The Rest Is Classified - 31. Putin’s War: The Secret Plot to Invade Ukraine (Ep 1)

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

How did western intelligence services learn of Putin's plan to invade Ukraine? 2021 is drawing to a close and the CIA is becoming increasingly concerned that Putin is going to invade Ukraine. He's made it clear he sees it as part of Russia and so Bill Burns, CIA director, is going to be sent out to Moscow in a desperate attempt to dissuade him. Listen as Gordon and David break down the run up to the war and CIA attempts to stop it. ------------------- 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

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We still believe that Russia is poised to go much further in launching a massive military attack against Ukraine. Hope we're wrong about that, but Russia has only escalated its threat against the rest of Ukrainian territory, including major cities and including the capital city of Kiev. There are still well over 150,000 Russian troops surrounding Ukraine. Russia has moved supplies of blood and medical equipment into position on their border. You don't need blood unless you plan on starting a war. None of us should be fooled. None of us will be fooled. There is no justification. Further, Russian assault into Ukraine remains a severe threat in the days ahead, None of us should be fooled. None of us will be fooled. There is no justification.

Further Russian assault into Ukraine remains a severe threat in the days ahead. And if Russia proceeds, it is Russia and Russia alone that bears the responsibility. Well welcome to the Rest is Classified. I'm not Joe Biden. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera. That was a very eloquent Joe Biden. If he'd been that eloquent during the election campaign, he might've won it actually.

Yes, yes indeed. Joe Biden could only hope for my, you know, sort of oratorical skills. That was former president Biden speaking just two days, Gordon, before Russia's invasion of Ukraine back in February of 2022. And the story that we're going to tell today and over the next few episodes is the story of kind of the, I guess you'd call it the rest is classifieds take on the Intel picture that really drove and shaped so much of the run up to that war and the opening battles of that conflict in many respects. That's right, David.

I mean, this is one of the defining stories of our times. I mean, it's a conflict, a war that has reshaped European security, global security, changed transatlantic relations forever. A few years ago, I think the idea of a land war in Europe, of tanks, artillery, millions of refugees, scenes that look like something out of World War II would have been unimaginable. I just don't think anyone could comprehend that that might happen. The fact people couldn't comprehend it is part of the story I think we're going to be talking about in these episodes, but it is what we've been living with for the last few years. And we are going to look at not the whole of the war, not the negotiations today that are going

back and forth over it, but really at this specific issue of the intelligence around the war, the intelligence in the run-up to the war and the way American, British, but also Ukrainian and Russian intelligence kind of dealt with that period and how they tried to shape outcomes, in some cases successfully, in some cases less successfully. I was really hoping that we were going to start this with Ukrainian and Russian history in about the 10th century, Gordon. But I was disturbed to find in this document, which we'll use for much of our conversation, that you actually just want to start in October of 2021. Is that right?

That is a disturbingly short view, Gordon. Come now. If you want to hear the long view, I think you can go to the rest is history, because I think our colleagues there did take take which takes you back to 10th century Kiev and Rus and Volodymyr and all the various other things that were going on to do with Vikings. There is that if people want it. Yeah, we love a good cross promote here. So go go listen to those on the rest is history. But we're much more just in the recent the recent story. I think that's right. We're much more just in the recent story. I think that's right. So, this story though starts in the fall of 2021, right? Which is a few months before the proper invasion.

And like all good, I guess, spy stories or many good spy stories, this one starts in the Oval Office. October 2021 and it's a meeting in the Oval Office. President Biden is there. He sat in his traditional armchair by the fireplace where I guess you get briefed when there's big news by all your officials and around him are his top intelligence security military officials. And he's receiving some pretty grim news because they are saying that the intelligence that they've built up shows that Russia is planning to attack Ukraine at some point in the coming months. Now, General Mark Milley, who's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has got maps. He's going to put those up on an easel in front of the resolute desk in the Oval Office

to kind of explain how it might unfold. And Biden, from the account, seems like he is genuinely shocked by this. Is this for real? Do you think this is for real, Biden asks? And the answer from all his spies, his military chiefs is yes. And Avril Haines, who's the director of national intelligence, is one of those at the meeting and she says later, within the intelligence community itself, there'd also been this kind of scepticism.

