Malcolm Nance - The Plot to Hack America

The Kremlin has harnessed the power of this tool to defeat its enemies both domestically and abroad. Amanda Taub wrote a brilliant primer on the subject in The New York Times. She explained the simple processes that can have a huge impact:

First, Kremlin insiders or other powerful individuals buy, steal or manufacture incriminating information about an opponent, an enemy, or any other person who poses a threat to powerful interests. Then, they publish it, destroying the target’s reputation in order to settle public scores or manipulate public events. 51

Taub writes that after the DNC email leak—if Russia is indeed responsible—“we may be seeing one of the most sordid tools of its domestic politics deployed as a hostile weapon in foreign policy.” 52She argues correctly the same position held by the U.S. intelligence community: That the DNC hack is materially different from other hacks the U.S. has experienced. She wrote, “Rather than using the information seized for intelligence purposes, the hackers selected damaging excerpts from the cache of stolen data, and then leaked them at a pivotal moment in the presidential election.” 53In other words, a classic case of Kompromat.

Collecting and exploiting information in political warfare is so common among Russian politicians that there is a series of websites dedicated to tracking the incidents, such as kompromat.ru. This site is run by a Russian blogger who sells salacious stories gathered from the steamy political underbelly of Russians who use it to their own advantage on a local scale.

David Remnick, editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, writes that whether or not Russia was responsible for the DNC hack and subsequent leak to WikiLeaks, “what’s undisputed is that the gathering of Kompromat—compromising material—is a familiar tactic in Putin’s arsenal… For years, the Russian intelligence services have filmed political enemies in stages of sexual and/or narcotic indulgence, and have distributed the grainy images online.” 54

In a previous article for The New Yorker , Remnick described one infamous case of Kompromat:

In 1999, on the eve of a national election, a prosecutor named Yuri Skuratov was investigating corruption at the Kremlin and among its oligarch allies. Now all that anyone remembers about Skuratov is the grainy black-and-white film of him attempting, without complete success, to have sex with two prostitutes; the film was broadcast nationally on state television, and that was the end of Skuratov and the investigation. (The head of the secret services at the time was Vladimir Putin.) 55

Franklin Foer writes in Slate , “There’s a clear pattern: Putin runs stealth efforts on behalf of politicians who rail against the European Union and want to push away from NATO.” 56In an interview on Slate ’s podcast “Trumpcast,” Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum also mentioned Russia’s “pattern” of interfering in elections of Western democracies, citing as one example Russia’s funding of Marine Le Pen, president of France’s National Front, a far right political party. 57Computer hacking adds another dimension to Kompromat. Applebaum said that the events unfolding in the 2016 presidential election seem to follow a pattern that other European countries have experienced when Russia has exerted its influence:

But I hadn’t thought through the idea that of course through hacking, which is something they’re famously very good at, that they could try and disrupt a campaign. And of course the pattern of this is something we’ve seen before: There’s a big leak, it’s right on an important political moment, it affects the way people think about the campaign, and of course instead of focusing on who did the leak and who’s interest it’s in, everyone focuses on the details, what’s in the emails, what did so-and-so write to so-and-so on Dec. 27, and that’s all that gets reported. 58

Paul Roderick Gregory argues in an opinion piece in Forbes that a former KGB officer like Putin could capitalize on Clinton’s use of a private email address and server while secretary of state to either blackmail her into dropping out of the presidential race, or leak information that “would weaken the United States’ hand in world affairs throughout a Clinton presidency.” 59Furthermore, he notes the Kremlin doesn’t even need to have hacked or be in possession of Clinton’s emails to exert this influence, writing, “Those who follow Kremlin propaganda understand that it is not necessary for Putin to have Clinton’s e-mail s to cause serious damage to a Clinton presidency. All he needs is that many believe he has Hillary’s e-mails.” 60He continues:

The Kremlin specializes in fabricating narratives (such as the U.S. intent to steal Siberia) that are false but may contain a small kernel of truth. Putin’s army of “information technologists” (propagandists) can release fabrications to its numerous clandestine sources throughout the world. Clinton might ignore or deny those narratives (which cannot be traced to the Kremlin), but the mere idea that Putin has her e-mails will lend the necessary credibility to the story. 61

The Putin Strategic Kompromat & Recruit strategy is so scripted and so clearly a FSB/KGB styled political warfare operation that members of U.S. intelligence quickly saw through it. The current members, including the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Director of the CIA John Brennan, danced around the subject on the DNC hacks, as they are sworn to secrecy about the origins and sources.

Former acting Director and former Deputy Director of the CIA, Michael Morell has served six presidents—three from each party—and has voted for both Democrats and Republicans. He has kept his politics to himself throughout his thirty-three year intelligence career, until now. He takes a dim view of the entire Russian constellation of “coincidences” that surrounds Donald Trump. We may recall the U.S. intelligence community’s observation that “coincidences take a lot of planning.” The Trump coincidences seemed to bear the hallmarks of the sword and the shield of the FSB.

In August 2016 Morell wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which he explained why he will no longer remain politically silent during this election. It had little to do with Trump and more to do with his professional intelligence assessment of the threat to the United States:

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated… In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation. 62

To help elect Donald J. Trump to President of the United States, the Russians would need to draw from their experience in the art of compromising the integrity of a selected person or political party that they wanted to influence or deter through the Russian strategy of Kompromat. If Vladimir Putin, the Russian intelligence apparatus, and its underground global hacking wings sought to destabilize the West, break up NATO, and reestablish the global order, they would need to lay out a strategic hybrid warfare plan.

Hybrid warfare is the new Russian model to harness the strength of all aspects of Russian intelligence, propaganda, cyber operations, and Kompromat to support battlefield preparations before ordering terrorism, special operations, and full-scale military warfare. In this case, the FSB would be tasked to plan a cyberspace-based strategic political warfare operation to influence the U.S. elections though the theft of emails and materials from the Democratic party and make selective releases through a third party surrogate, called a cutout, that does not know or care that the source is the FSB.