the National Security Agency, which does intelligence, but which carries out offensive cyber operations. And it had

been a specific pause on what they do. Now, the kinds of things they do is if, for instance, the US was to see a Russian hacking team planning a cyber attack on either Ukraine or on the United States or a ransomware attack or trying to interfere with an election, then US cyber commands might go and actually interfere with that attack and try and degrade their systems, take them down, carry a preemptive target. It's kind of tussling with the Russians in cyberspace. So it's not a pause on defending against Russian attacks, but something different. And it is interesting because, again, once you get into the details of it, some people have suggested that actually that's also something which does happen when a country is looking

towards opening negotiations with another country. It slightly pulls back on the more offensive operations it might be carrying out in the intelligence space because you're trying to avoid scuppering the diplomacy. It's not necessarily, I think, a sign that the US is, if you like, disarming against Russia, which some people took it as, although some people might worry that if that pause continues a bit like the Ukrainian intelligence pause, that it would have that consequence. But I think it's more of a signal, again, back to the fact that all of this is feeding into that political track and the diplomatic track in which the US and the Trump White House is trying to drive Ukraine to the negotiating

table and also not really drive Russia to the negotiating table, but signal to the Russians or at least avoid upsetting the Russians in order to get them to the negotiating table. So I think the way we should see all of this is part of that attempt, whatever you think about it, whatever we think about the morality or the efficacy of doing this, but that seems to be the strategy behind these different pauses all happening at the same time. Another point I guess I would make about these kind of liaison relationships in general is that even if they've gone on for a very long time, even if there is a significant measure of trust between the key personalities involved. And I think in this case,

there's a group of CIA officers now who would have cycled in and out of Kyiv station, who would have been probably forward deployed to some of these bases in Ukraine, who would have spent much of the last decade engaged in not just professional sort of work with the Ukrainian security services, but who would have become genuine friends with them, right, and really connected with them on a very personal level. Despite all of that, these relationships are part of a very transactional exchange based relationship, right? Like, it is ultimately a trade. And there is a precedent, unfortunately, for the CIA or the US, I mean, just abandoning these partnerships when the politics changed, right. And so you think about the support for, you know,

Afghanistan, who's hitting on Afghanistan, bingo, exactly, right. Once the Russians are gone, that that support basically goes away until we need to hunt bin Laden. And all of a sudden, we come surging back. Right. So it can be, I think as a human caught up in these kinds of relationships, and I'd imagine a lot of the officers who have served in Kyiv and who have spent a lot of time with Ukrainians over the past decade, probably feeling, looking at this, a real sense of shock and betrayal

at what's going on right now. No, that's right. I mean, because, you know, there are real life consequences for people on the front lines in Ukraine if you're not getting forewarning of what the Russians are doing or you're not able to hit them as hard and therefore they're coming at you. Or if you're in Kiev or another city and you might have Russian drones or missiles heading your way, which you're not getting warning about, real lives are on the state. So I think you're right.

But yes, I mean, it is a little bit murky exactly what this pause is. It's also a little bit murky about how long it might last, but hopefully we've given people a bit of a sense of what might be involved as well as what's at stake and what's behind it. And I guess we'll keep an eye on it. Let's hope we don't have to do one, David, about the pausing of the US-UK intelligence sharing relationship soon, if things get really transactional. You know, we might be looking at some others. I wonder what the Canadian US one is like at the moment,

or some of the others in five eyes. I don't think we're quite at that stage with the US and UK yet, but you never know. Not yet, not yet. Although it would not surprise me, Gordon, if we might have to do one in the not so distant future on those topics. I think we're in that world where we at least

need to consider it. And just a reminder, for those who wish to send questions, comments, feedback, in particular, feedback for Gordon on how he's doing in this podcast or just more generally in life, you can send us a note at the rest is classified at goalhanger.com. That is the rest is classified at goalhanger.com. We will come back to the Russia-Ukraine story though soon, as you mentioned,

Gordon, do a series of episodes on the Intel dynamics and kind of the run-up to this most recent part of the war. And then next week, Gordon, very exciting, we're going to be starting our series on the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs as seen in the movie Oppenheimer, although not the guy you're thinking of. We're gonna cover him and the story of how the Russians stole the secrets and the

plans really for the atomic bomb next week. So please do join us for that. That's right. How to steal an atomic bomb next week. We'll give you the we'll give you some clues. See you next time on The Rest is Classified. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Hi there, Alistair Campbell here from The Rest Is Politics. Alongside my co-host Rory Stewart, we've been covering on an almost daily basis the incredible developments at the top table of global politics between Trump, Putin, Zelensky, Stammer, Macron, Mares, all those fighting to disturb or create a new world order. As part of the show this week, Rory and I broke down the possible outcomes now on the table in the Ukraine conflict. Here's a clip. Let's say we've got three choices. We've got Ukraine tries to fight on alone without any of the US kit. Europe deploys, but it deploys without US backing. Or a third situation, which sounds great on paper, which is US security guarantees. But as

we've just said, Trump is very unlikely to give them. He will completely humiliate Europeans while pretending that he might give them and his guarantees aren't worth the paper they're written on. You need to be serious about the fact that that third option security guarantees very unlikely to happen and start thinking more seriously about what happens in option one and two. So to get our thoughts on what might be happening in the endgame that could shape Europe and the Western world forever, just search the rest is politics wherever you get your podcasts.