Putin's invasion of Ukraine was his 'greatest intelligence fiasco,' spy expert says

• Russia's invasion of Ukraine was an "intelligence fiasco," an intelligence expert wrote in The Times.
• Calder Walton is a scholar at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
• He said that Russia's FSB had failed to adequately prepare for the invasion of Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine was his "greatest intelligence fiasco," an intelligence expert has claimed.

Writing in The Sunday Times, Calder Walton, a scholar at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and author of "Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West," said that Russia's FSB intelligence agency had failed to prepare for the country's invasion of Ukraine.

Walton said that due to Putin's tendency to run his intelligence operations with "crippling sycophancy," he was likely not given accurate information as staff sought to confirm the president's views rather than risk going against him.

It likely played a role in the FSB's failure to establish well-placed recruits to act as saboteurs and help Russian forces during the invasion, Walton wrote.

Walton says the FSB, Russia's security service, is more criminal than professional.

"The FSB, which Putin ran in 1998, facilitates massive, systemic, state-run money laundering schemes for his personal enrichment and for Russian oligarchs," he wrote.

Changing tactics

Putin's campaign to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election was a remarkable operation, wrote Walton, but the shortcomings of Moscow's espionage operations emerged over the last year, with seemingly ordinary people accused of being Russian spies in the UK, Slovenia, and Greece.

Before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin had relied heavily on undercover diplomats to carry out clandestine work overseas, but the expulsion of many of these forced the president into a change of plan.

During the first three months of the war, over 450 Russian diplomats were sent packing from Russian embassies, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated last year.

The Russian president has since had to employ far riskier tactics to gather foreign intelligence, using unofficial spies and sleeper cells to carry out the work, including the so-called "illegals" — sleeper agents in foreign countries.

But over the last year, at least seven of these agents have been uncovered in Brazil, Greece, Norway, the Netherlands, and Slovenia, The Guardian reported.

"The time after the war, with all the expulsions, was a fateful time for the Russian intelligence system," a European intelligence official told the outlet.

Putin was merely a KGB "errand boy"

Putin has made much of his KGB past stationed in Dresden, in 1980s East Germany, and it shaped his worldview, said Walton. But the Russian president's intelligence credentials are not what he might claim.

Putin was likely never the elite Soviet spy that the world has been led to believe, an investigation by the German news outlet Der Spiegel revealed.

Many stories have painted him as a heroic figure who, among other things, single-handedly defended the KGB's offices from looters and carried out top-secret secret missions such as meeting with members of the Red Army Faction, a terrorist group that wreaked havoc in West Germany and committed a series of kidnappings and assassinations.

But according to Der Spiegel's report, the majority of Putin's work was actually limited to "banal" administrative tasks.

Horst Jehmlich, a former Stasi officer who worked in Dresden, told Der Spiegel that Putin was nothing more than an "errand boy."