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OPINION:
Going back to the days of the Soviet KGB, where Vladimir Putin served for years before becoming director of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, Russian intelligence officers have ruthlessly trained their sites on assessing and evaluating their adversaries.
Seeking to gain some advantage by lifting the veil on a person of interest’s background, vulnerabilities and motivations, they routinely ask, “Chem chelovek dishit?” (“What does the person breathe?”)
Responsible for deciphering the Kremlin’s plans and intentions so that the White House can make the most informed foreign policy decisions, the CIA has been asking the same question about Mr. Putin for decades.
Most important for CIA Russia analysts is empathy — the art of seeing the world through Mr. Putin’s twisted KGB eyes.
Mr. Putin has had at least three significant formative experiences in his life. First, he was born in St. Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, just a few years after World War II. He portrays himself as the defender of Russia, a besieged fortress under attack from the West — except this time, it’s democracy, not the Nazis, that viciously blockaded his hometown, which most threatens Mr. Putin’s regime security.
Mr. Putin, like his Soviet predecessors, has ruled with what George Kennan, U.S. diplomat and author of the Cold War containment strategy, accurately identified as a “jealous and intolerant eye” which “can distinguish, in the end, only vassals and enemies. And the neighbors of Russia, if they do not wish to be one, must reconcile themselves to being the other.”
Second, Mr. Putin holds a black belt in Judo, a key principle of which is to use an opponent’s strength against them. Exploiting America’s wide open democracy and cyberspace, which is a force multiplier for commerce and freedom of speech, Russian spy services conduct ubiquitous hacking and propaganda operations targeting our private sector and democratic institutions.
But most of all, Mr. Putin, who is fond of saying there is no such thing as a “former spy,” lives and breathes the KGB. True to his KGB training, he is always looking to develop rapport and find some superficial common ground with his interlocutors to create the illusion of trust and friendship, which he uses to try to manipulate relationships in his favor.
Sometimes Mr. Putin goes too far with blatantly obvious efforts to ingratiate himself, like when he gifted special envoy Steven Witkoff a portrait of President Trump and made a point of highlighting how he’d prayed for the president after the attempted assassination attempt last summer.
Mr. Putin also gave Mr. Witkoff the Russian Order of Courage medal for onward delivery to CIA’s deputy director for digital innovation, Juliane Gallina, whose 21-year-old son was killed fighting in a Russian military unit against Ukraine. Knowing Mr. Witkoff tragically lost a son as a result of the opioid epidemic, Mr. Putin rightly hedged that he’d deliver the medal to Ms. Gallina and her husband rather than refuse it.
Mr. Putin, whose deeper objective was far more duplicitous, wanted to use the medal to raise the public profile of Ms. Gallina’s heartbreaking family tragedy. He might have even believed his ruse would cause some personal animus between Mr. Witkoff and CIA leadership, thereby resulting in disrupting the flow of CIA intelligence to support Mr. Witkoff’s tireless efforts to bring an end to the war in Ukraine.
A highly successful real estate investor and lawyer with a well-deserved reputation as an outstanding negotiator, Mr. Witkoff nevertheless lacks experience of working in Russia, which would have forewarned him about Mr. Putin’s KGB subterfuge strategy.
That’s how the KGB operative in the Kremlin runs his cloak-and-dagger espionage and influence operations, and it’s what makes him an extraordinarily challenging foreign leader with whom to negotiate.
Mr. Putin wants us to feel like we notched a win by facilitating what appears to be a productive personal relationship with him — all while he continues to press the Kremlin’s interests, so often antithetical to our own. President Trump summed it up best during a recent Oval Office executive order signing ceremony, when he remarked, “Every conversation I have with him (Putin) is a good conversation, and then unfortunately, a bomb is loaded up into Kyiv or someplace and then I get very angry about it.”
President Ronald Reagan, who signed multiple arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, demonstrated that diplomatic engagement could produce great success — but only because his Cabinet secretaries were gripping a bayonet firmly at the chest of Reagan’s Soviet counterparts.
• 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.
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