The Perfect Weapon

by David E. Sanger

  SANGER: My point here is, can the members of NATO, including the new members in the Baltics, count on the United States to come to their military aid if they were attacked by Russia? And count on us fulfilling our obligations—

  TRUMP: Have they fulfilled their obligations to us? If they fulfill their obligations to us, the answer is yes.

  HABERMAN: And if not?

  TRUMP: Well, I’m not saying if not. I’m saying, right now there are many countries that have not fulfilled their obligations to us.

  There was our story for the evening before he became the Republican nominee: The first major presidential candidate to cast doubt on whether the United States would come to the defense of treaty allies.

  I had one other line of questions I wanted to try: How would he respond to cyberattacks? Particularly those “that are short of war” and “clearly appear to be coming from Russia?”

  TRUMP: Well, we’re under cyberattack.

  SANGER: We’re under regular cyberattack. Would you use cyberweapons before you used military force?

  TRUMP: Cyber is absolutely a thing of the future and the present. Look, we’re under cyberattack, forget about them. And we don’t even know where it’s coming from.

  SANGER: Some days we do, and some days we don’t.

  TRUMP: Because we’re obsolete. Right now, Russia and China in particular and other places.

  SANGER: Would you support the United States not only developing as we are but fielding cyberweapons as an alternative?

  TRUMP: Yes. I am a fan of the future, and cyber is the future.

  That was as far as we got on how the nominee thought about the newest weapon that Russia and the United States were utilizing in a global struggle for power: “Cyber is the future.” But worse yet, he fueled our suspicions that at a minimum he was perfectly comfortable with what was clearly Russian interference in the election. And he made us wonder whether, wittingly or unwittingly, he had become Putin’s agent of influence.

  * * *

  —

  The leaked emails apparently weren’t producing as much news as the GRU-linked hackers had hoped. So the next level of the plan kicked in: activating WikiLeaks.

  The first WikiLeaks dump was massive: 44,000 emails, more than 17,000 attachments. And not coincidentally, the deluge started just days after our interview with Trump, and right before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The most politically potent of the emails made clear that the DNC leadership was doing whatever it could to make sure Hillary Clinton got the nomination and Bernie Sanders did not.

  To anyone watching the nomination process, that was hardly surprising; while the DNC was supposed to be neutral, it was understood in the Democratic leadership that this was Clinton’s turn. She had the name recognition and the money and the experience, and many in the party felt she had been denied her chance when Obama came along in 2008. That air of inevitability about her candidacy ended up being one of her greatest liabilities.

  Yet the emails that were released in the trove were so blunt and insulting that they played to the divisions within the party, just as Sanders’s delegates were showing up in the sweltering heat of Philadelphia. One of the big questions was whether the Russians knew enough by themselves to intensify that division, or whether they had help from Americans who had an interest in undercutting the Democrats.

  If the Russian goal was simply to trigger chaos, it worked. Wasserman Schultz, the Florida congresswoman, had to resign as the party’s chair just ahead of the convention over which she was set to preside.

  And finally the country—or at least anyone following what was happening closely—was waking up. In the midst of the Democratic convention in late July, my colleague Nicole Perlroth and I wrote: “An unusual question is capturing the attention of cyber specialists, Russia experts and Democratic Party leaders in Philadelphia: Is Vladimir V. Putin trying to meddle in the American presidential election?”

  Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, accused the Russians of leaking the data “for the purpose of helping Donald Trump,” though he cited no evidence.

  Mook suggested that Trump’s answers to us the week before about whether he would come to NATO’s aid marked a watershed moment. Such an allegation seemed unprecedented. Even at the height of the Cold War, we wrote, “it was hard to find a presidential campaign willing to charge that its rival was essentially secretly doing the bidding of a key American adversary.” For the first time we raised the question of whether Putin himself was behind the leaks.

  That question had already seized the CIA and the NSA. Two days later, in Washington, word began to spread that a preliminary CIA assessment circulating in the White House—deeply classified—concluded with “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee. It was the first time that the government began to signal that a larger plot was under way.

  Yet publicly the White House remained silent. The CIA evidence, my Times colleague Eric Schmitt and I wrote, “leaves President Obama and his national security aides with a difficult diplomatic and political decision: whether to publicly accuse the government of President Vladimir V. Putin of engineering the hacking.”

  In fact, a fight was brewing inside the administration on just that point. What we didn’t know at the time was that a disagreement had surfaced among the intelligence agencies. The CIA’s “high confidence” was in part based on human sources inside Russia. The NSA was not prepared to sign on; it did not yet have enough signals intelligence and intercepted conversations to say with anything more than “moderate confidence” the hack was a GRU operation, and that Putin had ordered it.

  “This went to the heart of Russia’s role and intentions,” said one senior official who participated in the debate in early August, right after the conventions. “And finally Obama—who is usually pretty cool about these things—got pretty animated. He said, ‘I need clarity!’ And he didn’t have clarity” about who had ordered the hacking, or what its objectives were.

