With strong links suggesting Russian involvement in the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) email servers, the Kremlin’s efforts to disrupt and interfere in the West have once again come into the spotlight.
But experts told The Cipher Brief that although this cyberattack fits into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wider strategic aims, it could also signal the beginning of a new pattern.
William Courtney, an adjunct senior fellow at the nonpartisan RAND Corporation and a retired U.S. ambassador to Georgia and Kazakhstan, said over the years, including in the Soviet period, leaders in Moscow have been wary about interfering in U.S. elections because of the possibilities of efforts backfiring. That’s what makes this seemingly open effort so striking.
“What they seem to be doing now is a little more open, but then again there has never been a presidential candidate that has been so positive to the leadership in the Kremlin than Donald Trump is in this campaign,” Courtney, who also served as special assistant to the President for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, said. “Since this is the first time there’s been a candidate who has been so friendly toward the leadership in Moscow, my guess is they want to try to take some advantage of that.”
“This is the most open, attributable interference by Russian leaders in any presidential campaign that I can remember,” he added.
After the DNC hack and subsequent posting of nearly 20,000 internal emails to WikiLeaks, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Wednesday directly appealed to Russia to “find” Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s emails from the private email server she used while Secretary of State.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Trump on Thursday claimed he was being “sarcastic” with his call for Russia to use cyberespionage, but other comments made by the candidate suggest a sympathy with Kremlin goals.
Trump’s statement last week that if he is president the U.S. will only defend NATO countries if they had “fulfilled their obligations to us,” and his comment on Wednesday that he would “be looking at” recognizing Crimea as Russian territory and lifting sanctions against Russia, fit neatly into Putin’s strategic aims.
Past interference
Russia has long sought to influence Western politics, and this incident, like other efforts by Russia in Europe, is “certainly consistent with the security services’ mandate to do what they call active measures, which we would refer to as covert action,” according to Steven Hall, a former senior CIA officer.
Hall, who retired from the CIA in 2015 and spent much of his career overseeing intelligence operations in the countries of the former Soviet Union and the former Warsaw Pact, said the DNC hack should be seen as “as a political action or political influence, as opposed to a collection kind of thing for them,” according to Hall. It doesn’t speak to a classic clandestine collection operation, given the “public angle to this,” he noted.
But efforts like this – and the tools used – are nothing new, experts pointed out. The 2007 incident of hackers taking out the Estonian internet in a massive distributed denial of service type attack marked the beginning of this new phase of Russian cyber activity.
In 2014, ahead of Ukraine’s presidential election, hackers infiltrated and took the country’s central election computers completely offline in an effort to disrupt and undermine the legitimacy of the vote. Operations were restored, but the effort by shadowy, pro-Russian hacking collective CyberBerkut to manipulate the vote-tallying system was a troubling sign of how cyberattacks could be used to influence elections. Ukraine also fell victim to a power outage in December 2015 caused by a cyberattack linked to a Russian hacking group.
Now, Russia seems to be “comfortable enough with the capability they have that they’re ready to start exporting them outside of Central and Eastern Europe,” Hudson Institute research fellow Hannah Thoburn said, pointing to recent hacks linked to Russia such as the 2015 infiltration of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff network’s unclassified email system and the hack that targeted the German parliament.
What is notable about the DNC situation, according to Thoburn, is the use of a secondary organization — WikiLeaks — to publicize the information. “It’s perfectly normal, frankly, for countries to spy on other countries. That’s not what’s new, but what is is actually releasing what they find and attempting to use that to, one, attempt to influence the electorate, and two, I think also to attempt to create a kind of moral equivalency between Russia and the West,” Thoburn said. “We’re always talking about how elections in Russia are rigged - clearly Putin is going to win — and in their own kind of strange way, releasing these emails is a way for the Russians to say, ‘Look, you’re just as bad as we are. You’re just the same.’”
The Kremlin’s strategy
“There’s a long term strategic goal of weakening NATO and dividing European countries from each other, and then dividing Europe from America,” Courtney said.
