130. How Russia Made Trump: Putin Hacks The 2016 Election (Ep 1)

17:53David:And they plant it in a small journal in India first, which is funded by the KGB in 1983. And it takes years for it to be picked up. It takes another couple of years before Soviet news outlets start to push it, citing the Indian journals. Then they can claim they're not the source. It comes from this Indian journal. And then you see it start to spread. And by 1987, over 40 countries are reporting this claim. But it's taken four years to get it spread. But it does have a real impact eventually in how people see the potential for U.S. malfeasance behind AIDS.

18:28Gordon:Well, that's another theme, I think, of this series is that that 40-year stretch from the KGB initially planting the story to it really catching fire is no longer kind of a feature of the active measures and disinformation landscape, right? Because our modern technological infrastructure, the internet, social media, allow these kind of claims to spread, to go viral much more quickly and effectively than the tools the KGB had at its disposal in the 1980s. I also think, I mean, Gordon, it's worth mentioning that political interference has long been a part of active measures. I mean, getting agents or intelligence officers to infiltrate campaigns and using information as a weapon.

19:20Gordon:I mean, this was the case, for instance, in 1968, when the Russians use this against Nixon. They think Nixon's too hardline and anti-communist. The KGB, not a big fan also of Ronald Reagan. So they want to undermine his campaign in 1984. KGB issues orders to do whatever they can to stop him, you know, work with any other campaign, use front groups, use journalists, another feature of an active measures campaign to kind of attack and stop Reagan. Right. So I think the 2016 campaign that we're going to talk about can seem like it's unique, but the reality is that the Russians have attempted to politically interfere in US presidential campaigns going back decades.

20:06David:One of the things to say as well, David, is that we don't always learn from the history. I think we forgot the history of what the KGB was up to at the end of the Cold War. we thought it was over and in fact there is this continuity in russian intelligence operations in its desire to use active measures to influence to undermine to sow dissent it continues now maybe it's a bit quieter in the 1990s but as you hit the start of the 21st century you've got two things really one is technology is going to transform the ability to do active measures because you've got the internet, which is going to offer this new vector to spread information.

20:48David:And of course, in Moscow, in Russia, there's a new leader, Vladimir Putin. And so there, David, with Vladimir Putin coming to power in the Kremlin in 2000, let's take a break. And when we come back, we're going to see how Putin is driven to use active measures in a new, potentially transformative way and eventually directed against the United States. LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three?

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21:48David:well welcome back vladimir putin has come to power in moscow in 2000 we looked a bit at his rise didn't we in the mini series we did for club members with mark galiotti the expert at the formative experiences for this former kgb officer and what molded him and it is the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the chaos and humiliation of the 90s, which really shapes him. It's interesting because a lot of people, I think, in the KGB blamed the CIA for the collapse of the Soviet Union. They thought that actually the CIA had been secretly trying to divide and undermine the Soviet Union, which of course was a multi-ethnic, multi-nationality state at that time, and that it broke up into its constituent parts, Russia being only one of them, Baltic states.

22:39David:Ukraine, all these others. And I think it's true that many KGB officers thought this was all the result of an American active measure, if you like, although the Americans wouldn't call it an active measure. Now, that's not necessarily the case, but that was part of the perception, I think.

22:54Gordon:The Soviet Union would have definitely held together if it hadn't been for the CIA. It wasn't because you couldn't make toilet paper or anything like that. But right, This is the mentality of Putin and the KGB officers around him. Now, we talked a bit in our series with Mark Gagliotti about how Putin in those first few years in office, I mean, takes power in 2000. He's relatively solicitous of the West, at least not openly confrontational. And then it flips and it doesn't flip overnight. But there's a series of events that I think kind of reshape the relationship between Putin and the U.S. and the West more broadly.

23:34Gordon:There's, of course, the Iraq War, the invasion of Iraq in 2003. There's criticism from the West. I think rightly so. Putin's extremely brutal war that he's prosecuting in Chechnya throughout much of the early 2000s. There's NATO expansion, which, as we see, Putin is not a fan of. So by 2008, Putin becomes the prime minister rather than the president. Dmitry Medvedev is the president for four years between 2008 and 2012. And there's maybe some speculation that Putin might fade away and let a new generation takeover. Oops, that did not happen. In 2011, there are elections for the Duma, Russia's parliament, and those elections are absolutely rife with manipulation.

