Mowatt-Larssen, who spent a significant part of his career in Moscow and dealt with WMD terror threats after 9/11, outlines some of Putin's most significant miscalculations.
ROLF MOWATT-LARSSEN: Thank you, Michael. Pleasure to be here.
And the thing I wanted to convey through the inner integration of faith and my career in the agency is the question about, how do you do the right thing? As you know, in our best moments, we tried to do the right thing and succeeded, and in our worst moments, we didn't. So I wanted to to cover some of that dynamic. And that's why I wrote the memoir.
ROLF MOWATT-LARSSEN: When Director George Tenet at the time pulled me out of Chinese language training - I was supposed to go to Beijing and continue my geopolitical career - I would call it, I didn't expect to be put on terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction because, like most of us, I didn't really think that was a threat.
But the other thing about that period, which I think most Americans still don't realize - you certainly do and everyone in the agency at the time did - is we understood that our own agency, the FBI, Homeland Security, which didn't exist in the as the entity was now, wasn't prepared for what we learned on 9/11, was that terrorists could, in fact, change the world; was something of that impact, that strategic consequence.
The first aspect of his decision-making, which I think is the most important, is he believes he and Russia are victims of history. He said to the Duma in 2005 that, 'the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century was the collapse of the Soviet Union.' That's a very startling statement, considering the fact that by the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, every country in it wanted to leave the Soviet Union and become independent.
So it's a very different version of aspiration for his own country in the world that he has, as compared to the Western governance model.ROLF MOWATT-LARSSEN: You know, Michael, it's a harsh accusation. And the reason I say it is because, when one considers the possibility of how much violence he would bring down, I never thought it would come to this.
The first is I, like so many people, expected the Russian military to roll into the major cities in Ukraine and take them. Not because I doubted Ukrainian desire to resist the Russians, but I had a greater respect than I perhaps should have that the Russian military couldn't be stopped. I don't believe personally that that's as much because he failed to provide them with the correct assessment of the situation. He probably didn't want to hear that assessment. I think is because they failed to implement his strategy for a very quick war, a very quick war in Ukraine.
ROLF MOWATT-LARSSEN: One thing that's happened to the Russians - which happens to our children, if they decide to lie to us continually - you can't believe anything they say anymore. So I actually don't believe anything the Russian military or Putin himself says. I don't think there's any reason to believe they won't say anything they need to say in a deceptive -- there's a deception aspect to what they try to achieve in information space.
That's a very scary thing because I think we have to say, without trying to scare anybody right now, but just to be prepared: that the threat of nuclear, tactical nuclear or even greater in some form of escalation of this conflict, is not zero, as we at all hoped and assumed over the decades.
So on that level, I think it's very important that we get the world community united, including the Chinese, if it's possible, to set a standard that the use of any form of WMD in this war is simply not acceptable, and that in the event that Vladimir Putin escalates to use WMD, he would lose all support in the world, even from the very few countries today, such as China and India to some extent, that are supporting him.
And that's the scenario the world has to be prepared for in having signaled him in advance. That this doesn't just result in a few more sanctions of some form or another, which are already very biting, but it would result in something that Putin would find unacceptable. So again, I hate to speculate beyond that, but I think the U.S.
So what we're seeing in these early weeks of the war is some problems in the either discipline or in the handling of the war, in the part of the Russian establishment that Putin had secured the hardest, which is the FSB and the military. So he's obviously trying to ensure that he plugs any leaks, that he holds people accountable he doesn't trust. But I think his standard is becoming more unreasonable over time as to what he considers to be unpatriotic. And even people are leaving the country because they're calling a war, a war are considered unpatriotic. So this is a sign of a person in distress.
And in the near-abroad, which is the Russian term for all the countries that are that are for formerly part of the Soviet Union, they have a huge active role in establishing agent networks and conducting what, in the West, we call active measures, which are operations to influence events on the ground. So the FSB had decades to establish itself in Ukraine that run all the way back to when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.
When I see articles or news reporting about bare shelves in Russia, it brings me back to my time in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. I frankly knew the Soviet Union was unsustainable, the path they were on in the 1980s, simply by going out and going shopping because there were no, you couldn't buy anything. I mean, literally, the only thing you could rely on getting in the late eighties, even, was bread and vodka. And if you needed anything else, you imported it from Finland or other places.
Well, they tried that in the eighties, and there were no fast food places. So my point is that the answer to your problems that you perceive with the West is not to close your doors and put up an iron wall. It's to do what they started to do in the eighties and then, of course, accelerated after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which is bring in competition into your economy. And now that's now all reversing.
Well, the same dynamic is in Russia. The people in the villages all across Russia are fairly inert politically. They're going to, by and large, support Putin. And when they hear things like 'de-Nazification' and 'bioweapons in Ukraine,' they're going to, by and large, not question it, but they also don't have a real political impact. For the most part, in their villages, that's not where opposition is going to rise up.
MICHAEL MORELL: So, Rolf, if we put all of that together, right, everything that's happening internally, how much danger do you think Putin is in, politically? Not because anyone is threatening Russia or the existence of Russia. I'm not saying that. But because they had decided that the global system - that's what Putin essentially decided when he invaded Ukraine. Is that the global geopolitical system that has existed since the collapse of the Soviet Union was intolerable and that he was going to try to bring it back to what it was.
But I would refer listeners to go back, and even Google, read real briefly on the previous two coups that have occurred in in Moscow in modern history, of 1991 and 1993. In both cases, there were people within the, we call them the Special Services. That's the word they use for themselves and the military and intelligence establishment.
So unfortunately, that kind of a situation could arise if there's not a sort of bloodless coup where a group of people, a small group of people, would put their heads together and simply say, 'For the good of the country, you're going to have to step down.' That would obviously be everyone's preferred outcome if there were some move.
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