Peter Strzok on Kash Patel’s “ill-advised” trip to Russia
The FBI Director plans a trip to Russia this fall, hosted by the FSB. Strzok, an ex-FBI special agent who worked on the Russian probe, laid out how foolish a position Patel is putting himself in.
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Russia and North Korea completing suspected joint war supply route; U.S. to spread out $400 mln in Ukraine aid until 2029; Ukraine is producing drones faster than the U.S.; Kazakhstan forced to cut oil production after drone attacks on Russia.
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While those in high places are shaking hands, we’re exposing the cost of such compromises.
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KYIV, Ukraine — Russian intelligence is not an all-powerful bogeyman lurking beneath every bed or hiding in every dark closet.
But they are certainly no buffoons. Underestimating the heirs to the Soviet KGB would be a grave mistake — especially when you walk into the trap yourself. That’s the conclusion of Peter Strzok, a former deputy head of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division.
“The traditional Russian ability to conduct intelligence operations — whether that’s recruiting sources within a foreign intelligence service, conducting disinformation or perception management type activities — is excellent, world-class,” he said.
Strzok’s first exposure to Russia came long before the FBI. As a college student in the Cold War era, Peter had already immersed himself in books on Karl Marx, communist ideology, and the rise of the Soviet Union, all part of the core curriculum at Georgetown University.
To the sound of live artillery fire, while he was training as a reserve officer and artilleryman, he prepared for a direct military confrontation with the Soviets to defend NATO if WW3 erupted.
That early exposure carried over into a 22-year FBI career, during which Strzok came to know Russian intelligence tradecraft firsthand. It was then that he concluded: Russian spies can be very good when they want to be.
But he isn’t convinced this understanding still exists at the top of today’s FBI.
The current FBI director, Kash Patel, is planning a trip to Moscow and St. Petersburg in mid-October, Politico reported last week. The agenda or official reasons for such a visit remain unclear, as the FBI did not reply to The Counteroffensive media inquiry.
The last time the FBI director traveled to Russia was more than a decade ago, before Russia invaded Ukraine for the first time and before it interfered in the U.S. elections in 2016, which put an extra strain on relationships between Moscow and Washington. What is even more concerning is that the visit can take place just before the U.S. midterm elections scheduled for November 3.
Kash Patel already has quite a controversial history of interactions with Russia. He was at the center of attention last February after being paid $25,000 for contributing to the film’s direction, a payment financed by a Kremlin-linked company.
“Whether Patel is simply being opportunistic — trying to curry favor and gain power — or whether he genuinely believes these things, taken together, I wouldn’t want someone like that going into Russia,” reflected Strzok.
If Patel’s visit goes ahead, it will broaden the range of recent high-level contact with Moscow and might become another sign of easing Russia’s isolation on the world stage, rather than remaining a pariah state.
“In the best-case scenario, he wants to ask for their help tracking down Russian cyber actors. He wants to ask them not to engage in election interference…I suspect there will be a lot of wining and dining, prestigious private tours of the Hermitage, jet skis, helicopter rides — all the finer things that Russians know how to leverage very well,” said Strzok.
The first step to addressing a threat is to explore it honestly. But Patel has dismissed as the “Russiagate hoax” what the intelligence community concluded was Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections.
“In 2017/18, I proved the Steele Dossier was fictitious intelligence, weaponized by corrupt FBI officials to deceive a federal judge and unlawfully spy on then presidential candidate Trump’s campaign — all paid for by his opponent,” he said.
Peter Strzok recognizes the threat. He played a key role in the early stages of the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling as the senior agent. Before that, he worked on a network of Russian sleeper agents, ultimately arrested in 2010.
However, in 2018 Strzok was fired — not because of some failed investigation or a lack of expertise. He was dismissed for sending messages criticizing Trump to his colleague Lisa Page.
Since then, Strzok has gotten into academia, teaching counterintelligence and national security to undergrads at his alma mater, Georgetown University. He now sometimes dedicates his time to photography or writing fiction.
