The Justice Department is examining ties among the far-right Proud Boys, Roger Stone and others over their roles in 2018 “Stop the Steal” demonstrations.

Prosecutors involved in the Jan. 6 investigation have also been asking questions about connections between Roger J. Stone Jr. and a protest related to the 2018 elections in Florida.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times

The FBI is not the answer to the problem of domestic intelligence. As demonstrated by the 9/11 Commission’s report, the bureau turned in the most lackluster performance of any agency in the run-up to 9/11, even though it had (and has) the primary responsibility among police and intelligence services for preventing terrorist attacks on the nation from within. A request by one of the FBI field offices to apply for a warrant to search the laptop of Zacarias Moussaoui (a prospective hijack pilot) was turned down. A prescient report on flight training by Muslims in Arizona was ignored by FBI headquarters. There were only two analysts on the bin Laden beat in the entire bureau. Director Louis Freeh’s directive that the bureau focus its efforts on counterterrorism was ignored.

As Senator Richard Shelby, the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, pointed out in the wake of 9/11: “The bureau did not know what information it possessed, it did not approach this information with an intelligence analysis mind-set, and it too often neglected to inform other agencies of what it did know or believe.”

After 9/11 the bureau, under a new director, Robert Mueller, vowed to do better, but its efforts have fallen far short of success. In part because the bureau has been plagued by excessive turnover in the executive ranks of its intelligence and antiterrorism sections, and even more so in its information technology staff, it took the bureau two years after 9/11 just to devise a plan to reform its counterterrorism program. We know now that the plan was a failure, otherwise President Bush would not have forced the bureau, over its fierce opposition, to create (in 2005) the National Security Branch—a consolidation of the intelligence, counterterrorism, and counterintelligence divisions of the bureau. The NSB, however, has so far failed to change the bureau’s traditional culture.

The Structural Roots of the Problem

I am generally skeptical of organizational solutions to intelligence problems, most of which are not organizational problems. But the FBI’s inadequate performance of the domestic intelligence function is a genuine and serious organizational problem. Placing the domestic intelligence function in a criminal investigation agency ensures, as other nations realize, a poor fit.

Criminal investigation is retrospective. A crime has been committed and the investigators go about trying to find the criminal; when they do, they arrest him and continue gathering evidence that will be admissible in court to prove his guilt. If the criminal activity under investigation is by nature ongoing, as in the case of gang activity, the investigator may decide to allow it to continue until the activity generates irrefutable evidence of guilt. But then he will pounce. And at every stage he’ll take great care not to commit a procedural violation that might jeopardize a conviction. He will also balk at sharing with others any of the information that he obtains in his investigation, lest a leak tip off a suspect or make it easier for the suspect to defend himself in court should he be prosecuted. All that the sharing of information about a case can do from the FBI agent’s perspective (as well as that of the local U.S. Attorney, for whom the agent works, in effect) is to weaken his ability to control the future of the case.

Criminal investigation is case oriented, backward looking, information hugging, and fastidious (for fear of wrecking a prosecution). Intelligence, in contrast, is forward looking, threat oriented rather than case oriented, and freewheeling. Its focus is on identifying, and maintaining surveillance of, suspicious characters and on patiently assembling masses of seemingly unrelated data into patterns that are suggestive of an emergent threat but that may be based on speculative hypotheses far removed from probable cause, let alone from proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

When intelligence is working well, the spy or traitor or terrorist is detected early, before he or she does damage, and often he or she can be turned to our advantage. The orientation of intelligence toward preventing crimes from occurring or even from being contemplated, rather than toward prosecution after they occur, would prevent a domestic intelligence agency from obsessing over procedural missteps that might jeopardize a conviction.

The FBI argues that because terrorist acts are criminal and intelligence is an element of criminal law enforcement, counterterrorism intelligence can be assimilated to the FBI’s criminal law enforcement responsibilities. But the activities with which national security intelligence is concerned differ greatly from ordinary federal crimes. Terrorist activities are politically motivated (in a broad sense of “political” that includes motivations founded on religious, class, racial, or ethnic hostility) and are potentially much more dangerous than nonpolitical crimes because they aim to injure or destroy the nation as a whole or otherwise wreak havoc on a large scale. To counter terrorist activity requires knowledge—of political movements; foreign countries and languages; the operational methods of terrorists, spies, and saboteurs; and the characteristics and availability of weapons of mass destruction—that criminal investigators do not possess. It also requires a different mind-set.