Is this really for real? And the policymakers also were going to just ask, Is this really for real? And the policymakers also, we're going to just ask, can this actually be possible that Russia could be contemplating something so significant? But the spies have been watching this picture evolve over the last couple of months and they've become very confident about it. Now, it's worth saying that there'd been a buildup by the Russian military that spring, in the spring of 2021, where people had thought, hey, is there something happening here because Russian troops are heading towards the border? But nothing had happened that time.

There'd almost been like a false start, as it were, I guess, that made it seem more plausible that this was just more of the same. So I guess that's what you're bound to ask is, is this just an exercise? Is it going to be the same? Is it a bluff or is it really going to be something different? Over that summer of 2021, the spies become convinced it is going to be a full-scale invasion from multiple directions by Russia and not just a limited attack. Something really ambitious. The attempt to topple the government in Kiev, take the capital, install a puppet government. The parallels here are perhaps what the Soviet Union did in 1968 when it crushed the Prague

Spring in Czechoslovakia when there'd been a kind of liberal reforming government in the Soviet bloc, which it was unhappy with, and it sent the tanks in, crushed it, removed the leaders, or creating a kind of puppet government a bit like the Nazis did in Vichy France. When you put in your own people into an occupied country to run it, it's something that ambitious, but it does seem crazy to everyone, doesn't it? It does seem crazy. And also, Ukraine is monstrous. It's the size of Texas.

It's got a population of almost 50 million people. If you put yourself in the shoes of President Biden or any of the kind of senior advisors who were in this Oval Office meeting in October of 2021, you kind of look at this and you say, can't possibly think you'll conquer a country that size with the forces you're massing on the border, right? You have to have some pretty interesting assumptions underlying your planning process to think that you can do that with the forces that the Russians were massing on the border in the fall of 2021. That's right. I like the comparison you make that it's the size of Texas. I prefer the idea it's twice the size of the UK, I think is a better comparison.

It's a better comparison, but everything gets compared to Texas. Ukraine and Texas are both two UKs. That's the proper conversion. Which I'm quite surprised at actually that Texas, anyway, that's a sidebar. So I guess the question is, why are they so confident? Unsurprisingly, perhaps, even though we're the rest is classified, the exact sources of intelligence are not clear to us. I think even if we did know exactly what they were, we probably wouldn't say. Gordon might say. I wouldn't say.

Yeah, the journalist in me might. But I think there are things we do know about it, actually, and which have come out. It's multiple sources. There's satellite imagery. There are intercepts. There's human sources. There are kind of indicators. And you heard President Biden in the bit you read at the start talking about blood supplies moving to the border. Blood supplies, crematoria, things which are indicators that this is more than just a regular exercise. Although I guess you could assume at that point that it's all part of a bluff.

You would move mobile crematorium, you'd move blood supplies and hope that the other side sees it and to demonstrate that, oh, this is for real guys. You could still analytically, I think, get to a place where you say, oh, this is a bluff. So I think there is more to it than that. And I think what's clear is that they got in the intelligence community, very specific operational intelligence, which came from the very top in Moscow, suggesting that there was a plan and an intention. Of course, this isn't something which came from, for instance, intercepting the orders going down to the troops because the troops don't know about it yet at this point.

We can discuss what we think that might be, but it does seem to be something they got from the very top and from the heart of Moscow where they were getting that kind of intelligence and the confidence that they were planning it. Even in that October meeting in the Oval, the accounts of that and in particular what Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs briefed, it is exceptionally specific briefed, it is exceptionally specific operational information, essentially on the Russian battle plan, like down to a pretty granular level. It suggested to me a bit reading through the lines of the reporting that the CIA had gotten its hands on documents and that the Russians had produced and

that were being distributed among a very small group of Russian officials that laid this out. We don't know, but it felt that way from the information that Milley was briefing. Yeah, I noticed you immediately give credit to your former employers at the CIA. I'm using it as a catch-all for the United States intelligence community, Gordon. Are you, you are about to do something. I know what you're about to do. I'm about to say that my guess, it's an educated guess, let's put it in those, in those terms, that it's more likely to be intercepted communications and intercepts.