Always clean-shaven during his FBI years, Strzok has even grown a beard now streaked with gray. When asked how much of that gray was thanks to Russia, he smiled: “Probably quite a bit.”
Trying to understand the main players in Russian intelligence, one is most likely to encounter three main agencies.
The GRU is Russia’s military intelligence service, which also organizes major covert operations and many of Moscow’s most significant cyberattacks. It is widely believed to have been behind the poisoning of the former GRU colonel Sergei and his daughter Yulia Skripal, as well as the hack of the Democratic National Committee ahead of the 2016 U.S. election.
The SVR is Russia’s classic foreign intelligence service, responsible for running the network of deep-cover ‘illegals’ in the United States, one of the major cases Strzok helped investigate.
The FSB is widely regarded as the principal successor to the KGB after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It combines a broad range of responsibilities, including domestic security, counterterrorism, and certain foreign intelligence and covert operations.
It’s with the FSB that Patel will likely meet. But unlike the traditionally-apolitical FBI, the FSB has long been deeply connected with political players inside the government.
“Intelligence as an idea and as an activity is woven into Russian foreign policy and state activity in a way that doesn’t exist in the West and certainly not in the United States,” Strzok concluded.
Strzok is convinced that Patel, and anyone traveling with him, would be placed under “a microscope” throughout the visit. They could be monitored everywhere: hotel rooms may be bugged and under video surveillance, phone calls, text messages and emails intercepted.
“I would hope the people around Patel are savvy enough to say, ‘Look, boss, leave your work phone behind. We’ll give you a burner. Leave your personal devices at home,” Strzok shared. “Can they avoid hopping on the phone and posting something to their Instagram or sending something on a Signal chat? I don’t know.”
It’s not new for intelligence and security services (even those of adversarial states) to maintain at least minimal channels of communication, according to Strzok. You never know when you’ll have to play that card — in response to a shared terrorist or cyber threat.
One of the last publicly known instances of cooperation between the FBI and the FSB came before the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. The attack was carried out by two ethnic Chechens, killing three people and injuring more than 500. It later emerged that Russian authorities had warned the U.S. about one of the future attackers two years before the bombing, sharing intelligence with Washington.
In the last decade relations between the FBI and Russia’s FSB have been especially strained and remain purely pragmatic. Neither side trusts the other.
So, a physical visit to the FSB definitely adds an extra layer of danger. Hacking a device, for example, is simpler if you can get physical access to it, Strzok said.
“Even if you go in thinking, ‘Okay, I know the Russians are dangerous. I know they’re going to try to manipulate me,’ there are still countless vulnerabilities they can — and, in my view, will — try to exploit,” he said.
Moreover, if Russian intelligence were to obtain Patel’s DNA, it could reveal physiological vulnerabilities that might later be exploited, like a predisposition to certain diseases or previously unknown family ties.
That concern is one reason why European leaders, including French President Macron and former German Chancellor Scholz, reportedly refused to take COVID-19 PCR tests while in Russia in 2022. They feared that their biological samples could be handed over to the FSB.
“There are stories about going back into the Cold War where people were trying to break into the plumbing to get the stool of the person…[If Kash Patel] got a health condition trying to hide, could this show up potentially through either your feces, saliva or anything else that they could get?” Strzok said.
Strzok noted that Patel lacks experience in federal law enforcement, despite becoming the FBI Director. That’s why even if he wanted to be cautious enough, “If you’re not particularly bright or diligent to begin with, your best effort simply won’t be as good as the best effort of someone at the 50th percentile,” Strzok said.
Moscow and St. Petersburg are known for exclusive, invitation-only parties where expensive liquor flows freely. For Kash Patel, this presents yet another vulnerability for compromise.
The FBI director had engaged in “excessive drinking,” behavior that reportedly concerned some of his colleagues, The Atlantic previously reported. Patel denied the allegations. Though in February last year, a video of the FBI director exuberantly celebrating the U.S. hockey team’s victory at the Winter Olympics went viral.
“[Patel is] clearly somebody, in my opinion, who has a desire for sort of luxury things with the base of that is a little bit of an ego need to feel accepted, to feel like he is in a place of prominence and a place of both prestige and entitlement that translate to an image of value,” Strzok said.
