Johnson has some good opinions, but his thesis here is based only on a comment from one journalist at the WSJ - an outlet known to often publish info from the US Deep State.
It would be an embarrassment for the CIA to say “we had no clue what was happening” and it benefits them to let the Russians fear that the CIA has players seeded throughout Russian government.
So in sum, Johnson doesn’t know exactly what happened, nor do we. We will never know what was happening in Russia, nor will we ever know what the CIA knew about it.
If our gov. knew you can bet Putin knew. But it was Putins drama to manage however he determined. ....and I don’t think the Prigozhin thing is over yet.
The opposite seems to be true to me.
I would want my enemy’s to think my intelligence sources were incompetent, and were unable to pernitrate his inner circle, rather than having them believe we were hyper intelligent analysis with near psychic abilities who had spy’s through their internal network.
I don’t see the advantage to making them more cautious with their information security.