‘Too Wrong to Ignore’: CIA ‘Outsourcing Assassinations’ to Kiev Ruffled US Journos' Feathers

The CIA uses other nations’ intelligence agencies to handle its dirty work, which is often useful in the short term, but just as often has significant blowback, experts told Sputnik. In Ukraine, it’s resulted in an agency that assassinates its own people and maintains a “kill list” targeting those who dare to criticize the regime in Kiev.

A recent report in The Washington Post revealed how Ukrainian intelligence officers were carrying out espionage activities, including targeted assassinations, inside Russia, with the training and support of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The article in particular noted how Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency was responsible for the assassination of Russian journalist Daria Dugina with a car bomb in Moscow on August 20, 2022.

An unnamed CIA officer quoted in the article compared the SBU to Israel’s Mossad, which has become infamous for its assassinations around the globe, noting it “carries broader risks” beyond the threat it poses to Russia. The article notes that the ground-up reconstruction of the SBU began after the US-backed coup in Kiev in 2014, which brought a right-wing, nationalist, pro-Western government to power that began persecuting its own Russian-speaking citizens and made it a constitutional goal to join NATO, helping to set in motion the present military conflict.

An article in The New York Times a little more than a month after Dugina’s killing said the US “took no part in the attack” and that “afterward, American officials admonished Ukrainian officials over the assassination.” The Times said US officials were “frustrated” with the SBU’s “lack of transparency.”

Washington’s ‘Patron’ Intel Agencies

Columnist, former CIA officer, and torture whistleblower John Kiriakou told Sputnik that the US has long deputized the intelligence agencies of smaller nations to carry out the dirty work that Congressional oversight has made illegal for Americans to do directly, such as targeted killings.

“Well, the easy answer is the answer to ‘why?’ Because these intelligence relationships that begin as nascent, almost parent-child kind of relationships are relationships that the CIA seeks all around the world because it gives them outsized authority,” Kiriakou said. “Think back over the decades to the CIA helping to create myriad intelligence services across the African continent, in Greece, in post-World War 2 Italy, in France - just all over the world, this is what the CIA does: it helps to create these foreign intelligence services so that it can exert control over them. This was a great opportunity for the CIA to build the Ukrainian intelligence service from scratch. You know, I remember hearing old timers when I was at the CIA talk about having built these foreign intelligence services and actually having their own badges and their own ranks to go into these foreign intelligence services as if they owned the place. So this is a very common thing that the CIA does and has done really since the late 1940s.”

Kiriakou said that over the short term, the CIA’s efforts had proven to be a good investment “because the CIA is able to collect intelligence on the Russian military, perhaps on the Russian intelligence community. So in this short term, just over the last year-and-a-half to two years, it's probably been a decent investment. Over the long term, I would say no, because just as happened in, let's say, Vietnam or in Afghanistan, it has the potential to drag the CIA down into the muck of a conflict that it really doesn't know how to get out of. And that's something that the CIA always takes a risk of doing when it gets involved with these patron organizations.”

However, Kirakou noted that the real danger of such an arrangement is that the client state’s intelligence agency could one day come under the control of a government hostile to the United States, which might then share the CIA’s secrets with other US adversaries.

“That happens more often than people probably realize. I remember in the beginning of my career, being instructed to act as a liaison with something that at the time was called the Iraqi National Congress. It was a puppet organization set up by a liar and a thief and a criminal named Ahmed Chalabi. And so I would fly to London and I would meet with Chalabi and the people around Chalabi, only to then be told a year or two later that several of the Iraqi National Congress employees were actually plants placed there by the Iraqi intelligence service. And so my identity was blown to the Iraqi intelligence service, meaning that any time I traveled to the Middle East, I was in danger of being targeted by the Iraqis and the Iraqi government. And this kind of thing happens all the time, either because these organizations are infiltrated or because after a period of time, people sometimes do switch sides and then you've essentially wasted millions, maybe tens of millions of dollars, you've wasted years of work and you put your people in danger. And for what?”

Daria Dugina

© Photo : PLATONOVA | Z/Telegram

‘It’s Too Wrong to Ignore’

Turning to Dugina’s assassination, Kiriakou said the DC-based newspaper had decided to print the story revealing the CIA’s connection because it was considered to be far beyond the pale of acceptable practice for the agency.

“Executive Order 12333, in addition to doing other things, specifically prohibits the CIA from carrying out assassinations unless the target of the assassination presents what's called ‘a clear and present danger to the United States, to American citizens or to American installations’. Now, most people do not pose a clear and present danger. Al-Qaeda* did ISIS** did, some of these very specific, very targeted terrorist groups do. But Daria Dugina? No. Some random Syrian guy walking down the street in Damascus? No.”

