Shane Harris's new profile of CIA Director John Ratcliffe in The Atlantic, published October 23, is one of those stories. It is written to make Ratcliffe look like the sober professional in a chaotic administration. But read it carefully and it confirms something Washington has spent four years denying: the United States is not merely supplying Ukraine. Through the CIA, it is fighting Russia.

"The CIA is in the lead"

Harris does not bury the lede. Armed with information the CIA provides, Ukraine's military has been launching strikes deep inside Russia. American spy satellites give Ukraine early warning of incoming Russian missiles and drones. Among U.S. personnel on the ground in Ukraine, a retired senior officer who travels there frequently told him, "the CIA is in the lead."

It gets better. A Baltic intelligence officer who works closely with the Americans told Harris that, whatever Donald Trump says in public, the CIA's operations against Russia are now "much more aggressive" than they were under Joe Biden. Officers in the CIA's Special Activities Center, the people who run covert and paramilitary operations, are reportedly among the happiest at Langley, because they are so busy. And this is not new. As Harris notes, the CIA helped build Ukraine's modern intelligence apparatus after Russia took Crimea in 2014. This has been the agency's war for more than a decade.

Let me translate that from the polite language of a magazine profile. American intelligence is identifying the targets inside Russia, American satellites are running Ukraine's air-defense warning network, and American officers are "in the lead" on the ground. If Russia were doing that for Mexico against Texas, Washington would call it an act of war. Moscow has said for years that it is fighting NATO, not just Ukraine. Here, courtesy of The Atlantic and its anonymous sources, is the evidence.

Shooting ourselves in the fuel tank

Now comes the absurdity. According to Harris, the CIA's success has become a problem for the President. The refinery strikes the agency helps enable have hobbled Russia's economy. The International Energy Agency estimates that in the first eight months of this year, Ukraine hit a Russian refinery on average once every three days.