The intelligence battle is being won by the US secret services and the information they share with their Western allies. It remains to be clarified whether the accumulation of information comes from human espionage or is the result of the technological superiority of the American military industry. In any case, the ghostly and risky world of spies has been reserved for the literature of John Le Carré, Graham Greene and all the other Cold War writers who presented us with cold, unscrupulous, brave, treacherous characters and heroes to the time, that they stepped on the most confidential spaces of the enemy simulating a false personality.
The spy had to drag his anonymity to the grave. Now the most secret information is dumped on the networks and may be available to millions of people who have nothing to do with the conflict. The North American intelligence community has penetrated the Russian military secret services and has learned the intentions of the Kremlin: from warning that there would be an invasion almost a month in advance, to passing on to the Ukrainian government the attack plan for Putin's troops in each of the battles.
The information disclosed on social networks through the Discord platform a week ago came from the Pentagon, according to its credibility. Through technological sophistication they managed to enter the operating system of the Wagner Group, the army of mercenaries at the service of the Kremlin that directly confront Ukrainian soldiers in the Donbass.
It has been published how the Russians have recruited many prisoners to send them to war and they have released figures of Russians fleeing to the West to avoid being called up. Ukraine's resistance is incomprehensible without US and European military aid, but encrypted information reaching President Zelensky's beleaguered General Staff is possibly more valuable.
How could this sensitive material have been filtered? The most resounding precedent was the Wikileaks of Julian Assange, the Australian who has been imprisoned in London since in 2010 he exposed thousands of secret American reports available to anyone connected to the Internet. Edward Snowden did the same in 2013, removing the most confidential and compromised information from the bowels of the American intelligence services. Snowden is a traitor persecuted by American justice, but he is treated as a hero in Moscow, where he lives protected by Putin, who has granted him Russian nationality and residence in an unknown location.
It is true that the most encrypted information can be eaten by websites that disseminate it without much effort, once the links have been obtained. If American intelligence is pioneering in many respects, it is also vulnerable. We know that the Russian army was a facade like the one that General Grigory Potemkin presented to his queen and lover, Catherine the Great, on her propaganda trip to the Crimea in 1787, presenting her with cities decorated with fake wooden and cardboard houses.
But it is also a fact that Russia's elite spy agency, the FSB, is Putin's political wing that intervened on behalf of Trump in the 2016 elections, in Brexit and in all the movements that weakened the European Union. as has been the procés and the aid to extreme right forces such as Salvini's party in Italy.
Agents in all intelligence services no longer respond to the traits immortalized by literature and cinema. They work with new tools, but someone has to always be infiltrating the ranks of the adversary or enemy without leaving a trace and sending information to his bosses.
The traitor is not forgiven and is sought in the depths of the earth. I remember a British spy who spent years undercover in the IRA and who, after the Good Friday agreements of 1998, retired to a cabin with neither electricity nor running water, in County Donegal. A journalist interviewed him without specifying his location. It was his death sentence. He was already running in 2006 and his body was found in one of the most rustic and lonely places in Ireland, an area where you can catch trout from the streams by hand. The IRA, already dismantled, reached his hiding place. And I kill him.