Good police officers learn to think like criminals; good intelligence officers learn to think like terrorists and spies. The hunter must be empathetic with (as distinct from sympathetic to) his quarry, but cops and spies have different quarry.

As explained by intelligence veteran William Odom,

FBI officials want arrests and convictions. They want media attention and lots of it. . . . They have little patience for sustained surveillance of a suspect to gain more intelligence. To them, sharing intelligence is anathema. Intelligence is something to be used, not shared. . . . Intelligence officials do not want public attention. They want to remain anonymous. They do not need arrest authority. They want to follow spies and terrorists secretly, allowing them to reveal their co-conspirators. Their reward comes from providing intelligence to others, not hiding it. . . . [They] tend to be more thorough, taking their time to develop evidence both for trials and for operational use. They know that they cannot let spies or terrorists get away without risking considerable danger to the country. Cops worry much less that a criminal will get away. Criminals are abundant and there are plenty more to arrest. Spies and terrorists will almost always defeat police officers.

Punishment and Prevention

Criminal law enforcement is oriented toward punishment, but punishment cannot undo the consequences of a catastrophic attack. Criminal law aims to deter crime by punishing a large enough fraction of offenders to make the threat of punishment credible, as well as to incapacitate those offenders whom the threat of punishment did not deter from committing crimes, by locking them up or in extreme cases by executing them. Especially because many of the most dangerous modern terrorists are largely undeterrable, notably suicide bombers, law enforcement alone cannot defeat terrorism.

Law enforcement can actually impede the struggle against terrorism: sometimes by prematurely revealing what the government knows, thus giving the terrorists a chance to elude capture by changing their methods or locale; at other times by failing to intervene early enough (that is, before a crime has been committed). Identifying, assessing, and tracking activities in the preparation stage are quintessential intelligence tasks, but the activities themselves often are too ambiguous to be readily provable as crimes. Some are only minor crimes, some not crimes at all. Prosecuting persons suspected of being involved in the early stage (discussion, target surveillance, etc.) of preparing a terrorist attack may, when feasible, have value in deterring entry into that stage. Yet often the more effective strategy is not to arrest and prosecute at that stage but rather to monitor the suspects in an effort to learn the scope, intentions, membership, and affiliations of the terrorist or prototerrorist cell.

An agency that is not responsible for bringing criminals to justice can concentrate full time on pursuing terrorists without any of the distractions created by the complex demands of criminal justice (including concerns with discovery and proof). Success from the standpoint of intelligence can be chasing terrorists out of the country and making sure they don’t return, or even leaving them in place but turning them into government infor-mants. But detecting threats and preempting them before they are carried out may leave no room for successful prosecution—which is a clue to the difficulty of adapting a law enforcement agency to the intelligence role. Prosecutable crime is the lifeblood of law enforcement.

The proper aim of counterterrorism is to penetrate and control terrorist cells, not to cause their members to scatter as soon as the arrest of one rings a warning bell to the others. Penetration, “turning,” control, and disinformation are delicate intelligence operations requiring specialized skills, training, and aptitudes unlikely to be acquired and honed by FBI special agents converted temporarily into intelligence operatives.

Consider the FBI’s 2002 arrest in Lackawanna, New York, of six men of Yemeni descent who had attended an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. A domestic intelligence agency might have tried to infiltrate the group or to “flip” one of its members, turning the group into an asset against Al Qaeda. Instead, the suspects were arrested and charged in a highly publicized case. The same pattern of premature arrest and prosecution recurred with the “Miami 7,” a group of wannabe terrorists apprehended earlier this year.

The law enforcer’s approach to terrorism has the further disadvantages of causing intelligence data to be evaluated from the too-limited perspective of its utility in building a criminal case, and of retarding the sharing of information lest full credit for a successful prosecution be denied the field office that began the investigation. These disadvantages illustrate the difference, which is fundamental, between collecting information for the sake of knowledge and collecting it for the sake of building a case.

