Yesterday Seymour Hersh published a piece at his Substack in which he relayed what his US intelligence contacts have told him about the terrorist attack at Crocus Hall outside of Moscow last week. The gist of it is that US intelligence has a duty to warn all nations, including adversaries, of any terrorist attack that US intelligence sources pick up. HIs sources assure that US intelligence performed their duty by warning Russian authorities of the information they had of a possible terror attack:
This American intelligence community passed a warning of a possible attack involving religious extremists from Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan eighteen days in advance of the Moscow concert hall assault that killed at least 137 people and injured more than one hundred. Such a warning invariably comes from intercepts from the National Security Agency and agent reports from the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Americans did their job but the Russian intelligence community, heeding its boss, did not. President Vladimir Putin publicly called the warning “provocative statements” three days before the attack, and the Russian security services ignored it. They bear responsibility, in the view of American intelligence experts, for failing to do what was necessary to protect the concertgoers….
The prophetic alert released by the US Embassy in Moscow on March 7 explained that the embassy “is monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts, and U.S. citizens should be advised to avoid large gatherings in the next 48 hours.”
By any standard, the American intelligence was riveting. President Putin chose to ignore the warnings, and in its aftermath he has fixated on what he apparently and wrongly believes was an attack that in some way had been orchestrated or known in advance by the Ukrainian government….
The tragic reality, as the Russian leader continues to insist on Ukraine’s involvement, is that he and his cowed bureaucracy failed his people and their children. In many nations, such a catastrophic mistake would have political consequences.
To think that not that long ago the Soviet Union was suspcious of everyone and anyone!
Well, the N.Y. Times (hardly a neutral player) is saying otherwise. According to their account, the U.S. withheld specific details from Moscow that it purportedly had because they didn’t want to expose their intelligence gathering methods to an “adversary.” It’s a lame excuse, but if true it refutes the claim that the U.S. did its duty and acted in good faith. Time will tell.
I am disappointed with Hersh, because this is such a problematic entry. Why is he listening with such uncritical attention to US intelligence, however friendly he thinks his sources are? The warning to which he is referring was a very public warning issued on March 7, not backed up with more substantial evidence in private, of an attack on a public gathering and/or concert that was expected for March 8 or 9 – the warning, the prime purpose of which was to protect US citizens in Russia – was for 48 hours only. In other words its relevance expired on March 10th. The actual attack, which was originally scheduled for March 8 or 9, was postponed precisely because Russia did take appropriate action and beefed up its security for the concert in question at Crocus Hall, and did not take place until March 22. In addition, there are many problems with the narrative about the attack being an ISIS attack which I explained in my own recent entry on this topic as the perpetrators were very clearly not jihadists or any stripe, but mercenaries who were ill trained and ill prepared and who sought to exit Russia not to Belarus as some believe but to Ukraine.
Furthermore, I should add, that it seems to my mind utterly incomprehensible that Putin would knowingly sacrifice the lives of 140 or so young people to so little, if any, possible advantage and to the embarrassment of himself and his own government and to the shame and sorrow of the Russian people. There is nothing that Russia could do as a result of this incident that it could not just as easily do before it. I am amazed that someone like Hersh could give this more than a moment’s serious contemplation.
I’m not sure if he’s suggesting that Putin actually knowingly said screw it and allowed something to happen, thereby sacrificing innocent Russians. I think he’s suggesting that Putin didn’t take the warning seriously enough because he distrusted the source of the warning.
I’ve said in the past that I think Hersh has a poor understanding of Russian politics and culture because he obviously relies too much on mainstream media sources for his news on Russia. I also think – as you said – he may be allowing himself to be used as a conduit for narrative control by his intel sources.
Sy Hersh is an outlet for CIA approved leaks. This is 100% confirmation that this attack was led by USA to discredit Putin