Intel Veteran Warns That Trump ‘Betrayal' Would Be Catastrophic

Yahoo

09-02-2025

Senior figures in the intelligence community are warning Donald Trump against repeating what they view as one of the worst mistakes in U.S. foreign policy as he contemplates how to handle Ukraine's war against Russia.
'It will be the most tangible abandonment from the Trump foreign policy,' a former senior U.S. intelligence official told the Daily Beast.
Trump, who said he could end the conflict in 24 hours, has yet to unveil the details of his plan to stop the war, which has now raged for almost three years.
On Tuesday, Trump told reporters his administration is 'talking to the Russians' and Ukrainians, describing the talks as 'very constructive.' But there's still no timeline on when the specifics of any peace plan will be disclosed.
Keith Kellogg, Trump's special envoy on the war, told the New York Post Thursday that he believes the U.S. has 'some opportunities' to reach a deal, adding: 'And fortunately, I'm working for the master deals. He wrote The Art of the Deal. I wouldn't put anything past him.' Kellogg had earlier denied a report that he'll present a peace plan at the Munich Security Conference in Germany next week.
Trump himself had spoken about a potential deal on Monday to keep supporting Ukraine, in which the U.S. would be given access to the European country's rare earth minerals in exchange for Washington, D.C.'s continued support for Kyiv in the war. 'We're looking to do a deal with Ukraine, where they're going to secure what we're giving them with their rare earths and other things,' Trump said.
The president has been highly critical of the approach to the war taken by Joe Biden, who had vowed to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia for 'as long as it takes.' Some now fear Trump could dramatically change course—with his sweeping freeze on almost all U.S. foreign aid already disrupting support to Ukrainians affected by the fighting.
The former intelligence official who spoke to the Daily Beast likened a possible abrupt abandonment of Ukraine to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, an episode they described as 'the most significant betrayal in our nation's national security history.'
'This will be the Hungarian Revolution of our times in terms of U.S. behavior,' the former official said.
Author and filmmaker Richard Kerbaj wrote about the U.S. role in the revolution in his book The Secret History of the Five Eyes, a chronicle of the intelligence alliance between the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.K.
According to Kerbaj's account, the CIA told its lone officer in Hungary at the time that the agency was not permitted to send American weapons to the anti-Soviet revolutionaries as the Kremlin sent troops to crush the uprising. The Hungarian resistance fighters had been 'emboldened in their opposition to Russian troops by earlier suggestions on [CIA-funded station] Radio Free Europe that the U.S. military would come to their rescue,' Kerbaj writes.
'They essentially just sold out the revolutionaries,' Kerbaj told the Daily Beast. 'The Hungarians were duped into believing that their allies, the United States, would come to the rescue, but in fact the CIA and the Eisenhower administration seemed to have regarded them as little more than these disposable assets or instruments in the U.S. proxy war against the Kremlin, against the Soviet Union.'
Thousands of Hungarians were killed, and around 200,000 more were forced to flee the country.
Geza Katona, a high school teacher from a Hungarian family in the U.S., had been sent to Budapest undercover by the CIA because of his language skills. Kerbaj's book tells the story of his woeful lack of preparation and training. 'He went there by the seat of his pants,' Susan De Rosa, Katona's daughter, told him. Katona appealed for weapons and support from the U.S. to be sent but was told it was impossible. 'They sat idly by as Hungarian blood was being shed, calmly looked on as superior Russian forces trampled the glorious revolution underfoot,' Katona later said.
'Betrayal has consequences,' the former intelligence official said. 'Not just tragic consequences in the geography in which the betrayal occurs, but as our allies and adversaries look at that and try to assess whether we're a worthy, reliable partner or whether we are not—whether we're a very fickle partner.'
David Oakley, a former CIA staff operations officer now working as the academic director at the University of South Florida's Global and National Security Institute, says a similar situation unfolded in Iraq in the 1990s when people felt encouraged by the U.S. to mount an uprising against Saddam Hussein's regime which Washington, D.C. then did not support.
'By us raising expectations [and then] switching policy quickly, that does come back on our reliability and the credibility of our word,' Oakley told the Daily Beast. Today, he added, his concern 'is we're creating the conditions that that credibility and reliability deficit is even greater than normal because of some of this uncertainty with support, because of the rhetoric about some of our allies, some of our NATO partners.'
As the third anniversary of Russian President Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine approaches, attitudes around the war are changing. A Gallup poll in November found that 52 percent of Ukrainians wanted a quick, negotiated end to the war—a significant difference from the situation in 2023, where twice as many Ukrainians wanted the fight to continue as those who wanted a negotiated peace.
Over 60,000 Ukrainian soldiers are estimated to have been killed, with Putin aiming to seize as much territory as possible before peace talks get underway.
His Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, said Wednesday that Kyiv is still receiving aid from the U.S.—but he's under no illusions about what an end to that support could mean. 'We will be weaker,' Zelensky said of a situation where supplies are cut. 'And whether we would hold [the land]—I'm not sure.'