Sean Wiswesser ran CIA stations for three decades, and he knows what one Russian submarine is doing off the coast of Britain. It is a stretched missile boat with a smaller submarine fixed to its belly. That one carries divers. The divers train on cables — the fiber-optic lines on the seabed that carry the money, the traffic and the military orders between Europe and America. “These are preparations for war,” Wiswesser told Zev. He counted three places one could start this year: the Baltic, Taiwan, and the Strait of Hormuz.
Narativ called the first of them nine years ago. On January 10, 2017, ten days before Trump took the oath, this publication reported Putin massing nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad and warned that if Trump distanced himself from NATO, “Russia can expand its Ukrainian-style campaign to other states along Russia’s border.” Wiswesser now puts that campaign at the top of Putin’s list.
Russia is not waiting for a war to start it. At Leipzig-Halle, the airport NATO leans on to move cargo, one Russian drone crashed. A second one, armed, landed intact beside the Ukrainian freight terminal and sat there. Nobody set it off. That was the message. “They’re trying to say, hey, we can detonate this thing anytime we want. Your air defenses are hollow,” Wiswesser said. He called his column on it The Danger of Empty Deterrence. Empty is the word doing the work. In July 2024, Russia’s military intelligence service mailed incendiary devices out of Vilnius into Europe’s air cargo network; one ignited in the DHL depot at Leipzig, the same airport. Investigators read the run as a rehearsal for parcels bound for North America. “When Al-Qaeda did that, we went to war because of airline plots,” Wiswesser said. “The GRU did it, and we got precious little attention in the United States. We didn’t respond at all.”
The prize is a sixty-five-mile strip of Polish and Lithuanian farmland between Kaliningrad and Belarus. Take it and Russia owns a land bridge to Kaliningrad while Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia lose their land link to NATO. Zev pushed back — Putin cannot finish Ukraine, so where does he find a second army? Wiswesser answered with a calendar. Planners used to say Russia needed until 2030 to rebuild. Most now say 2028. Ukraine is ahead of Russia at drone war. Russia is ahead of everyone defending Europe.
PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL
America is answering the second front by leaving it. The Navy pulled its only aircraft carrier out of the Pacific. The Pentagon scaled back exercises with South Korea, and the president explained the retreat as a friendship with Kim Jong-un, who denied the friendship this week and fired ten missiles. Xi Jinping has told his generals to be ready to take Taiwan by 2027, sixteen months out. Wiswesser would not touch the politics; the commander in chief sets foreign policy, he said, twice. He also would not pretend to follow it. “What has the North Korean dictator done to earn de-escalation from our side? He hasn’t done anything.”
Iran has already tested the answer and found it thin. The United States and Israel destroyed Iran’s air defenses in days, which by the old arithmetic of the Gulf War ends a war. It didn’t. Iran had stockpiled thousands of missiles and tens of thousands of drones, and fired them at American bases across the region. Iran hit Bahrain hard enough that the Lincoln can no longer make port there. Iran now holds the northern half of the Strait of Hormuz while the Navy escorts tankers through the southern half. Wiswesser kept returning to Colin Powell: use force rarely, overwhelmingly, and with a stated objective. “What were we trying to accomplish, and what did we accomplish? Now we’ve got a divided Strait of Hormuz we didn’t have before.”
Wiswesser wrote a column called The Bear and the Dragon, and its argument is why the three fronts are one problem. Beijing and Moscow need no treaty to help each other, only an opening. Iran handed Russia the drone design; Russia improved it and sent it back. Chinese and Russian weapons and satellite targeting now reach Tehran. Every interceptor America burns over one front is one it does not have over the next, and American stocks are running low. Xi can count.
Wiswesser closed on his own will. The agency made him write one before it sent him to Afghanistan, and he put a line in it about the right of a single person to choose their own path. “These things are worth my life and more,” he said. “That’s what I put in my will as a young CIA officer.”
He gambled his life on an order Putin now tests with divers, Xi tests with a deadline, and Iran tests with drones. Nine years after Narativ said this was coming, nobody has answered.
Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War is out now from Naval Institute Press.
▶ Watch the full conversation:
