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60 minutes recently released a big investigation on Havana Syndrome basically saying that the cause is real attacks by Russian intelligence agents and not some sort of psychosocial mass hallucination (which many have believed since these incidents first began to occur). They identify specific Russian agents and link their movements to occurrences of Havana Syndrome aka AHIs (anomalous health incidents). As someone who was unsure about what was going on here this seems pretty convincing: Russians have been using some sort of weapon to target US intelligence personnel.
The culture war angle to this is twofold. First, the US IC has seemed unsure whether these AHIs (which usually take the form of some sort of brain injury) were the result of Russian attacks. If this article is legit then these reporters managed to do a better job than the people we pay and give access to classified information to so that they can find out exactly these sorts of things. This is an enormous failure on the part of US intelligence services, its agents have been getting attacked, many have been forced to medically retire, and the organizations they belong to haven't even been able to determine whether an attack happened at all. To be fair, some organizations seem to have said these were likely attacks, others have said the opposite, so not every organization failed to the same extent in this respect.
The other culture war angle is that if this article is true, Russia has been attacking members of the US intelligence community for a decade. What will be the retaliation for this? US relations with Russia are already pretty bad, but this is quite a big provocation. Russia occupies a spot in the US culture war, I wonder if this will change that position very much. Is Putin still strong and trad? Can he get more reviled by the people who hate him? Most people seem uninterested in/uninformed about spy stuff so maybe this won't really register in the public consciousness.
This isn't as culture-war-y a topic as some, but I think it's interesting.
It is hard to believe that US intelligence is becoming worse. The recent events (Ruso-Ukrainian war, Crocus City Hall shooting) show that is has become better.
It appears that CIA has wide access to online communication worldwide and combined with modern AI technologies that allows to sieve vast amounts of information and find a needle in the haystack. A translator I had known got hired by a US agency couple of years ago. She has never spoken what she does but I suspect that she works on automated translation models for US intelligence. Currently we should assume that communication in any language is equally monitored and analysed.
Also, it hard to believe that if Russians really possessed such technology that many describe as improbable it wouldn't have leaked by now. Even best agents eventually make mistakes.
Russians have been involved in assassination in other countries, like in the UK. But we know that because eventually we found some evidence. It is likely that it could have happened in this case too, especially after repeated attacks in several countries. Unless, of course, CIA knows more about these cases but keep silent.
And third, why would Russians use this technology against targets of low importance instead of someone who really matters?
They missed October 7th, a pretty stunning lapse. They called the Russia-Ukrainian war but then they thought Kiev might fall in 72 hours (as did I tbh) - then they overcorrected and went 'yeah, launch this massive telegraphed armoured thrust into a fortified enemy with air superiority, they'll run and panic'. Then they went back and said 'oh you should've attacked sooner in a more focused direction, been more Western and less Soviet - the defeat had nothing to do with attacking while outnumbered and outgunned'.
Let's not forget the constant fumbling over their own feet on Russiagate. I would've thought it was pretty important to know whether or not Russia was 'interfering' in your elections so you could then provide assurance about what exactly happened. Instead they just spread confusion and distrust all over the place with endless dossiers - confusion and distrust in elections is exactly what Russia wants.
US intelligence is pretty bad in a holistic sense. They have excellent technical capabilities (finding things via satellite for example) but their ability to achieve positive results is poor. Why couldn't the CIA rustle up a countercoup in Niger and keep their huge base there? Why are the Russians of all people making gains in Africa?
Did the US miss October 7th? I thought the emerging narrative is that the Egyptians and Israelis (and therefore certainly the Americans) knew ‘something’ was going to happen, they just didn’t expect it to be as big as it was and as well-planned as it was. Similarly re. Ukraine it seems they overestimated Russian competence rather than underestimating Ukrainian resolve (they predicted an ongoing guerilla campaign which wouldn’t happen if they were unmotivated). That’s a failure, but I guess it’s one they’ve been making since 1945 (arguably since 1917) and is probably better than the reverse.
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Bad/good is different from worse/better. Besides many things you are demanding of them are not of intelligence but executive which belong to a completely different part of the government. I doubt that CIA runs the country. And it is good that they don't.
Intelligence/analysis:
October 7th. Ukraine war. Russiagate.
