Aaron Maté: CIA Still Runs 12 Secret Border Bases In Ukraine, Even As Trump Breaks With Zelensky

Journalist Aaron Maté told Judge Andrew Napolitano on Tuesday that the CIA is still “running, if the New York Times is to be believed, 12 secret bases inside of Ukraine,” and still controlling Ukrainian intelligence agencies it “effectively rebuilt from scratch after Yanukovych was overthrown in 2014.” He made the claim in an interview for Napolitano’s Judging Freedom podcast, recorded on Election Day, Nov. 3, in an episode titled “CIA and MI6 vs Trump in Ukraine.”

Maté’s source for the bases is a February 2024 New York Times investigation, which as Ukrainska Pravda summarized it, described a CIA-supported network of spy bases built over about eight years, including 12 secret locations along the Russian border, with a partnership dating to 2014. 

“How pervasive is the CIA in Ukraine today?” Napolitano asked. To which Maté replied:

“Well, it’s so pervasive that it was the one that orchestrated this drone campaign against Russian energy facilities that Trump recently started opposing. It was Trump’s CIA that came up with that and was helping Ukraine do that. And Trump was on board with it until he needed something to sell voters on ahead of the midterms, whereas war on Iran was causing such a spike in energy prices.”

Maté said Trump has since pulled back and criticized Volodymyr Zelensky, “the CIA, as far as I know, is continuing its operations as normal,” and that it is “still helping out with targeting” and “still providing intelligence.” 

The Billionaire Question

Napolitano then said that Alastair Crooke had told him the CIA has financial resources from outside the U.S. government, and asked whether the CIA in Ukraine is being funded by anyone other than the Treasury. Maté said that when an agency wants something done off the books, “you’ll get a friendly billionaire or, you know, or some or a friendly corporation to do the work for you,” calling it “intelligence tradecraft going back a very long time.”

He put George Soros “at the top of the list” of billionaires involved in Ukraine: “Already in 2015, Soros’ foundations were saying that they’d spent $181 million on Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union.” The figure checks out as a 2015 number. An Atlantic Council piece from Dec. 14, 2015 said Soros “has provided over $181 million in support of almost 17,000 civil society initiatives in Ukraine.” The Soros-founded International Renaissance Foundation, which dates to April 1990, now puts its total at about $380 million.

“Given that some of those dollars went to groups that were involved in the uprising that overthrew Yanukovych, you know, you have to wonder if some of that was linked to Western intelligence,” Maté said, adding, “It might be something like we’ll never know.” He raised eBay founder Pierre Omidyar as another example, tied to a report that named Maté a leading spreader of Syria disinformation and was funded by an Omidyar foundation. “Maybe, or maybe this was done at the behest of the intelligence agencies that I was exposing,” he said. “Who knows how this works?” It is speculation, offered as such.

CIA And MI6 Vs. The White House

Napolitano asked whether the CIA and MI6 are “working at cross-purposes to the White House,” given that the White House wants the war to end and the agencies want it to continue. Maté said it depends on what is meant by the White House, because “there’s not one coherent policy.” He pointed to JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard on one side, and Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz and former envoy Keith Kellogg on the other, and said Rubio gutted the Kushner-Witkoff peace plan “after a brief freakout on Capitol Hill.” On Trump’s stated aims of a peace deal and a new Ukrainian leader, he said “absolutely the CIA and the MI6 are at cross purposes.”

Earlier, Maté said Zelensky’s refusal to compromise reflects a “small clique of ultra-extremists” inside Ukraine, and that Washington’s promised Patriot missiles are due, in his telling, in the fourth quarter of 2030. We could not confirm that date, and recent reports on Patriot deliveries describe delays, not a 2030 schedule.

Trump’s “99%” In Israel

Late in the interview Napolitano played a clip of Trump saying in May: “I’m at 99% approval rating in Israel. Can you believe it? In fact, if people ever got tired of me in the U.S., I’ll move to Israel and become prime minister.” The remark is not new: 

Maté’s reaction: “It might be true about his approval rating, and it’s irrelevant because he’s giving them so much cash and military equipment.” Napolitano noted Trump’s U.S. approval at 33% in the figures he cited.