  Trump himself seemed to understand what was at stake. “The new joke in town,” he wrote on Twitter, “is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.”

  Soon it would not be a joke.

  * In addition to the United States and Britain, the other members are Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

  CHAPTER X

  THE SLOW AWAKENING

  In this new cyber age, we’re going to have to make sure that we continually work to find the right balance of accountability and openness and transparency that is the hallmark of our democracy.

  —Barack Obama, at his final White House press conference, January 18, 2017

  In late July 2016, with emails stolen by GRU-affiliated hackers surfacing every few days on the WikiLeaks website, Victoria Nuland settled into her office in the State Department. Surrounded by the rugs and mementos of many foreign trips, she began drawing up her wish list of measures the US government could take to make life miserable for Vladimir Putin.

  Her list was long, and one of Nuland’s colleagues later said “it veered more toward punishment than deterrence.” But as it circulated among a small group of officials at the State Department and the National Security Council, Nuland’s call to action underscored that the United States had plenty of options.

  The list started with the obvious: If Putin wanted to play the game of releasing embarrassing information, why not let him feel what it was like to be on the receiving end? (Nuland certainly remembered what that was like, after the release of her infamous call with the American ambassador to Ukraine.) American intelligence agencies had assembled a pretty good picture of Putin’s vast financial holdings, spread around the world in secret accounts outside Russia. Many were being held on his behalf b
y his oligarch friends. Wouldn’t there be some justice, Nuland asked her colleagues, in some well-timed revelations about the hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of dollars that Putin had tucked away?

  And there was much to reveal about the oligarchs themselves, who had siphoned billions of dollars out of the Russian economy—one reason it was now moribund—and used the money to buy $100 million flats in London. Add to that some revelations about their less-than-savory businesses, and many of those fortunes could be frozen, threatening not only the oligarchs but the lifestyles of their children.

  Other options went far beyond embarrassment. Celeste Wallander, the Russia expert at the National Security Council, and Michael Daniel, the cyber-policy chief at the White House who was running the cyber-response team to mitigate the damage, wanted to know what it would take to mount an in-kind response. Daniel, normally a mild-mannered budget specialist, was a veteran of enough Russia hacks to argue that Putin would retreat only if whacked on the nose. Otherwise, Daniel told me later, Putin would “just keep doing what he always does.” Was it possible, he and Wallander asked, to fry the servers that DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 were using to distribute the stolen emails, or to go directly after WikiLeaks? One idea called for electronic attacks on the GRU, to make it clear that the NSA knew how their command-and-control systems operated and how to screw them up.

  But the NSA offered a caution: whatever troubles Washington brought upon the Russians, they argued, would have only temporary impact, and the cost would be huge. The Russians would learn which of their networks had been penetrated by the NSA, and how. “You don’t want to do something,” said one of the cyber warriors who opposed the ideas, “that has little enduring impact.”

  One extreme option on the table certainly would have gotten Putin’s attention: bringing the Russian economy to a standstill by cutting off its banking system and terminating its connection with SWIFT, the international clearinghouse for banking transactions.

  “It was an enormously satisfying response,” one of Nuland’s colleagues recalled later with a smile, “until we began to think about what it would do to the Europeans,” who were still reliant on Russian gas to provide heat through the winter. As one of President Obama’s top aides said, “No one was exactly eager to call the Germans and tell them it would be a pretty cold, long winter because the Russians were messing with the Hillary campaign.”

  By the accounts of three of Obama’s top national security aides, none of these recommendations formally made it to President Obama prior to the 2016 election. (Informally, several were discussed with him.) Those advisers at the top of his national-security pyramid—Susan Rice, the national security adviser; Rice’s deputy, Avril Haines, who was tasked with leading the “deputies process” to sort out the options; and Lisa Monaco, the homeland security adviser—all argued that while pushing back against the Russians was important, ensuring that the electoral process was secure was their first priority.

  “That was our number-one focus,” said Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff, who agreed with the cautious approach. “The president made it clear that the integrity of the election came first.” Making the Russians pay a price was important, but it could wait until the ballots were counted.

  So the waiting began.

  * * *

  —

  Once the GRU—through Guccifer 2.0, DCLeaks, and WikiLeaks—began distributing the hacked emails, each revelation of the DNC’s infighting or Hillary Clinton’s talks at fund-raisers became catnip for political reporters. The content of the leaks overwhelmed the bigger question of whether everyone—starting with the news organizations reporting the contents of the emails—was doing Putin’s bidding.

  From the time in early August that John Brennan, the CIA director, began sending intelligence reports over to the White House in sealed envelopes, the administration was preoccupied with the possibility that a far larger plot was under way. Perhaps, the officials feared, the DNC hack was only an opening shot, or a distraction. Already reports were trickling in about constant “probes” of election systems in Arizona and Illinois, all traced back to Russian hackers. Was Putin’s bigger plan to hack the votes on November 8? And how easy would that be to pull off?

