\n<\/p>\n
Nestled in a dense forest, the Ukrainian military base appears abandoned and destroyed, its command center a burned-out husk, a casualty of a Russian missile barrage early in the war.<\/p>\n
But that is above ground.<\/p>\n
Not far away, a discreet passageway descends to a subterranean bunker where teams of Ukrainian soldiers track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on conversations between Russian commanders. On one screen, a red line followed the route of an explosive drone threading through Russian air defenses from a point in central Ukraine to a target in the Russian city of Rostov.<\/p>\n
The underground bunker, built to replace the destroyed command center in the months after Russia\u2019s invasion, is a secret nerve center of Ukraine\u2019s military.<\/p>\n
There is also one more secret: The base is almost fully financed, and partly equipped, by the C.I.A.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cOne hundred and ten percent,\u201d Gen. Serhii Dvoretskiy, a top intelligence commander, said in an interview at the base.<\/p>\n
Now entering the third year of a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, the intelligence partnership between Washington and Kyiv is a linchpin of Ukraine\u2019s ability to defend itself. The C.I.A. and other American intelligence agencies provide intelligence for targeted missile strikes, track Russian troop movements and help support spy networks.<\/p>\n
But the partnership is no wartime creation, nor is Ukraine the only beneficiary.<\/p>\n
It took root a decade ago, coming together in fits and starts under three very different U.S. presidents, pushed forward by key individuals who often took daring risks. It has transformed Ukraine, whose intelligence agencies were long seen as thoroughly compromised by Russia, into one of Washington\u2019s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The listening post in the Ukrainian forest is part of a C.I.A.-supported network of spy bases constructed in the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border. Before the war, the Ukrainians proved themselves to the Americans by collecting intercepts that helped prove Russia\u2019s involvement in the 2014 downing<\/a> of a commercial jetliner, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The Ukrainians also helped the Americans go after the Russian operatives who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Around 2016, the C.I.A. began training an elite Ukrainian commando force \u2014 known as Unit 2245 \u2014 which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that C.I.A. technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow\u2019s encryption systems. (One officer in the unit was Kyrylo Budanov, now the general leading Ukraine\u2019s military intelligence.)<\/p>\n And the C.I.A. also helped train a new generation of Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, across Europe, and in Cuba and other places where the Russians have a large presence.<\/p>\n The relationship is so ingrained that C.I.A. officers remained at a remote location in western Ukraine when the Biden administration evacuated U.S. personnel in the weeks before Russia invaded in February 2022. During the invasion, the officers relayed critical intelligence, including where Russia was planning strikes and which weapons systems they would use.<\/p>\n \u201cWithout them, there would have been no way for us to resist the Russians, or to beat them,\u201d said Ivan Bakanov, who was then head of Ukraine\u2019s domestic intelligence agency, the S.B.U.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The details of this intelligence partnership, many of which are being disclosed by The New York Times for the first time, have been a closely guarded secret for a decade.<\/p>\n In more than 200 interviews, current and former officials in Ukraine, the United States and Europe described a partnership that nearly foundered from mutual distrust before it steadily expanded, turning Ukraine into an intelligence-gathering hub that intercepted more Russian communications than the C.I.A. station in Kyiv could initially handle. Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence and matters of sensitive diplomacy.<\/p>\n Now these intelligence networks are more important than ever, as Russia is on the offensive and Ukraine is more dependent on sabotage and long-range missile strikes that require spies far behind enemy lines. And they are increasingly at risk: If Republicans in Congress end military funding to Kyiv, the C.I.A. may have to scale back.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n To try to reassure Ukrainian leaders, William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, made a secret visit to Ukraine last Thursday, his 10th visit since the invasion.