Vladimir Putin and the Secret State: Inside Russian Intelligence, Part III
By Matthew Parish
Sunday 11 October 2026
In the final instalment of an extended Lviv Herald conversation, Matthew Parish talks to former CIA Chief of Station Sean M. Wiswesser about Vladimir Putin, the legacy of the KGB, assassination and intimidation, Russia’s intelligence failure in Ukraine, Moscow’s adaptation to war and the continuing struggle between Russian intelligence and the West.
There is an obvious person whose presence has hovered over the first two parts of my conversation with Sean M. Wiswesser without, until now, occupying centre stage: Vladimir Putin.
That is curious because Wiswesser’s book is entitled Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War. Putin is not merely the President of a country possessing powerful intelligence services. He emerged from the Soviet security apparatus himself, and the intelligence and security services have occupied an unusually prominent position in the Russian political system during his long period in power.
In Parts I and II, Sean and I approached this system from the ground upwards. We discussed recruitment and razrabotka, surveillance and kompromat, honeytraps and hospitality, the relationships between Russian intelligence, commerce and organised crime, active measures and the deliberate corrosion of public confidence. We also considered a paradox running throughout Sean’s book: Russian intelligence can be patient, sophisticated and dangerous while simultaneously being corrupt, bureaucratic and capable of remarkable mistakes.
In this final part, we reverse the telescope.
We begin with Vladimir Putin himself and ask how far his background in the Soviet intelligence world helps us understand the Russia he subsequently constructed. We then turn to assassination and intimidation, the Russian intelligence failure preceding the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the lessons Moscow has learned during the war and the increasingly important use of remotely recruited proxies across Europe.
Finally, Sean reflects upon something more personal: what decades in intelligence do to one’s capacity for trust, how a former CIA officer writes responsibly about a secret world and what he most wants readers to understand about Russian intelligence after they close his book.
Matthew Parish: Sean, Vladimir Putin is himself a product of the Soviet intelligence system, having served in the KGB. How important is that background to understanding the way he sees the world today? Do you think Putin actually thinks like an intelligence officer and, if so, what does that mean in practical terms for the way Russia conducts foreign policy and approaches its adversaries?
Sean Wiswesser: Putin’s worldview and his belief in sustained conflict with the West and Europe come from his KGB rearing. He is an avowed Chekist — a follower and believer in the Cheka, the first committee for the defence of the revolution, headed by “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky.
With that worldview and his vision of Soviet history, what can we expect from him? The West — not just political leaders, but Hollywood and European stars and singers, writers and academics — was fooled by him, in my view. In 2008, then again in 2014 and 2022, we saw Putin’s true colours shine through. I see a cold Chekist worldview and the desire to rewrite history’s map.
Matthew Parish: Your book is subtitled Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War. To what extent is this secret war really Putin’s personal project? If Vladimir Putin disappeared from Russian politics tomorrow, would the confrontation you describe continue because it is embedded in the culture and institutions of the Russian intelligence services, or has Putin fundamentally reshaped those institutions around his own worldview?
Sean Wiswesser: It is his project, his legacy. Putin wants to be known as “Vlad the Great”, a modern Czar. There has been more reverence for Czars, more statues put up and more visiting of dead Russian rulers by Putin than in any modern time for any leader of the region.
Putin is fighting battles from the last century with a brutality characteristic of the wars of the early twentieth century. Europe was hoping that was “all behind us now”; the United States has had twenty years of war. Putin has taken advantage of this and struck at the core of the alliance, challenging us to deter him: “You want to stop me, do something about it.” But largely we haven’t, not when it counted.
Matthew Parish: Vladimir Putin has also cultivated an image of somebody who understands intelligence operations intimately and uses secrecy, ambiguity and deception as instruments of statecraft. From the perspective of somebody who spent decades working against the Russian intelligence services, how much of that reputation reflects genuine sophistication and how much derives from the mythology that the Kremlin itself has constructed around Putin and his KGB past?
Sean Wiswesser: It is mythology, cultivated by the regime. Gleb Pavlovsky, Putin’s former spin doctor, said as much.
For instance, Putin did not really fight protesters in Dresden when the East German regime collapsed. Putin was a lieutenant colonel in what I would describe as a dead-end posting in East Germany. If he had enjoyed greater prestige in his career, he would have served in the West where it mattered for a First Chief Directorate — Foreign Intelligence — officer in the old KGB.
As for his claims that he was fighting to protect the KGB office when the collapse happened, Stasi records indicate there were no violent protests at the KGB office, and Putin also famously said that he “called Moscow and no one picked up”. So his own stories, which he shares to glorify his and his siloviki’s KGB past, are myths, in my assessment.
My wife was born and raised in that system. Anyone who was can tell you: it didn’t work. And the KGB was the “sword and shield” of a completely broken, corrupt system. So much for the KGB being the “elite of the USSR”, as Putin also preaches to modern Russian generations.
