Former CIA Boss on the Ukraine War: Is an End In Sight? - Mo News Premium

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Hi everyone,

It's a somber Independence Day in Ukraine today. The country is also marking six months since Russia launched its full-scale war - the biggest war between European countries since World War II.

In today's premium edition of Mo News, we bring you more from our conversation with former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell. We brought you the first two parts of this interview on China, Taiwan, Afghanistan, and the threat of Al Qaeda over the last two weeks. Newsletter | Podcast.

This week features Part 3/3 - with the focus on Ukraine, Russia, and Vladimir Putin. He gives us insight into:

• The state of play of the military and economic battlefields;

• What the CIA got wrong in its Russian assessment;

• Can Ukraine's will to fight overpower Russia's numbers?

• And, why he thinks the tide could be turning in Ukraine's favor.

☕️ But first, a few headlines this AM before our interview...

• Debt Dismissed? Today, President Biden is expected to announce a long-awaited plan on his key campaign promise to address student debt. ~ NBC NewsThe plan will reportedly forgive $10,000 in federal student loans for any borrower making $125,000 a year or less.Biden is also expected to extend the pause on federal student loan payments for several more months. This a continuation of the pause that first went into effect in spring 2020.The expected announcement comes just a week ahead of the White House’s August 31st deadline. President Biden has faced criticism for his drawn out decision-making process.$10K in loan forgiveness will face criticism from the right given the state of inflation, but will also not be enough to satisfy some on Biden's left who have urged the administration to cancel upwards of $50,000 in student loans.

• Alarms Raised at Mar-a-Lago: A letter from the National Archives (NARA) reveals that the 15 boxes retrieved from former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in January contained some of the government's most highly classified secrets.Reports about the letter sent from the NARA to the former president’s lawyers in May reveal that the Trump left the White House with more than 700 classified pages in total. Some with “Special Access Program” markings – the highest level of classification.The letter provides, for the first time, an official account of the volume and sensitivity of the documents kept by the former president.It also explains why FBI agents felt compelled to execute a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago on August 11th, to recover important records that still remained on the premises.The government has now retrieved highly sensitive materials from Trump’s Palm Beach estate on three separate occasions: In January 2022 by NARA, another batch by Justice Department officials in June, and a third set by the FBI in that search two weeks ago.The letter also raised the alarm over the potential threat to national security caused by keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, as well as Trump’s resistance to sharing them with the FBI. The letter indicates Trump’s attorneys were able to prevent the FBI from reviewing the materials for at least a month - stopping the agency from assessing whether any information was improperly shared.Key deadline: Remember - the DOJ has until tomorrow at noonET to file proposed redactions to the affidavit, which could include potential crimes that may have been committed on Trump’s part. A judge has to rule if he agrees with the DOJ redactions and the public has a right to know about the search.

• Independence Day Threats: Kyiv is bracing for reinvigorated Russian attacks as Ukraine marks 31 years of Independence from the Soviet Union. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned the attacks may be “particularly nasty" in honor of Ukraine’s Independence Day.Fighting around the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant poses one of the gravest risks in the six months of the war – stoking fears of a catastrophic nuclear accident.Ukraine claimed Russia renewed shelling at the facility over the weekend, reporting damage to a laboratory, chemical facilities, and transformers at the nuclear facility.“A moment of “maximum danger.” The United Nations is again warning of a dangerous situation in and around the power plant, calling for the immediate withdrawal of troops from the area.The UN has confirmed 5,587 civilian deaths and 7,890 injuries in Ukraine since Russia invaded on February 24th, and estimates about 17.7 million are in serious need of humanitarian aid – but many say both numbers are likely undercounted - and could rise even more once we enter winter.

Now, to my interview with former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell. He spent more than three decades at the CIA, worked with multiple presidents, and is currently the host of the Intelligence Matters podcast and a senior national security contributor for CBS News.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The full audio of this interview is also available on the Mo News Podcast.

MOSH: Michael, you and I spoke back in February. It was actually a couple days before the invasion, as things were ratcheting up, and you said there were assessments that Putin could take Kyiv in just a matter of days. It would only take a couple of days. What did those assessments get wrong? What have we learned about Vladimir Putin, Russia, and the state of our intelligence six months into this war?