Oh, I thought you were going to credit the Brits. The Brits. No, no, no. It's not, so cynical of you to think that, But I think it's more likely to be access to some high-level communications. I'm not sure that's the only source of it. I mean, I do remember speaking to someone, and I think it was an American who said to me that the UK had intelligence on specific areas and the US did, and it was a kind of family operation was the way they put it, which also suggests to me the way GCHQ and NSA work together the kind of joint signals collection. So we should say we don't know and if we did know for sure we're not giving anything away. No, we're speculating. Yeah, we're speculating but I think what's clear I guess the central point is it's really insightful intelligence which gives them high confidence about what's going to happen. I would also add that, and by the way, I wasn't saying on the plan that that was necessarily

taken by a human source. I fully agree with you that the source for that could have been signals intercepts in which somebody is sort of describing this plan to somebody else on the phone or over email, secure email, fax line, whatever it might be, right? The other bit of it that it seems like must have been part of this to get all of these people in the Oval essentially delivering a high confidence assessment that this is on the table for Putin. There would have to be some high level plan and intention, right? You'd have to have something

from somebody with direct access to Putin, who's saying, he's seriously considering this, or he's made up his mind, and it's just a matter of when some flavor of those things. So I guess the question is, why would Russia? Why would Putin specifically want to do this? And I guess, again, the the context is important, isn't it? Because in July 2021, so a few months earlier, Putin had published this 5000 word essay, which I'm sure you've read. I actually have read it, Gordon. Have you really? Not for this.

Yes, I read it in researching my second novel. I did read that there. I was being cynical. I know here you were and I've laid a trap for you. I have read it. And it's pretty wild. I did read that. I was being cynical. I know here you were and I've laid a trap for you. I have read it and it's pretty wild. I mean, I do find it fascinating that the president of a massive country that covers like one eighth of the world's land surface spent time writing a 5,000 word essay. We should say it's called On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians. The clue is to his thinking is in the title, isn't it? Which is essentially he sees Ukraine as part of Russia. He sees the two as one,

effectively meaning Ukraine is subservient to Russia. Your point about the fact he wrote the essay, I think part of the answer is COVID, isn't it? We all did strange things in lockdown. I baked a lot of banana bread and you know, and learned how to do things like that. But Putin, you know, writes an essay in his isolation. And I think he was particularly isolated. You know, he was paranoid about his his health and he continued to be. And he spends his time, it seems with history books and archives, looking at the past of Russia and coming up with this narrative that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, part of a single historical and, as he sees it, kind of spiritual space. And, crucially, that others have sought to tear them apart, particularly Western forces who are trying to turn Ukraine into a springboard in his mind to attack Russia.

It is fascinating, because I mean, so Gordon Carrera is baking banana bread. Other people are drinking too much and screaming at their children. Vladimir Putin is basically sitting alone, like behind long tables, coming to deeply historical, I guess, arguably ahistorical conclusions about the non-existence of the gigantic Texas sized country sitting next to him. It's probably the most disastrous covid lockdown story that we have, right? Because there is almost a straight line from his isolation in covid to this invasion. It's actually not that crazy to say that, I don't think.

You know, he comes to power at the turn of the century. So he's been in power for over 20 years. And you definitely get a sense of a man who is thinking about his legacy at that moment in his isolation. He wants to be a great leader. I think his image is not so much, you know, Stalin or Lenin or these communist leaders, but a great Tsar like Peter the Great. And these are people who expanded Russia and its borders, not people who let what he sees as part of Russia slip away. And in this vision, he has really of a kind of greater Russia in his mind, Ukraine is a central part of it.

