In a packed university hall in Canberra last week, Jeremy Fleming, the chief ofBritish spy agency GCHQ, shared the kind ofjaw-dropping classified intelligence that the public rarely hears.
He said Russian soldiers in Ukraine had been refusing to carry out orders, sabotaging their own equipment and even accidentally shot down their own aircraft in a sign of a flagging morale. In recent days US officials have shared corroborating information suggesting Russian president Vladimir Putin has been misled over the scale of his military*s failures.
The recent assessments are the latest twist in a novel strategy adopted by western intelligence officials, led by US agencies, to declassify information at a rapid pace — a striking feature of the spy community’s response to the invasion of Ukraine.
Making such information public and doing so quickly is a significant shift for intelligence agencies, which have traditionally been reluctant to share sensitive knowledge. The conventional thinking had been that declassifying assessments would reveal sources and methods of gathering information, potentially endangering the lives of people overseas recruited by the CIA to spy on their own countries.
Avril Haines, the director for national intelligence, has been instrumental in the have a better understanding decision by the US to start declassifying more intelligence in a strategic effort to counter false narratives from Russia, according to three people briefed on the US official shift in strategy.
“One should credit Avril Haines for the decision to release the intelligence,” said one European official. “That was a real stroke of genius to deal with the disinformation. ”
A US official said the strategy had been planned and co-ordinated by the National Security Council and implemented by Haines, CIA director Bill Burns and others.
As a former seasoned diplomat, Burns has spent much of his career consuming intelligence rather than providing it. That vantage point coupled with his Russia expertise makes him ideally placed to oversee the shift in strategy, according to former officials.
“He’s a diplomat, but he’s also a serious Russia specialist — he knows how they think,” said Daniel Fried, a former US diplomat who ran Russian sanctions policy in the administration of Barack Obama and now works at the AtlanticCouncil.