MORELL: We learned that we were pretty much all wrong. I don't know anybody who didn't say that he would be in Kyiv in a matter of days. So what did we get wrong? We got wrong the state of the Russian military. Putin had spent 25 years investing in that military and it turned out to be not the military that everybody thought. In a sense, militaries reflect the nature of the societies that they came from. The Russian military is riddled with corruption, no surprise. It was dominated by conscripts who didn't have a lot of training, had never been in battle, who didn't want to be in battle. The Russians have been known for years to have bad logistics, poor logistics. Sustaining one line of combat is one thing, but in the initial invasion, Putin had four to five lines of combat that he needed support with logistics. The leadership wasn't there. So the Russian military performed well below what everybody thought its capabilities were. And then on the flip side, the Ukrainians performed much better than everybody thought, and that was really all about will to fight. It turns out at the end of the day that the will to fight matters more than capability to fight.

MOSH: There's parallels in Afghanistan and Iraq to a certain extent, right?

MORELL: Absolutely. It's much harder to objectively measure will to fight. It's pretty easy to count airplanes and tanks and soldiers. It's really tough to measure will to fight. So you put those two things together, and you have the outcome that we saw.

MOSH: I find an irony there - within a few months, in the assessment that the Afghan military could hold longer than it did, proved to be wrong. And the assessment that Putin was stronger than we thought, also proved to be wrong.

MORELL: For the same reason, opposites. You know, the Afghan army just collapsed and ran away with its president. And the Ukrainian army did not run away. It stood up and citizens joined in part, and it's president didn't run away. The president stood up. It's interesting. It needs to be studied and lessons need to be learned, for sure.

MOSH: How important is that, when you're doing intelligence work, those studies of why something was wrong? And how does that inform the agency in the future?

MORELL: You have to study both when you get something right, as well as when you get something wrong, because you want to learn the lessons of why you got something right. And then, you do more of that. And you want to learn the lessons of why you got something wrong, so you do less of that. So both of them need to be studied.

We tend to only study failures and I would argue we need to study successes as much as we study failures. If you study failure seriously and if you take it seriously and it's not just a political exercise, but you take it seriously like we did with Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, you actually learn things. And, the main thing we learned in Iraq was not that the analysts made the wrong judgment, because if you actually looked at all the information they had, that information took you to the judgments they made about chemical weapons and biological weapons and the nuclear program. What we learned when we looked at it was that what they really got wrong was their level of confidence in that judgment. They said it was medium to high, but if you actually forced them to really think about their level of confidence, they would have ended up at low. The intelligence community would be in a completely different place with regard to Iraq, WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction), if we had said to President Bush, "We think he's got chemical weapons, biological weapons, and we think he's restarting his nuclear weapons program, but what you really need to know, Mr. President, is that we only have low confidence in this for the following reasons." That would be a very, very different situation than where we ended up. So what we learned from Iraq, WMD, is that confidence level needs as much attention and as much thought and as much rigor as the judgment itself.

And now because of Iraq, everybody's familiar with these confidence levels. All the analysts are familiar, the leadership of the intelligence community familiar, the policymakers are familiar. And you talk to them as much about confidence levels as you do about judgments, because of Iraq.

MOSH: I would add on Iraq that obviously there's politicians and policymakers who are able to pick through intelligence assessments and pursue their own agenda.

MORELL: That happened less on the weapons of mass destruction side than it did on the links between Iraq and Al-Qaeda's side, where certain policy makers took things way too far. But basically, on the weapons of mass destruction side, we believed he had those. Every intelligence service in the world believed it. The United Nations weapons inspectors believed it, academics who looked at the program believed it. Everybody got that wrong.

At the end of the day, what Saddam was doing was he got rid of the programs but he didn't want to tell anybody, because he didn't want the Iranians to know. But he was hoping that U.S. intelligence was good enough to be able to see that he got rid of them, so that the sanctions would go away and then once the sanctions went away, his plan was to restart all these programs. So in a sense, we were not able to see what he was hiding, but wanted us to see.

MOSH: I took a course with a guy named Jerrold Post, who, unfortunately, passed away recently, but his job was to do the psychological portraits of these leaders.