“So what the CIA has done over the years several times - and it's gone bad several times - is they outsource assassination to other organizations. In this case, apparently, at least according to The Washington Post, to Ukrainian intelligence officers,” he said.

“Now, why in the world would the CIA do something like this? It has nothing to gain from doing something like this. And I think that's why it was reported. Remember, the Washington Post is, for all intents and purposes, the official newspaper of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Post and the CIA have been very, very close for decades. And indeed, Jeff Bezos, who's the owner of the Washington Post, also has a $400 million contract through Amazon Cloud Services with the CIA. So there are very close ties between Bezos and the CIA. Why, then, would the CIA report this as an exclusive? I think that they would report it as an exclusive because it's wrong, wrong, wrong, and even by The Washington Post's biased view, it's too wrong to ignore.”

“It's patently illegal. That's why we have executive orders that address this kind of thing. You're just not allowed to do it,” Kirakou said. He recalled “in the early 1980s when the CIA was told that it could not assassinate these Lebanese leaders of Hezbollah, so what they did is they just paid money to Lebanese Christians and the Lebanese Christians assassinated them - not with close-in, hands-on operation, but by blowing up an entire city block with car bombs and then killing dozens of people in the process. You can't do stuff like that. It's illegal. It's a crime against humanity, just as it is to murder a woman who's just going about her normal business in the course of a day. You can't do it. And I think that's why the Post reported it.”

WaPo or WikiLeaks?

He noted there was “really no difference” between what the Washington Post had reported and what Julian Assange reported as the head of WikiLeaks.

“Julian Assange exposed more crimes committed by the US military in Iraq, including what's now known as the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, where an American helicopter gunship is murdering Reuters journalists and then shooting at the ambulance crews coming to their rescue. And he's charged with more than a dozen counts of espionage. But we're supposed to look the other way when the Ukrainians do it.”

“The CIA's plan to murder Julian Assange in broad daylight in the center of Knightsbridge, London, made its way all the way to the White House and the national security adviser before he finally said this plan is so insane and so illegal, we just can't take the risk of doing it," he said.

"I think what it means is that we lack any meaningful congressional oversight of our intelligence community. It's not the 1970s or the early 1980s anymore where the CIA actually went to went to Capitol Hill and ‘had the Riot Act read to them’, where CIA officers were prosecuted for committing crimes, where others were forced into retirement, and where Congress actually stood up and told the CIA: ‘you're going to have to operate within the confines of the law’. Those days are gone and there's no meaningful oversight of the CIA on Capitol Hill.”

Kiev and the ‘Kill List’

International relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda told Sputnik that “It's not really new information to those who have been paying attention to what has been happening, not only the last year, almost two years since the Russian intervention in Ukraine began, but what has been going on in the country for the last decade.”

Sleboda noted how the CIA “basically took over and rebuilt from scratch” Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, giving it financing, training, technology, and hand-picking the staff.

“So the CIA built up the arm of the Kiev regime's intelligence wing that has assassinated Russian civilians in Russia. We're talking Daria Dugina, she was doing her own journalistic and political activity, [but] she is the daughter of the prominent Russian philosopher and political scientist [Alexander Dugin] that has long been a bête noire of the West, because he does have a very anti-Western political view, has long held it. Both of them were on the Kiev regime's official ‘kill list’, the Mirotvorets or ‘peacemaker’ list, which has long been acknowledged even in the Western mainstream media, is curated by the Kiev regime's Ministry of the Interior (sic).”

“This clearly indicates how the CIA's, the US', complicity in these attacks, if not their outright culpability. Likewise, with Vladlen Tatarsky, the blogger from the Donbass region” who was killed by a bomb placed at a public speaking event in St. Petersburg in April 2023.

“What I think is even more relevant is that this military intelligence wing built up by the CIA has assassinated - they say, dozens. It's actually hundreds of East Ukrainians, those that the regime regards as ‘collaborators’ or ‘traitors’, many of them civilians who didn't serve any military role. And the CIA has built up the organization that has done all of this and continues to provide them with funding and arms and even fake military uniforms so they can penetrate into the Donbass and carry out these types of assassinations. And this has been going on very regularly and it's barely mentioned in the Western media, and when it is mentioned, it's with the ‘oh, yeah, okay, so maybe these are summary executions of your own people, but they deserve it’. That is the mentality because they don't support the regime that seized power in Ukraine in 2014.”

“I think in a way that is almost more damning than the assassinations of Russian civilians in Russia. This is a regime that is killing its own people, and the intelligence wing that is carrying it out was built up from the ground by the CIA,” Sleboda said.

*Al-Qaeda and al-Nusra Front (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) are terrorist organizations banned in Russia and many other countries.

**Daesh (also known as ISIS/ISIL/IS) is a terrorist organization outlawed in Russia and many other states.