If our nation’s spies are the infantry of our ideology, as John Le Carré as soon as noticed, Tom Sylvester is an unknown soldier who turned a four-star normal. Two years in the past, he was named the CIA’s deputy director of operations, in command of hundreds of officers conducting espionage, covert motion, and paramilitary operations. He received the job by advantage of his position in stealing Russia’s battle plans for Ukraine, warning the world concerning the coming invasion, and offering steadfast help to Kyiv’s army and intelligence companies. These missions had been on the coronary heart of a dialog we had final summer time.
This text is tailored from The Mission: The CIA within the twenty first Century by Tim Weiner (Mariner Books, 464 pp., $35, July 2025).
Sylvester had been underneath cowl for 33 years after we sat down in a windowless chamber at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia; earlier than we met, no sitting director of the clandestine service had ever given an on-the-record interview, so far as I do know. I requested to fulfill him shortly after he appeared—as “Tom S.”—on a newly created in-house CIA podcast. I had been struck by what he’d mentioned concerning the energy of tyrants to form the destiny of countries: “I’ve had this catbird seat in watching, over the previous many years, what has occurred in world historical past. And what continues to horrify me, shock me, is the truth that single people have inside their energy the flexibility to wreak ache and struggling.”
Sylvester turned the CIA’s appearing director in the intervening time President Donald Trump took the oath of workplace on Jan. 20, serving till Trump’s nominee, John Ratcliffe, a MAGA acolyte, was sworn in three days later. He remained the deputy director of operations till he stepped down in late Might.
Trying again on our dialog, I ponder how Sylvester copes with the shattering of the nation’s alliances, what he makes of the amateurs and toadies now in command of U.S. nationwide safety, and if he fears that the probabilities of a catastrophic intelligence failure are rising as quick as they did on the daybreak of the twenty first century. The CIA is an executor of U.S. international coverage; its spies are exquisitely delicate to orders from on excessive, and so they conduct covert operations underneath the command of presidents and presidents alone. What do they do when the best risk to U.S. nationwide safety is the person within the White Home?
Officers stand guard outdoors the George Bush Middle for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia, in July 2022. Tom Brenner/The New York Occasions through Redux Footage
Sylvester, at 60, had the lean and hungry look of a army commando and the dry wit of a hard-bitten battle correspondent. His father was a international service officer who served within the Saigon embassy throughout the Vietnam Struggle, on the U.S. mission in Beijing shortly after Mao Zedong died, and as consul normal in Shanghai. His grandfather was a vice admiral, his great-grandfather commanded the Navy within the Pacific earlier than World Struggle II, and his great-great-grandfather helped rescue Beijing’s international legations throughout the Boxer Insurrection in 1900. He went to Andover, shook President Ronald Reagan’s hand upon graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1985, and parlayed six years as a SEAL right into a profession on the CIA, beginning out on the Cairo station.
After 9/11, he led a largely profitable mission to penetrate Saddam Hussein’s army and intelligence companies earlier than the U.S. assault on Baghdad after which served as station chief in Damascus in 2005 and 2006. He spent the subsequent decade operating covert operations all through the Center East.
In the summertime of 2017, Sylvester obtained new marching orders from Tomas Rakusan, the brand new chief of the clandestine service, whose identification remained a state secret till after his retirement. Rakusan had spied on Russia since earlier than the top of the Chilly Struggle, working all through Central and Japanese Europe. His hatred of the Russians was bred within the bone. His mother and father had been Czech; he was 9 years outdated when Soviet troops crushed the Prague Spring rebellion in 1968. Rakusan noticed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s subversion of the presidential election on Trump’s behalf because the espionage equal of 9/11. In retaliation, he aimed to penetrate the Kremlin—among the many best aspirations of the CIA since its basis, and a objective by no means achieved.