MORELL: They often do things where the logical explanation isn't the explanation. I'll give you an example. When Saddam was captured, an FBI agent and a CIA officer interviewed him every day. From the day he was caught until the day he was executed. And one day he wasn't feeling well and he was taken to see a military doctor, and he started flirting with a U.S. military nurse, who wouldn't give him the time of day. On the walk back to his cell, he said, "How come she wouldn't talk to me? How come she didn't give me the time of day?" This was when he was clean shaven. And they jokingly told him American women like men with facial hair, a joke. And so he started growing his beard out. When he walked into the courtroom for his trial, Jerrold, who was on CNN, commented about his beard, and thought that he was playing to the Islamic judges. But, as we would find out, Saddam was trying to get the attention of American nurses. Turns out, it is very difficult to get inside somebody's head.

MOSH: Human beings are human beings. Men are men, it turns out at the end of the day. I want to come back to Russia, because despite not taking Kyiv, we're now six months in. They control between 20% and 25% of Ukraine. What is your sense of how long this could last? I've seen the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs say it could last years, if not a decade.

MORELL: If you look at the military war on the battlefield, the current situation favors Ukraine. The Russians, when they made their tactical decision to withdraw to eastern Ukraine and focus on the Donbas, they had already lost a lot of force. They've made some gains in the Donbas region, but very minor, but they've paid an excruciatingly high price. The estimates are about 75,000 soldiers killed or captured out of a total of – these are the Russians – about 260,000. A huge loss. Their precision-guided ammunitions are running extraordinarily low, because they can't replace them, because they need imported parts that they can't get. They're spent. The Russian military cannot move forward in a significant way, possibly for years.

The Ukrainians now have weapons they could use, if we give them the right number of weapons, and if we possibly give them some additional weapons, they might have a capability to drive the Russians out of Ukraine, which would be a win, a big win. That's what I think needs to happen here. We need to give them even more weapons. So that's the battlefield war, advantage Ukraine.

Then you go to the economic war and yes, things are tough in Russia. You can't get imported goods. Any manufacturing done in Russia that relies on imported goods is basically shut down, so car production is shut down. Russia has probably lost about 30% of its GDP this year, so things are tough there, but things are even tougher in Ukraine, economically. Ukraine is probably going to lose about 50% of its GDP this year. Half their GDP is gone because of this war. They are running a budget deficit of about over $10 billion a month in terms of government spending, that they need filled. So how long can they sustain themselves?

And then you get to the issue of the economic cost on the West in terms of inflation. And you particularly get energy prices that today are 20 times more expensive in Western Europe than it was when the war started. It’s really remarkable. And we're coming up on winter here, and I think what Putin is hoping is that as we get into winter, and as things really start to bite both in Ukraine and in Western Europe, that the Western alliance will start coming apart. Then he'll be in a position where Western Europe and Ukraine will want to negotiate. And he'll be willing to negotiate. Because he can't go any further militarily, and he'll want to draw the line right where it is.

He's made some gains relative to where he was in 2014, so he'll want to draw the line right where it is. He'll want the sanctions to go away, he'll want there to be a ceasefire, and then he will rebuild his forces over a period of time and he'll be back to fight another day. I feel if that's the situation we end up in, that's a win for him because the sanctions go away in large part, because that will be part of the deal. He can sell this politically as a win at home "I regained the Donbas, I regained this Russian speaking part of Ukraine. That's what I wanted to do from the beginning," which is not true, but that's what he’ll say. Before winter sets in, we need to go all in with the Ukrainians. Not fight for them, but we've been short of –

MOSH: Everything short of U.S. troops on the ground.

MORELL: To have Ukrainians push the Russians out of Ukraine before winter comes.

MOSH: This is often a bet, whether it's the Middle East, China or Russia, the bet is always that the Westerners lose focus, lose faith, get impatient and move on.

MORELL: I had dinner one night with three Chinese intelligence officers, and they were talking about good and bad millennia. They were talking about a good thousand years in Chinese history, a bad thousand years in Chinese history. And we worry about the next quarter, or the next four years.

MOSH: We lose perspective. In a couple years we're going to be 250 years old as a country, which seems old, until you talk about China. Talk to me about Putin, in your personal experience as someone who worked in intelligence. Putin himself is somebody who came up through intelligence. How do you think that impacts how he operates, who has influence over him, and how he conducts himself as a leader?

