Russian Intelligence Capabilities in Decline

The Soviets once boasted the most intricate and prolific human intelligence network in the world, but things have taken a turn since the end of the Cold War. So why can’t Putin’s Russia keep pace with its predecessors?

If someone were tasked with designing the worst geographical region known to man, it would likely resemble the Soviet space. In a place like that, you must be able to conquer, convert, and control anyone in between you and the natural geographic barriers you need. So human intelligence wasn’t a nice-to-have; it was the only way to survive.

Once the Cold War ended, the Russians were left with the shell of a system; still operational but only a shadow of what it once was. Most with this specialized training moved into the private sector or more powerful government positions under Putin.

Now I’m never going to say that Russian Intelligence sucks, but it’s taken some blows that will require a long recovery. I’m mainly concerned about the misinformation-pushing-bots that litter the internet.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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TRANSCIPT

Everybody. Peter Zine here coming to you from Colorado. Yes, this is later in the day that we got a foot of snow. It’s crazy. Anyway, I wanted to close out the series on Russian intelligence with why the Russians seem to be significantly weaker than we would have expected them to be, because, after all, this was one of the countries that arguably had the best human intelligence collection system in the world.

I think it’s worth first exploring why I say that the Russian geography is not like the American. So the United States has great coast, great waterways, great land. It’s easy to develop. It’s easy to expand. And so when we want to do human intelligence, you have to take somebody out of that environment and then put them in another one.

And since the United States is a very large country, even though we are multicultural, it’s not like we have a lot of experience in this is going to sound really horrible. Infiltrating and conquering other peoples. I mean. Yes, yes, yes. You can make the case for the Native Americans, you know, a century ago or more. But this isn’t something that’s kind of built into a society where as the Russian system is very, very different.

Moscow McAvoy originally was a relatively small chunk of land with not great capital generation or agricultural opportunities, and it had no natural barriers like the United States has with its border with Mexico or Canada, much less the rest of the world. And so they had to go out and conquer everyone that they border. And all that did was give them territory that they had to occupy and no borders that were decent.

So they went and conquered everyone around that group, too. And they kept expanding, expanding and expanding until they reached a series of geographic barriers like the Caucasus Mountains or the Baltic Sea that either halted their expansion or even better, provided a physical barrier for anyone else coming in and anyone who has been following me on Ukraine. You know, this is kind of my core reason why I think the Russians will never back down and why this war was always inevitable.

Anyway, this leaves the Russians with dozens of ethnicities that they have conquered and are literally using as cannon fodder. And since pretty much no one on the planet has grown up saying, Oh, I want to be cannon fodder later, you have to find a way to induce their cooperation. You can’t make them part of the leadership because they’re conquered people and you don’t want them going their own way.

So you basically shoot through the entire system with intelligence operatives. So the Russians, from the beginning, hundreds of years ago, have become experts at planting their people in other populations that may be hostile to Russian interests and collecting information and recruiting dissidents and basically turning the population against one another. And in doing that, they built up a skill set that dealt that served them very well in the Soviet period.

And the Soviets basically dusted off the Russian strategy and applied it to the world writ large, not just to the Soviet bloc countries or their occupied territories or folks within the Soviet Union itself. And that meant that by the time we got to 1989, the Soviet system had the richest human intelligence gathering network in human history. But then the Soviet system collapsed and just as everything else got weaker.

Same thing here. If you don’t pay your spies, they probably weren’t going to spy as well. There was also a problem with leadership, especially after the year 2000. There was also a big problem with the numbers that they had. So a lot of intelligence operatives after the Cold War ended went into business for themselves and got into drug running and worked for cartel cells and were for people smuggling or worked with the Taliban.

They basically forswear king country or czar in country and went into business and used their skill set for criminal enterprises. And they continued to be a problem today. Second, more importantly is that Putin drew a lot of his support from people who were part of the HUMINT network, specifically on the training and the leadership side, and brought them into his coalition to run the government after he became president in 2000.

Well, most of these people, like, you know, this is a wonderful opportunity to get rich. And so they got out of the business of manning the intel networks and got into the business of government. And these are the silver arcs, if you’re familiar with that term. The siloviki are the strong men, the military intelligence folks who run the system.

The oligarchs are the people who run business in the silver arcs of the people who have a foot in both worlds. Probably the most famous Eric is a guy by the name of Igor Sechin, who runs Rosneft, which is Russia’s national oil monopoly. Anyway, so the Russians have lost most of their operatives abroad because they stopped paying them in the nineties and they’ve lost most of their traders at home because they went into the business of government with Putin.