Well, that's right. And Gordon, the backstory here is that Ukraine had been a part of the Soviet Union, right? It's a separate republic from Russia. And it gets independence, and I maybe should use kind to say that for most of its history up until maybe the first 25 years of its sort of post-independence history from the 90s up to 2014, there is this kind of ebb and flow of Russian influence over the politics of Ukraine. And maybe the trend line over that time, and this is what's so concerning to Putin,

is that the pro-Russian politicians in Kiev are sort of increasingly losing their grip and their influence as more and more Ukrainians look west toward Europe. That seems to have dramatically affected his sort of psychology. Yeah, that's right. An important bit of that history is that in 2014, you had a pro-Russian government which is toppled by people power and protests. And at that point, Putin seizes the Crimea Peninsula and starts a conflict in the east of Ukraine, the region known as the Donbass, Luhansk and Donetsk, which have populations more sympathetic to Russia. So that's a kind of

conflict which is going on all these years. But I think at this point, as you get into 2022 or 21, 22, Putin is seeing a closing window to act before Ukraine, in his mind, gets too close to the West. He thinks Ukraine is divided. It's got a new president. We'll come back to him later. Vladimir Zelensky, he's a former comedian, which is perhaps why Putin is so dismissive of him. Also, I do think it's important that Putin sees this window to act because he also thinks the US is distracted. He thinks the US

administrations are more interested in China. They've signaled that that's their priority. China. They've signaled that that's their priority. And I do think that the Afghan withdrawal in the summer of 2021, that disastrous moment when the US leaves Kabul and the Taliban take over the country does play a role in that. And I know people in the intelligence community who do believe that, because it was read, I think, in Moscow as a sign that President Biden wasn't willing to put his troops on the line. He wanted to kind of withdraw from some of these conflicts. And people on Russian TV are going around and saying, well, Washington will abandon its puppets in Ukraine, as they did in Afghanistan, to their supporters there, to whatever comes. So there is this sense that Putin feels he's got the

upper hand, he's modernized his military, he's got big cash reserves, he thinks the Europeans are dependent on his gas. So he thinks this is the moment, you know, this is perhaps even, he thinks his last moment to take Ukraine and make it his and of course, he doesn't really care what the Ukrainian people think. It's about what he thinks and about Russia. They don't exist, right? No, they don't have any agency in this. Yeah. Well, and I guess two other data points on sort of the European side that are probably factoring in one is Angela Merkel's stepping down, right? And Macron, I believe that point is sort of involved in kind of a nasty re-election fight, right? And so if you're Putin and you're sort of putting these pieces together, and again, Russian Intel doesn't have a great

analytic function in general. So you think about CIA, you think about SIS in Britain, you think about your joint intelligence community that sort of puts this stuff together. There are analytical components in most Western intelligence services that will most of the time speak truth to power and write things for political leaders that the political leaders may not want to hear. Russian Intel on the analytics side, and in particular, I'm talking about like the SVR, the foreign intelligence service, the GRU, military intelligence, both have this external basing function, right? The analytic side is not great. And so I think that if you're Putin, getting to sort of a

bunch of really faulty assumptions underlying your assessment, there's not going to be an outside check on this from the SVR, right? They's not going to be an outside check on this from the SVR, right? They're not going to put a report in front of you that says, well, look, the Afghan withdrawal was a disaster. But by the way, given all the covert action work that we, the CIA had done in Ukraine since 2014, you might come to the conclusion that, well, we're actually going to double down if you go in. He's probably not getting that stuff, right? There's an element of groupthink here that's probably embedded in the decision making. Yeah.

I think his spies are going to tell him, yeah, the Ukrainians are weak, they're divided. It's going to be straightforward. It's similar, I think, to the way Stalin, again, used to get raw intelligence rather than assessed intelligence. People didn't feed up to him the truth. And even when he did get the truth, like that Hitler was going to invade the Soviet Union, he didn't believe it. And I think it's the same problem of that kind of isolated figure that you have with with Putin here. So for all those reasons, I think we have a sense that he believes this is his moment to act. And at this point, the US seems to have worked that one out. So, should we take a break there? And then

we'll come back and see how the US acts on that intelligence afterwards. I'm David Oleshogga, historian and broadcaster. And I'm Sarah Churchwell, author, journalist and academic. And together, we are hosts of Goalhanger's latest podcast, Journey Through Time. We're going to be looking at hidden social histories behind famous chapters from the past. Asking what it was like to have lived through prohibition or to have been there on the ground during the Great Fire of London. We'll be uncovering all of that. And we'll have characters and stories that have been totally forgotten but shouldn't have been. This week, we're looking at a terror attack

