David V. Gioe and Michael V. Hayden
“Speak plainly!” Russian President Vladimir Putin snapped at his foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, at a televised security council meeting on the eve of his shambolic full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Naryshkin was visibly nervous. Once he had finally stammered out his support for recognizing the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states—the words Putin was waiting for—he was abruptly told to sit down, like an unprepared pupil flubbing an oral exam. Naryshkin’s apparent ambivalence about embracing Putin’s pretext for the war was likely due to the lack of solid intelligence that Putin’s “special military operation” would return Kyiv to Moscow’s imperial orbit. But rather than air any misgivings, Naryshkin chose compliance and conformity. The intelligence may have been hazy, but the risks of contradicting Putin were clear.
Putin’s unwavering belief that Ukraine would swiftly capitulate represents the greatest intelligence failure of his quarter-century tenure in power. He was furious when his invasion did not unfold as he envisioned, casting blame on and even arresting some senior security officials. But Putin had laid his own trap. Like many authoritarians, he had fostered conditions in which subordinates told him only what he wanted to hear. Intelligence, in its best form, encourages political leaders to ask the right questions, challenge their assumptions, and consider what might go wrong. Although intelligence officers have a professional responsibility to adapt to the interests, foreign policy priorities, and preferred briefing style of the leaders they serve, sometimes the highest form of service an intelligence agency can provide is to disabuse its political masters of a strongly held but false idea.
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