LANGLEY, Va., July 8 (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday thanked officials at Central Intelligence Agency headquarters for alerting the world to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine and hailed what he called “the quiet courage” of American spies.
Marking the CIA’s 75th anniversary, Biden said he had been involved with the agency for 52 of those years, first as a junior senator in 1975 on a committee created to investigate mind-control experiments and other abuses by the agency.
Intelligence gathered by the CIA exposed Putin’s plans and allowed Washington to warn other countries about the war, he said.
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“Thanks to the incredible work of our intelligence professionals, we were able to alert the world to what Vladimir Putin is planning in Ukraine,” he said. “The exposure of Putin’s book blew a huge hole in the pretense and discredited his lies about what we are doing in Ukraine.”
Before the Russian invasion on February 24, when Russia massed more than 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border, Putin repeatedly accused the United States and other Western powers of deliberately creating a scenario to draw Moscow into war.
Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a “special operation”.
Biden’s speech was a stark contrast to that of former President Donald Trump, who gave his first speech as president at CIA headquarters, where he lambasted the media and his political opponents in front of a “wall of stars” honoring dozens of CIA agents who have died in the line of duty. .
Biden noted that two stars were added to the wall this year. “Your physical health and well-being is critically important to me and to your leadership here at the CIA,” Biden said, a possible reference to Havana syndrome, a series of abnormal health incidents that have affected about 200 US diplomats and intelligence officers around the world.
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Reporting by Jeff Mason in Langley, Va. Writing by Andrea Shallal Editing by Heather Timmons and Matthew Lewis
Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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