Show Putin his Ukraine strategy is failing

OPINION:

Under normal circumstances, I would have traded a day in CIA headquarters for the glorious overseas field, but May 1, 2011, was a distinct outlier because I had a front row seat in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, tracking U.S. SEAL Team operators who were delivering justice to Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

The Special Forces operation relied first and foremost on the skill, planning and lethality of our exceptional military, but it all began with the human intelligence that the CIA had painstakingly collected over years of field work.

CIA analysts incorporated highly sensitive source reporting with overhead reconnaissance, signals intelligence and on-the-ground surveillance of the target. President Obama weighed the intelligence analysis, deliberated policy options and made the right decision.

CIA covert espionage in war zones where I had served, albeit of less strategic consequence than the bin Laden raid, had likewise been the foundation for the analysis on which national security strategy and tactical military decisions were made. We always hit our mark when each phase went off without a hitch. A breakdown at any point along the path from collection to analysis to decision-making would result in an intelligence failure.

That three-phase national security paradigm applies to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, where breakdowns in collection, analysis and executive decision-making cost our nation dearly.

In 1995, an alert Philippines police officer disrupted the al Qaeda Bojinka plot to hijack and explode passenger aircraft in the air.

In 1996, bin Laden issued a “jihad” fatwa, a declaration of war, against the U.S. In 1998, al Qaeda launched simultaneous truck bomb attacks that killed more than 200 people at U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

In 2000, al Qaeda mounted a suicide terrorist attack against the USS Cole in Yemen.

The Clinton administration did little of consequence to respond to al Qaeda’s looming threats to our national security beyond ineffective retaliatory cruise missile strikes in Khartoum and Khost in 1998, which only boosted bin Laden’s stature.

When I served at the CIA, we considered the 9/11 intelligence failure to be an admonition for not only counterterrorism operations but also our sacred responsibility to defend our nation from other global threats.

Consider the challenge we face today from Russia, which is concurrently directing hybrid warfare against NATO while prosecuting the most destructive land war in Europe since World War II.

Russian ruler Vladimir Putin has deployed drones to disrupt flights in Copenhagen and Oslo, conducted reconnaissance of Danish and Swedish military bases and violated Polish airspace.

Poland triggered NATO’s Article 4, which requires immediate consultations among NATO member states, and NATO fighter aircraft shot down the drones. Last month, three Russian MiG fighters violated Estonian airspace for 12 minutes. This is in addition to the Kremlin’s other forms of hybrid warfare directed against the West, including ubiquitous espionage, cyberhacking and interference in elections.

CIA Russia analysts are no doubt assessing Mr. Putin’s objectives, which include seeking to deter NATO from supporting Ukraine, probing NATO’s tactical responses to airspace violations and making it clear that the U.S., the leader of the free world, is unable to deter the gray zone military aggression in Russia’s self-designated sphere of influence.

Former Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis recently rebuked NATO for “doing nothing” to deter Mr. Putin’s expanding hybrid war. By “allowing higher and higher levels of escalation with no proper answers,” Mr. Landsbergis warned, NATO was risking another Pearl Harbor.

Working closely with our NATO member partners, the U.S. intelligence community must collect information on Mr. Putin’s plans and intentions so the Trump administration’s national security team can coordinate and lead the most effective NATO strategy to deter Russia.

Public statements about how NATO is prepared to act and backchannel messages to the Kremlin are not enough. NATO needs to demonstrate with action that it has the capability and fortitude to induce the Kremlin to change course. Immediately increasing NATO’s military assistance to Ukraine — with the U.S. serving as the arsenal of democracy with Tomahawk missiles and more air defense — would make it clear that Mr. Putin’s brinkmanship strategy is failing to achieve its objective.

Mr. Putin used nuclear threats to induce escalation paralysis in the Biden administration, which delayed delivery of military equipment and restricted Ukraine’s use of long-range artillery, thereby prolonging the war. Our past mistakes, as James Joyce wrote, can be “the portals of discovery,” but only if we remove the scales from our eyes about the seriousness of Mr. Putin’s threats to our national security and alter Mr. Putin’s behavior with a powerful peace-through-strength strategy.

• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. He can be reached at danielhoffman@yahoo.com.