☕️ BURN NOTICE ☙ Wednesday, February 28, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
A special edition, describing the contents and significance of the CIA's historic, unprecedented public disclosure of its Ukraine project, as 2024 continues delivering in handfuls, plus plenty more.
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For the story, Adam and Michael got deep access to top-secret CIA material and even toured one of its secret underground bases on the border in Ukraine. I’m wondering, how much top-secret, classified information was exposed to these reporters so they could write this story, obviously with close CIA cooperation?
I’m not sure that, in the entirety of its long, dubious existence, the CIA has ever dumped this much current, classified information into the public domain before. I think we have witnessed yet another historic, record-breaking 2024 disclosure.
Especially given recent classified-document controversies here in the States, one wonders who authorized the declassification of all that classified information? Was it authorized?
But the even bigger question is: why.
Before we attempt to answer that particularly pesky question, a question that, in the hours following the article’s publication, has consumed hundreds of hours of podcast time and libraries of blog articles, let’s first check in and see how the boys in Ukraine are doing. When last we left them, Russia had just taken over the strategically-paramount, fortified city of Avdiivka following a frantic, five-month battle.There’s pretty big news. Right after Avdiivka fell, something new happened in the Special Military Operation. Something we have never seen before. The entire, vast Russia-Ukraine battle map lit up like a secret CIA switchboard.
The Live UA Map (shown above, with my annotations) is compiled from open-source information, including published news stories, official announcements, and clever scraping of geolocation data found in the metadata of cell phone pictures and drone videos. Russian-controlled areas and attacks are shaded red, Ukraine’s are blue.
What first strikes you about the proportion of red and blue on that map?
Yep. What the map strongly suggests — a conclusion shared by most independent war bloggers — is that, once Russia had captured the key strategic location of Avdiivka in central Ukraine, it commenced a massive, all-theatre offensive, all along the extended front, putting Ukraine in an impossible situation: where should it send its dwindling, aging, worn-out reserve forces? To what part of the line?
Somehow, Western ‘leaders’ appear completely taken by surprise — how could this happen? They seem to be panicking and are politically freaking out. Mercurial gadfly Emmanuel Macron called for an emergency, last-minute NATO conference yesterday and shocked attendees by suggesting the West should give Ukraine not just ammunition, but uniformed troops, a development that would ring the World War III dinner bell.
The Time’s extensive, detailed article prints to 34 single-spaced pages. It’s a small book. But here are the basics: according to the Times, on the same day Ukraine’s democratically-elected, pro-Russian government fell in 2014, CIA director John Brennan’s private government plane landed in Kiev. The Director immediately formed a enduring friendship with the new, pro-Western replacement president (Zelensky’s predecessor), and forged a lasting work relationship with its brand-new spy chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko.Many analysts credibly believe the CIA helped or even engineered the coup that overthrew Ukraine’s fairly-elected, Russia-friendly government on February 24, 2014. (Eight years later — to the day — Russia invaded Ukraine.) If true, the CIA had a complete claim to the government it created. And, if true, all the top Ukrainians are actually handpicked CIA assets.
What happened next in February 2014, according to the article, could be best described as the CIA moving into Ukraine’s master bedroom and making the owners move down to the basement. “Working with” Ukraine, Obama’s CIA began building its “network” of underground bases in Ukraine — who knows how many — including the aforementioned dirty dozen of militarized, underground, US-built bases right along Russia’s border. Sadly, the CIA was aided by intelligence-friendly, Cold War-era Republicans, too:
The article continued, citing example after example, trying its hardest to put the CIA into a good light and make the article into some kind of CIA recruitment brochure. But the reader can only avoid feeling nauseated and betrayed by the CIA, by believing that Russia is an existential threat to the United States and no risk is too great to oppose it. In other words, you have to still be an all-in Cold Warrior.
Next, the disclosure of all this detailed information about the CIA’s activities in Ukraine is opening up vast new panoramas of connecting dots. For example, Mike Benz reminded Twitter yesterday about the curious timing of Hunter Biden’s Burisma Board job compared with the timeline of the CIA’s admitted invasion of Ukraine:
A side-effect of the CIA’s limited hangout will be the chance to keep putting the puzzle pieces together. So, stand by.
Speaking of Jeffrey Epstein, I must apologize for accidentally creating some confusion yesterday with my offhand remark suggesting the new CIA-Ukraine disclosures suggested similarities between Hunter Biden and Jeffrey Epstein. For lack of time, I failed yesterday to properly expand that premise. I shall correct that oversight now.