And that has left a bit of a shell of a system. Now they’re still good because that system to train these people still exist to a degree, but it had to become a lot more focused and they became very sensitive. The Russians became very sensitive to losing their operatives. They try to use them in places where they could have cover, that it was as dense as possible.

And as a rule, no matter what country you’re in, the most reliable cover for an operative is to say they’re a diplomat because that gives them an excuse to be in the country with a limited visa overwatch. They have diplomatic immunity. So if they get caught doing something and get sent home, you just send them to another country.

Well, that had worked for the Russians for a while until the Ukraine were started in. The Europeans decided to belly up to the bar and actually start looking after some of their own security interests. And so far in the war, well over 400, probably close to 500 now intelligent operatives who were registered as diplomats have been ejected. And the Europeans, rather than just sending them home and calling the day, have shared the identities of each and every one of them with every other country in the world.

So the Russians can never to deploy those operatives ever again in any sort of clandestine role with official government cover. And that means that the Russians have to reinvent a lot of their intelligence apparatus, give you an idea of the scale that the United States had to recreate its intelligence apparatus after 911 because we had the information. But we can process it fast enough.

20 years on, we’re still figuring out how to do that. This is not something that’s going to be shaped out by the time that this war is over. This is something that is going to be dogging the Russians for at least a decade. And that leaves me with one final point. There is another class of assets, deep cover assets, sometimes called the legal, sometimes called plants, where the people are assigned to go to another country, establish a false identity and live that false identity until such time as they’re called into action.

This is really the stuff of spy novels, but it does exist. And the Russians historically have been pretty good at it. What we have seen in the last year is at least a dozen instances of these plants, these illegals, these deep covert agents being unmasked, because as the Russians have realized, they can’t train at the same rate that they used to and they lost their entire diplomatic corps access to intelligence.

They’re having to rely on their deep plants to do basic intelligence gathering. And that is not a skill that these people are. Well suited to. For one, you know, these are years, if not decades of investment in time. And they’re being asked to do basic intelligence gathering and HUMINT collection. Well, that’s like using a maserati to deliver newspapers.

I mean, yes, it’ll work, but it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to imagine something going wrong. And that has now gone wrong with a number of these agents. So I’m never going to say that Russian intelligence sucks, but why has it taken a series of structural body blows that are going to be very, very difficult and time consuming to recover from?

And in the meantime, anyone who’s looking to resist Russian influence, it’s gotten pretty simple. You just have to worry about the bot farm. Right now. Russian misinformation is still coming screaming into the system, but it’s no longer. What’s the word I’m looking for. It’s no longer part of a multi vectored approach. It’s really the only leg the Russians have to stand on.

And at some point I think it’s pretty safe to say that one of the major governments of the world was going to do something about the bot form, and then the Russians are going to have to come up with everything else from scratch. All right. That’s it for me to you all. Take care.

Top Secret Pentagon Documents Leaked by a 21-Year-Old

What happens when you give a 21-year-old access to TOP SECRET documents? They end up leaking those documents on a gaming chat platform…shocking.

Most of the information that was leaked pertains to the Ukraine War and how the U.S. has low confidence in the reports coming out of Ukraine. Nothing too far-fetched, but that doesn’t mean we should take everything in the public domain at face value. Let’s remember who is blasting this info around and how easy it is to tamper with.

Russia once boasted the largest human intelligence arm, but we haven’t seen much Russian interference since Snowden. This means they’ve gotten really good, or that capability has lapsed, and I lean toward the latter.

As the US faces another leak, the real question that must be asked is whether people like Snowden, Manning, and Teixeira should even have access to this stuff.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado where spring has sprung and the frogs are chirping, which means, of course, later today we’re supposed to get a foot of snow. Anyway, I thought it would be worth me commenting on the recent intelligence leaks by airmen Teixeira. Let’s deal with the contents of what was leaked and then we can talk about espionage and leaks in general.

So most of the documents that were leaked relate to the war in Ukraine in some way and involve internal U.S. assessments of how the war is going and how the Ukrainians are doing. And they’re broadly less than fully complementary. Basic indication from the leak is that the Ukrainians have been suffering higher casualties than are reported and more importantly, that the confidence in the numbers provided by the Ukrainians is very low. So the U.S. really doesn’t have a good view. In addition, there’s concern that by engaging in a static defense in places like Bakhmut, the Ukrainians are losing their combat firepower, which is going to make it more difficult for them to launch future offensives. There’s nothing about either of those assessments that is particularly controversial. But before you say that everything that is now out there in the public domain is true, keep in mind that it has been the Russians now that have publicized this stuff far and wide, and they have undoubtedly changed a lot of the details in order to make their propaganda machine a little bit stronger than it otherwise would be.

