Lack of US consensus on Russia? Bounty report poses sharper question.

In early May a classified CIA update for officers across U.S. intelligence agencies and others with security clearance reportedly cited evidence of a Russian program suspected of paying Taliban-linked militias to kill American and coalition troops in Afghanistan.

The military and intelligence agencies were investigating whether the bounty program might have played a part in an April 2019 roadside bombing near Bagram Air Base in which three Marine reservists were killed. The United States had evidence – in the form of a half-million dollars in cash found in a Seal Team 6 raid of a Taliban hideout – that bounties had already been paid.

And intelligence from captured Taliban fighters spurred the U.S. to investigate a funding channel connecting money handlers in Afghanistan with sources in Russia.

Information on the alleged Russian bounty program had already been included in a President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, in late February, according to reporting this week in The New York Times.

But the inclusion of Russia’s bounty plan more than two months later in the CIA update, called the Wire, is raising questions among some former intelligence officers and national security experts: Was it just bureaucratic issues that caused the delay? Did new and better sourcing materialize over those two months to warrant the broader dissemination?