The Central Intelligence Agency has launched a new attempt to seize what US foreign intelligence officials see as an “unprecedented” opportunity to recruit Russians dissatisfied with the war on Ukraine and Kremlin policies. A promotional video calling for cooperation with the CIA, shot in the best Hollywood tradition, was released on Monday in a new recording Official CIA telegram channel which is designed to communicate with Russian citizens.
The first of two videos, one of which contains instructions on anonymous and secure ways to contact US intelligence, took place on Telegram, Russia’s most popular unofficial news source.
CIA personnel in charge of the project, in an interview with CNN said that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has created a historic opportunity for the American intelligence community to reach out to large numbers of Russians dissatisfied with the policies of Vladimir Putin’s regime and to obtain from them “information what the United States needs.
According to one of the sources, the CIA hopes that Russian citizens, especially the military, scientists, intelligence officers, diplomats and computer scientists, will take an interest in Langley’s new proposal.
“We wanted to tell Russians in their native language that we know what they are going through,” added a CNN source who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity. According to him, the new video is not intended to incite unrest, but to interest people who may be of interest to US intelligence agencies and to dispel the myths that have grown up around this issue.
The video does not mention Vladimir Putin or the war in Ukraine – according to the source, the CIA prefers to emphasize “timeless values”. The video even appeals to a sense of Russian patriotism and pays homage to Russian culture – the video quotes lines from the works of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
The moving two-minute video shows Russians living their lives and considering important decisions – with the target audience, apparently, mainly government employees.
A CIA source noted that the war with Ukraine has caused many events in Russia that could become a decisive factor for those who are unhappy with the actions of the authorities – hundreds of thousands of young Russians have been mobilized and sent to the war, not only opponents and independent journalists were forced to leave the country, but also just men who did not want to take up arms.
A potential target group, according to the CIA, could include thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Russians living both at home and abroad who are able to “share valuable information” – including people working in the fields of cybersecurity, technology, finance, military and diplomacy.
Many of them simply don’t know how to contact the CIA or suspect they are of interest to US intelligence. The success of last year’s campaign to recruit new agents from Russia prompted the CIA to step up its marketing efforts, the source said.
The source said that if last year’s recruitment drive “hadn’t been successful, we wouldn’t have made such an effort.” At the same time, the interlocutor refused to specify how many informants the agency managed to recruit over the past 15 months.
Former CIA counterintelligence chief James Olson praises the new social media-focused campaign and says now is “probably the best time in history to recruit Russians”.
While the CIA searches for Russians living abroad, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched a similar project targeting Russians living in the United States. Text messages offering to cooperate with the FBI, for example, began to be received by everyone entering and leaving the Russian Embassy building in Washington.
In this regard, the Russian diplomatic mission tweeted a statement about the “ridiculousness” of attempts to “sow panic and promote the desertion of employees” of the embassy.
James Olson told CNN that the CIA wanted to “get its message out as widely as possible.”
“We can offer them protection. We can offer them security. We can offer them complete anonymity. And we can offer them financial terms that match the value of the information they provide.
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