Matthew Parish: Let us move from Putin himself to one of the darkest manifestations of Russian intelligence activity. In Part II we discussed the possibility that brazenness can have operational value: an operation can communicate the message “we can reach you” even when responsibility eventually becomes apparent. What, then, is the relationship between Russian assassination — what intelligence professionals call “wet work” — and political signalling?
Sean Wiswesser: Russian “wet work” can serve more than one purpose.
The immediate objective may obviously be eliminating an individual Moscow considers an enemy. But assassination can also send a message to everybody else.
A defector sees what happened. A dissident sees what happened. Other intelligence officers see what happened. Governments see what happened.
That creates deterrence through fear: We can reach you. I wrote a piece on it called “The Kremlin Kill List”; it’s an old pattern, an old form of Chekist intimidation going back to Stalin and before Stalin.
What is particularly troubling today is the level of recklessness. During the Cold War, the KGB at least had to consider Western retaliation very seriously. Today the FSB and GRU in particular appear considerably more willing to accept risk in operations abroad.
Matthew Parish: We should now come to Ukraine, because one of the great questions raised by the events of February 2022 is how Russia could have misjudged this country so profoundly. Russian intelligence had devoted enormous resources to Ukraine. Yet the assumptions underlying the opening stages of the invasion proved gravely mistaken. What did the Russian intelligence services misunderstand about Ukraine?
Sean Wiswesser: This is one of the most consequential intelligence failures of modern times.
The FSB’s Fifth Service had enormous responsibility for Ukraine and for helping prepare the political environment for Russian objectives there. They catastrophically underestimated Ukrainian national identity and Ukraine’s willingness to fight. I detail this heavily in Chapter 10 of my book, Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks.
But I believe the deeper failure was systemic.
Putin created a structure in which intelligence and security officials are rewarded for pleasing the nachalnik — the Chief.
Corruption and the desire to tell the leadership what it wants to hear poison intelligence analysis.
So this was not simply a collection failure. It was a failure produced by an authoritarian political and intelligence system that overestimated Russian competence and profoundly underestimated the Ukrainian people.
Matthew Parish: That failure is now several years behind us, however, and there is a danger in assuming that an adversary never learns. The Russia fighting in Ukraine today is not simply the Russia that began the full-scale invasion in February 2022. How has the war changed Russian intelligence tradecraft? What has Moscow learned?
Sean Wiswesser: Russia has adapted. The first two years of the war were about Russia’s failures. I had chapters in two books where I argued the same, including work for the Army War College and a book in the UK called The Air War in Ukraine: The First Year of Conflict. But that is no longer the story.
After Russia’s disastrous opening phase, Westerners sometimes underestimated its capacity to learn. The Russian military and intelligence services have demonstrated that they can innovate despite enormous corruption and bureaucracy.
They increasingly use cyber capabilities, drones, proxies, criminal intermediaries and remotely recruited assets. At the same time, many traditional Russian intelligence methods have not disappeared.
That is the important point: modern Russian intelligence layers new technology onto very old doctrine. But deception, recruitment, coercion and human vulnerability remain.
Matthew Parish: That brings us to a development of particular importance for the rest of Europe. Intelligence operations once required trained officers, elaborate cover and considerable infrastructure. Now somebody can apparently be recruited remotely through a messaging application to undertake a relatively simple task. What does the proliferation of these expendable proxies mean for European counter-intelligence?
Sean Wiswesser: This is one of the most disturbing developments.
Russia increasingly recruits marginalised individuals, criminals, disgruntled young people and other disposable proxies through Telegram and similar applications.
Someone might initially be offered money to photograph a railway line or military facility. Then comes another request. Perhaps he is given a device and told to leave it somewhere.
For Russia, this provides two tremendous advantages: deniability and low cost.
It also protects Russian intelligence officers from exposure. The concept of using intermediaries is not new; Russian services have done that for a hundred years.
What is new is the speed and scale at which digital platforms allow them to find disposable human beings across Europe.
Matthew Parish: There is another difficulty in talking publicly about intelligence: the person who knows the most may also be the person least free to speak. You spent almost three decades in the CIA. Your book discusses subjects about which some of your knowledge must necessarily remain confidential. How did you decide what you could responsibly say, and how did you distinguish your own recollections from propositions that you could establish for the reader?
Sean Wiswesser: There were really two obligations.
First, as a former CIA officer, I followed the appropriate prepublication review process. There are things from my career that I cannot and will not discuss, including particular operational details, locations and identities.
Second, I had an obligation to the reader.
Where I make broader arguments about Russian intelligence, I try to support them with evidence. That is why the book contains hundreds of citations and draws extensively on open sources, historical research, defectors, former Russian intelligence officers and previously documented cases.
There is an important distinction between saying, “This is something I personally remember”, and saying, “This is what the accumulated evidence demonstrates”.
I tried very hard to preserve that distinction.