24:25Gordon:Now, one of the things that I think is interesting, Gordon, is that essentially the Russian intelligence services perform an active measure on the Russian population itself. I think the initial petri dish for a lot of what we're talking about actually originates inside Russia because Putin's party doesn't perform very well. Protests break out. It's clear that there is opposition to Putin returning as president. And Putin is very shaken by all of this. And again, that mindset that we're talking about of all of this being a CIA, a Western plot.

25:03David:A KGB paranoid mindset, isn't it?

25:05Gordon:He basically sees this as another domino in these color revolutions that had been sweeping ex or former Soviet states and kind of the Russian near abroad. So places like Georgia, in Ukraine in 2004, there had been these so-called color revolutions bringing to power political parties and politicians that were anti-Russian. And again, Putin sees all of this not as a sort of expression of the popular will that the people around Russia or even some Russians inside Russia don't want to be subjugated by Putin and the people around him. He sees this as a CIA plot. This is the CIA using active measures against Russia.

25:53Gordon:And I think that's a really important point for the mindset that's going to frame the 2016 election is that wrongly, I would argue, Putin has come to the conclusion that he has been the victim of a very elaborate CIA and Western active measure already.

26:12David:And it's really interesting, isn't it, who he blames specifically for inciting some of the protests and supporting some of the protests. It's the US Secretary of State at the time, who is Hillary Clinton, Obama's Secretary of State. And he views her as having legitimized and supported some of these opposition groups and protests. Even the idea she might have been giving signals to them through their speech to rise up and protest against him. And so I think this is where some of the very personal antagonism starts between Vladimir Putin and Hillary Clinton.

26:50Gordon:When Putin actually announces his presidential campaign in 2011, he's sitting around a table speaking to all of these kind of stony faced political allies. And he says that Clinton, quote, set the tone for certain actors inside the country, meeting the protesters. She gave the signal. There's kind of two big points here, right? One of them is that Putin believes he has been the target of an ongoing series of U.S. active measures. And two, he sees Hillary Clinton as being, to some degree, the mastermind of those active measures. During Putin's presidential campaign announcement, he's sitting right at a table speaking to a group of political allies.

27:35Gordon:And he says, Putin says, quote, that Hillary Clinton had set the tone for certain actors inside the country. He's referring to the protesters who were angry that Putin is going to return to power and that he's, you know, and his party have essentially rigged the election. She, Clinton, gave the signal. There's kind of two big points here. One of them is Putin, by the time we get to 2011, 2012, believes strongly that he has been the target of an active measure. And I think it's not just Russia, but his control, his political control over Russia has been the target of a CIA or Western active measure.

28:16Gordon:And then the second point is that one of the primary Western politicians behind this is Hillary Clinton. Those are two very important points to frame what's going to happen in 2016 is he's been victimized and he's been victimized by Hillary Clinton.

28:33David:That's right. And now he's back as president, as leader of Russia. And it is a different Putin. I think it took a while for people in the West to understand it was a different Putin after 2012. He's more aggressive. He's more nationalistic. He's reaching deeper into social conservatism, into religious currents. and he's starting to see Russia as in conflict, maybe not war, but a conflict with the West. And he's more willing to use aggressive tools, what are sometimes called grey zone activities, against the West. It's interesting because as we get into 2013 and the run up to 2016, Putin has been worried that the internet, that technology, that a free information space is a threat to his hold on power.

29:24David:He views the internet as dangerous. He famously calls the internet a CIA project at one point. And by that, I think he means it was created by the US government to spread Western ideas. It's a vector for subversion and protest, for Western information warfare. And he's starting to think about how to fight back against that and looking for ways and tools of doing it. And you get this very interesting article in 2013 by General Valery Gerasimov, who we encountered in our Pregosian series, didn't we? It's still there as the chief of general staff and head of the Russian military. He publishes this article, which in a relatively obscure journal, but it becomes seen as a definitive article about what gets called the Gerasimov doctrine.