<\/p>\n From the outset, a shared adversary \u2014 President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia \u2014 brought the C.I.A. and its Ukrainian partners together. Obsessed with \u201closing\u201d Ukraine to the West, Mr. Putin had regularly interfered in Ukraine\u2019s political system, handpicking leaders he believed would keep Ukraine within Russia\u2019s orbit, yet each time it backfired, driving protesters into the streets.<\/p>\n Mr. Putin has long blamed Western intelligence agencies for manipulating Kyiv and sowing anti-Russia sentiment in Ukraine.<\/p>\n Toward the end of 2021, according to a senior European official, Mr. Putin was weighing whether to launch his full-scale invasion when he met with the head of one of Russia\u2019s main spy services, who told him that the C.I.A., together with Britain\u2019s MI6, were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Moscow.<\/p>\n But the Times investigation found that Mr. Putin and his advisers misread a critical dynamic. The C.I.A. didn\u2019t push its way into Ukraine. U.S. officials were often reluctant to fully engage, fearing that Ukrainian officials could not be trusted, and worrying about provoking the Kremlin.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Yet a tight circle of Ukrainian intelligence officials assiduously courted the C.I.A. and gradually made themselves vital to the Americans. In 2015, Gen. Valeriy Kondratiuk, then Ukraine\u2019s head of military intelligence, arrived at a meeting with the C.I.A.\u2019s deputy station chief and without warning handed over a stack of top-secret files.<\/p>\n That initial tranche contained secrets about the Russian Navy\u2019s Northern Fleet, including detailed information about the latest Russian nuclear submarine designs. Before long, teams of C.I.A. officers were regularly leaving his office with backpacks full of documents.<\/p>\n \u201cWe understood that we needed to create the conditions of trust,\u201d General Kondratiuk said.<\/p>\n As the partnership deepened after 2016, the Ukrainians became impatient with what they considered Washington\u2019s undue caution, and began staging assassinations and other lethal operations, which violated the terms the White House thought the Ukrainians had agreed to. Infuriated, officials in Washington threatened to cut off support, but they never did.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe relationships only got stronger and stronger because both sides saw value in it, and the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv \u2014 our station there, the operation out of Ukraine \u2014 became the best source of information, signals and everything else, on Russia,\u201d said a former senior American official. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t get enough of it.\u201d<\/p>\n This is the untold story of how it all happened.<\/p>\n The C.I.A.\u2019s partnership in Ukraine can be traced back to two phone calls on the night of Feb. 24, 2014, eight years to the day before Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion.<\/p>\n Millions of Ukrainians had just overrun the country\u2019s pro-Kremlin government and the president, Viktor Yanukovych, and his spy chiefs had fled<\/a> to Russia. In the tumult, a fragile pro-Western government quickly took power.<\/p>\n The government\u2019s new spy chief, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, arrived at the headquarters of the domestic intelligence agency and found a pile of smoldering documents in the courtyard. Inside, many of the computers had been wiped or were infected with Russian malware.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was empty. No lights. No leadership. Nobody was there,\u201d Mr. Nalyvaichenko said in an interview.<\/p>\n He went to an office and called the C.I.A. station chief and the local head of MI6. It was near midnight but he summoned them to the building, asked for help in rebuilding the agency from the ground up, and proposed a three-way partnership. \u201cThat\u2019s how it all started,\u201d Mr. Nalyvaichenko said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The situation quickly became more dangerous. Mr. Putin seized<\/a> Crimea. His agents fomented<\/a> separatist rebellions that would become a war in the country\u2019s east. Ukraine was on war footing, and Mr. Nalyvaichenko appealed to the C.I.A. for overhead imagery and other intelligence to help defend its territory.<\/p>\n With violence escalating, an unmarked U.S. government plane touched down at an airport in Kyiv carrying John O. Brennan, then the director of the C.I.A. He told Mr. Nalyvaichenko that the C.I.A. was interested in developing a relationship but only at a pace the agency was comfortable with, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.<\/p>\n To the C.I.A., the unknown question was how long Mr. Nalyvaichenko and the pro-Western government would be around. The C.I.A. had been burned before in Ukraine.