Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in Volume IV of B.H. Magazine. To get your copy (and access to future issues), subscribe here.
History has a wicked sense of humour. In 1914, hours after narrowly escaping a well-orchestrated assassination attempt, Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s chauffeur made a wrong turn en route to Sarajevo State Hospital to visit bystanders injured in the blast intended for the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.
Disoriented and separated from the royal motorcade, the driver panicked and stalled the vehicle at a bustling intersection – directly alongside one of Ferdinand’s would-be assassins who had failed earlier that day.
Gavrilo Princip calmly stepped toward the open-topped Gräf & Stift Double Phaeton, drew a miniaturised Fabrique Nationale 1910 semi-automatic pistol – predecessor to the three-inch-long Walther PPK “spy gun” – and fired two rounds into the back seat at point-blank range, killing Archduke Ferdinand and igniting the fuse for World War I.
24 years later, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich brandishing a nonaggression pact signed by Adolf Hitler, claiming a victory for pragmatic diplomacy and to have secured “peace for our time.” In truth, he held World War II in his hand.
So, when American Vice President JD Vance touched down in the same Bavarian capital in February this year to deliver a similar message of propitiation to Vladimir Putin, it was difficult not to sense history’s dark jester grinning in the wings.
In 14 minutes on stage at the Munich Security Conference, in a city freighted with the ruinous memory of the West’s most costly failed bid at appeasement, Vance’s speech barely mentioned Ukraine. Instead, the vice president advanced an off-key tangential broadside against censorship and German immigration policy that ignored Russia entirely.
It wasn’t rhetorical misjudgment; it was an intentional shift in focus designed to direct attention away from the ongoing criminal actions of a party with which America was preparing to try and cut a deal.
“The threat that I worry the most about with Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within,” Vance said.
Six weeks later, he and President Trump would lure Zelensky to the Oval Office, ostensibly to discuss handing over a huge chunk of Ukraine’s natural resources in exchange for a boost to their dwindling supply of Patriot air defense missiles, without which Putin’s bombs and drones patrol freely to their civilian targets every night. But it was an ambush.
Before a hostile gallery including Trump’s entourage, Russian propaganda outlet TASS News, and one American conservative media personality fondling his lapels, JD Vance called Zelensky an ingrate, then accused him of staging “propaganda tours,” exaggerating the scope and severity of Russia’s aerial terror campaign against the civilian population of Ukraine.
Arthur Sinodinos, former Australian ambassador to the United States, said he was shocked watching the live broadcast go out from Washington. “It was just incredibly confronting,” said Sinodinos.
The day before Vance spoke in Munich, I sat down with Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and a former three-time world heavyweight boxing champion. He retired with 41 knockouts and only two losses – both due to injury – and was never once knocked off his feet in his entire professional career.
A couple of nights prior, a senior Ukrainian spy had confirmed the meeting to me in a lively traditional restaurant in central Kyiv. We were drinking vodka at a private upstairs table with several military and intelligence commanders, including Deputy Minister of Defence Brig. Gen. Sergei Melnik, who prefers being addressed by his battlefield call sign: “Marsel.”
Melnik speaks better English than he lets on, but let the covert linguist inform me of the positive development. “We have good news and bad news for you, Jack,” said the spy. “The good news is the mayor is waiting for you at 1700 on Thursday. The bad news? He’s waiting for you in the ring.”
An elaborate urban shuffle involving an underground car swap meant to confuse potential aerial surveillance led us to Klitschko in Kyiv. In a small anteroom to the vast mayoral office, a shoulder-operated surface-to-air missile launcher leans propped up against the wall like a pool cue.
In Ukraine’s ongoing political drama, Klitschko is widely seen as one of President Zelensky’s most formidable potential rivals, yet he swiftly dismisses any talk of elections during wartime as dangerously irresponsible.
“An election at this time now would be a disaster,” Klitschko stated firmly.
“We are at war. Even if it was logistically possible, now is the wrong time to argue with each other about politics. It is time for us to stand together.”
As we were departing, one of my travelling companions, Glenn Corn, a 25-year veteran CIA intelligence officer who rose to become a member of the Senior Intelligence Service – a small cadre of the most highly cleared spooks and operators within the agency – turned to me conspiratorially.
“You know that guy [Klitschko] – he’s got a brother. And this other guy, I’m hearing he might know how to fight a bit, too,” Corn said, in a Long Island accent suggesting he probably does as well.
He was referring to Klitschko’s younger sibling, Wladimir, who currently holds the world record for the longest cumulative heavyweight boxing title reign of all time and – along with the likes of Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali – is generally counted among the most dangerous fighters ever to lace up a glove.
