On Day 608, we accused editors at The Washington Post of incompetence for publishing a 4,000-word exclusive about ties between the CIA and Ukraine’s security services1.
The article, “based on on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Ukrainian, U.S. and Western intelligence and security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity citing security concerns as well as the sensitivity of the subject,” is, er, full of errors. At least that’s what Valeriy Kondratiuk says. He headed the counterintelligence department at Ukraine’s State Secuirty Service in 2014 and later the Defense Intelligency Agency (2015-2016) and Foreign Intelligence Service (2020).
Who, namely, pitched the idea to write about the relationship between Ukraine’s secret services and the CIA during an ongoing war? The two flaks on the byline are Isabelle Khurshudyan, the newspaper’s Ukraine bureau chief, and Greg Miller, an investigative journalist for The Washington Post based in London.
We don’t read anything Isabelle writes about Ukraine a priori, because she is clueless. As for Greg, Kyiv has never been his beat. Also, Tootsie Club and Decadence are not mentioned. It’s impossible to document CIA shenanigans in Kyiv without a chapter devoted to these venues.
Why publish a story with so many mistakes during an ongoing war? My best guess is to muddy the water and confuse everyone. I probably should go back and actually read the article, but I can’t get past the fifth paragraph.
On the Ukraine jacket, Good Bread from Good People.
On the American jacket, more on wacko Speaker Johnson c/o Politico.
I’m glad the journalist at Politico listened to the podcast episodes, which I found bizarre. The subtitle of the article might be changed to “The evangelical musings of the new House speaker and his wife are a crash course in how he doesn’t think.”
Oh, and this about christofascism.
Disclaimer: A recent surge in linkery to some of this site’s more pointed comment on Kyiv’s corporate lapdogs and demagogue paste-up artists might lead to a conclusion that all that goes on here is potshot-taking and the raking of muck, when nothing could be further from the truth: regular readers of ukraine@war will attest that most material posted here is gently evocative, quietly reverent, and more often than not focused on building community, on uniting rather than dividing.