An incident involving the arrests in New York of two Muslim teenage girls whom the FBI suspected of wanting to become suicide bombers, and held in custody for six weeks, illustrates how emphasis on a criminal-law response to terrorism can impair vital “hearts and minds” strategies as well as (as may have happened in the Lackawanna case) shut down inquiry prematurely. The arrest of the two girls caused indignation in the New York Muslim community—whose loyalty and goodwill (as the FBI recognizes) are vital safeguards against domestic terrorism. It is natural for a law enforcement agency to want to arrest a person suspected of criminal activity. An intelligence agency, rather than wanting the girls arrested, would want to discover who had put the idea of becoming suicide bombers in their minds (maybe no one). Its low-key investigation might culminate in simply a chat with the girls’ parents. If the girls had a connection, however indirect, with a terrorist cell, the publicity from their arrest doubtless caused the members to scatter—and to reconstitute the cell elsewhere, out of sight of the FBI.

Clashing Cultures

The problem at base is related to the very different “cultures” of law enforcement and intelligence. The performance of criminal investigators, unlike that of intelligence officers, can be evaluated by objective, indeed quantitative, criteria, such as number of arrests weighted by successful convictions, with successful convictions weighted in turn by length of sentence imposed, amount of property recovered, and amount of favorable publicity generated. Intelligence officers cannot be evaluated by such objective criteria; their successes are often invisible, indeed unknowable. For example, the earlier a plot is detected and disrupted, the more difficult it is to know whether it ever had a chance of success. And information obtained by intelligence officers may be only a small part of the total information that enabled a threat to be detected and thwarted.

This asymmetry of performance measurement makes it difficult for a police department to hire and retain able intelligence officers. Able employees prefer objective to subjective performance criteria; they know they’ll do better if they are judged by such criteria than if their performance is evaluated by nonobjective, nonquantifiable, criteria that may include personality, appearance, personal connections, and sheer luck. Thus in an agency such as the FBI that combines criminal investigation with intelligence, the abler recruits will gravitate toward criminal investigation. They may be required to undergo some intelligence training and to do stints in intelligence jobs, but always they will be looking to return to the main career track.

Henry Kissinger has remarked that “intelligence personnel in the real world are subject to unusual psychological pressures. Separated from their compatriots by security walls, operating in a culture suspicious of even unavoidable secrecy, they are surrounded by an atmosphere of cultural ambiguity. Their unadvertised and unadvertisable successes are taken for granted, while they are blamed for policies that frequently result from strategic rather than intelligence misjudgments.” This does not sound like the description of an FBI agent, and it casts grave doubt on the wisdom of the FBI’s method of obtaining intelligence officers, which is to provide intelligence training to its special agents, all of whom are hired and trained as criminal investigators.

The two worlds of law enforcement and intelligence don’t fit comfortably together in the same agency—let alone in the same individual, the special agent with intelligence training who shuttles between the two worlds.

Most of the FBI’s employees, including 90 percent of its special agents, as distinct from its support staff, are stationed in the bureau’s 56 field offices rather than in its Washington headquarters. This geographic dispersal is another reflection of the bureau’s emphasis on criminal investigation and another impediment to the conduct of national security intelligence. Most federal crime is local and is prosecuted locally by one of the 96 U.S. Attorneys’ offices, which like the FBI’s field offices are scattered across the nation. The FBI agents in these offices essentially work for the U.S. Attorney, who is a prosecutor, not an intelligence official. But although most federal crime is local, the principal dangers to domestic security at present emanate from international terrorist groups. Clues to their activities may be scattered all over the world. Effective intelligence requires combining scraps of information regardless of geographic origin rather than allowing information to be sequestered in local offices.

I use “scraps” advisedly; it brings out still another problem with confiding domestic intelligence to the FBI. Because of the gravity of threats to national security, intelligence officers must track down any lead, however implausible, that might point to an attack that would endanger national security. Most of those leads lead nowhere, let alone to an arrest, prosecution, conviction, and sentence. Chasing such will-o’-the-wisps is simply alien to the police mentality.

The marriage of criminal investigation and domestic intelligence within the FBI has complicated the coordination of domestic and foreign intelligence. Often the same suspects are tracked outside the United States by the CIA and inside by the FBI’s intelligence divisions. Yet the CIA and FBI have a history of mutual suspicion and antipathy. This had begun to diminish even before 9/11, especially at the top of the two agencies. But the cultural and procedural gulf between criminal investigations and intelligence operations remains, has been aggravated by recent efforts of the bureau to snatch turf from the embattled CIA, and impairs coordination between the two agencies, just as it does within the FBI.

An agency 100 percent dedicated to domestic intelligence would do better at it than the FBI, which is at most 20 percent intelligence and thus dominated by the criminal investigators.