Rakusan vowed a intestine renovation of the CIA’s Russia Home, established early within the Chilly Struggle to assemble intelligence on the Soviet Union and run covert operations to undermine Soviet affect all over the world. He started by bringing in scores of senior counterterrorism officers—together with Sylvester, one in every of his favourite officers. “The Russians manipulated our fucking elections,” he informed them. “How can we make certain this by no means occurs once more?” He didn’t care in the event that they didn’t communicate Russian or had by no means set foot in Moscow. He ordered them to take their experience in concentrating on and recruiting terrorists and switch it in opposition to Russian spies, diplomats, and oligarchs. The objective was to acquire intelligence on the intentions of the Russian chief and his interior circle by means of espionage.
Rakusan enlisted the digital eavesdroppers on the Nationwide Safety Company (NSA) and the counterintelligence forces of the FBI. He requested the leaders of the congressional intelligence and armed companies committees for assist. How a lot cash do you want? they requested. They delivered tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars}, and Rakusan doubled the dimensions of Russia Home in lower than two years.
“What he had completed was to reimagine, and get us out of, a paradigm the place we’re caught within the early Chilly Struggle,” Sylvester mentioned. “The center of the difficulty was the concrete choices by which to make sure that we might put daylight into Russia Home,” lengthy essentially the most cloistered a part of the CIA. Its convention heart at headquarters was adorned with Soviet propaganda posters depicting muscular peasants and good-looking troopers. One-third of Russia Home was a again room the place operators and analysts had toiled all through their careers within the best secrecy; the character of their work had not modified essentially since Winston Churchill known as Joseph Stalin’s Russia a riddle wrapped in a thriller inside an enigma. They guarded and hoarded intelligence reaped by means of years of painstaking operations, reluctant to share their secrets and techniques with outsiders, and everybody was an outsider. They had been proud to the purpose of conceitedness. To their disgrace, that they had didn’t see the Kremlin’s covert help for Trump’s election till it was too late.
Rakusan ordered the outdated guard within the again room to unseal their secret recordsdata, sanitize them to guard sources and strategies, and share them with the remainder of the clandestine service—and, extra importantly, its allies abroad. Up to now, these secrets and techniques at all times had been deemed too delicate. That every one modified, and the outcome was revolutionary. The decision to arms marked the return of espionage to its conventional place of preeminence on the CIA after 16 years within the shadow of counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and their attendant horrors. (“We had been centered on that, and China and Russia had been centered on us,” former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell mentioned.) The CIA had didn’t deduce the army intentions of the Russians throughout the Chilly Struggle. Now its spies had been beginning to peer contained in the Kremlin, and divining secrets and techniques solely espionage may reveal.
By the summer time of 2020, CIA officers had been working in shut liaison with the British, Dutch, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Estonians, and lots of different companies in opposition to the Russians. “There was the strategic choice on how we might share intelligence,” Sylvester mentioned. “We used it as an affect mechanism, in and of itself, to get governments to start out cooperating with us.” This difficult-won belief “allowed them to open up faucets of cooperation and intelligence that that they had theretofore not shared with us,” he added. The CIA and its international allies had been cross-fertilizing intelligence, choreographing operations, and, most significantly, recruiting Russian sources.
CIA Director William Burns prepares to testify earlier than the Senate Choose Committee on Intelligence about world threats in opposition to america on March 11, 2024. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Photographs
The CIA had been capable of “push again in opposition to the Russian companies” largely by “working with liaison companions abroad to show and disrupt Russian intelligence actions,” then-CIA Director William Burns informed me final yr. “After which what we tried to construct on that, beginning within the spring of 2021, was the recruitment dimension of this,” he mentioned. “This was actually, particularly as soon as the battle drums began beating, a once-in-a-generation alternative, given the disaffection in some elements of the Russian elite and Russian society” in opposition to Putin’s regime.
Sylvester took cost of the decision to arms in opposition to the Kremlin because the CIA’s new operations chief for Europe and Eurasia within the spring of 2021. That October, 5 weeks after Kabul fell to the Taliban, he foresaw that Russia was getting ready to invade Ukraine. No eureka second, no flash of perception, no single supply had led to this revelation. Many streams of intelligence, flowing by means of myriad channels, had develop into a mighty river. The CIA, driving that present, had arrived on the conclusion that Putin was going to battle.
