by Clint Watts
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The height of intrigue over Trump’s possible collusion with or compromise by the Russians came in January 2017, when ex-MI6 officer Christopher Steele’s Trump dossier was published by BuzzFeed. The dossier contained what Trump haters hoped for: juicy tales of sexual compromise mixed with Kremlin deliberations over how far to back Trump over Clinton. Some portions were verifiably true, others were likely false, and many parts remain debatable. The best interpretations of the Steele dossier come from fellow veterans of the British Secret Intelligence Service, the writers John le Carré and Ben Macintyre.32
When asked, “Do you think the Russians really have something on Trump?” Ben Macintyre provided the best explanation of what Putin is really up to with his election meddling:
Yes, kompromat was done on him. Of course, kompromat is done on everyone. So they end up, the theory goes, with this compromising bit of material and then they begin to release parts of it. They set up an ex-MI6 guy, Chris Steele, who is a patsy, effectively, and they feed him some stuff that’s true, and some stuff that isn’t true, and some stuff that is demonstrably wrong. Which means that Trump can then stand up and deny it, while knowing that the essence of it is true. And then he has a stone in his shoe for the rest of his administration.
It’s important to remember that Putin is a K.G.B.-trained officer, and he thinks in the traditional K.G.B. way.
Le Carré then added:
“As far as Trump, I would suspect they have it, because they’ve denied it. If they have it and they’ve set Trump up, they’d say, ‘Oh no, we haven’t got anything.’ But to Trump they’re saying, ‘Aren’t we being kind to you?’”
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Regardless of whether Trump won because of Russia or through his disruptive style and populist message, Russia achieved a major victory when Trump became president.
Never in American history has a U.S. leader taken such a proactive and warm approach to Russia or its predecessor, the Soviet Union. Public support for Russia prior to Trump’s ascendance traditionally arose from the American left wing, those more amenable to socialist and Communist narratives traditionally and recently those mobilized by the Edward Snowden disclosures. But with the rise of Trump, a rapid and sizable shift of support for Putin and company has come from the American right wing—the same GOP that led the way against Communism and claimed victory over the Soviet Union under Reagan and Bush. In a February 2017 Gallup poll, Putin’s favorability rating showed a 166 percent increase among Republicans and a 92 percent increase among independents just since 2015. Among all Americans, Putin’s favorability doubled in just two years. Nearly a quarter of all Americans now approve of a foreign leader who just launched the greatest assault on democracy in history.
For those surprised by this American affection for authoritarianism, don’t be. Political science professor Seva Gunitsky recently reminded Americans that fascism and Hitler were equally popular during the 1930s. Gunitsky compared U.S. public opinion in the 1930s with opinions today, noting that, “as late as July 1942, a Gallup poll showed that 1 in 6 Americans thought Hitler was ‘doing the right thing’ to the Jews. A poll found that nearly a fifth of Americans saw Jews as a national ‘menace’—more than any other group, including Germans.”33 In both the 1930s and today, the swing in American support against Hitler and for Putin likely arises from the president more than any other factor. Roosevelt declared war on Hitler, and Trump’s rise came with a public embrace of Putin. Americans like to believe they are independent thinkers, but rapid public opinion shifts suggest otherwise.