“This is what I keep telling people,” Corn grinned.
“We don’t want to have to f**king fight these dudes, man.”
Three-star Gen. Valery Kondratiuk – a former chief of Ukraine’s military and foreign intelligence services – says the Oval Office confrontation dramatically reshaped Kyiv’s political landscape. Rather than impairing his domestic standing, Zelensky returned from Washington to the highest domestic popularity ratings he had seen in over a year.
As America reconsiders its commitment to NATO, the United Kingdom is actively moving into the diplomatic breach. In his boldest pledge yet, Britain’s new prime minister recently committed to “putting our own troops on the ground if necessary.”
There may be a more covert effort to increase British influence on NATO’s eastern flank underway, too.
Ukraine’s Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) operates from a facility in northwest Kyiv nicknamed “the Island.” In the last couple of years, several slick new office buildings have gone up, and there are whispers that MI6 is now operating from inside the compound’s walls.
Oleksandr Iatsyna, Ukraine’s chief public oncologist and medical director of Ukraine’s National Cancer Institute, pointed the new facility out to me in February. “All these new buildings here are MI6. Everybody knows it’s them, we’re less sure why they’re here,” he said.
Iatsyna is also the founder of Mercy and Health, an NGO that provides support to Ukrainian forces at the very front line. With U.S. government aid largely curtailed, grassroots efforts have become critically important to Ukraine’s survival.
In February, I travelled with Mercy and Health volunteers to Sumy, a northeastern frontline city made additionally perilous by its direct proximity to Kursk, where Ukrainian forces captured a swath of Russian territory last year. One maternity hospital we visited had recently been struck by a Russian cruise missile. The brick walls of some patient rooms were punctured by tank artillery shells fired directly into the hospital.
“It’s hard for me to believe that the U.S. is really siding with Putin when they are aware of what he has done here,” said Iatsyna.
“I think only the intelligence agencies know the truth about what’s going on.”
There is an old adage among Western diplomats that at any moment, one of the bloc’s major powers tends to be the proverbial drunk at the card table from whom friendly players extract small concessions, in turn fending off less familiar suitors that might sense the opportunity to plunder more.
“But you don’t want to be the drunk at the table when the sharks are out – especially when you’re holding most of the chips,” one veteran CIA officer who preferred to remain anonymous told me recently. And the sharks are out.
President Xi is an audacious, once-in-a-generation strategic thinker who – in fewer than 40 years – has maneuverer from abject poverty and both physical and political exile to wielding unilateral, unchecked control over the entire Chinese system of government and the full breadth of the world’s second-largest economy.
At its 19th National Congress in 2017, every Communist Party delegation voted unanimously to write Mr Xi’s name into the Chinese constitution – alongside Chairman Mao’s.
The sheer improbability of his personal rise to power is a reminder that when forecasting Xi Jinping’s ultimate ambitions in deploying the extraordinary authority he has accrued – nothing can confidently be put off the table. He is not to be underestimated.
But, ironically for the prototypically stoic proponent of fàng cháng xiàn, diào dà yú – the proverbial Chinese strategic patience which translates roughly in English to “using a long line to catch a big fish” – the new Chinese emperor’s principal weakness is that he is in a hurry.
The birth rate required to maintain the current population of the human species is about 2.1 children per adult female. So, when the architects of China’s one-child policy implemented their crude solution for curbing birth rates too strong for communism to sustain, they sowed a demographic time bomb into the fabric of China’s economy that was set to cause a massive slowdown in growth years later.
Economists estimate that by 2040, China’s median age will hit 47 – the highest reading ever recorded in any country.
China is getting old before it gets rich while operating a protected, exchange-managed economy already hooked on cheap state-sponsored credit and system-addicted to easy growth. It is a potentially calamitous cocktail of externalities that – left unmitigated – will comprehensively devastate the Chinese economy.
For all the calm exterior, in a geopolitical sense, Mr Xi is on tilt. This may explain the astonishing lengths the Chinese state has gone to in promoting its narrative.
At the 2016 Rio Olympics, Australian freestyler Mack Horton batted away a reporter’s question about Chinese misbehaviour in the pool, saying, “I’ve got no time for drug cheats.”
He was referring to Sun Yang, the Chinese swimming prodigy and national champion who had a string of run-ins with FINA over several years – but escaped any serious sanction due to lost samples and other errors – including a standoff with testing staff in 2019 that reportedly culminated in one sample container being smashed with a hammer.
It was a retort that would upend the Hortons’ lives and turn the swim meet into an international incident. China’s retaliation was swift and sprawling.
