Cipher Brief Expert and former CIA Station Chief Dan Hoffman was in Helsinki filing question and answer dispatches for Cipher Brief members. Here’s a look at his post-summit brief:
The Cipher Brief: Presidents Trump and Putin met for a little over two hours on Monday. We’re told that aides were not allowed in the room, and President Trump came out praising the Russian leader, much to the dismay of those – both Democrats and Republicans – had expected him to press the Russian leader on a number of critical national security issues. That obviously didn’t happen. What was your initial reaction?
Hoffman: My assessment is looking at what happened today through the eyes of the Kremlin. At the end of the day, I see my value, as someone who can look at the world as closely as possible through the eyes of Vladimir Putin. Putin came to Helsinki to create the impression that it’s impossible for the U.S. to solve the myriad of problems in the world, without Russia’s help and one of the reasons, I think, that Putin wanted the meeting in Finland, aside from the fact that it’s logistically easy for him after the World Cup, is that it got President Trump as close as possible to Moscow, without actually going there. Putin had a very short distance to travel obviously, and I think for Putin maybe, there’s a subtle point there for Trump coming to him. As if to say, ‘if you want to solve the major issues of the world: nuclear proliferation, arms control, Syria, North Korea, Iran’s Nuclear program, then you’re not going to solve these problems without Russia. Putin wants the world to believe that Russia is so consequential, that it’s on par with the United States.
The Cipher Brief: President Putin used language in the press conference that fell along those lines, saying that he had offered his suggestions to President Trump.
Hoffman: Right, like we’re going to solve these problems together. Irrespective of the fact that Putin is causing some of those problems himself, he’s the one who aided and abetted Assad to commit crimes against humanity, and he created this migration crisis for the region, and the world. He’s the one who blocked countless United Nations security council resolutions that would have at least allowed us to hold Assad accountable and put an end to the Syrian humanitarian catastrophe. He’s the one who’s foreign minister has talked about ratcheting down sanctions on North Korea before negotiations, because Russia has economic interests in N. Korea, and would lik,e for strategic reasons, to reduce or eliminate altogether the U.S. military presence and eliminate our U.S. military exercises. So there’s no question that we have a multi-faceted relationship with Russia, we need to talk to them. But, we shouldn’t make these sort of assumptions that we’re going to see the world the same way, because we don’t.
The Cipher Brief: President Trump sided today with President Putin over the U.S. Intelligence Community when it came to assessments that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. election. How do you feel about that, having spent most of your career in the IC?
Hoffman: Well, here are the facts. Russia meddled in our election. They targeted our social networking and media sites to degrade our trust in those sites because they are the infrastructure, the backbone of modern democracy. They haven’t stopped. They are mounting a full-scale assault on our democratic process. And, I would have expected President Trump’s Intelligence community, as I know they did, to tell him this is what’s going on and why. For his Russia director in the NSC, Fiona Hill, who knows Russia as well, in my opinion, as anybody on the planet, to have said the same thing. The DNI just said publicly, that the system is blinking red. That invokes George Tenet’s words after 9-11. That’s a very stark admonition. And then Ambassador Bolton has called Russia’s cyber attacks on America an ‘act of war’. So these are President Trump’s own people, who are vociferously arguing about the threat emanating from Russia.
And Trump persists in seeing Russia through what I would argue appears to be this prism, maybe warped as it might appear to be, of domestic politics, and this slight he believes he suffered, from those who think that he didn’t win the election. The irony of all of this is that is exactly what Putin wanted us to believe at this press conference. Putin says ‘Yes, of course I wanted President Trump to win’. He’s got the Cheshire grin, the wink and nod. ‘Of course, I meddled in your election, I just can’t tell you that directly’. He, Putin, goes through the old, tired MO of, “show me the evidence”, so he can see where we’re getting our evidence from, so he can kill the sources, sometimes literally. That’s what he always wants to do. Or this horrifically bad idea of a cyber security working group. One of the things I’ve been saying all day on TV is that, that’s like inviting a criminal, who committed the crime, to help you solve the crime. I mean, we just don’t do that.