Even beyond simple favorability toward a dictator who may have accumulated more wealth than any other man in the world, Russia’s influence efforts and rising social media use track closely with declining American faith in democracy. America’s millennial generation, when asked if it’s essential to live in a democracy, agreed only 30 percent of the time, a 45 percent drop from those born fifty years before them.34 In a separate 2014 poll, support for democratic political systems declined by 18 percent between 2006 and 2014.35
Trump supporters, who more often encounter Russian propaganda than the broader population, also theoretically supported the rollback of amendments limiting presidential terms. When asked, “If Donald Trump were to say that the 2020 presidential election should be postponed until the country can make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote, would you support or oppose postponing the election?” a majority of the 650 Trump-supporting Republicans surveyed said yes. Almost half thought Trump had won the popular vote, and more than two-thirds believed that millions of illegal immigrants had voted and that voter fraud happens regularly.36 These baseless falsehoods came from Trump’s mouth and were promoted by the Kremlin. These surveys remain hypotheticals, and it’s unlikely that such constitutional changes or postponement of voting would stand up to checks by the legislative and judicial branches. But at no time in recent U.S. history have such authoritarian principles—suspension of democratic norms and suspension of constitutional provisions—been considered or even mentioned in political discussions. All of these changes, allegations, and considerations eerily mirror the actions of a dictator Trump openly admires: Vladimir Putin.
Upward trends for shying away from democratic governance may not adequately demonstrate the magnitude of Russia’s influence success, but two anecdotes since the election provide a stark reminder of just how much things have changed in a very short time. On May 13, 2017, a startling sight occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia.37 A mob of white nationalist men toting torches descended on a statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate Civil War general, protesting the planned removal of the artifact. The crowd chanted and shouted, “White lives matter” and “No more brother wars,” strangely adding “Russia is our friend” to the list of slogans.38
Imagining a time during the Cold War when white men might have gathered to chant, “The Soviet Union is our friend” seems impossible, but in the post-Trump world, Virginia has become a common site for pro-Putin rhetoric—a conservative state home to many current and retired servicemen who fought the Soviets during the Cold War. Three months later, white nationalists returned to Charlottesville for another torch-wielding rally, and this time violence broke out between white nationalist protesters gathering at the same statue and counterprotesters seeking to challenge their calls. Bickering boiled over into tragedy when a young man from Ohio, a white nationalist, barreled his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing a woman and injuring many more. Alongside the violence, protesting, and social media coverage, another strange video surfaced. White nationalist American men interviewed during the protest boasted of their support for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Footage posted by Brandon Wall, using the Twitter handle @Walldo,39 showed a spirited white nationalist clad in a “Bashar’s Barrel Delivery Co.” T-shirt and yelling into the camera, “Fight against the globalists. Assad did nothing wrong . . . Two chemical bombs would have solved this whole ISIS problem.”40 In roughly fifteen seconds, two of the Kremlin’s most highly promoted themes were repeated and displayed in the middle of the United States.
Putin’s greatest achievement in these social-media-powered active measures will ultimately be his ability to unite previously disparate alt-right communities through persistent information campaigns. The Kremlin won audiences in the lead-ups to elections and has maintained them long beyond the close of polls. In the UK’s Brexit vote, the U.S. presidential election, and the French and German contests of 2017, Russia has effectively leveraged online white nationalist communities as indigenous counters to their American and European political rivals.
Across all of these alt-right audiences, anti-immigration programming has remained a consistent feature of RT and Sputnik news stories. Unrelenting refugee flows into Europe are an enduring theme echoed in Kremlin media. Russia has amplified allegations of refugee crime and its drain on European governments. Anti-immigration and anti-refugee sympathies disseminated by Kremlin media outfits further support R
ussia’s broader calls for nationalism over globalism, and for breaking the European Union and the NATO military alliance into pieces, which would provide Putin space to maneuver successfully against any other country in a one-on-one fashion.
The closer one gets to Moscow, the more aggressive active measures become, with greater combinations of physical actions designed to drive cyber influence discussions. Montenegro’s entrance into the NATO alliance on June 5, 2017, met significant challenges from Russia.41 The former Yugoslav republic’s coastal ports represent the only stretch of the Mediterranean not under NATO control, and in recent years it has become a hub of Russian investment and tourism.42 Less than a month before Trump and Clinton squared off in America, the Montenegrin election showcased the Kremlin’s reach and the lengths to which it would go to employ active measures to influence strategic electoral outcomes.
