2023-07-08 19:17:18
The military point 504 | Barely a month after Russian tanks crossed the border, Director Burns flew to Warsaw to make the deal that allowed the CIA to use the country as a hub
The CIA has written its clandestine rules to avoid an escalation of the war, accepted by the contenders but also by the dozens of countries assisting the resistance or bordering Russia and Ukraine.
Barely a month after Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian border, Burns flew to Warsaw to meet with the heads of Polish intelligence agencies and hammer out the deal that allowed the CIA to use the country as a clandestine hub. Warsaw and Washington had already been on excellent terms since the end of the Cold War: between 2002 and 2003, at the height of the war on terror, the country hosted CIA torture centers, the infamous black sites whose existence the Poles admitted only a decade later, in the village of Stare Kiejkuty and near the airport of Szymany, where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed among others was taken.
After the start of hostilities in Donbass and Crimea in 2014, the relationship intensified and the agency established the third-largest operational station in Europe in Poland. Now the country has become the NATO response center: on the one hand it has welcomed hundreds of thousands of refugees, on the other it is the main logistic hub for bringing weapons and supplies sent by the allies to Ukraine. On Polish territory – where American arms and ammunition are stored – Washington has also established the headquarters of the army’s Fifth Corps, in Poznan, and not far away, in Biedrusko, the first permanent garrison where today 10,000 soldiers are stationed preparing the Poles to the use of Abrams tanks.
Poland’s most delicate role, says the American journalist William Arkin in his investigation published in Newsweek, is however the one it plays in the CIA’s secret war. In April Burns returned to Warsaw, where he met with Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski, coordinator of the special services, to discuss cooperation between the two countries, particularly in the collection of intelligence information. From here, the CIA agents in fact manage relations with agents and spies – in particular Russians and Ukrainians – but also with members of the special forces of about twenty countries, all based in Poland, and carry out cybernetic operations with partners Poles.
This very close collaboration, says Arkin, was fundamental last November, when a missile landed in the Polish town of Przewodow, risking an accidental escalation. That day Burns was in Ankara, at the Turkish intelligence headquarters, to reiterate that the United States would not tolerate nuclear threats and confirm the importance of strategic stability, and from there he flew to Kiev to deliver the message to Zelensky. While en route, the missile killed two Polish farmers about thirty kilometers from the border.
A Russian attack on a NATO country would have meant the automatic implementation of Article 5, which would have brought the entire alliance into war, but the United States – which tracks and monitors every missile launched – knew that the rocket had Ukraine by mistake: as soon as he received the information from Washington, Burns passed it on to Polish President Andzej Duda, avoiding a global crisis.
July 8, 2023 (change July 8, 2023 | 7:16 pm)
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