Matthew Parish: That distinction interests me particularly as I completed The Spy: A Memoir, because memory and interpretation inevitably interact when one writes retrospectively about encounters whose significance may only become apparent years afterwards. There is also a more personal question. Does spending decades in intelligence change your ability to trust people? Once you have been professionally trained to ask why somebody really wants to meet you, can you ever entirely stop asking the question?
Sean Wiswesser: Intelligence work certainly teaches you to ask questions most people do not routinely ask: Why does this person want to meet me? What does he want? Why is he telling me this? Is there another explanation?
Those habits do not simply disappear. But there is an important distinction between situational awareness and paranoia.
If intelligence work taught me anything about people, it is that most human relationships are exactly what they appear to be. I learned to trust my instincts as a kid who grew up in a pretty tough neighbourhood. But there were friends I could rely on. Similarly, in intelligence work, some people are worth trusting with your life, while others will betray you.
You cannot function effectively — in intelligence or in life — if you distrust everyone. I have met heroic Russians willing to risk their lives and their families to help the West and the United States.
I developed enormous respect for some Russians I encountered, particularly those who ultimately rejected the corrupt system they served. I understand that during a time of war, some want to hate “all Russians”. I get that. No one has more of a right to that feeling than Ukrainians right now, suffering horribly from Putin’s war.
But others are fighting the system from within, quietly. SVR officer Sergey Tretyakov is an example I can discuss publicly and name in my book. I had the honour of debriefing Sergey, who had been deputy resident of the SVR residency in New York.
I describe people like Sergey as “hero spies”. They sacrificed enormously. Please read the epilogue of my book, a tribute to them, the “hero spies”.
Matthew Parish: We have now ranged across three conversations from recruitment and surveillance to kompromat, honeytraps, organised crime, active measures, assassination, Ukraine and finally Vladimir Putin himself. Let me therefore end with the question that perhaps matters most to the ordinary reader. What is the single misconception about Russian intelligence that you most want somebody to abandon after reading Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks?
Sean Wiswesser: That Russian intelligence is either omnipotent or incompetent.
It is neither.
The Russian services are deeply corrupt. They make mistakes. Their officers fail. Their operations are exposed. But they are also relentless, patient and capable of extraordinarily damaging successes.
They only need one operation to work.
The broader lesson of the book is that Russian intelligence should not be understood as some exotic sideshow of spies exchanging secrets in dark alleys.
Under Putin, the intelligence and security services are fundamental to how the Russian state functions. They help sustain Putin’s rule internally and prosecute his confrontation with the West externally.
That is what I hope readers understand when they finish Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War.
Putin’s war in the shadows is not something happening somewhere else, involving mysterious spies. It is an ongoing struggle against our governments, our institutions and increasingly against what we believe to be true.
Understanding their tradecraft is the first step towards making that tradecraft less effective.
And with that observation, our three-part conversation comes to an appropriate end.
One idea has recurred throughout it. Russian intelligence is dangerous not because it possesses supernatural powers, but because it is persistent. It works upon human beings and therefore upon the ordinary weaknesses of human beings: ambition, money, resentment, ideology, fear, loneliness, vanity and desire. Technology changes the mechanisms through which these vulnerabilities may be exploited, but it does not abolish them.
Ukraine also provides a powerful corrective to the mythology of intelligence omnipotence. The Russian system studied Ukraine intensively and nevertheless, in Wiswesser’s assessment, fundamentally misunderstood Ukrainian national identity and the willingness of Ukrainians to defend their country. Yet that failure should not encourage complacency. Sean’s warning in this final instalment is precisely that Russia has adapted since 2022.
There is a deeper paradox here. An authoritarian intelligence system may enjoy powers unavailable to its democratic counterparts: fewer legal restrictions, less oversight and far greater opportunities for coercion. Yet the same political structure can corrupt the information upon which power depends. If intelligence officers learn that professional advancement depends upon telling the nachalnik what he wishes to hear, intelligence ceases to perform one of its most important functions: telling political leaders things they would rather not know.
That brings us finally back to Vladimir Putin. Across these interviews, Wiswesser’s argument has been that Putin’s Russia cannot adequately be understood if its intelligence services are treated as peripheral institutions populated by mysterious men exchanging secrets. In his account, they are woven into the political structure of the Russian state itself. That is why the title of his book refers not merely to Russian intelligence, but to Putin’s Secret War.
For those of us living and working in Ukraine, the war is anything but secret. But understanding the clandestine structures beneath the visible conflict — their strengths, their weaknesses, their methods and their mistakes — remains essential to understanding the struggle in which Ukraine and Europe now find themselves.
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Sean M. Wiswesser is a former CIA Chief of Station and the author of Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War, published by Naval Institute Press. The book was submitted to the CIA Publication Classification Review Board pursuant to the author’s obligations arising from his former employment. The views and opinions expressed by Sean M. Wiswesser in this interview and in his book are his own and do not represent the views of the Central Intelligence Agency or any other agency of the United States Government.
Publisher’s book page:https://www.usni.org/press/books/tradecraft-tactics-and-dirty-tricks