Those are the vulnerabilities that the FSB can quickly catch and later weaponize against the FBI head.
It remains unknown whether Patel will meet with Putin or any other high-ranking Russian officials. However, it is already clear that the Kremlin will take any opportunity to show that Russia is not some outcast state; it still ‘counts’ among the world’s major players, hosting foreign dignitaries eager to shake hands with Russians and flash diplomatic smiles.
“They’re going to highlight that and say, “See? Look, we belong. We’re accepted by members of the international community. We aren’t doing anything wrong…” Russians are extraordinarily good at playing that up and maximizing its PR value,” Strzok said.
At this very moment the Kremlin might be popping champagne. Each new meeting creates legitimacy, another propaganda victory for Moscow. Each foreign leader’s visit silently papers over the atrocities Russia is committing daily in Ukraine.
If Patel goes to Russia as planned, every handshake he takes will be covered in blood.
Interested in more coverage about intelligence work? Take a look at these stories:
Is Russia opening a new front in Belarus?
A Ukrainian nuclear program: Could it be done?
Ukrainian sabotage groups operating behind Russian lines
Editor’s Note:
While those in high places are shaking hands, we’re exposing the cost of such compromises.
Subscribe to our content to be the first to receive high-quality analysis and understand what’s really happening behind the scenes of world politics.
THE LATEST NEWS AT THIS HOUR:
By Myroslava Tanska-Vikulova
Good morning to readers; Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands.
RUSSIA AND NORTH KOREA COMPLETING SUSPECTED JOINT WAR SUPPLY ROUTE: Russia and North Korea are finalizing construction of a road bridge over the Tumen River, which will be the first road connection between the two countries. Despite official statements about trade and tourism, an investigation by Truth Hounds for The Guardian reveals that the bridge, costing over $100 million, is being built to covertly supply weapons for the war against Ukraine.
The choice of a road bridge over a railway is driven by security concerns: trucks are much harder to identify and track via satellite.
U.S. TO SPREAD OUT $400 MLN IN UKRAINE AID UNTIL 2029: The U.S. Department of Defense has developed a plan under which $400 million in Ukraine aid will be spread out to last until the end of Trump’s term in office, with the final deliveries to be completed only in 2029, Reuters reports. The slow pace of funding is causing outrage among U.S. lawmakers, as Kyiv needs weapons immediately.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy will meet with Donald Trump in Washington on Tuesday, where he will press for the urgent delivery of air defense systems and the conclusion of a drone agreement. Following the talks at the White House, the President of Ukraine will visit the Capitol to meet with U.S. senators.
UKRAINE IS PRODUCING DRONES FASTER THAN THE U.S.: In 2026, Ukraine will produce 6–7 million first-person-view attack drones (500,000 per month), while a special U.S. program worth $1.1 billion calls for the purchase of only 200,000 drones by early 2027, according to Travis Metz, who runs the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance program.
The main obstacles for the U.S. have been a shortage of semiconductors and a strict ban on the use of Chinese components. To bridge the gap and learn from Ukraine’s experience, the Pentagon is engaging Ukrainian manufacturers, who are already establishing joint ventures in the U.S.
KAZAKHSTAN FORCED TO CUT OIL PRODUCTION AFTER DRONE ATTACKS ON RUSSIA: Due to the shutdown of a key maritime terminal in the Black Sea following a drone attack, Kazakhstan reduced its daily oil production by more than 50%, to 1 million barrels. For a country that ranks among the world’s top 10 crude oil suppliers, this was a serious blow that further destabilized the global market amid the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. The situation has once again laid bare Astana’s reliance on Russia for exporting its oil.
On Monday, Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Energy noted that, following a week-long forced shutdown, operations at the terminal and oil shipments have now resumed.
CAT OF CONFLICT:
This is Rudia, Myroslava’s in-laws cat. She’s enjoying her life after a close call with death, while her little one is being taken care of.
Stay safe out there.
Best,
Mariana
The cat looks concerned. I'm concerned too but for different reasons