By James Bamford* – The Nation
Recent Pentagon leaks reveal that the shadow war between Russia and the US over Ukraine is becoming more overt—and far more dangerous.
On the eastern wall of the Kremlin, Spasskaya Tower rises high above the old gray paving stones of Red Square. Beneath its hipped roof are the “Kremlin Chimes,” a 500-year-old clock with four broad 20-foot faces. In the darkened, early morning hours of May 3, the hands registered 2:27 when the first drone appeared, quickly speeding in high above the yellow and white sign warning that the area was a “No Drone Zone,” in Russian and English. A split-second later, it exploded a few feet above the green dome of the Kremlin’s Old Senate Palace. Sixteen minutes later, a second drone coming from another direction set off a bright flash and crashed into the convex roof near a pole bearing a fluttering Russian flag. Security officers could be seen ducking as they scrambled up a ladder to check out the earlier damage.
In all of Russia, there is no greater symbol of power and authority than the green dome and the building beneath it. Completed in 1787 and the shape of an isosceles triangle, this was where Vladimir Lenin had a private four-room apartment, along with a 40,000-volume library; where Joseph Stalin had an office and a five-room suite that also housed his children, Svetlana and Vasily; and where Nikita Khrushchev paced the floor of his office, next to a desk cluttered with tacky models of satellites, planes, and locomotives, while pondering the fate of the world during the Cuban missile crisis. For all those who followed, from Brezhnev to Yeltsin, the Kremlin served as a way station during their years in power. Today, it is where Vladimir Putin has his presidential office, with its tall windows covered in French-style curtains of silky-white folds, his polish oak desk with a briefing console extending from the front, and his flat-screen computer monitor with its screensaver of the Spasskaya Tower at night.
The early morning dual drone attack was meant as a warning—not an assassination attempt. As the attackers certainly knew, Putin at the time was at his home in Novo Ogaryovo, a 19th-century English Gothic manor, surrounded by an 18-foot wall built on the banks of the Moscow River, near the village of Usovo. Had someone wanted to harm him, they would have loaded the drones with considerably more explosives and targeted his home in the middle of the night—not his empty office.
Instead, the attack was the latest, and boldest, move in a deadly three-way shadow war between Russia, Ukraine, and the United States. Deadly and extremely dangerous. The armed drones were an unsubtle and explosive message: Forget your warning signs and your high-tech defenses, we know where you are, we know how to kill you, and you are on our list. “If we presume it was a Ukrainian attack,” noted Russia specialist and security analyst Mark Galeotti, “consider it a performative strike, a demonstration of capability and a declaration of intent: ‘Don’t think Moscow is safe.’”
As with the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline, there were accusations that Russia itself had attacked the Kremlin. “Social media is awash with cries of ‘fake!’ and ‘false flag!’”said Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Moscow editor, who went on to ask: “Why would it stage-manage such a potentially embarrassing incident that many will interpret as a sign of the Kremlin’s weakness? And think back to those TV news bulletins: They avoided showing images of the explosions.”
Rather than Russia, it was instead far more likely that Ukraine was behind the attacks, just as it was also likely behind a recent string of assassinations, both attempted and successful. Among them, the car-bomb murder near Moscow of Daria Dugina, the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin, a Russian ultra-nationalist philosopher who is known as “Putin’s brain“—and was probably the intended target of the attack. The Russian Federal Security Service alleged that Dugina’s murder “was prepared and committed by the Ukrainian intelligence agencies.” And the United States reportedly agreed, believing that parts of the Ukrainian government authorized the killing.
PENTAGON LEAKS REVEAL NEW DANGERS
With no repercussions from Washington or Europe following that attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky apparently decided to ramp up his assassination program along with other sabotage attacks in Russia. In a meeting in late January, for example, Zelensky suggested that Ukraine “conduct strikes in Russia.” Among them was an operation to “blow up” the Soviet-built Druzhba pipeline that provides oil to Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic—all members of NATO. These new revelations are contained in the hundreds of highly classified Pentagon and intelligence documents allegedly leaked by Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman later charged with espionage.
In addition to revealing just how far the Ukrainian government is prepared to go to take the fight to Russia, the leaked documents bolster the view that Ukraine itself was also behind the September 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline. From the context of the messages, and the codewords on the documents, it is clear that the US National Security Agency has long been eavesdropping on the highest levels of the Ukrainian government, if not Zelensky’s private cell phone. After all, in the past the NSA has targeted the private cell phones of allied leaders in such countries as Brazil and Germany. What seems clear is that the Biden administration knows much more about Ukraine’s likely role in the pipeline’s destruction—a violent act of war against Russia, Europe, and NATO—than it has shared with the American public.
Following the January meeting focused on “strikes in Russia,” on April 2 Vladlen Tatarsky, a high-profile pro-Kremlin military blogger, was assassinated when handed a bomb-rigged sculpture in a St. Petersburg café. A month later, on May 3 came the drone attack on the Kremlin, and just three days later was another assassination attempt. This time, the target was another popular pro-war blogger, former State Duma (parliament) member Zakhar Prilepin. As with Daria Dugina, the weapon was a remotely controlled car bomb and, although Prilepin survived with injuries, his passenger was killed. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office later charged Alexander Permyakov, a 30-year-old native of the occupied Donetsk region of Ukraine, who, they said, “claims that he was acting on the orders of Ukraine’s special services.” A spokesman said the organization could neither confirm nor deny the involvement of Ukraine’s special services in the explosion.
“We regard these actions as a planned terrorist act and an attempt on the president’s life, carried out on the eve of the Victory Day, May 9, parade,” said a statement from Putin’s presidential office regarding the attack on the Kremlin. “The Russian side reserves the right to take retaliatory measures where and when it sees fit.” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, then blamed the United States. “We know very well that decisions about such actions, about such terrorist attacks, are made not in Kyiv but in Washington,” he said. “This is also often dictated from across the ocean.… In Washington they must clearly understand that we know this.” The leaked documents will probably bolster that view, since they clearly indicate that the US. knew in advance about the planning for such violent attacks—but apparently never intervened to stop them. Or if they did, Ukraine simply ignored the warning.
Just as President Joe Biden is never far from the “football”—the black leather briefcase containing the nuclear go-codes to launch World War III—President Putin is never far from his “cheget,” that serves the same purpose. “All the necessary communication tools, including the strategic communications, are always with the president wherever he is, be it Russia or any other country in the world,” Peskov told reporters in Moscow in 2021. Lest anyone forget, it was the assassination of a lowly archduke that precipitated the start of World War I.
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*James Bamford is a best-selling author, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, and winner of the National Magazine Award for Reporting. His most recent book is Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence, published by Twelve Books.