All this is unlikely to change. The effective control of an organization requires some uniformity in compensation methods, recruitment, evaluation, promotion, and working conditions in order to minimize conflict, foster cooperation, and avoid confusion and uncertainty.

If the missions assigned to the organization are too disparate—if their optimal performance requires different methods, personnel policies, supervisory structures, information technology, and so on; if indeed, as in the case of criminal investigation and domestic intelligence, the missions are incompatible—the compromises necessary to impose the requisite minimum uniformity will cause performance of the missions to be suboptimal.

If shoes came in only one size, they would be cheap to manufacture but most people would be poorly shod. Because criminal investigation is the dominant mission and prevailing culture of the FBI, the inherent tensions between criminal investigation and national security intelligence will continue to be resolved in favor of criminal investigation.

Current polls show a growing mistrust of the FBI among nearly half of America due to a spate of investigative activities that appear politically one-sided. Some pundits and politicians have piled on with invidious characterizations of the entire bureau as “fascist,” “Gestapo-like,” “thoroughly corrupt,” and a tool of the Democratic Party that should be completely disbanded.

While the hyperbole is not helpful, the public’s frustration is certainly understandable following disclosures by special counsel John Durham of abuses stemming from the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, the shocking search of a former Republican president’s home over a document dispute, the highly tactical home arrests of pro-life protesters and other conservatives, and the unjustified early morning search of journalists’ homes for the politically embarrassing diary of President Biden’s daughter — to name just a few. 

A prominent over-rotation proposal fronted by some in the media and on Capitol Hill is the complete dissolution of the FBI and distribution of its mission to other federal law enforcement agencies. This is a feel-good sound bite, but it will never happen. It is irresponsible to feed it as a possibility to that half of the country that traditionally admired the FBI but now is deeply concerned. Here’s why.

Keep in mind that 99 percent of the FBI had no involvement in any of the troubling investigations and actions listed above. The majority go about their daily business working the kinds of cases we would want them to. If whistleblower and other anecdotal reporting is to be believed, there is significant concern among current and retired FBI agents that some in the bureau are unduly cooperating with abusive Department of Justice (DOJ) political agendas. The responsibility for the present erosion of trust in the FBI by millions in this country lies at the feet of a very few.

Second, parceling out the FBI’s investigative and intelligence jurisdictions to other agencies is immensely impractical. These agencies are small compared to the FBI, are single threaded in their missions, and would be years if not decades away from being able to absorb authorities with which they have no experience or training.  

Some have suggested simply reconstituting the FBI under a different name. This makes no sense. Like it or not, the FBI is a brand cultivated over a century, generating deep cooperation domestically and around the world that helps solve tough cases and save lives. The FBI, because it’s the FBI, is still attractive to tens of thousands of good candidates for very few positions every year. Effective reforms that don’t blow up the positive effects of the FBI are possible.

What is clear is that some type of prudent reform mitigating concerns that the FBI can be manipulated politically is in order. A historical perspective may be useful.

Eighty percent of Americans were not born or are too young to remember the last time the FBI came under intense fire for politically motivated investigations that were found to be constitutionally out of bounds. These investigations came to a head in the 1960s and early ’70s under the Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon administrations. At that time, the executive branch launched intelligence investigations and operations with little constraint.

As a result, wiretaps ordered by the DOJ of Martin Luther King Jr. came to light, as well as surveillance and undercover penetration of anti-Vietnam War and civil rights protest groups.  Protections guaranteed by the First and Fourth Amendments were abused. And it wasn’t just the FBI that drew attention as it was revealed that the CIA was attempting sanctioned assassinations overseas, the National Security Agency (NSA) was routinely listening in on American conversations, and the IRS was casually sharing taxpayer records of perceived administration enemies.

In 1975, a bipartisan special Senate committee colloquially known as the “Church Committee” was formed and subsequently exposed all these adventurous executive branch excesses. Arising from that were a number of reforms ranging from presidential executive orders to the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court and its protocols and, eventually, to the articulation and promulgation of Attorney General Guidelines that dictated the constitutionally safe thresholds the FBI needs to meet to start an investigation. 

All of this was good because it led to measures that strengthened constitutional protections while preserving the positive native capabilities of key national security agencies. There was understandable public indignation and loss of trust at that time 50 years ago because of these exposed abuses, but prudent reforms reigned, and we were better for it as a nation.  