MORELL: I think (former CIA Director) Bob Gates has it right. Bob says "when you look in Putin's eyes, you see KGB, KGB, KGB." Vladimir Putin is a thug and a bully. Vladimir Putin only believes in relative power. How much does he have and how much do you have if you're his adversary? He is amoral. He has no morals. He doesn't care if Ukrainian women and children die, he doesn't care if his own women and children die. He doesn't believe that negotiations can lead to win-win, there's only win-lose in a negotiation in his mind. He takes risks. Most people are risk averse. He is risk prone. He will take risks, and he's a particularly dangerous kind of risk taker. When he takes a risk and succeeds, he's often willing to take an even bigger risk. He's the type of leader who does not welcome his subordinates telling them what they really think. He creates an atmosphere where they end up telling him what they think he wants to hear, rather than what they really think. That's very dangerous.

MOSH: Which we're sort of seeing play out here in Ukraine?

MORELL: This has been the case ever since he came to power. He is surrounded by his inner circle, about 15 guys. All guys, no women. There's a couple military guys in there, but the rest of them were former KGB, and they were all with him when he was in St. Petersburg, so they've been with him a very long time.

There were two parts to the KGB, and when the KGB split, it split into these two parts. One part is the FSB. It's the internal security service inside Russia. Those are the bullies and thugs. And then the other part is the SVR, it's the external intelligence service. It's the Russians who go overseas and try to recruit people to spy for Russia. They're not bullies and thugs, they're pretty sophisticated.

And where did Vladimir Putin come from in that old KGB? He came from the thugs’ side. He was sent essentially inside the Soviet bloc to East Germany. He was an internal guy. He wasn't sent to Paris or London or Washington. He came from the bully and thug side. All of the guys who surround him are basically bully and thug guys.

MOSH: You lay out a scenario where eventually there's some sort of compromise, but Putin is in it for the long run, for the long war. What do Americans need to understand about what we're seeing play out in Ukraine? And how many years from now will we still be talking about Ukraine, Putin, Russia?

MORELL: There's two scenarios here. One scenario is the preferred scenario, which is that the West is able to supply the Ukrainians with the arms and the money that they need to push Russia out and actually defeat the Russian army. And that very well might put an end to Vladimir Putin politically, and then we don't need to worry about him anymore. That's the preferred scenario.

The other scenario is the scenario we talked about where there's some sort of ceasefire, and he lives to fight another day. And if he lives to fight another day, there will be another fight. He will want to come back and finish Ukraine, and if he finishes Ukraine, he'll probably want to do Moldova. After he does Moldova, he might even want to do the Baltic states and take on NATO.

MOSH: I was going to say that Moldova was the last non-NATO one. And then that's NATO, at this point.

MORELL: Eventually, he will want to do the Baltics, and then you're in a really tough spot. So the scenarios are: win this, or the fight will continue down the road.

MOSH: That's pretty stark. Whey you say “do the Baltics,” that's World War III.

MORELL: If, we choose to stand behind them. I think that would be a tough decision for NATO. No doubt in my mind that the U.S., the U.K., the French, probably even the Germans, would want to have World War III here to defend the Baltics, but everybody in NATO would have to agree for it to be a NATO operation. And would NATO come apart at that moment? That's the kind of thing that Vladimir Putin is thinking about.

MOSH: I have one more question on Russia, and it involves the Brittany Griner situation, prisoner trades, and the big debate here about them. She's the WNBA player who's there. Another former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan is there. There's been a debate within the administration as to whether to engage in these prisoner trades. We have done them before.

Should we be offering a Russian arms dealer for U.S. citizens? Does that incentivize more kidnapping? Where do you come down on these sorts of situations?

MORELL: These are really hard. Because the families of the Americans who have been imprisoned, either wrongfully, or their sentences are much longer than they should be for political reasons....(politicians are) meeting with those families. They're begging you to help in any way you can.

And, at the same time, you've got people like me, coming in the room and saying, “if you do this, you're just going to incentivize the taking of hostages.” So I've never been on the side of having to make the decision. I've always been on the side of saying, here are the consequences of making the decision. I've had the easy job. It is a really hard decision to make because you're dealing with a set of current circumstances that cry out for doing the trade, while at the same time, you know that this is just going to incentivize more of it.

###

[Top Banner Photo Credit: Getty Images - Ukraine's first Independence Day: A crowd holds a demonstration outside Soviet headquarters in Kyiv in 1991]

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