Malcolm Nance: The Plot to Hack America

During the 2008 election season, Chinese government hackers penetrated the computers of the Obama and McCain campaigns and made off with numerous policy documents related to China. 9Director of National Security at the time, Dennis Blair said, “based on everything I know, this was a case of political cyberespionage by the Chinese government against the two American political parties.” 10

However, the nature of those hackings resembled traditional intelligence collection operations. Past operations include Chinese army hackers stealing a letter drafted by Senator John McCain supporting Taiwan. Chinese government officials contacted McCain’s office to lodge a complaint not realizing that the stolen letter had never left his office computer. Such inadvertent collection versus exploitation foreshadowing is rare in a truly coordinated information war, and this Chinese attempt at propaganda was sloppy and almost amateurish.

President Obama made reference to the hacks by the Chinese on May 29, 2009. “Hackers gained access to emails and a range of campaign files, from policy position papers to travel plans.” 11He then laid out a new cyber security policy designed to deter attacks such as these. For all of the security measures and new legislation, the DNC of 2016 was still open to exploitation.

By the last week of August 2016, it would become patently clear that someone had stolen every facet of the Democratic Party system, took what they pleased, and launched an organized campaign to discredit it in the media. Simply put, the Democratic machine was hit by a terrorist attack without bombs. The effect of the hacker’s campaign was to influence a strategic outcome that could only help one American political party and indirectly help a foreign actor’s strategic policy against the West. A hack of this magnitude could only be perpetrated by a determined foe that wanted to foment division in the Democratic Party, a foe with the advanced cyber technology to see to it that Donald J. Trump would take advantage if the chaos caused at a critical moment in the process, almost exactly one hundred days from the election.

That foe had been waiting patiently for the right opportunity to damage America. And his opportunity would come to him, on a golden platter, at the Miss Universe Pageant of 2013 in Moscow.

ACCORDING TO THE OFFICIAL KREMLIN BIOGRAPHY, Putin was interested in intelligence at an early age. When Putin attended a public KGB event as a teenager, he asked the amused officers how to achieve his goal of becoming an intelligence officer. They told him to either serve in the army or earn a degree in law, so he went to university for law at Leningrad State University, where he earned his degree in 1975. After graduation he joined and studied as a junior officer at the KGB 101st Intelligence School and later attended the Yuri Andropov Red Banner Institute. The spy craft programs he attended were designed to give the officer basic training including foreign language, surveillance, specialty photography, wiretapping, breaking and entry, small arms assassination, and how to manipulate people to become spies against their own nation. The school’s curriculum also included a heavy dose of indoctrination in Marxist-Leninist philosophy and an emphasis of service to the state above all else. 1Here Putin would learn the organization’s unofficial motto: “Once KGB, always KGB.”

“Fairly quickly, I left for special training in Moscow, where I spent a year,” Putin said. “Then I returned again to Leningrad, worked there in the First Main [Chief] Directorate—the [foreign] intelligence service.” 2

From 1985–1990 Putin was assigned to No. 4 Angelikastrasse, the KGB offices in Dresden, located in what was then East Germany. There he ran East German academics and businessmen across the Iron curtain and helped them spy or recruit sympathetic West Germans for the KGB. Most interestingly, he used agents with the East German computer company Robotron as cover stories for agents to steal computer technology secrets from the West with the help of the East German secret police, the Stasi. Putin’s pattern of theft using advanced information systems would come up again and again in his future. For this assignment, the KGB awarded Major Putin a Bronze medal.

During the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a crowd of East German protesters gathered outside Putin’s office and threatened to storm the building. Putin received orders to conduct emergency destruction of his field site’s files. The beginning of the end had come for Communism in Germany and the KGB needed to sanitize its many satellite offices before they abandoned them. 3For a short period he was also assigned to Directorate K, the KGB’s Counterintelligence division. This unit was designed to hunt spies, and his experience would build on a natural mistrust of people, a tendency that would come to serve him well in his future. Putin officially resigned from the KGB in August 1991 after the KGB old guard attempted to overthrow the government and keep communism in place. He went to work at a University in Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg.

Anatoly Sobchek, Mayor of St. Petersburg launched Putin’s political career. Vladimir was made Deputy Mayor of the city and appointed chair of foreign economic relations. The innocuous sounding body was actually a gold plated prize in the immediate post-Soviet era. It was Putin’s job to liquidate Soviet assets and real estate in St. Petersburg and control the buying of foodstuffs and assets for a population that was just feeling freedom for the first time in seventy years. His position brought in billions of dollars to the mayor and his friends in the second largest city. Needless to say this job required the toughness and guile of a former spy, but it also showed him how to work the new class of oligarchs that would make money hand over fist.

In the post-Soviet period, St. Petersburg became known as the “Gangster Capitol.” During that period under President Boris Yeltsin, Putin was alleged to have been stealing food and siphoning funds off from the sale of assets and reconstruction. However when corruption accusations hit Mayor Sobcheck and Yeltsin, Putin showed loyalty and stood behind those who backed him up when he was rising. Sobchek, a reformer would later die in suspicious circumstances, some say poisoning, after returning to St Petersburg to stump for Putin in February, 2000. 4

Yeltsin, suffering from ill health, alcoholism, and under threat of removal due to the massive corruption in Russia, kept the strong young Putin by his side. Here Putin cultivated the public image of an unabashed KGB officer who mastered judo and politics. Putin even created his own public relations videos. In 1998 he became Director of the FSB, the Office of State Security, now centralizing all power both foreign and domestic. In August 1999 Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin to the office of Prime Minister and the Duma approved his appointment shortly thereafter.

Once he was appointed Prime Minister he would find a reason to quickly launch a second brutal war in Chechnya that would eventually kill over fifty thousand people—terrorism. As the political campaign started, terrorists detonated four apartment complexes in Russia and Dagestan, killing over three hundred citizens. When Putin hit the stumps and came out as a pit bull on a Russian nationalist platform against terrorism, he rose in popularity. When Yeltsin resigned the Presidency, Putin became President in accordance with the Russian constitution.

American Journalist David Satter, who investigated the apartment bombings, believes that a failed Hexogen bomb with advanced military detonators found in the city of Ryazan used technology and materials exclusive to the Russian army. The men caught planting them were FSB officers. 5In response, Satter, author of a book on Putin’s rise to power —Darkness at Dawn —was expelled from Russia in January 2014. Virtually all other high profile activists who investigated this attack ended up assassinated, including the ex-KGB officer Litvinenko, who was poisoned with an extremely rare Polonium-210 radionuclide while drinking tea. The substance could only have originated in Russian nuclear reactors. He died three weeks later.