  In part, Obama’s concern about an Election Day hack grew from the alarm with which a small band of White House aides viewed the contents of Brennan’s restricted missives. The envelopes contained reporting from a tiny number of high-ranking Russian informants in Putin’s orbit—including at least one source so sensitive that Brennan did not want the reports included in the President’s Daily Brief, which had a wide circulation in the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon. It was largely these sources’ accounts of Putin’s intentions and orders that made the CIA declare with “high confidence” that the DNC hack was the work of the Russian government at a time when the NSA and other intelligence agencies still harbored doubts. The sources described a coordinated campaign ordered by Putin himself, the ultimate modern-day cyber assault—subtle, deniable, launched on many fronts—incongruously directed from behind the six-hundred-year-old walls of the Kremlin. Putin didn’t think Trump could win the election, the CIA concluded. Like just about everyone else, he was betting that Clinton, his nemesis, would prevail. But he was hoping to weaken her by fueling a post-election-day narrative that she had stolen the election by vote tampering.

  Brennan later argued that Putin and his top aides had two goals: “Their first objective was to undermine the credibility and integrity of the US electoral process. They were trying to damage Hillary Clinton. They thought she would be elected, and they wanted her bloodied by the time she was going to be inaugurated,” he said in a conversation in Aspen, Colorado, in the summer of 2017, six months after he had left the CIA. But Putin was hedging his bets, Brennan surmised, by “also trying to promote the prospects of Mr. Trump.”

  Whether Russia could succeed in tampering with votes depended on the resilience of the voting infrastructure. That infrastructure was run by state officials, who were reluctant to let the federal government become involved too closely. Some holes in the system in a few of the most critical swing states were well known: Pennsylvania, notably, had almost no paper backup for its voting machines. Even if a post-election audit of the vote were conducted, there was no viable way to confirm that votes were reported the way they had actually been cast. Other states had similar vulnerabilities. But no one had a detailed, nationwide picture of the problem. Initially, “no one really understood what the vulnerability of the election system was—whether you could hack the vote,” Avril Haines told me later.

  To understand the vulnerabilities, Obama secretly ordered a National Intelligence Estimate, a usually classified document prepared by an independent group called the National Intelligence Council that looks at big, complex topics and gives detailed assessments of American vulnerabilities and capabilities. The NIC was known for its independence, and occasionally for its willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. Past NIEs had examined Iran’s nuclear capability, the stability of the Chinese leadership, and even the national security implications of climate change. But never before had the group been asked to take a comprehensive look at the susceptibility of the American election system to outside influence.

  While the administration waited for the report, Trump began warning about election-machine tampering, seemingly laying a foundation for the argument, to be made on November 9, that Hillary Clinton had won fraudulently. He began hitting this theme in the friendly environment of the Sean Hannity show on Fox News on August 1, and ramped it up at a rally, where a standard campaign line emerged: “I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged.” He never talked about evidence, or who would do the rigging. He didn’t have to: the rhetoric tapped into his core supporters’ belief that somehow the “deep state” was going to manipulate events to deny him the presidency. He’d later tell a rally in Wisconsin: “Remember, we are co
mpeting in a rigged election….They even want to try and rig the election at the polling booths, where so many cities are corrupt and voter fraud is all too common.”

  It all fit a disturbing pattern. The publication of the DNC material seemed highly coordinated. Russian propaganda was in overdrive; while no one yet understood the extent of the problem, there were reports of fictitious news stories about Clinton’s health, which usually were stuck in an echo chamber, bouncing between the Russian TV network RT and Breitbart News, Steve Bannon’s mouthpiece. “I didn’t realize at the time that two-thirds of American adults get their news through social media,” said Haines, who was among the most thoughtful members of Obama’s team about the impact of social movements on democratic processes. “So while we knew something about Russian efforts to manipulate social media, I think it is fair to say that we did not recognize the extent of the vulnerability.”

  Obama’s vacation on Martha’s Vineyard created an informal deadline for his national-security team. By the time he returned to Washington in the last week in August, they knew he would be looking for options, starting with how to protect the electoral infrastructure.

  Jeh Johnson, the former Defense Department general counsel who was by then the secretary of homeland security, began making the case, in private and in public, that America’s election system was “critical infrastructure” and deserved special protection—the way the power grid did, or the Lincoln Memorial. It seemed a convincing argument: if the undergirding of American democracy, its ability to conduct free and fair elections, didn’t constitute “critical infrastructure,” what would? But when Johnson arranged a conference call with state election officials around the country, the disconnect was obvious. He described “troubling reports” he had on his desk of probing and scanning of the election systems in Arizona and other states. But he encountered a wall of suspicion; if he hoped to get support for a federal emergency initiative to help the state election boards address their cyber vulnerabilities, he was badly mistaken.