Before Russia’s unprovoked February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the United States and the United Kingdom undertook an aggressive public and private information campaign to attempt to achieve two concurrent objectives. The primary goal was to convince their allies of the threat of Russia’s pending offensive (and to smooth the mobilization of support to Ukraine after the fact) and to a lesser degree a secondary goal was to attempt to deter Moscow from acting. Central to this campaign was the very visible and highly publicized use of intelligence. Indeed, as Dan Drezner wrote in the Washington Post, “The U.S. intelligence community sure has been chatty as of late about what it thinks Russia is doing.”1 The use of intelligence to support policy or diplomatic efforts and to achieve a strategic effect is, in and of itself, not novel. Intelligence is meant to inform policymakers and their decisions.
What was novel was the speed, frequency, and extent to which intelligence was disclosed to the broader public—intelligence which demonstrated significant human or digital penetrations into Russia’s political and military hierarchies, and which was designed to achieve a specific effect. These disclosures also benefited from an unplanned development: the existence of an external third-party validator in the open-source intelligence community. This nascent and maturing field offered a means by which some information, though not all, could be validated in near real-time. Tactical-level activity verified by these communities helped to reinforce Washington’s broader message that policymakers were advancing using sensitive intelligence capabilities.
This use of intelligence, the perceived success of the effort, and the utility of that information will likely lead to an increase in demands both by politicians and the public writ large. This raises new issues and reaffirms preexisting challenges that affect and influence the use of intelligence. In that sense, the Ukraine campaign reflects lessons from past successes while, more importantly, also reflecting the lessons from past failures and offering warnings of risks for the future. Many of these lessons are not new. The need to protect sources and methods; the risk that politicians will selectively use intelligence for political aims; the importance of tailoring messaging to competing and differing audiences; all of these are familiar themes encountered throughout the history of intelligence.
What is perhaps most novel about the use of intelligence in Ukraine, and likely going forward, is that this represents an effort by the United States to recapture the initiative in the information war, which it largely ceded to Russia by omission and commission. This effort brings with it additional policy challenges and new considerations.
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