Malcolm Nance - The Plot to Hack America

The statements rang alarms all across Europe and instantly damaged credibility of the US nominee worldwide… except in Russia.

Like Hitler, Putin uses a form of Post-Soviet appeal to a virulent Russian ethno-nationalism in former Soviet states. With his stoking of the nationalist fever he and his intelligence agencies fund and direct ethnic Russian populations to agitate to the point where Russian military forces can seize territory that was lost. To effect this, it is necessary for the SVR and GRU to covertly fund and mobilize popular political support in the affected areas and build a public outcry to “defend” ethnic Russian populations. It is particularly acute in nations that were former Soviet satellite states, but are now closely aligned with NATO.

Hitler carried out a similar strategy in 1938 when he exhorted Germans to validate his annexation of the Sudetenland, the ethnic German-speaking region of what was then Czechoslovakia. Hitler saw the immense power of rallying the German people to repatriate those he characterized as poor ethnic Germans to the greater Reich. Putin has adopted this strategy of ethnic “rescue” to justify political operations in Eastern Europe. Usually this was a slow process of creating Russian political parties, infusing them with cash and illicit weapons. Waiting for them to form a popular uprising with the help of the SVR and then diplomatically protesting greatly that ethnic Russians were in danger. Hillary Clinton noted this when she said Putin was a man “who believes his mission is to restore Russia’s greatness… When he looks at Ukraine, he sees a place that he believes is by its very nature part of Mother Russia.” 15

Trump himself was aware of Putin’s designs, but unlike most Americans, he applauded. In his 2011 book Time to Get Tough he wrote, “Putin has big plans for Russia. He wants to edge out its neighbors so that Russia can dominate oil supplies to all of Europe,” Elaborating, Trump wrote “I respect Putin and Russians but cannot believe our leader (Obama) allows them to get away with so much… Hats off to the Russians.” 16

To meet his goals for hegemony in the Ukraine and the Baltics, Putin would require a total realignment of the priorities of NATO. It would also be most favorable to Russia if the United States could be convinced that it was not in their interest to respond to Baltic States’ requests for article 5 of the NATO Charter. Article 5, which requires all member states to respond militarily if one nation is attacked, has only been invoked once, by the United States after the 9/11 attacks. How would the Americans ever abandon NATO? They created it. Only a President that shared the same viewpoint or who was in league with Putin’s desires would ever even consider such treachery. Certainly not a nominee from the conservative American Republican party led by Senator John McCain and Lindsey Graham; they were the war hawks.

It is widely believed that the issue of the Ukraine is a solid Red line for Moscow. This may explain why he and his surrogates made serious efforts to hire and put in place Americans who could advance their interests. Veteran journalist Marvin Kalb notes that the entirety of the national security elites in the West hold the view that to Putin, Eastern Europe is a Russian sphere of influence or “Russian backyard.” 17Anna Vassilieva, of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey told NBC News that “Ukraine is a big issue… a red line that Putin is not going to compromise.” 18

Hillary Clinton’s own words must have struck fear into Putin’s heart because it encapsulates the Western school of thought on how to deal with him in the future:

I am in the category of people who wanted us to do more in response to the annexation of Crimea and the continuing destabilization of Ukraine… I do think we should do more to help Ukraine defend its borders. New equipment, new training for the Ukrainians. The United States plus NATO have been very reluctant to do that, and I understand it completely because it’s a very sticky, potentially dangerous, situation. But I think the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian civilians who’ve been fighting against the separatists have proven that they’re worthy of some greater support. 19

Such pronouncements would give Putin every impetus to find alternatives to her worldview. And surprisingly, seemingly out of nowhere, Putin managed to find and ally himself with the one man in the United States who believed precisely as himself: Donald J. Trump. Trump himself believed that NATO was obsolete and should be disbanded, that Crimea should be given to Russia, and that America should adopt an isolationist foreign policy. In the interim, NATO member states that didn’t pay their full share of the alliance financial commitments would be ignored if they had a military crisis. Who would have ever thought that Russia could be so lucky to find that a major party nominee in America would align himself so closely with the new Russian worldview? Who could have dreamed that a potential American President would imply that the United States would corrupt NATO’s mission to a protection racket that essentially extorts its members? Forty percent of the American electorate indirectly approved this high-stakes international racketeering.

Trump’s positions on NATO would also meet the strategic political objectives of the Kremlin simply by mainstreaming ideas and concepts that were far afield of hawkish Republican positions since the beginning of the Cold War. To the Republican Party, NATO was the United States. Until the rise of Trump there had never been any discussion as to the viability, militarily or financially, of the United States position in that alliance. It was unthinkable for the potential United States President to actually enunciate a position in which the necessity of the alliance was questioned.

It was bad enough that Trump was essentially giving assurances to Putin that Crimea was off the table, but he also appeared to not be the best surrogate, since he did not seem to understand the timeline of Ukraine’s crisis, either. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos Trump said, “he’s not going into Ukraine, OK, just so you understand. He’s not going to go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down. You can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want.”

“Well, he’s already there, isn’t he?” Stephanopoulos responded, in a reference to Crimea, which Putin took from Ukraine in early 2014.

Trump replied, “OK—well, he’s there in a certain way. But I’m not there.” 20

If NATO wasn’t coming to the rescue in Georgia, Ukraine, or Crimea, then a Donald Trump administration could almost be relied upon to validate or even explain away a Moscow invasion of the NATO Baltic republics. For Putin, it must surely be a dream come true to put a major party candidate espousing these policies into the White House.

Russia would need to task out the Kremlin staff, the SVR, GRU, FSB and all aspects of the State propaganda organs to meet the Spymaster-in-Chief’s goals. We may never know the actual discussions of how an operation like LUCKY-7 started, but it must have developed in a circumstance where Vladimir Putin used his instincts and information from his acolytes and spies to see something in Donald Trump that virtually no one was seeing in 2012.

Once the candidate was positively handled by the office of the President and his allies in the oligarchy, the intelligence community would form an information warfare management cell (IWMC). The LUCKY-7 joint task organization would be needed to directly respond and advise the Kremlin on how to best support a mission of this sensitivity. Though each agencies’ staffs would be compartmented from the rest of the FSB and GRU, such an operation would absolutely require a joint information operations office.