On election day, Montenegrin authorities arrested twenty men, mostly ethnic Serbs, dressed as police officers, who planned to break into Montenegro’s parliament, kill Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic, and claim that electoral fraud had robbed pro-Russian parties connected to Putin of victory.43 A month after the detentions, prosecutors in Montenegro alleged that nationalists from Russia had organized the Serbian mini-invasion of their country, with two individuals, Eduard Shirokov and Vladimir Popov, identified as the plot’s masterminds, on assignment from Russia’s military intelligence arm, the GRU. Among the Serbians, Aleksandar Sindjelic, head of the nationalist Serbian Wolves organization, an outfit similar to the Russian Night Wolves, allegedly received 200,000 euros from the GRU operatives to undertake the coup attempt.44
Oddly, during the NATO summit in May 2017, President Trump shoved aside the newly elected prime minister of Montenegro, Dusko Markovic, to get in the front of a pack of dignitaries. Surely Trump’s brush with Markovic was just a coincidence—or was it a signal from Putin’s newest ally, Trump, who has been a divisive force in NATO unity since inauguration?45
Elections and politics remain a constant political vector for Kremlin meddling, but Putin’s information war doesn’t stop in those years between votes. Russian active measures leading up to an election or following an election focus on social issues, and immigration remains a chief lever for winning over foreign audiences. Lisa F., a thirteen-year-old German-Russian girl with dual citizenship, went missing on her way to school in Berlin on January 11, 2016. A little over a day later, the girl resurfaced, claiming she had been abducted by three men of “southern” or “Arab” origin, none of whom spoke German very well.
Russia’s state-sponsored media quickly ran wild, broadcasting numerous and repeated stories of immigrants raping Lisa F.—asylum seekers in Germany who’d held her as a sex slave. Germany’s Russian community, numbering nearly two million, reacted strongly to the rape story, and within a week Russian émigrés were protesting in several German cities and at the office of German chancellor Angela Merkel, sporting banners that read, “Our children are in danger” and “Hands off my child.”46 The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, blamed the German government for squashing the story out of political correctness.47
The case of Lisa F. quickly fell apart as investigators sought out the perpetrators. German authorities pulled her cell phone records and traced her communications to an older teenager with whom she’d previously had relations. Within hours of her initial claims, Lisa F. gave a slightly different accounting of her whereabouts, saying that she’d voluntarily gone with the men. Months later, investigators determined that she’d stayed the night with a friend and fabricated the entire abduction-and-rape story.48 Lisa F.’s family remained steadfast in promoting the girl’s original story, though, and likely many Russians in Germany still believe the first account they heard, not knowing that later the entire conspiracy proved nothing more than a fabrication.
A Russian GRU textbook on psychological warfare dating from 1999 recently surfaced, explaining active measures techniques in great detail. A student of this course, known as Dmitry, recalled to the Moscow Times “the specific black propaganda techniques taught in his textbook.” He described one ploy used: “During the Chechen conflict, Russian psychological warfare experts spread rumors that foreign fighters had raped the 13-year-old daughter of a Chechen village elder. The rumors helped sow discord between Chechen fighters and Arab Islamist volunteers, undermining the unity of the rebels.”49 Whether it’s Berlin, Chechnya, or America, the playbook is old; the medium is new. Social media provides a sharp, devastating new edge.
At this point, one might conclude that Russia’s social active measures have been diabolically successful. This isn’t necessarily the case, particularly since the U.S. election. With each active measures action, Russia’s hand and the game it plays are exposed a little more. From the start, Russia’s decision to launch cyber-enabled active measures to influence elections has been a campaign rather than a single battle—Ukraine in 2014, Brexit in 2016, the U.S. presidential election of 2016, France’s presidential contest of 2017, and finally the German federal election of 2017. In these latter two contests, France and Germany have proven a bit more resilient.
