PERSPEKTIV |
Soft Targets
On April 12 , 1982 , Yuri Andropov , the chairman of the K . G . B ., ordered foreign-intelligence operatives to carry out “ active measures ”— aktivniye meropriyatiya — against the reëlection campaign of President Ronald Reagan . Unlike classic espionage , which involves the collection of foreign secrets , active measures aim at influencing events — at undermining a rival power with forgeries , front groups , and countless other techniques honed during the Cold War . The Soviet leadership considered Reagan an implacable militarist . According to extensive notes made by Vasili Mitrokhin , a high-ranking K . G . B . officer and archivist who later defected to Great Britain , Soviet intelligence tried to infiltrate the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic National Committees , popularize the slogan “ Reagan Means War !,” and discredit the President as a corrupt servant of the military-industrial complex . The effort had no evident effect . Reagan won forty-nine of fifty states .
Active measures were used by both sides throughout the Cold War . In the nineteen-sixties , Soviet intelligence officers spread a rumor that the U . S . government was involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King , Jr . In the eighties , they spread the rumor that American intelligence had “ created ” the aids virus , at Fort Detrick , Maryland . They regularly lent support to leftist parties and insurgencies . The C . I . A ., for its part , worked to overthrow regimes in Iran , Cuba , Haiti , Brazil , Chile , and Panama . It used cash payments , propaganda , and sometimes violent measures to sway elections away from leftist parties in Italy , Guatemala , Indonesia , South Vietnam , and Nicaragua . After the collapse of the Soviet Union , in the early nineties , the C . I . A . asked Russia to abandon active measures to spread disinformation that could harm the U . S . Russia promised to do so . But when Sergey Tretyakov , the station chief for Russian intelligence in New York , defected , in 2000 , he revealed that Moscow ’ s active measures had never subsided . “ Nothing has changed ,” he wrote , in 2008 . “ Russia is doing everything it can today to embarrass the U . S .” Vladimir Putin , who is quick to accuse the West of hypocrisy , frequently points to this history . He sees a straight line from the West ’ s support of the anti-Moscow “ color revolutions ,” in Georgia , Kyrgyzstan , and Ukraine , which deposed corrupt , Soviet-era leaders , to its endorsement of the uprisings of the Arab Spring . Five years ago , he blamed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the anti-Kremlin protests in Moscow ’ s Bolotnaya Square . “ She set the tone for some of our actors in the country and gave the signal ,” Putin said . “ They heard this and , with the support of the U . S . State Department , began active work .” ( No evidence was provided for the accusation .) He considers nongovernmental agencies and civil-society groups like the National Endowment for Democracy
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, Human Rights Watch , Amnesty International , and the election-monitoring group Golos to be barely disguised instruments of regime change . The U . S . officials who administer the system that Putin sees as such an existential danger to his own reject his rhetoric as “ whataboutism ,” a strategy of false moral equivalences . Benjamin Rhodes , a deputy national-security adviser under President Obama , is among those who reject Putin ’ s logic , but he said , “ Putin is not entirely wrong ,” adding that , in the past , “ we engaged in regime change around the world . There is just enough rope for him to hang us .”*
The 2016 Presidential campaign in the United States was of keen interest to Putin . He loathed Obama , who had applied economic sanctions against Putin ’ s cronies after the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of eastern Ukraine . ( Russian state television derided Obama as “ weak ,” “ uncivilized ,” and a “ eunuch .”) Clinton , in Putin ’ s view , was worse — the embodiment of the liberal interventionist strain of U . S . foreign policy , more hawkish than Obama , and an obstacle to ending sanctions and reëstablishing Russian geopolitical influence . At the same time , Putin deftly flattered Trump , who was uncommonly positive in his statements about Putin ’ s strength and effectiveness as a leader . As early as 2007 , Trump declared that Putin was “ doing a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia period .” In 2013 , before visiting Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant , Trump wondered , in a tweet , if he would meet Putin , and , “ if so , will he become my new best friend ?” During the Presidential campaign , Trump delighted in saying that Putin was a superior leader who had turned the Obama Administration into a “ laughingstock .”
For those interested in active measures , the digital age presented opportunities far more alluring than anything available in the era of Andropov . The Democratic and Republican National Committees offered what cybersecurity experts call a large “ attack surface .” Tied into politics at the highest level , they were nonetheless unprotected by the defenses afforded to sensitive government institutions . John Podesta , the chairman of Hillary Clinton ’ s campaign and a former chief of staff of Bill Clinton ’ s , had every reason to be aware of the fragile nature of modern communications . As a senior counsellor in the Obama White House , he was involved in digital policy . Yet even he had not bothered to use the most elementary sort of defense , two-step verification , for his e-mail account .
“ The honest answer is that my team and I were over-reliant on the fact that we were pretty careful about what we click on ,” Podesta said . In this instance , he received a phishing e-mail , ostensibly from “ the Gmail team ,” that urged him to “ change your password immediately .” An I . T . person who
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was asked to verify it mistakenly replied that it was “ a legitimate e-mail .” The American political landscape also offered a particularly soft target for dezinformatsiya , false information intended to discredit the official version of events , or the very notion of reliable truth . Americans were more divided along ideological lines than at any point in two decades , according to the Pew Research Center . American trust in the mainstream media had fallen to a historic low . The fractured media environment seemed to spawn conspiracy theories about everything from Barack Obama ’ s place of birth ( supposedly Kenya ) to the origins of climate change ( a Chinese hoax ). Trump , in building his political identity , promoted such theories .
“ Free societies are often split because people have their own views , and that ’ s what former Soviet and current Russian intelligence tries to take advantage of ,” Oleg Kalugin , a former K . G . B . general , who has lived in the United States since 1995 , said . “ The goal is to deepen the splits .” Such a strategy is especially valuable when a country like Russia , which is considerably weaker than it was at the height of the Soviet era , is waging a geopolitical struggle with a stronger entity .
In early January , two weeks before the Inauguration , James Clapper , the director of national intelligence , released a declassified report concluding that Putin had ordered an influence campaign to harm Clinton ’ s election prospects , fortify Donald Trump ’ s , and “ undermine public faith in the U . S . democratic process .” The declassified report provides more assertion than evidence . Intelligence officers say that this was necessary to protect their information-gathering methods .
Critics of the report have repeatedly noted that intelligence agencies , in the months before the Iraq War , endorsed faulty assessments concerning weapons of mass destruction . But the intelligence community was deeply divided over the actual extent of Iraq ’ s weapons development ; the question of Russia ’ s responsibility for cyberattacks in the 2016 election has produced no such tumult . Seventeen federal intelligence agencies have agreed that Russia was responsible for the hacking .
In testimony before the Senate , Clapper described an unprecedented Russian effort to interfere in the U . S . electoral process . The operation involved hacking Democrats ’ e-mails , publicizing the stolen contents through WikiLeaks , and manipulating social media to spread “ fake news ” and pro-Trump messages .
At first , Trump derided the scrutiny of the hacking as a “ witch hunt ,” and said that the attacks could have been from anyone — the Russians , the Chinese , or “ somebody sitting on their bed that weighs four hundred pounds .” In the end , he grudgingly accepted the finding , but insisted that Russian interference had had “ absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election .” Yevgenia
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TRUMP , PUTIN , AND THE NEW COLD WAR |