B8 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MARCH 27 , 2022
strength of the Soviets. Today, it looks as
though the CIA’s spies have been gathering
intelligence from inside the Kremlin to gain
insights about Putin’s intentions. Odds are
that someone in his inner circle is helping.
How else would they know what Putin was
thinking? A KGB man to the marrow of his
bones, he is “a master at manipulating infor-
mation, suppressing information, and creat-
ing pseudo-information,” as Fiona Hill and
Clifford Gaddy wrote in “Mr. Putin: Operative
in the Kremlin,” originally published in 2013.
“Putin has spent a great deal of time in his
professional life bending the truth, manipu-
lating facts, and playing with fictions,” they
wrote. “He is also, we conclude, not always
able to distinguish one from the other.”
As Washington’s best Kremlinologist, Hill
was senior director for Russian and European
affairs on President Trump’s National Security
Council staff. She testified in his first impeach-
ment, on the charge that he extorted Ukraine’s
president, withholding deliveries of Javelin
antitank weapons by first demanding “a
favor” — dirt on Joe Biden. Hill directly
accused Republicans of abetting Putin’s long
war against American democracy. “Some of
you on this committee appear to believe that
Russia and its security services did not con-
duct a campaign against our country — and
that perhaps, somehow, for some reason,
Ukraine did,” she testified. “This is a fictional
narrative that has been perpetrated and prop-
agated by the Russian security services them-
selves.”
The first American to bear witness against
the Kremlin’s lies was George Kennan, who
died in 2005 at the age of 101. Kennan was in
charge of the American embassy in Moscow in
February 1946 when he wrote “The Long
Telegram,” still the most famous dispatch in
the history of U.S. diplomacy. Every member
of the newly emerging national-security es-
tablishment absorbed it, and Stalin, thanks to
his spies, read it, too. So should you.
“The very disrespect of Russians for objec-
tive truth—indeed, their disbelief in its exis-
tence—leads them to view all stated facts as
instruments for furtherance of one ulterior
purpose or another,” Kennan wrote. The Rus-
sians conducted their affairs on two levels: the
public domain of policy and diplomacy, and
the secret world of espionage and subversion.
They were “impervious to the logic of reason”
but “highly sensitive to the logic of force” —
not tanks and troops but American political
warfare designed to thwart the Kremlin’s
dreams of glory. Kennan later defined political
warfare as “all the means at a nation’s com-
mand, short of war, to achieve its national
objectives.” He was the intellectual author of
the Marshall Plan to rebuild war-torn Europe
and, to his sorrow later in life, the man who
conceived that the newborn CIA should use
covert operations, including “the encourage-
ment of underground resistance,” in the fight
against the Kremlin.
That realm of American intelligence is a
dirty and dangerous business. When it fails, as
it so often did, people die. But the fate of
Ukraine — and Putin himself — may depend
on its success.28 MONDAY | 7 P.M. Tracy Deonn’s “Legendborn” is
discussed at YA Fantasy Book Club streamed
through Lost City Books at lostcitybookstore.com.
Free.
29 TUESDAY | 6 P.M. Eric Gapstur discusses “Sort of
Super” with Jeff Kinney streamed through An
Unlikely Story at anunlikelystory.com/event. Free.
7 P.M. Sherry Harris and Libby Klein discuss their
cozy mysteries streamed through One More Page at
onemorepagebooks.com/event and in person at One
More Page Books, 2200 N. Westmoreland St., #101.
Arlington. Free. 70 3-300-9 74 6.7 P.M. Andrew Holleran’s “Dancer from the Dance”
is discussed at LGBTQIA Book Club streamed
through Lost City Books at lostcitybookstore.com.
Free.
31 THURSDAY | 6 P.M. Struggle Magazine launches
its premier issue of the new D.C. literary publication
at Big Bear Cafe, 1700 First St. NW. $20.7 P.M. Jenna Bush Hager discusses “Everything
Beautiful in Its Time: Seasons of Love and Loss”
streamed through Sixth and I at sixthandi.org and
also in person at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, 600 I
St. NW. $23-$32. (202) 408-3100.
8:30 P.M. Lisa Scottoline discusses “What
Happened to the Bennetts” streamed through Book
Passage at bookpassage.com. Free.
For more literary events, go to wapo.st/literarycalLITERARY CALENDAR
March 27 - 31Book WorldWashington Post Paperback Bestsellers
COURTESY OF THE AMERICAN BOOKSELLERS ASSOCIATIONFICTION1 KLARA AND THE SUN (Vintage, $16.95). By Kazuo
Ishiguro. Solar-powered robot Klara, an Artificial
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betrayal on an inhospitable planet.21984 (Signet, $9.99). By George Orwell. The classic
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Knowing that mankind will destroy itself, prescient
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galactic empire to preserve all knowledge.Rankings reflect sales for the week ended Mar. 20. The charts may not be
reproduced without permission from the American Booksellers Association, the
trade association for independent bookstores in the United States, and
indiebound.org. Copyright 2022 American Booksellers Association. (The
bestseller lists alternate between hardcover and paperback each week.) Bestsellers at washingtonpost.com/booksTim Weiner’s most recent book is “The Folly and
the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare
1945-2020.” He is working on a history of the 21st-
century CIA.Essential reading for
understanding U.S.-Russia
intelligence warfare
HISTORY REVIEW BY TIM WEINER
SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS
On J une 28, 2019, President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin walked to participate in the “family photo” at the G20
summit in Osaka, Japan. During a meeting on the sidelines, Trump grinned and said, “Don’t meddle in the election.” Putin was smiling.
tion: How does a secret intelligence service
exist in an open democratic society? Powers
wrote in the aftermath of the 1975 Church
Committee hearings, which exposed the CIA’s
most egregious cold-war covert actions. Sen.