30:15David:Now, Mark Gagliotti, who we've spoken about, is one of those who comes up with that term, and he thinks it's been slightly overstretched as a term. But the key thing to know is Gerasimov is arguing, isn't he, that the West is using new tools and information warfare against Russia. And there is a new information environment, thanks to things like the internet and social media, which is allowing a new form of warfare to be waged by reaching out to populations and mobilizing them potentially for protest, as seen just a couple of years ago in the Arab Spring, which would be really 2011, 2012, hadn't it?

30:55Gordon:The interesting, I think, again, to the Putin mindset is as he's realizing and his intelligence services are beginning to kind of use information warfare quite broadly, he again, I think, sees himself as being a target of these exact same tools on the part of the West. Now, you remember, Gordon, in the spring of 2016, the Panama Papers, when that kind of scandal broke, which is basically this massive document dump from a Panamanian law firm called Mossack Fonseca that showed the techniques that Putin himself and a lot of other wealthy people use to kind of hide money. It showed in some cases Putin and Putin affiliates, including, I think, was it a violinist or cellist with the St.

31:48Gordon:Petersburg Orchestra who had accounts in the Caribbean that were worth millions and millions of dollars? And it's sort Where did this come from? And it's quite obvious it came from Putin. So Putin was angry, to say the least, about this document dump. And he's asked at a press conference in April of 2016. So just as this election interference story is going to start, he's asked about the release of those papers. And he says officials and state agencies in the United States are behind all this, right? The Americans, Putin says, are trying to weaken Russia from within to spread distrust for the ruling authorities and the bodies of power within the society.

32:28Gordon:So it's an active measure in his mind.

32:31David:And what's so interesting is there isn't any evidence I've seen that it was an active measure. Like so many things we're talking about, Russia interprets it as such because you've got a KGB officer who's trained in active measures running the country. a bunch of other security officials around them. They are obsessed with active measures because this is what they've spent their career doing. So when they see these Panama papers, they assume it must be. As far as I know, and I could be wrong, there could be a hidden hand somewhere in it, it was just someone who worked in the company leaking this information.

33:01David:But it is an example where Moscow and Russia and Putin are becoming paranoid. You also get, we glossed over one character as well, who we should probably just mention briefly, which is a friend of the show, Edward Snowden, who also makes his appearance in Moscow and ends up, after leaking lots of American intelligence secrets, in Moscow. But I guess the crucial thing about Snowden is not so much the fact he ends up in Moscow, but the fact that he reveals the extent to which the US is controlling the internet and has the ability to spy on the world through the internet, which again feeds into this idea that the US is using information as a weapon.

33:44David:That's the mindset which has grown, isn't it?

33:46Gordon:That's right. And I'll refer listeners, those who might be new to the program, we did a six episode series on the Edward Snowden debacle. I think it was last spring, and Gordon throughout that series expressed a very worrisome affection for the young Edward That is a mischaracterization.

34:06David:It's all on tape.

34:07Gordon:It's all on tape and you can go listen to it. Go judge for yourself. I mean, the other thing that we probably shouldn't gloss over is that in 2013, 2014, there were massive protests in Ukraine about essentially whether Ukraine would be looking toward the EU or would be looking back toward Russia. And there was a massive people power movement that came out into Maidan Square in Kiev to essentially say we don't want to live under the Russian thumb. And at that point in time, there was a quite pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, who essentially makes a decision to take, I think, what you could call more or less a cash bribe from the Russians, from Putin, to scrap an EU association agreement.

35:01Gordon:And that triggers this protest movement. Putin sees, again, a U.S. hand behind those protests as being yet another active measure against Russian power control and influence in Ukraine. I think we should say that, you know, your point, Gordon, on we've been talking about Putin's mindset here for a bit. I think one of the very interesting themes of this entire story is that both sides, the Russian and the American side, because they conduct intelligence work in very different ways, there's a very different culture and mindset and historical experience with intelligence. in both countries. The mirror imaging that is done in both societies makes it very hard to analytically understand what's happening.

35:58Gordon:So in Putin's world, he's been victimized by US active measures going back to the mid 2000s, right? Which I think is not true. But he's interpreting all of this to the lens of the way that he is a former KGB officer and the way that the Russian intelligence services operate, which is active measures are a big part of what they do. We'll see as we get to it in the US response that I think one of the reasons why we struggle to understand what actually happened is we don't have a long tradition of active measures in this country. I think we're actually quite bad at information operations. It's not ingrained in the sort of intelligence DNA.