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It takes a flim-flammer to catch a flim-flammer. Houdini wanted the world to see reason in an age of spiritualism. He went undercover to seances, exposed fakes and charlatans, and even tried to convince Washington lawmakers to ban mediums for good. Well, welcome back. It is October of 2021 and, Gordon, U.S. and British intelligence are coming to the view that Putin is going to do this. He is going to invade Ukraine. Confidence is high that Putin is sort of assembling all of the pieces that he is going to need

to conduct this invasion. And that October briefing in the Oval Office that we had let off this episode with, and the people who were there basically say that the picture, this intelligence picture, is absolutely shocking. And it becomes this question of not can he do it, right? But I think this is the first kind of critical question here with respect to the intelligence is,

is there a way to deter him from actually taking this step? Yeah, that's right. It's interesting, because President Biden also sets out that he wants to try and deter Putin. But he also says he doesn't want to risk World War Three. So he makes clear sensible. That's a sensible idea. Although we'll come back to that. But his priorities, he doesn't want the US to get sucked into a kind of direct shooting war with Russia, which could escalate all the way because of course Russia has nukes as we know from our Klaus Fuchs episodes, which have just gone out. Thanks to Klaus and others, to be fair.

The long shadow of Klaus Fuchs hangs over yet another Rest is Classified series. That's right. Biden effectively, by making that really clear, also signals that the US is not going to bluff, if you like, that it's going to get involved directly in confronting Russia militarily if Russia does go in. So the US does take something off the table there. Now, it would have been a bluff because the US doesn't want to get into a shooting war or a nuclear war with Russia. And you can argue that that is sensible not to bluff with something as serious as that. But Putin is quite happy to bluff with the nuclear card or at least to play the nuclear card. But that is something that

President Biden makes clear to his team right at the start. So instead, he's going to try and deter and dissuade President Putin by warning him of the consequences. And for that, he turns to the CIA. And so one man, Bill Burns, who you know a bit, I guess. I do. Yes. Director of the CIA at the time, an interesting guy, former diplomat, wasn't he? Now he was Biden's CIA director through the whole term. And so he is now former CIA director.

And he gave, you know, sort of round of interviews as he was departing that office. And one of my favorites is he gave one to David Ignatius of the Washington Post. And Ignatius described Bill Burns, he said, you know, the head of the OSS, the sort of World War Two swashbuckling predecessor of the CIA was Wild Bill Donovan. And he called Bill Burns, mild Bill, because he is a sort of deeply respected diplomat and negotiator, a very tough guy, but he is kind of self-effacing, kind of normal guy, very tall, I would say, gray hair, which I believe he credits Vladimir Putin for because he spent much of his adult life negotiating with Russians and Putin in particular. He's got a great mustache, a minus mustache.

It's not a Tom Selleck mustache, but it's good. And he was the ambassador to Moscow in the early 2000s. And so has sort of direct interaction with Putin over 20 plus years. He also has a PhD from Oxford, so he must be smart. He has a PhD from Oxford. I guess he played on the men's basketball team. Is that right? Oxford does Oxford have a good basketball team?

What is that? What's the status of Oxford's basketball situation? I don't think it's kind of like a US college. So I'm not quite sure if that's as prestigious as it sounds, but I still think he's kind of into it. And he's big into college basketball. That's a big thing of his. He's obviously the right person because he's a CIA director, but he's also a diplomat, and he knows Putin personally and all these people personally. So you can see why he's

absolutely the right man at that moment. And President Biden says, I want you to go to Moscow, I want you to deliver this message. We have a bit of an account of this fascinating visit. It comes from someone called John Sullivan, who was the US ambassador to Moscow at the time and who's written a memoir, Midnight in Moscow, where he's in Washington actually at the time that Burns is being sent out. So the two fly out together on Sunday, October the 31st. It's Halloween, of course. So Sullivan can remember driving to Andrews Air Force Base and the Halloween kids are

out as he's leaving on the streets, which adds, I think, to the atmosphere that something spooky is going on. John Sullivan went on the entire flight dressed as a pirate. He's in his pirate outfit. Yeah, in his pirate outfit. It sounds like a CIA plane, a kind of private jet. You used to fly in that all the time. Yeah, exactly.