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine gained independence and then veered between competing political forces: those that wanted to remain close to Moscow and those that wanted to align with the West. During a previous stint as spy chief, Mr. Nalyvaichenko started a similar partnership with the C.I.A., which dissolved when the country swung back toward Russia.<\/p>\n Now Mr. Brennan explained that to unlock C.I.A. assistance the Ukrainians had to prove that they could provide intelligence of value to the Americans. They also needed to purge Russian spies; the domestic spy agency, the S.B.U., was riddled with them. (Case in point: The Russians quickly learned about Mr. Brennan\u2019s supposedly secret visit. The Kremlin\u2019s propaganda outlets published a photoshopped image of the C.I.A. director wearing a clown wig and makeup.)<\/p>\n Mr. Brennan returned to Washington, where advisers to President Barack Obama were deeply concerned about provoking Moscow. The White House crafted secret rules that infuriated the Ukrainians and that some inside the C.I.A. thought of as handcuffs. The rules barred intelligence agencies from providing any support to Ukraine that could be \u201creasonably expected\u201d to have lethal consequences.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The result was a delicate balancing act. The C.I.A. was supposed to strengthen Ukraine\u2019s intelligence agencies without provoking the Russians. The red lines were never precisely clear, which created a persistent tension in the partnership.<\/p>\n In Kyiv, Mr. Nalyvaichenko picked a longtime aide, General Kondratiuk, to serve as head of counterintelligence, and they created a new paramilitary unit that was deployed behind enemy lines to conduct operations and gather intelligence that the C.I.A. or MI6 would not provide to them.<\/p>\n Known as the Fifth Directorate, this unit would be filled with officers born after Ukraine gained independence.<\/p>\n \u201cThey had no connection with Russia,\u201d General Kondratiuk said. \u201cThey didn\u2019t even know what the Soviet Union was.\u201d<\/p>\n That summer, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, blew up in midair<\/a> and crashed in eastern Ukraine, killing nearly 300 passengers and crew. The Fifth Directorate produced telephone intercepts and other intelligence within hours of the crash that quickly placed responsibility on Russian-backed separatists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The C.I.A. was impressed, and made its first meaningful commitment by providing secure communications gear and specialized training to members of the Fifth Directorate and two other elite units.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Ukrainians wanted fish and we, for policy reasons, couldn\u2019t deliver that fish,\u201d said a former U.S. official, referring to intelligence that could help them battle the Russians. \u201cBut we were happy to teach them how to fish and deliver fly-fishing equipment.\u201d<\/p>\n In the summer of 2015, Ukraine\u2019s president, Petro Poroshenko, shook up the domestic service and installed an ally to replace Mr. Nalyvaichenko, the C.I.A.\u2019s trusted partner. But the change created an opportunity elsewhere.<\/p>\n In the reshuffle, General Kondratiuk was appointed as the head of the country\u2019s military intelligence agency, known as the HUR, where years earlier he had started his career. It would be an early example of how personal ties, more than policy shifts, would deepen the C.I.A.\u2019s involvement in Ukraine. <\/p>\n Unlike the domestic agency, the HUR had the authority to collect intelligence outside the country, including in Russia. But the Americans had seen little value in cultivating the agency because it wasn\u2019t producing any intelligence of value on the Russians \u2014 and because it was seen as a bastion of Russian sympathizers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Trying to build trust, General Kondratiuk arranged a meeting with his American counterpart at the Defense Intelligence Agency and handed over a stack of secret Russian documents. But senior D.I.A. officials were suspicious and discouraged building closer ties.<\/p>\n The general needed to find a more willing partner.<\/p>\n Months earlier, while still with the domestic agency, General Kondratiuk visited the C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va. In those meetings, he met a C.I.A. officer with a jolly demeanor and a bushy beard who had been tapped to become the next station chief in Kyiv.