But three things to come from this. First of all. Teixeira, the guy who did the leak – the U.S. airman – from all appearances, was not recruited by the Russians. And that’s something that’s kind of had me curious for a while now. Not since Edward Snowden in 2013 have we had any of our leakers have a very firm and obvious Russian connection. Snowden apologists, of course, are going to reject that out of hand. But, you know, screw them. The Russians used to maintain the world’s best human intelligence arm. And in the last decade, either they’ve gotten so good that no one has detected them functionally working really anywhere, or that capacity has languished along with everything else that we’ve seen in the Russian state services of late, whether it’s the military or their cyber capabilities or anything else. That’s probably really good news. Second, Teixeira himself and why people do things like this, it’s really an issue of foreign recruitment. Even if they’re not a foreigner involved. People are often motivated by the same factors, with the big three being ego, ideology and sex. And in the case of Teixeira, it looks like it was probably a combination of all three. He was on a gamer’s forum. He had these documents. He had access to these documents. He brought them home. He photocopied them. He took PDF photos of them, and then he published them on the gamers platform, Discord, like the whiny bitch he is.

In the case of a couple of previous big leaks, I’m thinking here of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Ideology was certainly part of it for Manning in terms of Edward Snowden clearly was paid by the Russians, clearly fled to Russia, clearly married a trophy bride as soon as he got there. So, you know, I’m sure it’s for love, but let’s be a little bit more honest here. And then ideology, of course, intertwines with Snowden as well. I think the criticism here, if there is one, is we’ve now had three leaks of significance in the last 13 years that get into the files that are top secret and above. And if you look at the three specific cases of Snowden, Manning and Teixeira, they all have something in common. They probably should have never had access to these documents in the first place. Snowden was a part time contractor, and yes, he was definitely a spy. And yes, he definitely hacked into the system. But somebody at his level should have never been near a terminal, and given access in the first place. Manning was a private at the time and definitely should have not had access to the high end stuff. And Teixeira was a 21 year old airman. Now I am not the sort of person who’s going to go in and pick apart American security policy when it comes to information. But there is a pattern here and probably something that should be addressed in the not too distant future. But the biggest bit of encouragement I had is how fast Teixeira was caught. I mean, it really only took a few days for the FBI to find them. At the same time, a bunch of independent journalists found him and then publicized his information. So at least on time, on target, we are getting better from the law enforcement side of this. But maybe we should work a little bit more in information security on the personnel side.

Okay. I think that’s it for me. Take care.

Where Are All the Russian Hackers?

Today’s video was recorded in Wānaka, New Zealand, during my yearly backpacking trip.

Since the onset of the Ukraine War, everyone’s been checking under their bed and looking in their closet for the boogeyman – a.k.a Russian Hackers – but they haven’t been there.

There are a few reasons why Russian cybercrime has been lying low. The Russians have been hitting NATO countries with cyber attacks for the past few years. Places like Estonia have learned a thing or two, enabling other NATO members to build robust cyber defenses over the past few years.

Additionally, much of Russian cybercrime is carried out by private crime syndicates, which makes going on the offense a bit easier. Unofficially, of course, the US was able to drop the hammer on many of these organizations, which limited their capabilities heading into the war.

I’m not saying everything is hunky dory, but we’re starting to see the true power of some offensive cyber tactics now on the table.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

Economic Growth Is Collapsing Around the World

When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) releases its least optimistic report in the last 50 years, alarm bells should go off for everyone. IMF’s projected global economic growth for the next year is 2.8%, and for the next five years is only 3%. The scariest part is that these numbers are likely overly optimistic.

No matter where you live in the world, this stagnation of economic growth will hit you, from the rich world to the developing world, and even the country that has had the highest growth rates for years – China. There might be a few isolated pockets of growth seen in areas that are nearshoring or friendshoring, but this will just exasperate the economic collapse of other places as industry pulls out.

We are looking at the unwinding of the globalized world from a geographic and demographic POV. In a situation like this, low economic growth rates will always be the result.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Hey everybody. Hello, from snowbound Colorado where it was 60 degrees yesterday will be 60 degrees tomorrow. The news of the last couple of weeks on the economic front has been from the International Monetary Fund, which is that big international lender that helps countries get out of trouble. They are arguably the best in the world when it comes to doing economic forecasts. And the most recent forecast is the least optimistic one they’ve had in the last 50 years. Specifically, they think that growth next year, on average for the world is going to be 2.8% and for the next five years, only 3%. And honestly, they’re probably being significantly over optimistic. So let me kind of give you it from three points of view.

