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I love Biden's work on declassifying Russia Intel all along, here. Really he's done a good job at building an international coalition and undermining Putin. Every time. Putin says something, it seems like Biden's got the documents showing it's a lie.
That's a good one and very interesting. Normally, you wouldn't release intel and assessments to the general public to protect sources. But, this time is different from the very start. Why? Are the sources indestructible? In any case, Putin must be constantly looking over his shoulder and wondering where it's coming from. The release of some of this information has stopped planned Russian efforts.
Sources and methods are never compromised in these releases.
Second, one of the things they teach you in intelligence analysis is to not only read the facts that are being reported (and try to measure their accuracy), but to ask why they’re being reported. Not as in “Why is the NYT making this a headline” - that’s not what matters unless you’re doing media studies or sociology. I mean “Why is the government/organization putting this out there?”
In this case, it’s obvious. There’s a current narrative around the Russian war on Ukraine, and it’s being pushed by some American politicians and news agencies as well as foreign actors, and it’s being used for political effect. There’s perfectly justified reasons for skepticism from numbers published by both Ukraine and Russia for both fog of war and propaganda reasons.
The Biden administration has an active interest in maintaining US and international support for the war, and that’s in danger because of a perception of a lack of success. They need to counter that narrative.
I don’t have any reason to believe that these numbers are wrong - I very much suspect they’re largely right - but the political angle is why they’re being reported, while US intelligence estimates of other conflicts currently going on around the world are not.
I'm obviously not talking about this assessment, which is a product of DOD battlefield analysis.
I'm talking about the hand full of times early on when the US released stories to the press stories about Russian plans. Russia plans a false flag event for provocation, etc. Those events didn't happen because the world knew what they intended. That Intel came from somewhere.
Battlefield analysis in this context would notionally be a product of signals intelligence, photo reconnaissance, and information sharing with allied forces. It’s still sources and methods stuff, and the people doing it are part of the US intelligence community. That includes the branch intelligence services, DIA, CIA, and other three letter agencies.
For something like Putin’s plan on invading on a certain date, those are more going to lean on CIA drawing on resources in the Russian government and military. They will also involve signals and imagery, which often belong to other agencies. In these cases it is still a multi source intelligence product that cannot (in theory) be reverse engineered to leak sources and methods.
Things do leak, of course. I remember a photo published in the congressional record (which made it into Aviation Week iirc) that showed a US Keyhole photo in which you could read the tail numbers on a parked plane. That leaked the resolution of that generation of satellite, which is among the most highly classified subjects.
You are right, though. Sometimes the US will publish otherwise highly classified info, such as was used to document the engineering of WMDs in Iraq. That didn’t work out too well in the end but the general idea was that making a conclusive argument for war justified the potential exposure of that information (and Curveball was I believe already in the US at that time, but it’s been awhile).