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After a long day of meetings, the C.I.A. took General Kondratiuk to a Washington Capitals hockey match, where he and the incoming station chief sat in a luxury box and loudly booed Alex Ovechkin, the team\u2019s star player from Russia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The station chief had not yet arrived when General Kondratiuk handed over to the C.I.A. the secret documents about the Russian Navy. \u201cThere\u2019s more where this came from,\u201d he promised, and the documents were sent off to analysts in Langley.<\/p>\n The analysts concluded the documents were authentic, and after the station chief arrived in Kyiv, the C.I.A. became General Kondratiuk\u2019s primary partner.<\/p>\n General Kondratiuk knew he needed the C.I.A. to strengthen his own agency. The C.I.A. thought the general might be able to help Langley, too. It struggled to recruit spies inside Russia because its case officers were under heavy surveillance.<\/p>\n \u201cFor a Russian, allowing oneself to be recruited by an American is to commit the absolute, ultimate in treachery and treason,\u201d General Kondratiuk said. \u201cBut for a Russian to be recruited by a Ukrainian, it\u2019s just friends talking over a beer.\u201d<\/p>\n The new station chief began regularly visiting General Kondratiuk, whose office was decorated with an aquarium where yellow and blue fish \u2014 the national colors of Ukraine \u2014 swam circles around a model of a sunken Russian submarine. The two men became close, which drove the relationship between the two agencies, and the Ukrainians gave the new station chief an affectionate nickname: Santa Claus.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In January 2016, General Kondratiuk flew to Washington for meetings at Scattergood, an estate on the C.I.A. campus in Virginia where the agency often fetes visiting dignitaries. The agency agreed to help the HUR modernize, and to improve its ability to intercept Russian military communications. In exchange, General Kondratiuk agreed to share all of the raw intelligence with the Americans.<\/p>\n Now the partnership was real.<\/p>\n Today, the narrow road leading to the secret base is framed by minefields, seeded as a line of defense in the weeks after Russia\u2019s invasion. The Russian missiles that hit the base had seemingly shut it down, but just weeks later the Ukrainians returned.<\/p>\n With money and equipment provided by the C.I.A., crews under General Dvoretskiy\u2019s command began to rebuild, but underground. To avoid detection, they only worked at night and when Russian spy satellites were not overhead. Workers also parked their cars a distance away from the construction site.<\/p>\n In the bunker, General Dvoretskiy pointed to communications equipment and large computer servers, some of which were financed by the C.I.A. He said his teams were using the base to hack into the Russian military\u2019s secure communications networks.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the thing that breaks into satellites and decodes secret conversations,\u201d General Dvoretskiy told a Times journalist on a tour, adding that they were hacking into spy satellites from China and Belarus, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Another officer placed two recently produced maps on a table, as evidence of how Ukraine is tracking Russian activity around the world.<\/p>\n The first showed the overhead routes of Russian spy satellites traveling over central Ukraine. The second showed how Russian spy satellites are passing over strategic military installations \u2014 including a nuclear weapons facility \u2014 in the eastern and central United States.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The C.I.A. began sending equipment in 2016, after the pivotal meeting at Scattergood, General Dvoretskiy said, providing encrypted radios and devices for intercepting secret enemy communications.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Beyond the base, the C.I.A. also oversaw a training program, carried out in two European cities, to teach Ukrainian intelligence officers how to convincingly assume fake personas and steal secrets in Russia and other countries that are adept at rooting out spies. The program was called Operation Goldfish, which derived from a joke about a Russian-speaking goldfish who offers two Estonians wishes in exchange for its freedom.<\/p>\n The punchline was that one of the Estonians bashed the fish\u2019s head with a rock, explaining that anything speaking Russian could not be trusted.<\/p>\n The Operation Goldfish officers were soon deployed to 12 newly-built, forward operating bases constructed along the Russian border. From each base, General Kondratiuk said, the Ukrainian officers ran networks of agents who gathered intelligence inside Russia.<\/p>\n C.I.A. officers installed equipment at the bases to help gather intelligence and also identified some of the most skilled Ukrainian graduates of the Operation Goldfish program, working with them to approach potential Russian sources. These graduates then trained sleeper agents on Ukrainian territory meant to launch guerrilla operations in case of occupation.