“We received over 680,000 death threats in under an hour,” said Horton’s father Andrew. Their home in Melbourne was broken into on the same night. The family’s phones melted down under waves of abuse. Australian Federal Police rushed to protect Mack’s younger brother, who was still in school. Horton himself was nearly pulled from the Olympic final due to security fears.
It wasn’t until its conclusion that Horton realised he’d been under constant protection over the course of the event. Sitting in the grandstand at Estádio Aquático Olímpico, an Olympic team manager casually told him: “People have been looking after you all week.”
“I turned around and realised there were two guys at the top of the stairs that I had seen around a bit,” said Horton. Upon returning to the Olympic Village, he took closer notice of two armed guards stationed at the entrance to the Australian team’s digs.
“None of the other teams had those security guys out front, it was just us,” the swimmer continued.
It was the start of a years-long campaign of harassment overtly conducted by Chinese actors. For years after 2016, Chinese agents – or their proxies – tailed them, broke into their house, poured concrete and broken glass into their swimming pool, and flooded their property by clogging downpipes with Chinese newspapers.
In Rio, Horton had his controversial rival covered in the pool, getting home by 13 hundredths of a second to win gold in the marquee 400-metre men’s freestyle. But when Yang beat him at the world championships in 2019 – amid another series of testing irregularities – Horton refused to take the podium alongside him, reigniting world interest in Yang’s chequered run with doping authorities.
Horton says he didn’t fully resolve to stage his protest until the moment he was called to ascend the podium. “Usually, the crowd claps as soon as you step on,” he said, describing a pregnant pause that descended on the arena as he stood unmoved.
“That was the moment when I realised I was committed. Then, all of a sudden, there was this loud applause that started to grow. I think they realised what I was doing. It was pretty special.”
The harassment kicked up another gear. A neighbour’s car mistaken for the Hortons’ was firebombed. More than once, armed plainclothes government personnel appeared at the Horton family home with instructions but little detail about who they were or what spurred them there.
The vagueness surrounding these sudden appearances formed a running joke in the Horton household. “We call them the Men in Black,” said Andrew. To this day, the Hortons have government handlers who periodically tighten the level of security around the family – often without any explanation at all.
All of this felt shockingly disproportionate, even before considering the now irrefutable fact that Horton’s allegations were on the money.
In 2020, the Court of Arbitration for Sport handed Sun Yang an eight-year ban for tampering with doping samples that exposed a system deeply corrupted by Chinese influence. The ruling triggered a broader review of FINA that ultimately led swimming’s world body to be gutted and restructured entirely under a new name: World Aquatics.
In 1997, Adam Leslie graduated from the Australian Army Pilots Course in a UH-1H helicopter, better known as a “Huey,” flying the line at the 5th Aviation Regiment before moving into Army intelligence in 2000.
In 2019, he departed government employment and, after a stint in Silicon Valley, took over the Washington outpost of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an independent publicly funded think tank established by the Howard government in 2001 that became a leading voice in criticising China’s escalating incrementalism in Asia.
Leslie can be vague about parts of his résumé. My attempts to account for the several-year gap in his CV between departing the army in 2003 and arriving in Silicon Valley – which Leslie won’t be drawn on – have thus far proven fruitless, a decent indication his work was clandestine in nature.
In 2024, the Australian government cut funding to ASPI’s Washington office as part of the Independent Review of Commonwealth Funding for Strategic Policy Work, conducted by Peter Varghese. The decision was handed down without notice in the lull before Christmas, absent of any consultation with Leslie at all.
Leslie suspects the decision-makers were consulting elsewhere. In 2020, the Chinese government responded to calls for an independent review of the COVID-19 outbreak by refusing to conduct an investigation into the origins of the pandemic, but formally presenting Australia with a list of 14 unrelated diplomatic grievances.
The tenth point criticised Canberra’s funding of an “anti-China think tank” allegedly spreading misinformation about China’s arbitrary detention of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Many were quick to interpret the late-night defunding of ASPI Washington as the Australian government bowing to Beijing – despite the fact Australia supported multiple United Nations condemnations labelling China’s forced reeducation programs a crime against humanity as recently as October 2024.
The Albanese government played down criticism of the decision as hyperbole and tried to move on. But despite fleeting press coverage, the Washington intelligence diaspora noticed. I first heard about the cuts from a source close to Canadian intelligence less than 24 hours after they happened.
More recently, America has launched a global trade war against virtually every other country in the world, sending the global financial markets into a flat spin that – as this article goes to print – has destroyed a staggering $10 trillion of international market value and has pushed many major economies toward recession, including America’s.