Frank Church (D-Idaho) famously described
the CIA as “a rogue elephant,” trampling
people and nations, running coups, spying on
Americans, installing dictators and plotting to
kill leaders like Fidel Castro. Powers dared to
ask: Who do you think gave those
orders? Who wanted Castro dead?
Presidents did. The CIA took the fall.
Powers also observed that the Cold
War conduct of the CIA presented a
problem for the United States: “What
sort of people are we? What do we
stand for?” We might ask the same
about the secret prisons and interro-
gation by torture in the war on terror-
ism. But the CIA’s blows against Putin
— and the transparent way in which
secrets have been wielded as political
weapons — make clear that intelli-
gence can also serve as a force for
democracy.
The spilling of the CIA’s secrets was
a godsend for the KGB chief, Yuri
Andropov, who led the Soviet spy
service from 1967 to 1982. Long before
Putin monkey-wrenched the 2016 U.S.
presidential election to help Donald Trump,
Andropov created a huge department of disin-
formation, which found that Americans (and
the world) could be persuaded to believe
anything. The CIA killed JFK! America has
seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca! The U.S.
Army invented AIDS! Putin, Andropov’s KGB
acolyte, built on that foundation in launching
the war on Ukraine, creating fake videos of
atrocities against Russians, false-flag attacks,
phony reports of Ukrainian nukes and bio-
weapons, and much more.
Andropov, the Soviet leader from 1982 to
1984, became convinced that President Ron-
ald Reagan was preparing to fight and win
World War III in those years. Robert M. Gates
— then the CIA’s chief intelligence analyst,
later the agency’s director and a 21st-century
secretary of defense — knew that the United
States was far too close to the brink. His 1996
memoir, “From the Shadows: The Ultimate
Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How
They Won the Cold War,” covers 30 years of
American apprehensions and misapprehen-
sions of the Soviet threat. Looking back, we
now know that neither side ever saw the other
clearly. A career Soviet analyst, Gates had
never set foot on Russian soil until the Cold
War was coming to a close. (“It was nice to see
it from the ground,” he deadpanned at the
time.) Our spy satellites had been counting
their missiles but not the potatoes rotting in
the field for want of fuel to take them to
market, and so the CIA overestimated the trueV
ladimir Putin is waging war against the
West. He’s been doing it for many years.
You might call it World War Z, after the
letter emblazoned on Russian military vehi-
cles invading Ukraine. Russians write the
letter Z as 3.
This war will not be won or lost with
missiles and tanks alone. Armed forces live or
die by virtue of intelligence. They depend on it
to know their enemies, to see them coming, to
shape their strategies for battle, and
to try to win the hearts and minds of
friends and foes alike. The United
States and Russia have waged an
intelligence war for 75 years. And U.S.
intelligence — its abilities to antici-
pate and counter the Russian presi-
dent’s moves, to call out his lies, to
penetrate the walls of the Kremlin —
is an essential element in the fight for
Ukraine.
Now American spies and intelli-
gence analysts have struck blows
against Putin’s dreams of empire.
The Central Intelligence Agency gave
the White House and the State De-
partment the power to expose Putin’s
plans to use disinformation as pre-
texts for war. The preemptive strikes
defused Russian lies and propa-
ganda, shaping the battlefield in
Ukraine and strengthening the will of the
West. And U.S. intelligence has been providing
covert support to Ukraine ever since Putin
launched his first war against the nation eight
years ago.
It’s the latest struggle in the political
warfare that has raged between the United
States and Russia since the CIA’s creation in
- We catch glimpses of that conflict when a
turncoat is caught spying or when intelligence
succeeds or fails spectacularly. But it takes
time for the smoke to clear and the picture to
become visible. To begin to understand the
attack that Putin has levied on the United
States and its allies, and the American re-
sponse to his attack on Ukraine, it’s crucial to
know the history of the CIA and to gain insight
into Putin himself. Along with the reporting
from the battlefront, arm yourself with a short
stack of books.
In 1979, Thomas Powers published “The
Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms
and the CIA,” which remains the best book
ever written about the agency. (I say this
advisedly, having written one myself.) Present
at its creation, Helms led the CIA under
Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M.
Nixon, when the United States’ spies went
head-to-head against their enemies in Asia,
Europe, the Americas and, finally, in Washing-
ton. Nixon fired him for refusing to help cover
up the Watergate break-in.
The genius of the book is its painstaking
examination of a uniquely American ques-