<\/p>\n It can often take years for the C.I.A. to develop enough trust in a foreign agency to begin conducting joint operations. With the Ukrainians it had taken less than six months. The new partnership started producing so much raw intelligence about Russia that it had to be shipped to Langley for processing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But the C.I.A. did have red lines. It wouldn\u2019t help the Ukrainians conduct offensive lethal operations.<\/p>\n \u201cWe made a distinction between intelligence collection operations and things that go boom,\u201d a former senior U.S. official said.<\/p>\n It was a distinction that grated on the Ukrainians.<\/p>\n First, General Kondratiuk was annoyed when the Americans refused to provide satellite images from inside Russia. Soon after, he requested C.I.A. assistance in planning a clandestine mission to send HUR commandos into Russia to plant explosive devices at train depots used by the Russian military. If the Russian military sought to take more Ukrainian territory, Ukrainians could detonate the explosives to slow the Russian advance.<\/p>\n When the station chief briefed his superiors, they \u201clost their minds,\u201d as one former official put it. Mr. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, called General Kondratiuk to make certain that mission was canceled and that Ukraine abided by the red lines forbidding lethal operations.<\/p>\n General Kondratiuk canceled the mission, but he also took a different lesson. \u201cGoing forward, we worked to not have discussions about these things with your guys,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Late that summer, Ukrainian spies discovered that Russian forces were deploying attack helicopters at an airfield on the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula, possibly to stage a surprise attack.<\/p>\n General Kondratiuk decided to send a team into Crimea to plant explosives at the airfield so they could be detonated if Russia moved to attack.<\/p>\n This time, he didn\u2019t ask the C.I.A. for permission. He turned to Unit 2245, the commando force that received specialized military training from the C.I.A.\u2019s elite paramilitary group, known as the Ground Department. The intent of the training was to teach defensive techniques, but C.I.A. officers understood that without their knowledge the Ukrainians could use the same techniques in offensive lethal operations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n At the time, the future head of Ukraine\u2019s military intelligence agency, General Budanov, was a rising star in Unit 2245. He was known for daring operations behind enemy lines and had deep ties to the C.I.A. The agency had trained him and also taken the extraordinary step of sending him for rehabilitation to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland after he was shot in the right arm during fighting in the Donbas.<\/p>\n Disguised in Russian uniforms, then-Lt. Col. Budanov led commandos across a narrow gulf in inflatable speedboats, landing at night in Crimea.<\/p>\n But an elite Russian commando unit was waiting for them. The Ukrainians fought back, killing several Russian fighters, including the son of a general, before retreating to the shoreline, plunging into the sea and swimming for hours to Ukrainian-controlled territory.<\/p>\n It was a disaster. In a public address, President Putin accused the Ukrainians of plotting a terrorist attack and promised to avenge the deaths of the Russian fighters.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no doubt that we will not let these things pass,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In Washington, the Obama White House was livid. Joseph R. Biden Jr., then the vice president and a champion of assistance to Ukraine, called Ukraine\u2019s president to angrily complain.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt causes a gigantic problem,\u201d Mr. Biden said in the call, a recording of which was leaked and published online. \u201cAll I\u2019m telling you as a friend is that my making arguments here is a hell of a lot harder now.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of Mr. Obama\u2019s advisers wanted to shut the C.I.A. program down, but Mr. Brennan persuaded them that doing so would be self-defeating, given the relationship was starting to produce intelligence on the Russians as the C.I.A. was investigating Russian election meddling.<\/p>\n Mr. Brennan got on the phone with General Kondratiuk to again emphasize the red lines.<\/p>\n The general was upset. \u201cThis is our country,\u201d he responded, according to a colleague. \u201cIt\u2019s our war, and we\u2019ve got to fight.