I had one sort of ready to go all the time. You know, flying, in particular the CIA director flying, it's kind of an interesting little world of the CIA that you don't really see as an analyst, but I've been fortunate enough to learn more about it actually since leaving. And so what's interesting is you think about the CIA director flying, and I believe it's pictured this way in most films. You think of it as like a Gulfstream,

like a G6 or G7 plane, like private jet. The reality is those planes would be vulnerable to tail spotters. Matching that consistent plane, that tail flying, it would be tracked as the CIA director's plane, not something you want. So the CIA does have some Gulf streams on contract that they'll use inside the continental United States

if the CIA director's traveling. But for international travel, a CIA director flies on a C-17 sort of military transport plane and because it's a rotating cast of planes that are used when they're not being flown by the CIA director, they're being used for other purposes. The CIA has a secure trailer, almost like an Airstream, which is nicknamed the Winnebago. And that secure trailer is dragged into the hull of the C17 and is sort of fitted down. It has kind of business class seats for maybe 20 or so people.

It's got a secure and kind of a open comms pod, right? So the director can work in there on a laptop. The director has a bunk, a chair, a wrap-around table. There's a shower in there. Leon Panetta apparently upgraded the shower situation, so every director since Panetta has been very grateful for that. And then you have outside of the Winnebago, a lot of the sort of, you know, strap hangers and other people who are traveling, who are kind of just out there on ordinary seats. Some directors have bolted down exercise equipment outside of the Winnebago so they can bike or row on these long overnight flights. And so

basically what it does is it allows the director, even though apparently the download speed is quite bad, it allows the director to basically fly and stay current on everything in a secure way. And then of course, when the flight's over, they'll just pull the trailer out and the C-17 will go off to something else. So it's kind of an interesting way that these guys or gals in the case of Gina Haspel will

travel. Interesting. I'm sure MI6 have exactly the same setup. But they take this plane, they're supposed to go straight to Moscow, but the weather is really bad. So they actually get diverted to Riga in Latvia and have to spend the night there suddenly without warning, I think the embassy has to accommodate the CIA director in the security detail. Or there would be a ton of people. There'd be like 20, 30, 40 people that you're not

planning to sort of house. So finally, they get to Moscow around midday on the Tuesday. The first meeting for CIA Director Burns is with Nikolai Patrushev, who is the head of Putin's National Security Council. He's no longer but he was then a kind of gaunt looking, slightly skeletal looking, former spy like Putin. He's wearing a cape during the meeting. But he's conspiratorial, paranoid and hard-line. I mean, he's not the kind of guy who looks like a lot of fun. I think he's a serious guy. And they're

escorted into a conference room to wait for him. He enters with a smile. He knows Burns, and he's known him for many years. Patrushev then talks about how terrible the state of relations are between the two countries. Blames it, of course, all on America. It's all the Americans. But then Burns says he's here for a reason. He's here to deliver a message from President Biden about what the US has learned regarding this troop buildup on the Ukrainian borders and that there'll be consequences if Russia follow through. Now, what I think is really interesting is by a few people's accounts and people I've

spoken to, Patrushchev himself may have been surprised that this is what Burns was there to talk about. He thought they were there to talk about the next summit meeting between the two leaders. And it does suggest that he doesn't know what's going on. He's not going to say what troop buildup, but in his head, that seems to be what he's thinking because Ambassador Sullivan says, Patrushev betrayed no visible reaction. He folded his notes, put them to one side and looked Burns directly in the eye while speaking in a firm, confident voice. And he says he explains Russia may not be as powerful as the US economically, but military have been modernized and it was a match for America.

