Stephen Kinzer, the author and Brown University senior fellow, told Bannon’s War Room on Thursday that the CIA began “dropping armed commandos into Ukraine” in 1947 “with the goal of fomenting a guerrilla uprising against the Soviet government,” the opening chapter of what he calls a 75-year American effort to push Ukraine into conflict with Russia. Kinzer was on WarRoom Battleground to discuss his new book Boiling Point.
That said, the CIA itself was created in September 1947 (the wartime OSS had been abolished in 1945, and the Central Intelligence Group filled the gap in between). The documented drops came later: Casey Michel, writing in Politico in 2022, dates the first flights over Soviet Ukraine to September 1949, and says the CIA dropped about 85 agents, three-quarters of whom were captured or killed almost immediately. The agency’s program with Ukrainian exiles, AERODYNAMIC, is listed by FOIA Research as running from 1949 to 1970. A passage quoted from the book’s description says CIA officers recruited “their first Ukrainian agents” in the refugee camps of postwar Europe; Kinzer did not say on air what he meant by 1947.
Kinzer then ran the rest of the timeline as he tells it. “It stretched all through decades until 1991 when Ukraine finally became independent,” he said, and when Ukraine wrote permanent neutrality into its constitution, “we didn’t like that. And through a series of operations that cost millions and millions of dollars, the CIA worked to change public opinion and change political opinion towards a more favorable approach to the United States.” He said that effort ended in the uprising that overthrew the neutralist government in 2014 and replaced it with “essentially a proxy of the United States,” after which Washington began “to pour weapons into Ukraine.”
Kinzer tied that to the late-stage fight John Mearsheimer warned of, which he read as meaning America would be “fighting to the last Ukrainian.” “This is one of the most outrageous parts of the Ukraine war, that the Ukrainians are just roadkill,” Kinzer said, citing U.S. senators who called the aid “the best money we’ve ever spent because we’re killing Russians.”
He did not dispute who started the 2022 war. “Russia’s the aggressor and Ukraine is the victim,” he said, but that picture is “the culminating frame in a long movie that lasted 75 years.”
Guest host Ben Harnwell then asked whether Washington had deliberately provoked Russia so the defense industry could profit. Kinzer called the question not cynical but “clear,” and offered his own version: planners saw a “win-win” in pushing NATO toward Russia’s border, because if Moscow accepted it, the U.S. could “proceed to the next step, which is trying to subvert Russia itself,” and if it invaded, “we can paint Russia as the brutal aggressor.” He added that “if Joe Biden had just pronounced five words, Ukraine will not join NATO, this whole war might have been avoided.”