Now, generations have passed, and the imperatives of those old reforms have seemingly turned evanescent. And so, further reform is necessary to curb a current executive branch that appears to be targeting political opposition with an inordinate forcefulness that insults and possibly violates constitutional protections. Refreshed reforms are now likely as power is poised to shift in Washington, but the FBI can get out ahead of some of this by unilaterally instituting a few basic new protocols designed to restore trust.

First, any high-profile investigation involving political campaigns, candidates and political figures should be subject to objective General Counsel review to ensure adequate predication required by the Attorney General Guidelines is clearly present in order to avoid another Crossfire Hurricane debacle. Contrary to Inspector General assertions, the Crossfire Hurricane case file articulated no basis for legitimate initiation required by the guidelines.  

Second, FBI agents and analysts should be required to sign employment contracts agreeing to avoid politically charged or revealing statements on internal communications and social media platforms under penalty of discipline, to include dismissal. The public should have faith that the FBI is apolitical.

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Third, arrest and search plans involving politically sensitive suspects should undergo prior review by an independent entity within the FBI to ensure that the level of tactical response fits the violation and relative risk presented by the subject. Safety is important but so is a response strategy that doesn’t foster perceptions of heavy-handedness, if not extrajudicial punishment or “message sending.”  

Trust is the currency that enables successful FBI investigations that all law-abiding Americans desire. Less trust, less success. Hyperbolic caricatures and impractical “disband the FBI” drumbeats are useless. Positive reform is normally helpful, welcome, and vitally needed to reestablish lost trust.  

Kevin R. Brock is a former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI and principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). He independently consults with private companies and public-safety agencies on strategic mission technologies.

The current pattern of conflict in Ukraine suggests that the age of drone warfare has arrived. The U.S. Army, which leads joint efforts to counter the threat posed by unmanned air systems, anticipated this development years ago and has identified means for tracking and engaging hostile drones.

However, it is important to recognize that the drone challenge is in its infancy, at a level of sophistication comparable to where armored warfare stood a century ago. We should not assume that Ukraine’s claimed success in downing Russia’s drones with what the Wall Street Journal calls a “hodgepodge” of air defenses will work ten years from now.

The problem is that any country investing in drone systems has numerous options for making them more lethal and survivable—more options than defenders currently do.

Consider the possibilities.

If every drone threatening U.S. forces was as big and expensive as this Sukhoi unmanned combat air … [+] vehicle, conventional air defenses might be adequate. But the threat is evolving in other directions.

Wikipedia

First of all, the vast majority of drones are relatively inexpensive. Even countries of modest means can mount swarm attacks that saturate and overwhelm conventional defenses. Without better defenses, we risk returning to the era when British prime minister Stanley Baldwin warned that “the bomber will always get through.”

Second, because drones are usually small, they are already difficult to detect and track. They can be made more stealthy by design modifications, use of different materials, and operational features that put them beyond the range of defensive missiles or below the horizon of defensive radars.

Third, since the technology used to manufacture drones is readily available in global commerce, users can evade the sanctions employed to limit trafficking in other military technologies. For instance, the Iranian Shahad-136 drones being used by Russia in Ukraine incorporate Western technology for functions like guidance.

Fourth, drones can be remotely controlled or preprogrammed to behave unpredictably in flight, confounding the efforts of defenders to find a suitable point of engagement. The Shahad-136 may barely exceed a speed of 100 miles per hour, but with a range of over 1,500 miles it has the potential to reach intended targets via circuitous paths that can only be countered using extensive defensive networks.

Fifth, drones are already used for a variety of missions from kamikaze kinetic attacks to artillery spotting to broad-area surveillance of troop movements. Their versatility will grow over time as they exploit onboard data fusion, satellite uplinks, and other technologies once too expensive for most users.

Although basic drone design has been gradually advancing for some time, the tactical air defenses of U.S. forces have not. Development of improved defenses slowed during the global war on terror because the enemy lacked air weapons. As a result, the military is dependent on relatively outdated defensive missiles that either lack the reach to engage distant drones or are too expensive to offer a suitable exchange ratio in defeating drones.

The Army’s latest effort to upgrade its short-range air defenses by funding a successor to the venerable Stinger missile is a case in point. The service says it wants a missile with increased speed and range, an improved (probably dual-mode) seeker, interoperability with existing launchers, and growth potential that avoids “vendor lock.”