The “top foreign policy objective of Russia is to stir up and weaken Europe,” Courtney said, since Putin would rather deal with countries on a bilateral basis than with the European Union. The ability to pursue that strategy is dependent on “targets of opportunity,” he noted, such as Brexit, the rise of far right parties in Europe or the nomination of Trump.
Meanwhile, Robert Dannenberg, former managing director and head of the office of global security for Goldman Sachs, said he believes the U.S. “media analysis of the DNC hack by the Russians has completely missed the point.”
“The likely primary target for the WikiLeaks release wasn't U.S. domestic audiences at all, rather international audiences including leaders” such as Xi Jinping of China, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and others “who have been badgered by Putin in recent years to ignore the hypocritical moral posturing of the United States about corruption and other issues,” Dannenberg, who also worked at CIA for 24 years, said.
But it is NATO and weakening Europe that remains “front and center for Putin,” Hall said, and interfering in the West clearly aids that strategic aim.
“I don’t think he makes that strong of a distinction between the United States and NATO,” he said. “I think he honestly believes that NATO is a mechanism that the U.S. controls 100 percent.”
Putin’s goal is, essentially, to “make Russia great again,” Thoburn said, and it’s more than just a catchy riff off of Trump’s slogan for America.
“That actually in a flip way is his goal, to return Russia to its position in the world that he sees as its rightful place by whatever means it takes to get there,” she said.
Putin is not a “brilliant strategist,” according to her — he’s “an opportunist at its very best.” The Russian president takes advantage of any situation “in order to slowly push toward his goal of the growth of Russia” and to strengthen Russia at the expense of other countries.
“He sort of sees it rather starkly,” she said. “When we are weakened, he is strengthened — and vice versa.”
What Trump offers is merely a chance for Putin to promote his own strategic aims, according to Thoburn.
“I am very concerned by people who automatically jump to this conclusion that Trump is in some way a kind of Manchurian candidate or being run by the Russians — that conspiracy theory is a step too far. But what seems reasonably clear is that both Putin’s goals and Trump’s rhetoric have kind of a friendly position toward each other,” she said.
“Trump has his beliefs, Marine Le Pen has her beliefs, and it’s not because they’re being run by Russia. It’s the opposite way around — these are people who are of like mind and should thus be promoted in whatever way that means, verbally, loans, whatever it may be. I don’t like this push to say Trump is some kind of plant. That’s completely incorrect,” she added.
There are certainly eyebrow raising ties in the Trump campaign to Russian interests — a number of advisors on Trump’s campaign have now, or in the past, had financial interests in the country or expressed sympathy with Putin’s policies. Perhaps the most high-profile connection is with Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort, who previously worked as a consultant for Viktor Yanukovych, the former Putin-backed president of Ukraine who was ousted in 2014. As Hall said, “if he was dealing with Yanukovych in Ukraine, you can guarantee that the Kremlin blessed all of that relationship.”
Trump’s campaign has sought to emphasize that they have no contact with the Russians and Trump has tweeted he personally has “ZERO” investments in the country, but “that’s irrelevant,” Hall said.
“The Russians would do this with or without Trump,” he said. “They’ll do it just so they can demean the Democrats to hopefully get this Republican president.”
A new pattern?
This sort of activity is nothing new for Russia — but the DNC hack could speak to a new configuration of Russian interference in the West, experts said.
“The worry is that this could be the beginning of a new pattern,” Thoburn said. “It’s been ramping up now for many years, probably since 2007 in particular. But you have to wonder, is this going to become par for the course in elections around the world?”
Observers should watch upcoming elections, such as parliamentary elections in Croatia and Georgia this fall, and France’s presidential race in 2017, closely in light of this case of interference in Western politics, she noted.
Hall, meanwhile, recalled how a senior State Dept. official and Russia expert once told him, “Don’t underestimate simply how Russian national insecurity can actually be a policy for them.”
“I thought, Well, surely, they’re not just being what we would consider to be slightly sophomoric about that, slightly almost teenager-ish about this: Pay attention to me, you can’t do this! And I’ve had senior guys who spent years and years in Russia say, No, actually, that’s a big part of it,” he said. “Stymying U.S. and Western initiatives can in and of itself be a policy for Putin and for Russia, just because it contributes to that.”