Executive:
Africa coup/countercoups.
There's more I could add - the FBI for instance has been mobilizing lone wolves, encouraging them to launch terror attacks that could then be foiled. This isn't really productive behaviour.
https://theintercept.com/2015/03/16/howthefbicreatedaterrorist/
US intelligence used to do quite a decent job. Coups and regime change, they got some wins down on the board. They got some high-profile Soviet defectors, funding Solidarity. A fair few failures but a pretty good showing compared to now.
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It's difficult to reason about the competency of US intelligence since both the successes and failures are often hidden.
From first principles, we'd reason that US intelligence is not very competent because they can't effectively recruit high IQ people in comparison to tech, banking, and consulting.
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These guys missed that the Afghan military was 225 000 man smaller than they said when they had thousands of people on the ground.
As for Ukraine I think they massively misscalculated it. Their goal was to provoke Russia to invade and then turn Ukraine into Russia's Iraq war. The idea was sanctions against Russia while Russia is forced to integrate Ukraine's basket case pension system into the Russian system while they have to deal with riots, terrorism and stinger missiles shooting down choppers. Ukraine was supposed to be a repeat of the Soviet-Afghan war. Instead, they have to be the logistics and training for a Ukrainian force 4 times the size of the US Marine Corps including their reserves fighting a high intensity war. Russia didn't collapse and if anything their arms industry is producing at a record pace.
IMO without doing the whole debate again you are making a giant assumption the CIA purposefully tried to provoke Russia into war versus what I believe is a much simpler explanation that Ukraine just wanted to be richer. Poland is at current trajectories will be wealthier than England by 2030. From a cultural orbit for Russia it’s tough for them to keep people in their sphere of influence when they can look at their neighbors house and see it getting wealthier. If the CIA does nothing Ukraine itself would be looking for western connections.
Russia had no issue with Ukraine doing business with the west. It was the west who demanded that Ukraine cuts ties with Russia. An infeasible demand when they had millions of Russians in the country and deep economic ties to Russia. Western intelligence was deeply involved in the 2014 coup. Then our politicians who freak out over "it is ok to be white" had no problem funding people wearing swastikas who wanted to drive panzers into Russian cities while banning the Russian orthodox church and prohibiting the use of the Russian language.
Continuously shelling the Donbass, Merkel outright admitting that they were disingenuous during negotiations in order to buy time to arm Ukraine and building CIA bases right on Russia's border points to the US provoking a war.
As for Ukraine's economy their GDP increased 600% between the year 2000 and 2013. Since joining Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria in being border states to the US empire, their GDP has collapsed by a third over a decade. The polish option was never an option for Ukraine. Poland's export is labour. Poland's birth rate was substantially higher than Ukraine's and they have far more young people to export. Ukraine is demographically a combination of Japan's birth rate and Venezuela's emigration rate. Exporting labour when the demographics are comparable to the collapse of the Roman empire isn't sustainable.
I am sure there are Ukrainians who are fighting thinking that they can become a truck driver in Germany if they join the west but this doesn't account for the overwhelming political support from the west.
I find it hard to believe that the US demanded that Ukraine stops doing business with Russia.
Also, I also don't believe that Poland's main export is labour. It is true that a lot of Polish people were working in other EU countries but now Poland is developing their own industries and getting richer in this way.
Ukraine however remained poorer than Russia, mostly due to its own corruption. Despite all the flaws of the EU, the EU membership has been good for economic development of post-Soviet countries. Ukraine could definitely benefit from the EU membership.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union%E2%80%93Ukraine_Association_Agreement#Trade
This would have turned Russia's biggest trading partner and a deeply integrated part of the Russian economy into a state with the same rules for trade with Russia as EU countries. Effectively the idea was to bribe Ukraine into chosing the west by promising mountains of tax money from northern Europe in exchange for taking an anti Russian stance.
Several million Poles have moved west to work and western European companies are major employers in Europe. It is effectively a wage dumping operation.
Obviously when Ukraine joins the EU, it will be required doing business with Russia in accordance with the EU customs rules.
But that is completely different from the statement that the EU demanded Ukraine stop doing business with Russia.
We need to be precise what we mean to have a meaningful discussion.
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