Just before France’s two-day media blackout leading up to the presidential election, Jack Posobiec, the Washington bureau chief of the Canadian conservative outlet The Rebel, tweeted, “Massive doc dump,” pointing everyone to hacked emails from French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron.50 For months, Russian hackers and state-sponsored media employed their well-run cyber active measures against Macron, in favor of their preferred candidate, Marine Le Pen—a fellow traveler of Putin, openly appearing alongside him in photos and going so far as to visit the Kremlin only two months prior to the election.
But the French electoral system structurally inoculates itself against Russian meddling. The first round of voting, on April 23, 2017, saw four candidates each win around 20 percent of the vote. For the Kremlin’s influence system to push Le Pen to the top, it needed to push aside three challengers. Even after the field narrowed to Macron and Le Pen, the final vote went to the polls two weeks later, rather than ten months later, as in the United States. This provided Putin’s meddlers with only a narrow window in which to release compromising information for the mainstream media to discuss and social media to circulate.
There was no time for the release of the Macron emails on May 5, less than two days before the final vote, to gain any traction in people’s opinions, particularly due to the media blackout. Instead the Macron emails sought to undermine his mandate to govern post-election, similar to the allegations of voter fraud in the U.S. context.
France, in general, boasts a society less receptive to compromising data dumps. While sexual indiscretion has been a principal angle for smearing opponents in the United States, France’s last two presidents, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, both were thought to have had affairs with other women. Compromising information released by Kremlin hackers would have to be egregious and criminal in order to offend French sensibilities and shift opinions. The troll army certainly sought to diminish Macron’s chances, but its reach with overt RT and Sputnik news outlets remained limited, and the social media influence in French didn’t appear as robust or as effective as the English-language campaign employed on Americans. Even if it had been, social media news consumption in France (and in Germany) measures only about half of that in America. Europeans, for now, especially older voters, get their news the old-fashioned way: through traditional news outlets and conversations with friends and family, trusted sources of known origin and stronger track records.
Putin’s greatest prize may be Germany—the remaining dominant player in the European Union and NATO. Putin failed to help replace Chancellor Merkel and install a sympathetic supporter, but he did help increase the share of parliament members from the right-wing, Russia-sympathetic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency claimed that Russia’s GRU hackers, the same APT28 credited with hacking the DNC, broke into Germany’s lower house
of parliament, the Bundestag, in May 2015, along with other offices of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. Germany’s much larger Russian immigrant population carries stronger sympathies for its homeland than France’s smaller émigré community, as indicated by its large showing at the Lisa F. protests. Germany’s alt-right audiences’ draw to Russian propaganda has proven far stronger than its counterparts’ reaction in France, and the Kremlin’s social media troll army appears more skilled in both understanding the German audience and communicating in German.
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On March 30, 2017, I testified to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee regarding Russian influence operations leading up to the election. Since then, I’ve briefed nearly every agency of the U.S. government in one form or another. When I started the Russia research, I expected it to go the way of my deep dives on al-Qaeda and the Islamic State: a research paper would lead to a project examining Russian active measures. A think tank or a government agency would offer some funding to map out the landscape. Al-Qaeda or ISIS tracking and analysis studies came fairly easily. Everyone wanted a Russia brief, so I thought the process would mirror my counterterrorism work. It turns out that tracking Russia’s social media active measures has been the best research I’ve ever been a part of, and also the worst business decision I’ve ever made.
Immediately following Trump’s election, I sketched out my recommendations for how to counter Russia’s active measures campaign. Building on lessons learned from the Cold War, I felt that a modern update to the techniques utilized by the U.S. Information Agency could be employed on social media—that is, if the U.S. government wanted to do anything about it. The first step was to raise awareness of Russian active measures by outing the propaganda outlets disseminating Kremlin themes. But since the end of the Cold War, no U.S. agency has assumed responsibility for this key role, and no agency I pitched the concept to seemed interested in pursuing the mission—all seemed paralyzed by Trump’s inaction on Russia throughout 2017.