Alternative War: Unabridged

by J. J. Patrick

  Many of the key judgments in the assessment relied on a body of reporting from multiple sources which were consistent with the agencies’ understanding of Russian behaviour – meaning they went out and sought open source material too, taking exactly the same approach I had. “Insights into Russian efforts—including specific cyber operations—and Russian views of key US players derive from multiple corroborating sources. Some of our judgments about Kremlin preferences and intent are drawn from the behaviour of Kremlin-loyal political figures, state media, and pro-Kremlin social media actors, all of whom the Kremlin either directly uses to convey messages or who are answerable to the Kremlin,” the report says. The Russian leadership, it adds: “Invests significant resources in both foreign and domestic propaganda and places a premium on transmitting what it views as consistent, self-reinforcing narratives regarding its desires and red lines, whether on Ukraine, Syria, or relations with the United States.”

  The key findings of the report were starkly worded from the outset but I had already reached the same conclusions and found myself nodding along. “We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” the report stated. “We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” Where it uses the term we, the report refers to the corroborated and agreed opinions of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Security Agency.

  According to the agencies, the level of direct attack deployed in Russia’s hybrid assault was unprecedented: “Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.”

  With moderate (in the case of the NSA) and high confidence (of the CIA and FBI), the report went on to conclude: “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavourably to him.” Moscow’s approach, the spies said, evolved over the course of the campaign in reaction to Russia’s understanding of the electoral prospects of the two main candidates. When it appeared to Moscow that Hilary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign began to focus more on undermining her future presidency and the ongoing collection of intelligence between election day in November and the report's publication in December enhanced the USIC’s confidence in this conclusion. The influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy which “blends covert intelligence operations — such as cyber activity — with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or trolls,” the agencies said, adding: “Russia, like its Soviet predecessor, has a history of conducting covert influence campaigns focused on US presidential elections that have used intelligence officers and agents and press placements to disparage candidates perceived as hostile to the Kremlin.”

  The report specifically confirmed the leak activity relating to the DNC hack, saying “Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly” and this was the channel by which Russia laundered the trail and relayed material to WikiLeaks.

  The warning the report gave made grim reading for the Western world, saying “Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against US allies and their election processes.” A warning which was proven well-founded in France. “In trying to influence the US election,” the intelligence agencies concluded, “we assess the Kremlin sought to advance its longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, the promotion of which Putin and other senior Russian leaders view as a threat to Russia and Putin’s regime.”

  Putin had, of course, publicly pointed to the financial web unveiled by the Panama Papers and the Olympic doping scandal – which ruined his own country’s sporting reputation – as US-directed efforts to defame Russia. The report suggested he sought to use disclosures to further discredit the image of the United States by casting it as hypocritical. According to the CIA, the Russian President was likely to have targeted Clinton because he had “publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012,” and because: “He holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.” This assertion that the Russian Government developed a clear preference for Trump over Clinton had been repeatedly supported over time and there was no doubt remaining that Trump’s Administration had operated in collusion with Russia, whether directly or through deniable assets, for quite some time.

  Beginning in June, Putin’s public comments about the US presidential race avoided directly praising Trump: “probably because Kremlin officials thought that any praise from Putin personally would backfire in the United States.” Nonetheless, Putin publicly indicated a preference for President-elect Trump’s stated policy to work with Russia and pro-Kremlin figures spoke highly about what they saw as his “Russia-friendly positions on Syria and Ukraine,” at the same time as consistently labelling Clinton’s foreign policy as “aggressive rhetoric.” It’s a point of fact Trump’s own foreign policy was highly sympathetic to the Russian Federation and figures involved in shaping his policy had those direct links to Moscow, as I’d established. According to the report, Moscow also saw the election of Trump as a way to achieve an international counterterrorism coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which has come to pass – though this has brought its own questions, not least relating to Qatar, and including a number of serious concerns my own discoveries had raised.

  I revisited Trump’s counter-terrorism approach on reading the CIA’s take and found, on February the 5th 2017, Trump told reporters248: “It’s better to get along with Russia than not. And if Russia helps us in the fight against ISIS, which is a major fight, and Islamic terrorism all over the world — that’s a good thing.” However, US national security experts do not believe Russia is committed to combatting the Islamic State. While Washington’s top goal is to retake ground and the ISIS self-declared capital of Raqqa, the Russian goal appears to be to ensure Syrian President Bashar al-Assad remains in power.

  Jim Townsend, Obama’s former deputy assistant secretary of defence for European and NATO policy, told journalists: “Whatever they [Russia] do against ISIS is done to protect themselves or to support Assad. It's a different kind of fight for them.”