All of those goals are feasible, but the end result is likely to be a system that costs a multiple of what most drones do. So as drone swarms become more common, the Army could find defense against these relatively inexpensive threats a losing game. Simply stocking a sufficient supply of defensive munitions could prove quite costly.

Against that backdrop, the defensive weapons that seem to offer the greatest potential for keeping ahead of the drone threat are all non-kinetic rather than traditional kinetic interceptors. The term ”kinetic” in this context refers to force accomplished via motion, as in the case of a missile or other munition. Three types of non-kinetic counters to unmanned air systems appear viable within the current decade: electronic jamming, high-power microwaves, and lasers.

Jamming. Jamming, in a generic sense, involves disrupting signals by overpowering receivers with electronic noise in the same frequency. Drones typically operate using command links to remote pilots, and many also depend of GPS signals to navigate. When the transmission of these signals is overpowered by jamming, the drone is effectively disabled.

For instance, Virginia-based CACI, a leader in counter-drone applications of jamming, has assembled a library of over 400 distinctive signals used to control drones that can be exploited by defenders. Its technology automates the kill chain, in the process identifying the source of a threat and the optimal method for degrading the control links of hostile drones. This approach is intrinsically faster and cheaper than trying to defend using kinetic weapons.

Microwaves. Raytheon Technologies RTX has pioneered the development of high-power microwaves that disable the guidance systems of drones at the speed of light. Although microwave weapons are somewhat less discriminate than lasers, that quality potentially enables them to disable multiple drones, as in a swarm, simultaneously.

The company is working with the Army’s Rapid Capabilities Office to explore the use of high-power microwaves in defeating drone swarms. Its microwave weapon, called Phaser, is one among several counter-drone systems that the company has developed.

Lasers. Like electronic jamming and high-power microwaves, lasers operate at the speed of light to achieve non-kinetic kill. A high-energy laser can destroy most drones in seconds by heating the vehicle to a point where systems fail. Unlike jamming and microwaves, lasers are extremely accurate; when pointed precisely, they will kill intended targets while causing no collateral damage.

Lockheed Martin LMT has in recent years deliver a series of increasingly energetic laser systems to the Department of Defense, and will likely scale up its technology to the megawatt level. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency earlier this year began a classified, five-year effort to develop panelized, scalable lasers capable of defeating swarms of drones—swarms potentially numbering in the hundreds of vehicles.

Of course, none of these “effectors” will work without technology for the timely detection and tracking of threats. That will likely require new techniques for networking and fusing data from multiple sensors. At the moment, though, finding affordable kill mechanisms is the greater challenge in countering swarms of drones, and non-kinetic systems operating at the speed of light offer inherent advantages over traditional means like missiles.

All of the companies mentioned in this commentary contribute to my think tank.

Israel used the NSO Group’s software as a tool of diplomacy. The F.B.I. wanted it for domestic surveillance. Then everything soured. Here are highlights of a New York Times Magazine investigation.

The Israeli cyber company NSO Group at one of its branches in the Arava Desert in Sapir, Israel. Credit…Amir Levy/Getty Images

Russian President Vladimir Putin was dubbed a “fighter of the Antichrist” by a top religious figure as rhetoric referring to the war in Ukraine as a “de-Satanization” operation escalates.

Russian pundits and media presenting the invasion of Ukraine as a holy war are not new, with Russian ideologues frequently portraying the conflict as a struggle between the religious and traditional Russia versus the decadent and secular West. Russian Orthodox Christians and Muslims in the country have united in their opposition to the progressive values of the West, which they view as symbolized in the post-Maidan government in Kyiv. But recently, rhetoric from these camps has escalated into describing the West as “satanic,” starting with Putin’s use of the term in his speech announcing the annexation of several eastern Ukrainian territories, which has since been widely adopted by his key allies and Russian state media.

Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, the world’s largest by a substantial margin, has joined in these calls, moving to portray the conflict as a new crusade of sorts.

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“Go bravely to fulfill your military duty. And remember that if you lay down your life for your country, you will be with God in his kingdom, glory, and eternal life,” he said in a sermon directed toward newly mobilized troops at the Zachatyevsky Monastery in Moscow last month, according to the Daily Beast.

