Malcolm Nance - The Plot to Hack America

Centered in a secret location the IWMC would be a hub where the specialties of each agency could be brought to bear. The collection of data and its dissemination would be necessary to quickly influence the news cycles, be supported by State media and send tips and advice to their candidate though direct, official comment by Putin or indirectly through specially tasked senior SVR case officers.

Putin, his chief of staff, and the Director of the SVR would be the only senior staff to be aware of what outcome the President desired. Based on past strategic intelligence missions, only a few—perhaps no more than five or six case officers—would be assigned to manage a mission of this political magnitude. By virtue of the clandestine nature of their work, these would be the most trusted intelligence officers in the FSB; officers who work for Putin personally.

An overall IWMC Commander would be the controller for the entire mission. He would have a subordinate executive officer from the Special Communications and Information Service of Russia (SCISR), Russia’s version of the National Security Agency, to ensure the fusion of HUMINT and CYBER into the operation went smoothly. For the FSB side, there would be a senior manager to oversee the SVR contribution to the IWMC. An FSB-SCISR cyberwarfare officer would manage the SVR’s FANCY BEARS cyber hacking team and a second officer would control the GRU’s COZY BEARS cyber commandoes as an alternate, sometimes parallel collections team. A third cyberwarfare officer from the Scientific & Technology directorate would be the operations manager to run a black propaganda support team. When necessary, a fourth liaison officer could task and collect from the Russian mafia-run CRIMINAL BEARS. At the Kremlin level, all liaison with state media and statements by the President himself would be handled by the Russian Foreign Ministry.

To advise the President on the behaviors and opportunities to manage their candidate, the SVR’s political activities branch would assign perhaps three or four of the best field officers in the SVR and GRU. They would be read into the program and isolated at the IWMC. These officers would have to possess a proven track record on turning the unwitting into active spies, whether they wanted to be or not. Due to the nature of the mission, the officers would need to be fluent in American English with experience working as “illegals,”—deep cover covert operations officers—who served in the United States and understand both business and the political process. Perhaps one political warfare advisor would be allowed to know the full scope of this mission, remotely evaluate the target of the mission, and advise the cell operations managers as to the day to day effects of the entire process. If events required other officers to be brought in, they would be assigned compartmented tasks from the pool of the IWMC staff.

Until a friendly American administration was elected all of these goals would be pies in the sky. Nothing could be effected without risk and the launch of this operation would be the least risky of all operations. The right man was running for President, he was managed by a close ally, and his foreign policy/intelligence chief was literally on the Kremlin Payroll of Russia Today.

PHASE 1: Make Contact, Befriend, and Encourage the Asset

PHASE 2: Make Asset Feel Indebted to Russia

PHASE 3: Conduct Covert Cyber-Intelligence Preparation of the Battle Space

PHASE 4: Prepare the Political Battle Space

PHASE 5: Develop and Sustain Supporting Political/Propaganda

PHASE 6: Fund and Manipulate a Cut-Out Asset to Disperse Kompromat information.

PHASE 7: Execute Kompromat Operations

Phases 1 through 4 had already been put in place. Phase 5 would be the easiest. By using Russia Today TV to blast Hilary Clinton on an international scale and tacitly express support for Trump, Putin has been able to get Donald to tout his connections to Russia as a positive for America.

Trump and his surrogates have helped the Kremlin as well by making exclamations that Putin doesn’t respect Obama, and that Russia doesn’t like “crooked” Hilary because she helped spark political protests in Russia in 2011 and 2013, and by convincing formerly anti-Russian Americans that Putin is an ally to be assisted in the war against ISIS. It was a master stroke that would require considerable planning and precision to execute if it had been done by spies. However, it was executed by a carnival barker. To his followers, Trump has successfully spun the line that “Putin respects me and would work with me, he won’t work with Hilary,” and they love it.

The FSB CYBER BEARS strategy was to steal critical political intelligence data from all wings of the U.S. Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Hillary Clinton Campaign, and donors and supporters. Republican Party enemies of Russian defense policy would also need to be hacked in case they became too opposed to the operation. A little side activity to guarantee the silence of the risk-adverse politicians would generally be found in the hidden corners of a laptop or nude photos that were deleted from the hard drive but still recoverable by one or more of the CYBER BEARS.

For old-school officers trained under the KGB, conducting a political and cyberwarfare operation would be a lifelong dream. It would create the space and environment to realign Russia as the preeminent power in the world. Even though most Russians who know Putin believe that this would be a very long shot, the fortunate emergence of a self-absorbed and servile Donald Trump coupled with Putin’s long hatred of Hillary Clinton meddling in his Eastern European plans would make this a tempting opportunity to severely damage the United States. Winning battles in Cyberspace are a matter of influencing the global perception thought output of “opinions” and “voices” to “trend” a perception that the producer wishes. Whether it’s the number of hits on the latest trending kitty playing with yarn video or the location of a Pokémon GO character, if an organization with a large enough computing system and secret operatives so wishes they can steal, smear, influence and quite possibly select a U.S. President with little pushback from the media. This is apparently the terminal mission objective of Operation Lucky-7: Direct the CYBER BEARS to collect enough damaging information on Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Democratic Party to damage them in the mind of the American public.

Russian intelligence would spare no effort to elect Donald J. Trump President of the United States. However, the IWMC needed to disseminate the information publically. A cut-out could be found, but the group needed its own “legend”—espionage terminology for a false backstory to protect the identities of the case officers. The Cyberspies decided to create their own legend and to honor a hacker that was already well known: Guccifer.

The original and only Guccifer was the Romanian eccentric Marcel Lehel Lazar who was arrested and extradited from Romania to the U.S. after breaking into dozens of emails that belonged to officials like both George Bush Sr. , George W. Bush, Colin Powell, and Sidney Blumenthal, long time friend of Hillary Clinton. He used the name Guccifer as his handle for his attacks. He had claimed that he successfully hacked a private server belonging to Hillary Clinton, but during the House hearing on the FBI decision not to prosecute Clinton for use of private server or other crimes, Representative Blake Farenthold asked FBI Director James Comey if there was any truth to the claims made by Guccifer that he breached the server. Comey stated unequivocally that Guccifer lied about the breach and there was no indication that any such breach ever occurred, even if the concerns or threat may have existed.