36:37Gordon:Culturally different. Culturally, it's different. And so when we are facing down a Russian active measure, we don't see the full scope of it because we view intelligence work as, well, you're stealing secrets and it goes far beyond that. So both sides, I think, really throughout the story, will have a very hard time grappling with what they're dealing with because of that mirror imaging.

37:01David:A lot of this does go back. We're picking up that point and also going back to that issue of Ukraine and Maidan and the change of regime in Ukraine. Of course, then you get the start of the first wave of the Ukraine conflict and Russia seizing Crimea, what you also get is a sense within Russia that it is in conflict with the West at this point. Something which I don't think the West recognises on our part, because we don't recognise what they're willing to do. But Ukraine is important. It will be important to our story in lots of ways, because you can start to see as well, can't you, that Russia will start to fight back and use information operations and active measures in the context of that conflict in Ukraine.

37:43David:That's where things are starting to heat up as we get through 2014, isn't it?

37:47Gordon:That's right. In one instance, the Russians intercept a phone call between a very senior State Department official named Victoria Nuland, who I believe was the most senior State Department official on Russia at the time. She's talking to the US ambassador to Ukraine, and Victoria Nuland on the call says, bleep gun, Becky, the EU. And then the Russians collect this. Unbelievable. Well, that's why I asked Becky for the bleep gun.

38:15David:Well, I meant the sentiment.

38:16Gordon:Oh, the sentiment. Oh yeah. Well, I mean, the EU can be very frustrating, Gordon. We'll get into whether there was a Russian hand

38:24David:in Brexit. That's another point. That's Alastair Campbell's big thing. But yeah, sorry, back to the story.

38:30Gordon:And Victoria Nuland, by the way, is the one who, during the protests, wasn't she like handing out muffins to some of the protesters and the Russians just latched onto that as like evidence of US support as, you know, Victoria Nuland is handing out baked goods to protesters on the Maidan. Anyhow, the Russians take that intercepted phone call, they dump it out on the internet and put it up on YouTube. And I think it's a great example of an old school Intel collection method, obviously intercepting phone calls that happens all the time. But the new one, which is, let's put it out there. Let's put it on social media, Let's make it available to create tension with the EU.

39:09Gordon:So make it hard for Victoria Nuland to deal with, you know, and the State Department more broadly to deal with European officials and create a political kind of wildfire around that content as opposed to what the Russians are actually doing in Ukraine. And it's picked up by obviously Russian TV stations, but ultimately a bunch of American and European news agencies who are just all over it. Yeah.

39:37David:And I think it is the first sign we get of Russia, and it's often in Ukraine, as we'll see also with cyber hacking as we come to it, that Russia trials a lot of these techniques, as you said, sometimes domestically to try and sway opinion at home to support the regime. But often in Ukraine abroad, as the first place they try things out, and then they're going to try it further afield. So by the time we get to 2016, you can see that Putin is getting paranoid. He thinks the West is trying to undermine him. He thinks it's using the Internet to do that. He thinks he's in a conflict with the West and he particularly hates Hillary Clinton.

40:14David:That's right.

40:15Gordon:And interestingly enough, Gordon, some of the first inklings, I think, of what is going on in the run up to 2016 come from a contact of the U.S. State Department. Now, we have not spoken much on this podcast about diplomatic reporting, have we, Gordon? We've mostly talked, we've talked about SIGINT, we've talked about HUMANT, embassy reporting, State Department reporting, in some ways is quite similar to HUMANT, right? I mean, it is a it is a State Department officer in a foreign embassy, you know, a political officer, an economic officer who has contacts in that society, right? In that country, they could be business leaders.

40:58Gordon:They could be Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials, right? They could be kind of members of the sort of cultural, political business elite, whomever. The difference. So they're going to go out. The State Department officers will go out and they'll meet and talk to these people. And then they will write that up in cables that are usually classified secret. But what differentiates that from kind of the human that CIA collects is that it's usually not collected clandestinely. The host government understands that the Americans are meeting with members of their government. And even if it's not information that is going to be made public, it usually is not.