In a speech opening the 24th Congress of the World Russian People’s Council, Kirill heaped praise on Putin, calling him a “fighter of the Antichrist” and even one that would help prevent an apocalypse.

He stated that Putin’s Russia is fighting against a “unipolar world,” a manifestation of globalism, of which “the essence of this phenomenon is the creation in the world of conditions for the emergence of a sole ruler, who will be the Antichrist,” according to SOTA.

The patriarch specifically pointed to Western acceptance of gay marriage, euthanasia, and genetic experimentation as features of the “upcoming apocalypse.”

Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill, center, and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, right, arrive to attend the consecrating the country’s new Cathedral of Russian Armed Forces.

Alexei Pavlov, the assistant secretary of the Russian Federation’s Security Council, backed up this rhetoric in an op-ed published in Arguments and Facts titled “What is cooked in the ‘witch’s cauldron.’ Neo-pagan cults gain strength in Ukraine.” In the article, he alleges that neo-paganism, a new religion that seeks to return to worshiping pre-Christian gods, is growing rapidly in Ukraine, intertwined with satanism.

“With the continuation of the special operation in Ukraine, there is more and more evidence that the greatest atrocities in the territory of Donbass and in other Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine have been committed for many years by fanatics blinded by ideas that are far from common sense, morality and traditional religious teachings,” Pavlov wrote. He also mentions the influence of some neo-pagan figures on Ukrainian nationalism, such as Volodymyr Shayan.

He goes on to claim that satanists and neo-pagans were put in positions of power by the United States. The “sects” in Ukraine then multiplied drastically, pointing to not just satanism and neo-paganism but certain Christian and Jewish groups as well.

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks to Governor of Magadan Region Sergey Nosov via videoconference.

“Using network manipulations and psychotechnologies, the new authorities turned Ukraine from a state into a totalitarian hypersect,” he added.

The op-ed generated some controversy, however, as Moscow’s head rabbi accused the author of antisemitism, according to Haaretz, despite his listing of Judaism alongside Christianity and Islam as holding “real values.” Rabbi Berel Lazar was likely referring to one part of the op-ed in which Pavlov criticizes the ultra-Orthodox Judaism of two influential Jewish Ukrainian oligarchs, Igor Kolomoisky and Viktor Pinchuk, as holding the “superiority of the supporters of the sect over all nations and peoples.”

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Recently, the Muslim Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov fully endorsed Putin’s messaging, calling for a Jihad in Europe against “devils” and vowing to take none of them prisoner.

Ukraine, which has the backing of the United States and much of the West, is still engaged in combating Russian invaders more than seven months after the full-scale war began.

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared jihad against the West in a recent speech delivered at the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow. In demagoguing his twisted modern-day version of the Atlantic Charter — a “Black Sea Charter,” if you will — Putin laid out his global call for jihad. Its crusade? Simply put, the destruction of “the so-called West,” its cultural and religious values, and what Putin perceives to be Washington’s global unipolar hegemony.

That’s a far cry from where we were in February, when Putin was justifying his “special military operation” in Ukraine. Then, Putin’s primary obsession was Kievan Rus — and the Donbass’ place in it alongside Crimea. The Kremlin, additionally, was also aiming to turn the Black Sea into a Russian lake. Getting battered in Ukraine changed the equation and the excuses.

Jihad, in effect, is Putin’s desperate attempt to change the playing board. He needs to find a new battlefield other than in Ukraine in search of a victory, lest he finds himself falling out a window. Overturning the global world order, in place since the end of World War II, would be one bold way of doing it.

Putin launched his jihad for a new multipolar order during his speech by accusing the West — namely, Washington, London, NATO and the European Union — of playing a “dangerous, bloody and, I would say, dirty [game].” Never mind that it was Russia who invaded Ukraine and it was Kyiv who valiantly fought off a superpower to live and fight another day. Putin’s overarching argument is that “the West made me do it” and that’s why he must continue doing it to save the world.

Yet, in the wake of Russian defeats, first in Kyiv, later in the Donbass and beyond, Putin’s justifications have been ever-changing. Initially, Putin claimed it was solely to rescue the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass. Then, it was to reverse a U.S.-orchestrated coup forcing former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from power in 2014.

