Stephen Kinzer, the author and Brown University senior fellow, told Bannon's War Room on Thursday that the CIA began "dropping armed commandos into Ukraine" in 1947 "with the goal of fomenting a guerrilla uprising against the Soviet government," the opening chapter of what he calls a 75-year American effort to push Ukraine into conflict with Russia. Kinzer was on WarRoom Battleground to discuss his new book Boiling Point.
That said, the CIA itself was created in September 1947 (the wartime OSS had been abolished in 1945, and the Central Intelligence Group filled the gap in between). The documented drops came later: Casey Michel, writing in Politico in 2022, dates the first flights over Soviet Ukraine to September 1949, and says the CIA dropped about 85 agents, three-quarters of whom were captured or killed almost immediately. The agency's program with Ukrainian exiles, AERODYNAMIC, is listed by FOIA Research as running from 1949 to 1970. A passage quoted from the book's description says CIA officers recruited "their first Ukrainian agents" in the refugee camps of postwar Europe; Kinzer did not say on air what he meant by 1947.
Kinzer then ran the rest of the timeline as he tells it. "It stretched all through decades until 1991 when Ukraine finally became independent," he said, and when Ukraine wrote permanent neutrality into its constitution, "we
