The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War

by Jim Sciutto

for two years, as chief of staff to the US ambassador to China, I had the highest-level security clearance, Top Secret/Secret Compartmented Information (TS/SCI), which allows access to some of the most sensitive national security intelligence. During my assignment, I read numerous classified intelligence assessments. And one lesson I learned reading them is that they are rarely, if ever, 100 percent certain. Most often, they are based on a combination of concrete intelligence, including imagery and communication intercepts, and analysis, to generate what are essentially informed estimates. Some assessments lean more on analysis than hard information. For instance, US assessments of Russian plans to invade Ukraine, which turned out to be correct, relied in large part on imagery of a massive buildup of Russian forces around Ukraine and intercepted communications among Russian commanders discussing an invasion. The US assessment of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion leaned far more on the latter, with a heavy dose of political influence to imply certainty where there was none. But this new assessment of a possible Russian nuclear attack included substantial doses of both hard intelligence and analysis. “It’s never a cut-and-dry, black-and-white assessment,” the first senior administration official told me. “But the risk level seemed to be going up, beyond where it had been at any other point in time.”