So first of all, from the developed point of view, the rich world, the rich world, most economic activity comes in the form of private consumption. You run on your credit card, buying a house, going to college, raising kids, buying a home, all that good stuff. Problem is that most of that activity is done by people under age 50 and with mass urbanization starting in most places around 1940, 1950. We’ve seen lower and lower and lower birthrates throughout the rich world. There is no country that is an exception to that and in many cases, replacement population growth, which would be like a 2.1 children per woman. You know, most of the advance will drop below that rate over 50 years ago. Well, you fast forward 50 years and it’s not that you’re running out of children. That happened a long time ago. You’re now running out of working age adults. Specifically, the baby boomers were the last very large generation born in most countries. And on average, the baby boomers entered retirement last calendar year. So the rich world in most cases will never, ever be capable of generating the economic growth they have in the past. And in fact, it’s probably a little worse than that, because when you stop having kids, people still get older. And so when you have a lot of 30 somethings, but not a lot of ten year olds, those 30 somethings are spending money on themselves, on cars and condos as opposed to diapers. And that’s sort of economic growth, is a lot more has a lot more octane to it. And that’s what we’ve seen in, say, Europe in the 1990s and 2000s. Well, they’re never going back to that. They can never go back to that, but statistically impossible. Okay. So secularly lower growth rates in the rich world, it’s pretty much going to be the norm for at least the next 40 years.

Second, the developing world. Now, the key thing that separates the rich world from the developing world is that the developing world isn’t as rich, you know, pretty self-explanatory there. And they need a lot of capital in order to develop their systems. The rich world is the rich world because they have favorable geographies and it’s been easy for them to trade with the world, trade with one another and build infrastructure because things are relatively flat and open and rain falls from the sky to grow crops, all that good stuff. Most of the developing world lacks one or more or all of those characteristics. And so if you want to develop, you have to have the cash come in from somewhere else and that somewhere else has traditionally been the rich world. That money is no longer available, and even if it was, it would be going to pay for pensions and health care for an incredibly large and increasingly size retired class of people. So the developing world doesn’t have the money that it needs to build infrastructure or to develop consumer markets. So without that input, the most important input for the developing world. You are looking at a secular stagnation that will last until that capital can be generated somewhere else. So not only is the rich world looking at lower growth rates for at least the next generation, so is the developing world.

And then, of course, there’s China. Now, the Chinese, as you know, tend to lie about all their statistics, but they have managed to sustain growth rates above that of the rest of the world for some time now. In the rich world, typically 2% is considered kind of middle of the road. In the developing world, it’s usually in the 4 to 7% range. And for most of the last 40 years, the Chinese have been above 8%. And even if you consider that you can’t trust all of their data, they’ve certainly been on the high end of the poorer side of the world in terms of growth rates. And now they’re thinking that, you know, 4% may be as good as it’s going to get. In many ways, what the Chinese are dealing with is the worst of all worlds. Like the developed world they are facing a demographic bomb, that’s actually a much steeper decline than any other country in the world. This is a country that absolutely is going to get old before it gets rich and reach its first world living standards. So this type of consumption led growth that we’re used to seeing can’t happen. And the export growth that they use to sell products to the rest of the world can’t happen because that requires growth elsewhere. Second, the Chinese have followed the developing world paradigm to a certain degree in throwing a lot of cash at projects, especially infrastructure, to make it work. Well China already has a great infrastructure now, and as the Japanese discovered in the 90s and the 2000s, if you already have a good infrastructure and you build more infrastructure, you don’t get more economic growth except for from, you know, the development of that infrastructure itself. It doesn’t do much follow on because there’s no need for it. Well, the Chinese have been doing this year after year after year for decades now, and they now have a debt load of probably about 300 – 350% of GDP, which again, world record. And they’re just not capable of sustaining that in the long run. And then third, and most importantly, the single most important factor behind China’s success these last several decades has been de facto American sponsorship to allow the Chinese to have risk free, secure and above all, cheap access to the world’s energy markets, commodities markets and consumer markets without them having to lift a finger. That’s clearly not in the cards anymore.

So every aspect of growth from every corner of the world looks like it’s going to be lower for quite some time. And the IMF forecast is probably overoptimistic. What we’re dealing with is the unwinding of the globalized world from both a geographic and a demographic point of view. And that was always going to generate low growth rates. Now, low on average does not mean low everywhere. We’re seeing a lot of near shoring, reshoring, friend shoring as countries want to move manufacturing capacity, particularly for critical materials and critical technologies back home. So they’re not vulnerable to say, I don’t know, a genocidal dictatorship that will be growth stories in those places, but by definition, that manufacturing capacity will not be global. So it’s a bit of a global starvation diet from a growth point of view. So for every place where you have a Vietnam or Mexico, the United States will do very well in this environment. You will have a China and Korea and a Germany that goes down the tubes, and that’s just where we are now.

Okay. That’s it for me. See you guys next time.