Kyiv’s spy companies, rebuilt by the CIA after Putin seized Crimea and different elements of jap Ukraine in 2014, had develop into one in every of Washington’s greatest sources of intelligence on the Russians; the CIA was turning into the Ukrainians’ greatest protection in opposition to them. “It was in all probability among the finest investments that the CIA, the U.S. authorities, has made,” Sylvester mentioned; it had created “the belief, the boldness, the flexibility in occasions of have to really feel such as you had been within the trenches collectively.” By the autumn of 2021, the CIA had given the Ukrainians a graduate course in espionage and paramilitary operations, together with the flexibility to know and make the most of a gentle stream of U.S. intelligence.
“In case you ask me the 2 largest elements” which have allowed Ukraine to carry out in opposition to Russia, Sylvester mentioned, “one was the choices in 2014 onwards to take a position, put in folks and cash, and coaching repeatedly, all the way in which as much as the battle. And second was this ongoing choice on the intelligence sharing and the repeated journey by our director throughout Europe” upfront of the invasion.
Ukrainian troopers stand in a discipline the place they dug trenches in Donetsk oblast, Ukraine, on Jan. 10, 2023.Viktor Fridshon/World Photographs Ukraine through Getty Photographs
Burns mentioned the CIA needed to go public with its data that Russia was getting ready to invade, and Biden permitted. Many European political leaders had been skeptical; the stench of the CIA’s bogus reporting on Saddam’s arsenal nonetheless lingered. However when the foresight proved exact, Sylvester mentioned, the impact was electrical: “The truth that we shared correct data with many, lots of our companions that precisely predicted the truth that Russia got here into the battle, they informed us, was essentially the most highly effective factor the CIA had completed with them and for them for the final 18 years.”
Sylvester known as the survival of Ukraine a triumph of HUMINT: human intelligence, the guts and soul of espionage. The time period was coined within the Fifties to differentiate the work of human spies from SIGINT, alerts intelligence collected by the new child NSA, and IMINT, imagery obtained by the U-2 airplane and photoreconnaissance satellites. These applied sciences “threatened to alter the character of our work,” former CIA Director Richard Helms warned in 1983. “The collectors with technical devices started to disparage the work of human collectors. The brand new cry from the gadgeteers was, ‘Give us the cash and go away it to us.’ And, certainly, why take dangers operating spies when devices would let you know what you needed to know? However therein lay a fallacy. … As a result of devices can’t divine man’s intentions.”
“If there’s a weak point in our intelligence equipment,” Helms had concluded, “it’s in our means to determine what the leaders of a international energy are going to do in any given state of affairs.”
All this stays true. If the CIA has 10 analysts finding out the transcript of an intercepted dialog, “they’re going to come back to 10 totally different analytic assessments on what occurred,” Sylvester mentioned. However should you communicate with somebody who was within the room, you may know the reality, or one thing near it. “After we speak about human intelligence, it truly is the gathering of all the things that goes into how our adversaries are pondering, appearing, and the context wherein these choices are being made,” he mentioned. The folks the CIA had recruited to penetrate the Kremlin “will not be case numbers. … They’re human beings who’ve determined to make some extremely daring and brave issues to try to change the world round them.”
Washington’s means to warn of the Russian invasion and blunt its pressure rested “on espionage, human intelligence, the gathering of insights from folks to impact coverage,” Sylvester mentioned. So did the CIA’s decade of covert help for Ukraine. That mission relied on the flexibility “to construct up human relations” with its army and intelligence officers. “Is that espionage? Completely. That’s what HUMINT is,” he mentioned. “And I believe this must be so revelatory.”
The thought {that a} humanity lay on the coronary heart of espionage clashes with the notion that spying is at worst immoral to the core. Each issues are true. The director of the CIA’s boot camp throughout the Chilly Struggle, Hugh Cunningham, informed two generations of younger trainees: “We should have the best immorality, and we should have the best morality.” The alliance between a CIA officer and a international recruit was an alloy of belief and betrayal, based within the agent’s religion in america and his option to commit treason.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at CIA headquarters on Jan. 21, 2017. Olivier Doulier/Getty Photographs
All through the Chilly Struggle, the CIA was lucky that america, for all its flaws, may declare a better ethical floor than its enemies. That floor was misplaced 20 years in the past with the revelations of the company’s secret prisons and the tortures inflicted inside them. The combat for Ukraine and in opposition to Russia partly reclaimed it. Now that Trump has damaged belief with U.S. allies, the CIA’s means to work with its worldwide companions and recruit international brokers who may warn in opposition to unseen risks is imperiled. And the threats are as grave as any because the Chilly Struggle.