\u201d<\/p>\n The blowback from Washington cost General Kondratiuk his job. But Ukraine didn\u2019t back down.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n One day after General Kondratiuk was removed, a mysterious explosion in the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, ripped through an elevator carrying a senior Russian separatist commander named Arsen Pavlov, known by his nom de guerre, Motorola.<\/p>\n The C.I.A. soon learned that the assassins were members of the Fifth Directorate, the spy group that received C.I.A. training. Ukraine\u2019s domestic intelligence agency had even handed out commemorative patches to those involved, each one stitched with the word \u201cLift,\u201d the British term for an elevator.<\/p>\n Again, some of Mr. Obama\u2019s advisers were furious, but they were lame ducks \u2014 the presidential election pitting Donald J. Trump against Hillary Rodham Clinton was three weeks away \u2014 and the assassinations continued.<\/p>\n A team of Ukrainian agents set up an unmanned, shoulder-fired rocket launcher in a building in the occupied territories. It was directly across from the office of a rebel commander named Mikhail Tolstykh, better known as Givi. Using a remote trigger, they fired the launcher as soon as Givi entered his office, killing him, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.<\/p>\n A shadow war was now in overdrive. The Russians used a car bomb to assassinate the head of Unit 2245, the elite Ukrainian commando force. The commander, Col. Maksim Shapoval, was on his way to meeting with C.I.A. officers in Kyiv when his car exploded.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n At the colonel\u2019s wake, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, stood in mourning beside the C.I.A. station chief. Later, C.I.A. officers and their Ukrainian counterparts toasted Colonel Shapoval with whiskey shots.<\/p>\n \u201cFor all of us,\u201d General Kondratiuk said, \u201cit was a blow.\u201d<\/p>\n The election of Mr. Trump in November 2016 put the Ukrainians and their C.I.A. partners on edge.<\/p>\n Mr. Trump praised Mr. Putin and dismissed Russia\u2019s role in election interference. He was suspicious of Ukraine and later tried to pressure its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate his Democratic rival, Mr. Biden, resulting in Mr. Trump\u2019s first impeachment.<\/p>\n But whatever Mr. Trump said and did, his administration often went in the other direction. This is because Mr. Trump had put Russia hawks in key positions, including Mike Pompeo as C.I.A. director and John Bolton as national security adviser. They visited Kyiv to underline their full support for the secret partnership, which expanded to include more specialized training programs and the building of additional secret bases.<\/p>\n The base in the forest grew to include a new command center and barracks, and swelled from 80 to 800 Ukrainian intelligence officers. Preventing Russia from interfering in future U.S. elections was a top C.I.A. priority during this period, and Ukrainian and American intelligence officers joined forces to probe the computer systems of Russia\u2019s intelligence agencies to identify operatives trying to manipulate voters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In one joint operation, a HUR team duped an officer from Russia\u2019s military intelligence service into providing information that allowed the C.I.A. to connect Russia\u2019s government to the so-called Fancy Bear hacking group, which had been linked to election interference efforts in a number of countries.<\/p>\n General Budanov, whom Mr. Zelensky tapped to lead the HUR in 2020, said of the partnership: \u201cIt only strengthened. It grew systematically. The cooperation expanded to additional spheres and became more large-scale.\u201d<\/p>\n The relationship was so successful that the C.I.A. wanted to replicate it with other European intelligence services that shared a focus in countering Russia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The head of Russia House, the C.I.A. department overseeing operations against Russia, organized a secret meeting at The Hague. There, representatives from the C.I.A., Britain\u2019s MI6, the HUR, the Dutch service (a critical intelligence ally) and other agencies agreed to start pooling together more of their intelligence on Russia.<\/p>\n The result was a secret coalition against Russia \u2014 and the Ukrainians were vital members of it.<\/p>\n In March 2021, the Russian military started massing troops along the border with Ukraine. As the months passed, and more troops encircled the country, the question was whether Mr. Putin was making a feint or preparing for war.<\/p>\nA Cautious Beginning<\/h2>\n
A Secret Santa<\/h2>\n
Operation Goldfish<\/h2>\n
\u2018This is Our Country\u2019<\/h2>\n
Tiptoeing Around Trump<\/h2>\n
March to War<\/h2>\n