You know, he's kind of bragging, he's kind of confident and saying you can't stop us doing whatever we want to do in our neighborhood. That seems to be the message. I guess at this point, it is also worth mentioning that putting the CIA director in the middle of a negotiation like this, it's not without precedent, right? I mean, George Tenet famously did so in the late nineties in a piece of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, right? So Burns being in the middle of this, I think, has got some historical, historical parallels and he knows all the players. Which helps I think. Weirdly, the small talk as they walk out the door is about volleyball because Patrick Sheva

had been head of the Russian Volleyball Association, which is just kind of weird how you have to have small talk when you've just talked about a massive invasion. But I guess that's what you do. And then Burns is going to go out and meet with a few other kind of senior Russian Intel types, right? The director of the FSB, Alexander Bortnikov and the director of the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin. Yeah, that's right. And he gets the kind of same vibe, I guess, from them, which is that kind of brushing

him off effectively and saying, well, you know, we'll do what we want, but not really taking it seriously. But the next day, crucially, it's Putin. What's interesting is Burns then learns that it won't be in person, that he won't be seeing Putin in person, it's going to be a phone call, because Putin is away. And he is in Sochi, which is the resort on the Black Sea, where the Winter Olympics have been held a few years back and have been rebuilt. And Putin's built himself a kind of palace there, hasn't he?

Yes, nearby in Cape Idacopus. It's on the Black Sea. And I would commend this to all listeners. There is a YouTube documentary done by Alexei Navalny. I think it's called Putin's Palace. And it is all about the layout, the construction of this massive facility on the Black Sea, which I believe, at least at the time, and it probably still is, was the largest residence in Russia.

I had to do some research on this for the second novel, Gordon, and it has a personal ice hockey rink that is sort of embedded into the hillside, like four or five stories beneath the top of the hill. It is astoundingly large and it's got a couple rooms that have, look like lounges, a couple rooms that have stripper poles in them. It's got massive views of the water. It is like a world unto itself. Putin must've really saved his government salary for a very long time to afford the place. Cause I think it was, I think the price tag was over,

well, it might've been over a billion dollars. I needed to check that, but it was a significant price tag on that acreage. Real Bonge villain layer vibes going on. It is kind of, yes. One of the other facts I like is that supposedly he's got rooms which are kitted out looking exactly the same as his offices in the Kremlin in Moscow. So he can kind of be in Sochi and look like he's actually in Moscow to the TV audience who might watch pictures of it.

So they don't know he's actually, he's out there. He's got rooms with long tables, those long tables. He's got a couple couple rooms like that. So they have this conversation that CIA Director Burns says to Putin invading Ukraine would be a mistake. Putin seems to be very matter of fact about the intelligence. He's not shocked by the fact Burns is revealing that he knows about it. He doesn't try and deny it, as you might expect. He's dismissive of Zelensky, says Ukraine is weak and divided. And Burns does what he's there to do. He outlines the fact that if an invasion happens, the consequences will be significant and serious. Particularly, I guess, what they're trying to say is it's going to be different from 2014 when Russia took Crimea.

And when the general view, I have to say, is that the West, the Obama administration, didn't respond toughly enough to that. It was, to some extent, taken by surprise. It was off balance, but it didn't respond that significantly. The message Burns is trying to give, I think, is this time it's going to be different. They're talking about things like cutting Russia off from the swift banking system, significant economic sanctions. That's the message. There's one lovely detail though from John Sullivan's memoir, which is that he says that he must have got this from Burns, that at one point

Putin looks out of the window and he says his spies, Russian spies, tell him that out there in the Black Sea, there's an American warship which could fire missiles and kill him in a few minutes. And he just tells this to Burns. And it's a kind of weird thing to say, but it does, I don't know what it says to you, it suggests a man who is paranoid basically about people out to get him. It is deeply paranoid. I don't expect there's any world in which that's true.

I mean, I suppose at some point there could have been some kind of submersible or whatever that would have been in there. But it's hard to imagine a warship being just out there overlooking his palace. Ready to launch missiles to take him out. Ready to launch missiles at Putin. Yeah, you do wonder where that's coming from.

I mean, it does also beg this question, which I think is a very interesting one, is would there have been anything that the US could have threatened that would have actually deterred him at that point? Because it seems, you know, you think even cutting them off from Swift, because it seems, you know, you think even cutting them off from from swift, deeper financial sanctions, if we believe what Putin says, which is that Russia

and Ukraine are the same. And so therefore, what he's effectively saying is I don't have control over a part of my country, the menu sort of punishments that Burns is traveling with doesn't feel compelling to me. If I'm Putin, I think that's right. If I'm honest, I think it goes back to that point earlier, which is the only thing which might have dissuaded him is the thing that Biden took off the table, which is the threat of war that the US would go in to defend Ukraine itself if Russia attacked it. It's a counterfactual, it's a what if, but if that had been put on the table, it's the definition of a high-risk gambler, isn't it? Because it could be enough to stop Putin

