In the days immediately before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the British and American governments published assessments from their intelligence agencies that war was indeed imminent and that it would involve a full-scale military attack. Their predictions were dismissed as alarmist in some quarters, including in Ukraine itself, but turned out to be correct. So will these same agencies be able to predict what President Putin’s future intentions in Ukraine are likely to be?
Sadly, probably not. In the world of intelligence there is a difference between secrets and mysteries. A secret is a piece of concealed information which can be discovered—for example, how many tanks Russia has or whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The available intelligence which relates to secrets may be thin, faulty or badly interpreted (as was the case with Iraq). But if it is of good quality, and those responsible for assessing it are competent, it can reveal the truth. But future events are mysteries. By definition they haven’t happened; and to forecast them, intelligence agencies need not only access to secret information but an understanding of another country’s interests and past behaviour.
There are three main types of secret intelligence: human (spies), signals (the interception of communications or electronic emissions) and photo-reconnaissance from either aircraft or satellites. Each have their strengths and weaknesses. In the case of the invasion of Ukraine, it was the latter two which almost certainly provided the bulk of the raw material. Evidence became available in the weeks beforehand of the numbers, types, movements and dispositions of Russian forces in the areas bordering on Ukraine which showed that the capability for a full-scale military operation existed; and analysts’ interpretation of Russian interests and past behaviour suggested that it would indeed take place.
Forecasting future intentions from past behaviour is not always straightforward. In 1979, the Soviet Union was known to be massing troops on its border with Afghanistan. But western intelligence agencies did not predict an invasion: Afghanistan seemed peripheral to Soviet interests, the risks involved were high and there was no recent history of Soviet expansionism in Asia. But invade they did, and with disastrous consequences.
By contrast, in Poland the next year, when the Solidarity movement seemed about to cause the government to topple and Soviet troops were again diverted to the border, an invasion was widely expected. Maintaining a communist regime in Poland was a key Soviet interest in Europe and Soviet action in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 suggested that they would be willing to use armed force to preserve it. Yet they held back and encouraged General Jaruzelski to take power instead.
The minds of dictators in closed societies are hard to read. During the First Cold War, no outside intelligence agency ever had a human source inside the Politburo and the Soviet Union’s communication systems were sophisticated and hard to attack. There was no inside access to the country’s thinking at a high level of the kind that the East German Stasi enjoyed as a result of their placement of Günter Guillaume in the private office of the German chancellor Willy Brandt. It is unlikely that any comparable insight into to Putin’s thinking exists today.
Putin himself is of course a former intelligence officer and has relied heavily on members of his own service, the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti), as his closest advisors. It is unclear what analysis its successor service the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki) gave him about the invasion of Ukraine. It may be that they told him that it would all be a walkover, that his troops would be welcomed by cheering crowds and that the Ukrainian army would not resist. Or maybe they analysed the situation more accurately, but their forecasts were rejected.
There is a precedent for this. In 1941, Stalin received ample warnings from his spies, notably Richard Sorge in Tokyo and the Rote Kapelle organisation based in Switzerland, that the order had been given for the German army to invade in the coming summer. Stalin refused to believe them. He simply could not accept that Hitler would betray him in this way.
Ukraine is receiving intelligence support from the United States and other Nato powers. This helps it to understand developments on the battlefield and to identify and acquire targets. Coupled with the supply of more sophisticated and longer-range weapon systems, this greatly enhances its ability to resist and perhaps eventually to counter-attack. But what it cannot do is to tell them what Putin will do next. This remains, to use a term coined by the former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a “known unknown.”