  Colin Kahl, former Vice President Joseph Biden’s national security adviser, and Hal Brands, former special assistant to the secretary of defence for strategic planning, had also written249: “Russia’s overarching goal, and one that it has been fairly successful in achieving, is to fortify the Assad regime in power and thereby protect Russia’s strategic position in Syria and the broader Middle East.”

  Even Republican Senator John McCain, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has openly said250: “The time President Trump spent sharing sensitive information with the Russians was time he did not spend focusing on Russia’s aggressive behavior” or putting an end to the “slaughter of innocent civilians and targeting of hospitals in Syria.” Another Senator, Ben Cardin, the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also stated251 he: “Wouldn’t characterize the Russians as allies in the fight against ISIS.” Cardin’s spokesperson added the latter believes Russian actions in Syria have “exacerbated the conditions that have allowed ISIS to flourish.”

  As if there wasn’t eno
ugh evidence already, looking at this through the CIA microscope it’s clear something was out of balance in respect of Russia’s true intentions and, subsequently, the Trump narrative. A point which is driven home by the actions of the former USSR in the Aleppo offensive. The benefit to Russia, in terms of a conflict which increases volumes of migration to Europe and fuels the divisive narratives of the far-right parties it supports, is genuinely obvious: destabilisation by assets which are both detached and deniable simultaneously. Meanwhile, because this action exacerbates the problem, terrorism continued unrelentingly and a further attack in the UK – an atrocity at a music concert in Manchester on the 22nd of May 2017 – came during Trump’s visit to the Middle East.

  Speaking in Riyadh before the bombing252, Trump said: “This is not a battle between different faiths, different sects, or different civilisations. This is a battle between barbaric criminals who seek to obliterate human life, and decent people of all religions who seek to protect it.”

  During his visit, he claimed to have signed the largest arms deal in US history and the Qatar crisis began shortly afterwards. Additionally, those previous patterns I had identified across Europe and the US, pro-Kremlin commentators and media channels were among the first to attribute the Manchester attack to Islamic terror, hours before the police had even established details of the events.

  Trump then led a call to the world to unite in the fight against ISIS in the wake of the attack, on May the 23rd – a day before James Comey, the dismissed FBI director investigating his administration, was due to give open evidence about his Russia links – a hearing which was postponed. “This wicked ideology must be obliterated and I mean completely obliterated, and the innocent life must be protected. All civilised nations must join together to protect human life and the sacred right our citizens to live in safety and in peace,” Trump said during his press conference with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The dog-whistling, as this type of provocative propaganda is now referred to, and the distraction were no longer even questionable: these moves were all part of a strategy.

  Returning to the CIA’s report, the agency outlined Putin had many positive experiences working with other Western political leaders whose business interests made them more disposed to deal with Russia, such as former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. Though it did not go on to specify details beyond this, the report intimated they were already aware of Trump’s attempted business deals in Russia, along with his web of divested finances which all circle back to his personal empire.

  The CIA also made a shrewd observation that a narrative of contesting the result if it didn’t go Trump’s way – a mirror of Nigel Farage’s rhetoric during Brexit – and public criticism of the US election process as unfair (by Putin, Russian officials, and other pro-Kremlin pundits) almost immediately stopped once the result was known. Continuing along this line would have damaged the overt building of positive relations with Moscow, the report logically concluded. This not only showed just how blatant the true nature of Russian tactics was but also how a U-turn, even as brazen as this, can simply be accepted by people if it is handled correctly. Before the election, pro-Kremlin bloggers had prepared a Twitter campaign, #DemocracyRIP, to be deployed on election night in anticipation of Clinton’s victory, according to analysis of their social media activity. This also, almost accidentally, provided one of the final links between Russia and the Leave.EU campaign and Westmonster – both projects of Arron Banks and Nigel Farage, who ran a similar campaign on Social Media in the wake of the Macron victory in France – confirming the use of strategy came from a common playbook, rather than an elaborate series of coincidences. They had, as I’d established, openly supported the Russian-backed and financed, far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, throughout the French campaign and still continued to do so, even long afterwards.

  The declassified CIA report drew the conclusion the influence campaigns were: “Approved at the highest levels of the Russian Government—particularly those that would be politically sensitive,” directly pointing the finger of blame at Putin himself. Moscow’s campaign, the agencies said, reflected years of investment in its capabilities, which Moscow has honed in the former Soviet states.