Up to now few months, Trump has known as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator, accused him of beginning the battle in Ukraine, and tried to shove a cease-fire on Russia’s phrases down his throat. Trump minimize off the circulate of U.S. intelligence to Kyiv on March 5 and stored the spigot shut for per week as Ukrainian forces reeled and retreated. His help for Russia’s battle goals was a bitter betrayal and never solely of Ukraine. The CIA’s officers had been combating the Kremlin ever because the company’s creation in 1947. They rely mightily on secret liaisons with scores of international intelligence companies; they can’t assume globally with out that assist. Now Trump has made U.S. allies cautious of sharing secrets and techniques with Washington. This bodes unwell for officers and analysts attempting to look over the horizon to see what’s coming.
Trump has been implacably hostile to the CIA ever since its unassailable evaluation that Russia labored to elect him in 2016. He sees it because the capital of the “deep state,” that imaginary cryptocracy of spies and troopers working in secret to undermine his presidency. Within the weeks earlier than the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on the Capitol, he had come to consider that Gina Haspel, then his CIA director, had been a part of a plot to rig the presidential vote in opposition to him. Trump tried to keelhaul Haspel, however she stood as much as him and guarded the company from his wrath.
Ratcliffe has failed to take action at each flip. He has fired new CIA hires, focused senior officers for early retirement, twisted intelligence to please the president, and overseen an ideological purge. In March, Sylvester and his colleagues nominated a lately retired officer to succeed him: Ralph Goff, a six-time station chief who had been deeply concerned in Russian and Ukrainian operations. As a civilian, Goff had voiced the strongest help for Kyiv. That very same day, Laura Loomer, a far-right saboteur beloved by Trump, went to the Oval Workplace and handed him an extended listing of intelligence and nationwide safety officers whom she deemed denizens of the deep state. The White Home blocked Goff’s nomination inside hours.
With Ratcliffe in cost on the CIA, the MAGA warrior Kash Patel operating the FBI, the conspiracy theorist Tulsi Gabbard overseeing nationwide intelligence, and the Christian-nationalist Pete Hegseth on the Pentagon, Trump has created the makings of a nationwide safety nightmare. “Totalitarianism in energy invariably replaces all first-rate skills, no matter their sympathies, with these crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity continues to be the most effective assure of their loyalty,” Hannah Arendt noticed many years in the past.
“The world is getting more and more complicated and more and more harmful,” Sylvester mentioned final yr. “Throughout the globe our adversaries are doing all the things they will” to instill authoritarian rule. Russia and China relied on “different nations that concern their dominion, concern their tyranny, and solely cooperate from a way of both intimidation, or that it’s enterprise, or they’re purchased off.” However he asserted confidently that america had allies all over the world who “establish with us and what we need to do on this globe.” Who sides with it now because it lurches towards autocracy?
Over the course of eight many years, the CIA’s officers noticed themselves as a secret military within the battle for what as soon as was often known as the free world. Now the nation faces a risk from inside. Because the president assaults civil liberties and the Structure, the devices of U.S. nationwide safety are within the fingers of his sycophants. The foundations of its international coverage are crumbling. The ranks of the CIA’s most skilled spies and analysts are thinning. Its ties to international companies are fraying. All this raises the hazard of a disastrous intelligence failure. Think about what may occur if america had been struck once more by a shock assault within the coming days. What would cease Trump from declaring martial regulation, suspending elections, and really ruling as a dictator?
Presidents earlier than Trump have used the CIA to attempt to understand their imperial ambitions. And the nation’s spies should not have a historical past of defying presidents. However maybe these with the best morality will resist him. And years may move earlier than their tales is perhaps informed.
Tailored from the guide The Mission: The CIA within the twenty first Century by Tim Weiner. Copyright © 2025 by Tim Weiner. From Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
