Russian dictator Vladmir Putin was made aware of Wagner PMC leader Yevheniy Prygozhin’s preparations for his rebellion by Russia’s FSB Security Service at least two or three days in advance, reported The Washington Post on July 25, referencing intelligence assessments.
london. wolf, lots of questions about what this means for the future. we are seeing that this wasn t totally spontaneous. you are absolutely right, victor. amara, good morning to you as well. i want to talk about the intelligence leading up to the russian insurrection. our national security analyst the former assistant secretary over the department of homeland security julia kayan is joining us. ask you explain what goes into these intelligence assessments, why came as a surprise when u.s. and western officials had been watching prigozhin make preparations, clearly preparations for this kind of move? bs well, the surprise would have been about the exact timing. so a lot of intelligence gathering is either human intelligence rumors, t things t our people or people who are working for us are hearing on the ground. some of it will be signal intelligence, what we are picking up, thoughts, planning
this is a assessment by the pentagon that was revealed by the washington post that says that if china were to invade taiwan that they would be able to establish very quick air superiority, which is very important in an invasion. the assessments go on to say that taiwan doubts that their air defenses can accurately detect missile launchers that barely have more than half of taiwan s aircraft are fully mission capable and that moving their jets to shelters would take at least a week. so fredricka this really does reveal us thinking on taiwan a reveals the intelligence assessments that have certainly certainly do not want china to see and it does expose some us vulnerabilities. these assessments going to say that u s intelligence is having a harder and harder, harder time gathering intelligence on china. because in this situation, china apparently is using civilian boats to hide some of their military activities. so it shows american intelligence
rarely been as important as it is now. where s president biden? why? yeah, there s two key explanations that i have been getting from the white house. the first of which is that look, there are a lot of unknowns here still at play. there s a concern about the president getting ahead of where things actually are in terms of what the intelligence community knows or initial information provish to ultimately change, which as we know can happen with these intelligence assessments. the other question is they feel like the leading explanation right now is these are most likely benign balloons that posed a potential threat to commercial air space because they were flying much lower than that initial chinese balloon. but that ultimately, this is likely a benign situation, and they don t want to make it seem much bigger by having the president come out and talk about this. we ll see if the pressure changes or not and they feel the need to ultimately do that. it does seem like that briefing