  “By their nature, Russian influence campaigns are multifaceted and designed to be deniable because they use a mix of agents of influence, cut outs, front organisations, and false-flag operations,” the report added, so close to my own conclusions it caused a shiver to run down my spine. Highlighting the specific example of Moscow’s deployment of these tactics during the Ukraine crisis in 2014, when Russia deployed forces and advisers to eastern Ukraine and denied it publicly, the report stated: “The Kremlin’s campaign aimed at the US election featured disclosures of data obtained through Russian cyber operations; intrusions into US state and local electoral boards; and overt propaganda.” Russian intelligence collection both informed and enabled the influence campaign, the report added, saying: “Russian intelligence services collected against the US primary campaigns, think tanks, and lobbying groups they viewed as likely to shape future US policies. In July 2015, Russian intelligence gained access to Democratic National Committee (DNC) networks and maintained that access until at least June 2016.” From the JAR, I knew the access by APT28 and APT29 had gone on right up until the election itself and from my own poking around I had already uncovered a number of connections between Russia, lobby groups like BGR, and Trump.

  On the DNC email hack and subsequent leaks, the report states “Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be an independent Romanian hacker, made multiple contradictory statements and false claims about his likely Russian identity throughout the election. Press reporting suggests more than one person claiming to be Guccifer 2.0 interacted with journalists.” This conclusion was, of course, logical and followed previous findings of extensive state-sponsored Russian hacking I’d determined, and the questions around Guccifer being a Russian asset with a fake identity. The content of the DNC leak reviewed in the report was taken from e-mail accounts targeted by the Russian GRU in March 2016 and appeared on DCLeaks.com starting in June. The intelligence agencies stated the GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks – which I already believed with good reason to be a deniable Russian asset. According the analysts: “Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity.” They noted that documents published WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries and, in early September 2016, Putin had said publicly it was important the DNC data was exposed to WikiLeaks, calling the search for the source of the leaks a distraction and denying Russian state-level involvement. Importantly, the report also confirmed the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet, RT, had actively collaborated with WikiLeaks. According to the CIA, RT’s editor-in-chief visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in August 2013, where they discussed renewing his broadcast contract with RT. This was also reported in Russian and Western media. The Russian media, however, subsequently announced RT had become “the only Russian media company” to partner with WikiLeaks and had received access to “new leaks of secret information.” RT, the CIA said, had also routinely given Assange sympathetic coverage and provided him with a platform to denounce the United States – support mirrored by Nigel Farage, who also has those close links with RT and who had also visited Assange, as I separately established.

  According to the CIA, the election-related disclosures and disinformation more broadly reflected a pattern of Russian intelligence using hacked information in tailored influence efforts against targets such as Olympic athletes and other foreign governments. Such efforts, they confirmed, have included releasing or altering personal data, defacing websites, and releasing emails. A prominent target since the 2016 Summer Olympics was the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), with leaks assessed to have: “Originated with the GRU and that have involved data on US athletes. Crucial
ly, however, the report accurately identified Russia collected information on some Republican-affiliated targets but did not conduct a comparable disclosure campaign. Russia’s state-run propaganda machine — which I knew was comprised of its domestic media apparatus, outlets targeting global audiences such as RT and Sputnik and a network of quasi-government trolls — contributed to the influence campaign by “serving as a platform for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences,” the report stated. The same pattern was evident in both Brexit and the French election.

  State-owned Russian media also made increasingly favourable comments about Trump as the 2016 US general and primary election campaigns progressed, while consistently offering negative coverage of the Clinton campaign. On the 6th of August 2016, RT published an English language video called Julian Assange Special: Do WikiLeaks Have the E-mail That’ll Put Clinton in Prison? and an exclusive interview with Assange entitled Clinton and ISIS Funded by the Same Money. Starting in March 2016, Russian-linked actors began openly supporting President-elect Trump’s candidacy in media aimed at English-speaking audiences. RT and Sputnik consistently cast Trump as the target of unfair coverage from traditional US media outlets which they claimed were subservient to a corrupt political establishment. Again, this narrative was a mirror of both Farage’s and Le Pen’s respective campaigns and the Russian media hailed Trump’s victory as a “vindication of Putin’s advocacy of global populist movements”, which was also the theme of Putin’s annual conference for Western academics in October 2016. Putin’s chief propagandist, Dmitriy Kiselev, also used his flagship weekly news magazine program to cast Trump as an outsider victimised by a corrupt political establishment – The Swamp – and faulty democratic election process which aimed to prevent his election because of his desire to work with Moscow. According to the report, Pro-Kremlin proxy Vladimir Zhirinovskiy, leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, proclaimed just before the election: “If President-elect Trump won, Russia would drink champagne in anticipation of being able to advance its positions on Syria and Ukraine.” This again was a repetition of comments attributed to Putin in respect of the result of Brexit and the misuse of title for Trump provides a huge indicator Russia knew the result in advance.