41:36Gordon:It's not clandestine. You're not stealing a secret. from the foreign government. And folks who want to look at state cables, there have been a bunch that have been leaked over the past decade, which can be, obviously, they can be quite embarrassing because the diplomats will write up reports and send them back to Washington. And sometimes those reports include details on foreign leaders that are not particularly flattering.

42:04David:Yeah. And we'll get to the leaks. We'll get to the leaks maybe soon, a bit further on down the story. Yeah.

42:08Gordon:That's right. Now, this story comes from a terrific book on the Russian active measure called Russian Broulette by Michael Isikoff and David Korn. And they write in their book that in early 2014, a U.S. diplomat assigned to the U.S. embassy in Moscow reached out to some what they call it a secret source in Russia. I'm not quite sure what to make of that because, again, usually these contacts are known to the host government. And this diplomat was trying to understand Russia's plans toward Ukraine and Crimea. Again, it's not a paid source, but this person had ties into the Kremlin and had provided useful information in the past.

42:47Gordon:In the spring of 2015, so the State Department officials had a bunch of interactions with this person, the source comes back with something that's particularly interesting. And he tells the State Department official that the Kremlin is planning a wide ranging campaign to attack Western institutions and undermine Western democracies. So again, it's an active measure. It would include cyber attacks, information warfare, propaganda, social media campaigns. The source offered general reports on Russian penetration of media organizations, lobbying firms, political parties. It's interesting because I think while it, in retrospect, paints a picture of what is going to come, it's not particularly surprising at the time to U.S.

43:32Gordon:officials. Again, consider the history we talked about. Russian active measures are just sort of part of the game. But State Department wrote, you know, the size and magnitude and the seriousness of their intent was disturbing because it showed this kind of growing capacity for mounting influence operations and active measures against the U.S. Now, the U.S. official who's meeting with the source ends up filing more than a dozen embassy cables with this intelligence. I think these are what are called notice cables, Gordon. No dissemination. Very limited kind of distro. Usually, if a diplomatic cable was sent back to Washington and then got distributed at CIA, it would be quite easy to access because, again, it's usually just classified secret.

44:15Gordon:The notice cables would sometimes, if my memory is correct, come to you just hard copy and they'd be harder to get your hands on because it would typically be written by the ambassador or a very senior official inside the embassy and would include information that would be particularly sensitive. So kind of getting closer to human, but not quite.

44:35David:And it was seen as significant and interesting reporting, but it maybe doesn't feel like it has the impact you might expect.

44:44Gordon:I can understand why it wasn't really acted upon. Because on the one hand, it is giving kind of high level plans and intentions for what the Russian government intends to do. It's explaining that an active measure is coming or underway, but it doesn't give you enough specificity about the targets, I think, or maybe even the broader intent in order to be able to stop it. It's not particularly actionable and does seem to fit in line with what at that point must have seemed like just an ongoing wave of Russian active measures that are directed against the US and the West.

45:24David:That's right. And I think there was a bit of complacency about, well, the Russians might try and do this kind of thing, but it never really has much impact, doesn't work, won't sway anything. I just think that there was a complacency about the potential impact of these kind of operations at the time.

45:41Gordon:Well, that's right. And one US official later said, anybody who had any doubt about Putin's intentions just wasn't reading what we reported. And I think it's maybe not quite true, Because to your point, there was a sense that, well, we understand Putin's intentions. It just might not make much of an impact. In speaking with a number of former CIA and former FBI officials who were involved in the story, the complacency point was a big one. Because whether it was a failure of imagination, an intelligence failure, we just didn't see this coming. But in any case, the stage is set for a very audacious Russian active measure, one that is going to end up targeting all of American society.

46:28Gordon:And maybe there, Gordon, we'll end this first episode exploring Russian active measures and Vladimir Putin's intentions. And next time we will see how that active measure is unleashed on the United States.

46:40David:But of course, if you don't want to wait for that next episode, you can hear it right now and the rest of the series. And you will get access to the very special bonus series looking at Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and 2016. all of that if you join the declassified club at the rest is classified.com lots of other benefits there as well including your weekly newsletter but otherwise we'll see you next time we'll see you next time

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