William Burns has disclosed that the CIA capitalized on the disillusionment created by Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine to recruit Russian intelligence sources at a scale he described as significant. The agency also launched a parallel recruitment effort targeting Chinese nationals and made similar progress.
Burns discussed CIA operations in a wide-ranging Foreign Affairs interview on April 1, as covered by "Hvylya".
The recruitment drive included an unconventional public element: a series of three videos aired on Telegram that reached a wide Russian audience. The videos never mentioned Putin by name. Instead, Burns said, they appealed "to people's sense of genuine national purpose" and to their conviction that "corruption was at the core of the rot in that political system." The approach, he said, "produced significant results."
Burns acknowledged that conducting human intelligence in an era of smart cities, biometric data, and facial recognition is far harder than it was even a decade ago, particularly in countries like China and Russia. "But it's not impossible," he said. "The challenge is to master those emerging technologies as well or better than our rivals do."
The former director also noted that before the invasion, the circle of people who knew about Putin's war plans was extremely tight. At least one very senior Russian intelligence official Burns met in November 2021 appeared genuinely unaware of the invasion plan. "He was largely cut out of the planning," Burns said, explaining the official's sincere insistence that the CIA was wrong about an imminent attack.
Burns described the broader investment in intelligence partnerships as critical to the CIA's effectiveness, noting that the agency had worked closely with Ukrainian services since Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea to prepare Kyiv for self-defense.
"Hvylya" also covered Ukrainian strikes on Russian military radar systems in Crimea and bases in Donbas.