Welcome to Spycast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum.

I'm your host, Sasha Inber, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.

After Russia's full-scale invasion, the U.S. rushed to create a secret center

that set targets for the Ukrainians to destroy.

But the counteroffensive of 2023 failed to achieve its goals.

So, what went wrong? New York Times reporter Adam Entus spent more

than a year trying to answer that question. Through hundreds of interviews with officials on

both sides of the Atlantic, he uncovered a story shaped by politics and personalities. Americans and Ukrainian generals clashing over resources,

troop numbers and movements, and plans of attack.

Disagreements turned into mistrust and mistrust into missteps, and the consequences were felt

acutely on the battlefield.

Adam, you had reported on a coalition of intelligence officers from the CIA, NSA, the Defense

Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial Intel Agency, and others, and how they were

operating out of a basement at a U.S. military base in Weissbaud in

Germany under an operation called Task Force Dragon. Tell us about that operation.

So this was set up around April 2022 shortly after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

And there was a realization right from the beginning when they set up Task Force Dragon

that they were going to need to provide, in addition to bullets and mortar shells and

later Himars rockets, that they would need to provide them with intelligence.

And so what happened is policymakers at the

White House, at the Director of National Intelligence here in Washington, they basically wrote these

rules, which decided what we could share with them. And those rules told the guys in the basement

...