In a replay of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act signed by President Herbert Hoover in 1930 – which plunged the world into the Great Depression and laid the economic groundwork for World War II – the latest package of new trade barriers has rattled the foundations of global commerce so deeply that Wall Street isn’t gossiping about positioning or where to “catch the falling knife.”
Rather, trading desks are consumed by talk of a structural tightening in global liquidity. The jester lurks again.
International confidence in America’s diplomatic currency began waning long before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In the murkier, derivative world of intelligence gathering, one canary in the coal mine chirped loudly back in August 2021.
The atrocious images broadcast from Kabul airport as America pulled the ripcord in Afghanistan did more than shock viewers all over the West; they represented a diplomatic rupture that sent shockwaves through all of Washington’s major alliances.
Somehow – in its eleventh hour – the Trump administration had struck a deal with the Taliban to get out of Dodge, behind the Afghan government’s back. It was a deal the incoming administration was eager to see completed, President Biden having long been an outspoken critic of America’s longest war.
While front-of-house staff at NATO allies watched the chaotic U.S. withdrawal with disbelief, behind the scenes, spies from across the Western coalition were observing America welch on another supposedly ironclad commitment.
For the duration of the war in Afghanistan, operators from the CIA’s Special Activities Center – a secret plainclothes paramilitary assault force that recruits from the US military’s most elite units, referred to colloquially within the agency as “Ground Branch” – fought shoulder-to-shoulder with elite Afghan warfighters in a secret program that was concealed from public view.
Official Afghan documents refer to the nimble, go-to-the-ball raid squads as the National Strike Units. Langley designated them “CTPTs” – shorthand for Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams – but on the encrypted radio nets of the CIA in Afghanistan, they were known simply as the “Zero Units.”
Gen. Yasin Zia, a retired four-star Afghan general and former chief of general staff of the Afghan National Security Forces, said the Zero Units were a central – but classified – element of U.S. strategy from the outset of the war. “They were there from 9/11 until the very last American, Gen. Donohue, left Afghanistan, protecting not just Afghan interests but also the security of the West by targeting enemies who threatened civilians in the West,” said Zia.
When America bailed, scores of veterans of the Zero Units who were promised safe passage to America if Kabul ever fell were left behind. Over time, alarms were raised as these highly trained, combat-hardened veterans, frustrated by broken promises and facing Taliban persecution, became targets for recruitment by U.S. adversaries. Those who did make it to America encountered immovable bureaucratic hurdles to working legally.
According to an Associated Press investigation in 2022, Russia swiftly sought to exploit the West’s failure, actively recruiting abandoned Afghan commandos into the Wagner Group to bolster its own war effort in Ukraine – transforming American-trained fighters into potential strategic threats.
These blunders echo around the globe instantly, amplified by the authoritarian regimes who stand to gain a freer hand by undermining the American security guarantee. Beijing wasted no time, trumpeting the Afghanistan debacle as a cautionary tale for Taiwan in the Chinese state media.
“The shock of the U.S. abandoning the Kabul regime has been felt most strongly in parts of Asia – Taiwan above all. Is this some kind of omen of Taiwan’s future fate?” Chinese state media outlet the Global Times reported on August 16th, 2021.
Less than six months later, Russia’s tanks rolled into Ukraine in February 2022 – a gamble perhaps encouraged by the perception of U.S. weakness after Kabul.
Ralph Goff, a six-time CIA station chief who retired in 2023, said the erosion of America’s diplomatic credibility could metastasise into the clandestine world.
On March 15th, the Washington Post reported Goff had been called back to run the agency’s human espionage and covert action programs. Two weeks later, Politico broke the story that the CIA had withdrawn Goff from consideration, citing speculation his support for Ukraine may have influenced the decision.
“If partners – Five Eyes or others – lose trust in U.S. intelligence counterparts to protect sources and methods, they will curtail or limit sharing,” Goff said.
“And that particular failure of trust is very dangerous. It’s one of the reasons the U.S. intelligence community failed to stop 9/11.”
At a friendly lunch in Midtown Manhattan, with a law enforcement official who gathered intelligence domestically earlier this year, Goff described the perennial tension between foreign and domestic intelligence services that contributed to America’s failure to thwart the 9/11 attacks.
“Letting these guys loose on our foreign sources makes me feel like they would if I barged through the police tape and started stomping all over a crime scene before they’d secured it,” Goff smiled wryly. “The difference is none of my guys want to go out and solve bank robberies,” he joked, before telling me cooperation had improved thoroughly since 2001.
“The risk is not just that Trump is undermining Western diplomatic cooperation. He’s also dismantling an invisible network upon which Western interests have thrived for 80 years,” said Goff.
As things stand today, the next 80 years are unlikely to fall as heavily in the West’s favour.
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