Next, lacking a victory on Victory Day, Putin resorted to claiming the war was about fighting Nazis in Ukraine. That excuse imploded when Putin’s forces were revealed not to be self-proclaimed “Nazi-hunters” but reincarnated Nazis committing war crimes and crimes against humanity at will in Bucha, Kharkiv and even in Azov. Then the excuse was that Ukraine lost the right to sovereignty because, ostensibly, Kyiv fought to defend its sovereignty. 

Now it is Satanism.

Pivoting to this latest justification closely ties into Putin’s need to maintain the unwavering support of the Russian Orthodox Church. Not only is its leader, Patriarch Kirill I, providing “spiritual cover” for his war in Ukraine, the church itself is arguably the “core” of Putin’s domestic support.

Satanism is also Putin’s means to an end of simultaneously declaring jihad throughout Christendom and among Islamic extremists.

During his speech, Putin kept hammering on the theme of a decadent, immoral West and pitted it as a collective culture undermining the values of the Muslim world. Indeed, he claimed, it is one that is intent on destroying the Muslim world — and its values — as evidenced by U.S. military actions in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Putin’s pairing of Russian Christendom and extremist Islam in this new jihad against the West is not without precedent. It is rooted in his earliest interactions with Syria and its president, Bashar al-Assad. The Russian Orthodox Church, “a key unifier” in Russia and “central to his grip on power” has fully embraced Putin as “the savior of the Christian world.” Two holy sites significant to the church and Russian history are located in Syria: Maaloula, one of the remaining few cities that still speaks Aramaic — the language of Jesus — and Palmyra.

Palmyra is noteworthy because Catherine the Great idolized Zenobia, the “3rd-century queen of Palmyra,” and Catherine modeled her 18th-century court in St. Petersburg after the Syrian city. Notably, St. Petersburg is still referred to as “the Palmyra of the North.” Czarist history matters to Putin. He uses it to justify wars and land grabs.

Assad helped seal the arranged marriage between the Russian Orthodox Church and fundamentalist Islam, declaring in 2015 that Putin was “the only defender of Christian civilization one could rely on.” The seeds of Putin’s future jihad were planted — and cultivated with the blood of Russian soldiers dying in Syria. Assad’s payoff? Russian intervention on his behalf — and salvation — in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

Putin’s jihad and fight against Satanism is also directly aimed at Iran’s arch-conservative religious regime, as well as Afghanistan where Moscow is actively “recruiting Afghan commandos” to fight in Ukraine. But Putin’s jihad against the West is far broader than just the Middle East.

The Russian dictator is also aiming at Asian and African countries to peel them off from supporting Western sanctions. During his speech, he played all kinds of cards: colonialism, imperialism, racism, religious discrimination; the U.S. nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. He ignored, of course, Russia’s historical sins and the mortal sins that Putin’s soldiers commit daily in Ukraine.

Strikingly, in a direct threat to U.S. national security, Putin is targeting factions in the West to join in global jihad against Washington. He argues that the West has lost its way and Russia is now the only true standard-bearer for classical liberalism that is being lost to “Western cancel culture.”

Delusional? Yes. But also, revealing. Putin is out of ideas on how to win. First, he weaponized energy and winter. Then he went about weaponizing WMD and nuclear bluffing, including dangerously using the nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia as a “Nuclear Force Z.” Now, with this speech at Valdai, Putin is attempting to weaponize the entire global order as we know it by calling for jihad.

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Putin’s “Mother Russia” of all jihads will not work. Chinese President Xi Jinping isn’t interested in a Mussolini-type sideshow. Nor is NATO intimidated. Ukraine is on the offensive — and rarely do countries sign on to a losing cause. Even an attack from Belarus on Kyiv to start the jihad wouldn’t change the ultimate outcome. Putin is likely finished in Ukraine and in Moscow — as is Putinism. Russia just isn’t willing to admit it yet or see it through. Putin’s call for jihad will soon devolve into Putin’s final lament.

Mark Toth is a retired economist, historian and entrepreneur who has worked in banking, insurance, publishing and global commerce. He is a former board member of the World Trade Center, St. Louis, and has lived in U.S. diplomatic and military communities around the world, including London, Tel Aviv, Augsburg and Nagoya. Follow him on Twitter @MCTothSTL. 

Jonathan Sweet, a retired Army colonel, served 30 years as a military intelligence officer. His background includes tours of duty with the 101st Airborne Division and the Intelligence and Security Command. He led the U.S. European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012-14, working with NATO partners in the Black Sea and Baltics. Follow him on Twitter @JESweet2022.