The intelligence battle is being won by the secret services of the United States 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 the cold war writers who presented us with cold, unscrupulous, brave, traitorous and heroic characters at the same time, who trampled the most confidential spaces of the enemy simulating a false personality. A very unsuggestive life of those who live in the darkness of the dirtiest jobs.
The spy had to drag the anonymous to the grave. Now the most secret information is pouring into the networks and can be within the reach of millions of people who have nothing to do with the conflict. The American intelligence community has penetrated the Russian military secret services and learned about the Kremlin's intentions: from warning that there would be an invasion with almost a month's notice, to moving the Govt. Ukraine the plan of attack of Putin's troops in each of the battles.
The information disseminated on social networks through the Discord platform a week ago came from the Pentagon, as can be seen from its verisimilitude. Through technological sophistication, they came to enter the operating system of the Wagner Group, the army of mercenaries in the service of the Kremlin that directly confront the Ukrainian soldiers in the Donbass.
It has been published how the Russians have recruited many prisoners to send them to war and have released figures of Russians who have fled to the West to avoid conscription. Ukraine's resistance is not understood without American and European military aid, but perhaps more valuable is the encrypted information that reaches President Zelenski's beleaguered General Staff.
How could this sensitive material have been leaked? The most egregious precedent was the Wikileaks of Julian Assange, the Australian who has been imprisoned in London since 2010 exposed thousands of secret American reports 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 pursued 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 a residence in an unknown place. Most likely, he works for Putin as an insider to the Pentagon and State Department.
It is true that the most encrypted information can be exposed by websites that disclose 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 a propaganda trip to the Crimea in 1787, showing her cities decorated with fake wooden houses and cardboard.
But it's also a fact that Russia's elite spy agency, the FSB, is Putin's political arm that intervened on Trump's behalf in the 2016 election, Brexit and all the moves that weaken the European Union as has been the process and the aid to extreme right-wing forces such as Salvini's party in Italy or Berlusconi himself.
Agents in all intelligence services no longer respond to the temperament immortalized by literature and cinema. They work with new tools, but there must always be someone infiltrating the ranks of the opponent or enemy without leaving a trace and sending information to the bosses.
The traitor is not forgiven and is sought in the depths of the earth. I remember a British spy who spent years infiltrating the IRA and who, after the Good Friday Agreements of 1998, retired to a hut with no electricity or running water in County Donegal. A journalist interviewed him without specifying the location. It was his death sentence. He was already running in 2006 and his body was found in one of the loneliest places in Ireland, an area where you can catch trout from the streams with your hand. The IRA, already dismantled, reached the hiding place. And he killed him for a distant revenge.