if you say, we will go to war to defend it. A bit like Britain went to war to defend Poland in 1939 or Belgium in 1914. But also, in those two cases, it drew the country into a war. That would have been the high-risk option, I think. You're right that if Putin is so obsessed with But also, in those two cases, it drew the country into a war. That would have been the high risk option, I think. You're right that if Putin is so obsessed with Ukraine, would he have taken that gamble anyway? And then you could have ended up either the US having to go to war, in which case we are potentially into World War Three, or the US showing that it was bluffing and its credibility

being broken. So that's a pretty hard call, you know, I think. But it is, I think, the only alternative path at this point. And we're also left wondering what exactly Putin thinks the US has in terms of its intelligence picture at this point, because it feels very possible to me that Burns went with a more general picture of what they were up to and did a few skips in the old logic train to get to the point of the assessment that says, hey, we know you're going to do this, you need to stop. Or I guess at least able to spin a scenario in which the US actually doesn't have great information on what he's up to

and may in fact only have seen via satellite imagery, the military buildup. I also think he's probably made the calculation even if the US does know about it, they're not going to do anything about it. What does it matter? Yeah. What does it matter because of Afghanistan, because of all these other things? It's interesting because Burns is later asked to, in general terms, assess Putin's mental state. He said that Putin had been stewing at a combustible combination of grievance

and ambition for many years, but described his views as having hardened and that he was more insulated. You can see that Burns is coming away as well from this meeting with the sense this is a Russian leader who has changed. And you do see Putin change over time and who is harder and hard set on doing something about this. That's right. Well, and this is the era, I guess, when Putin was also, he had his face was kind of puffy. And there were the thoughts that he might have some kind of blood condition. He was being treated with steroids, things like that. Because you do have a thread running through this, which is things that had my grandfather been the president

of Russia during lockdown, he might have come up with himself. The crazy letter, sitting there in your palace, looking out the window, talking about American warships, you're spending a lot of time behind long tables, essentially reading stuff from your inner circle that are the equivalent of email forwards of nutty ideas. I mean, the lesson here is that anybody could decide to invade Ukraine if you're isolated enough,

I guess. You start to think it's a good idea. So Burns goes back to Washington. He goes back with a message that the Russians, he thinks, were extremely confident in their ability that if they could take Ukraine. He seems to think that maybe Putin hadn't made the final decision yet, but was pretty much there, and that he thought if Putin wanted to, he could do it. I think crucially, he reports back to Biden, my level of concern has gone up, not down,

having spoken to Putin. Well, and Gordon, maybe there with Bill Burns and the CIA extremely concerned about Putin's intentions and what he might soon do in Ukraine. Let's end it when we come back and pick up the story next time. We will look at what the CIA, what the West does to not just attempt to dissuade Putin, but to prepare Ukraine and others for a war.

We'll see you next time. See you next time. Here's that clip we mentioned earlier on. And gradually what you see in this period is mounting concern over what became called hyphenate Americans, this idea that foreign immigrant communities had divided allegiances. And so there are increasing demands for effectively loyalty tests. And Wilson gives a very famous speech in which he uses a famous phrase, and that's a phrase that you have spent a long time studying, Sarah. And that is to ask whether these Americans who

have loyalties to other nations will, when it comes down to it, whether they will put America first. And that's the phrase, right? America first. It is a phrase that was first popularized in this context in 1915, a year before Black Tom, in a speech that Wilson gave addressing these mounting concerns about hyphenate Americans, about whether they were real Americans or not. And the way that Wilson put it was he said, he demanded that immigrant communities stand up and state explicitly whether, he said, is it America first or is it not? And at that point, America first became an incredibly popular phrase. It basically dominates American political discourse for the next decade. Then it kind of subsided and then it has a resurgence around World War II when it was used to

talk about whether America should enter the Second World War. And then it went into abeyance for a long time until it made a dramatic reappearance in the 21st century, which listeners will be familiar with. If you want to hear the full episode, listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts.