CIA Director Bill Burns made his final secret visit to Ukraine as head of the US intelligence agency last weekend, meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky and tying up the current administration’s loose ends with Kyiv before Donald Trump moves into the White House on Jan. 20.
It has left Ukraine’s leadership wondering what will come next for the two countries’ intelligence cooperation. While intel officials in Kyiv maintain that their allied counterparts are not made aware of covert operations, such as assassinations of Russian military officials, the overall collaboration between the CIA and its Ukrainian partners has been robust during the Russian invasion, officials say.
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Trump has nominated former Representative John Ratcliffe to take Burns’ place. The CIA director reports to the Director of National Intelligence, a position that Ratcliffe himself once held, and for which Trump now has nominated Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic US Representative and a veteran of the Army National Guard.
Neither of them has faced confirmation hearings in the Senate yet, which will be back in session Jan. 3, when the new Congress will be sworn in. According to Politico, more than 100 former officials, including a number of diplomats, have urged senators to hold Gabbard’s hearings behind closed doors, and noted that the congresswoman’s “past actions ‘call into question her ability to deliver unbiased intelligence briefings to the President, Congress, and to the entire national security apparatus.’”
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Those “past actions” include disseminating Kremlin talking points on the war in Ukraine. In general, her seeming affinity for Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin has raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill.
There are few concerns in that regard surrounding the president-elect’s hawkish pick to run the spy agency, but the staunch Trump ally has a history of playing domestic politics in his role of overseeing the advancement of American interests abroad.
Ratcliffe, 59, has been vocal about American support for Ukraine. Two months into the war, Ratcliffe went on Fox News to say that while Biden was helping Ukraine, he wasn’t “helping them to win.”
He was first elected to Texas’s 4th congressional district in 2015, representing the northeastern Dallas suburbs in the House of Representatives until 2020, when he stepped down to become Trump’s Director of National Intelligence.
He had initially been tapped by Trump in 2019 for that post, which oversees the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies, but skeptical Republican lawmakers at the time thought he lacked the requisite experience.
“At a time when the Russians are interfering in our elections, we need a nonpartisan leader at the helm of the Intelligence Community who sees the world objectively and speaks truth to power, and unfortunately neither Acting Director Grenell nor Rep. Ratcliffe comes even close to that,” Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said after Ratcliffe’s DNI nomination.
On Trump’s second try in 2020, Ratcliffe managed to win over both the skeptical Democratic and Republican senators, by promising them he would not “politicize” the position.
During his tenure at DNI, despite those pledges to Congress, Ratcliffe declassified select reports about Russian intelligence during the 2016 election between Trump and Hillary Clinton that were meant to damage the Democrats’ chances.
“HUR was our little baby. We gave them all new equipment and training… The SBU was too big to reform.”
While neither the DNI director nor the CIA director plays any official role in the crafting of foreign policy, the spy agency, especially, has a very active role to play in wartime Ukraine. An October 2023 Washington Post article shed some light on the nature of that cooperation with the Security Services of Ukraine (SBU) and the military’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR) ever since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.
“The initial phases of cooperation were tentative, officials said, given concerns on both sides that Ukraine’s services were still heavily penetrated by the [Russian] FSB…” the Post authors wrote. “To manage that security risk, the CIA worked with the SBU to create an entirely new directorate, officials said, one that would focus on so-called ‘active measures’ operations against Russia and be insulated from other SBU departments. The new unit was prosaically dubbed the ‘Fifth Directorate’ to distinguish it from the four long-standing units of the SBU.”
Handpicked SBU recruits were trained by CIA personnel at centers just outside Kyiv.
Since then, the CIA has been working with the Ukrainian spies on the finer points of intelligence gathering rather than getting involved in specific operations, they said. A former US security official told the Washington Post that the focus was “more on secure communications and tradecraft… rather than ‘here’s how you blow up a mayor.’ I never got the sense that we were that involved in designing their ops.”
“We calculated that HUR was a smaller and more nimble organization where we could have more impact,” a former US intelligence official who worked in Ukraine told the Washington Post. “HUR was our little baby. We gave them all new equipment and training.” HUR officers “were young guys not Soviet-era KGB generals,” the official said, “while the SBU was too big to reform.”
Trump’s most recent comments about the nomination seem to indicate that his primary concern with the role of CIA director is that he will be a loyal servant of the man who picked him:
“From exposing fake Russian collusion to be a Clinton campaign operation, to catching the FBI’s abuse of Civil Liberties at the FISA Court, John Ratcliffe has always been a warrior for Truth and Honesty with the American Public,” Trump posted to his own social network after nominating Ratcliffe. “When 51 intelligence officials were lying about Hunter Biden’s laptop, there was one, John Ratcliffe, telling the truth to the American People.”
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