The Cipher Brief: And what about the Intelligence Community?
Hoffman: I think there’s no doubt that the President is conflicted about our Intelligence Community. He had some very harsh words about the conduct of the investigation related to the Hillary Clinton email scandal. But I think he’s allowing that to cloud his judgment, in terms of how he defends the United States. The Russians are going to meddle in the 2018 elections. What I argued yesterday here in Helsinki, was that the President needed to own this debate. Moral persuasion doesn’t work, sometimes you need to rap the Russians on the knuckles. What I was hoping Trump would say is, ‘I’m not going to ask you if you meddled in our election, I know you did. If you keep doing it, you’re going to pay a price. You know that I follow through when I say there is a red line, and there’s a red line here. This might have been something that began under my predecessor, but I’m going to finish it. And you’re not going to threaten my country’s national security anymore. So, when stuff starts going sideways in Russia because of what you are doing, you were forewarned, and the world was forewarned that I was going to do this. You’ve got one last chance to stop it’.
He didn’t do that, and there’s collateral damage. Here in our own country he’s been on the bully pulpit, speaking to his followers, and NATO allies in Europe, who have also been the target of Russian influence campaigns in Cyber Space.
The Cipher Brief: The President didn’t take the tone that you’d hoped he would have taken in this summit. Do you think, under any circumstances that you can see, based on your history, and experience that President Putin will change one single thing about the way that the Russians have been operating against the U.S., to date?
Hoffman: No, absolutely not. And, what I mean about this multi-faceted relationship we have, there are some who say that the President shouldn’t make a big deal about the meddling, because he’s got to solve bigger issues like Syria and arms control. I would argue that those are separate, that the Russians always want to link things together, and want to induce us not to make them pay a price for their nefarious behavior. And, I don’t know that we have a plan to counter what will be ongoing threats to our election, and that’s a real concern for our national security.
The Cipher Brief: What are you most worried about next? Are you worried that now the world has an emboldened Putin, who may be more aggressive? What would you expect, given your experience, might happen next?
Hoffman: Putin is launching a full-scale assault. I don’t think it’s as if he’s going to take it to a level 11, I mean he’s already bringing it pretty strong. There is a Kremlin return address on everything he’s doing. He wants us to know. There is a trail of breadcrumbs leading from just about every place that was hacked, leading right back to the Kremlin and Putin. And what I find odd, is that the President (Trump), at least sometimes, seemed to be very ready to engage in political battles during the campaign. During the primaries he was a tough competitor, he didn’t spare anybody. And he has certainly been hard on some of our allies. I’ve talked a lot about Putin’s formative experience as a KGB officer, but what actually matters more is that he was the Director of the FSB from 1998-99. Those are the guys who oppress their own citizens, and who mount a full court surveillance against foreign officials, of whom I was one. And if there is any group of people with whom we don’t share anything in common, in terms of the world view, it’s the FSB.
The Cipher Brief: Given what you’ve just said, how do you square all of the speculation in the U.S. that Russia must have something on President Trump? We’ve seen no evidence to support that, but blackmail has always been a typical strategy of the FSB.
Hoffman: I’ll reiterate, that you’ve got to be really careful about jumping to conclusions.
The Cipher Brief: The allegations have been out there a long time.
Hoffman: The onus has been, and will always be on our intelligence community to collect the intelligence, about what is driving Putin to do what he is going. And I don’t like to speculate, because I think that Intel officers should look at the evidence and make judgements, be they high or low confidence, but based on the evidence. There’s no question that President Trump wants to have a positive relationship with Putin. So if I were an analyst in another country, say Western Europe, not the U.S., and I’m asking myself “Why is that”? It is possible that Trump understands that Putin did meddle in the election, that he did want him to win, and for political reasons, why should he do anything to change Putin’s calculus? That’s an extraordinarily Machiavellian approach to politics. I don’t see any evidence of that, but I would not be surprised if some come to that conclusion. But I’ll emphasize that I don’t have that evidence right now. I’m still in fact finding mode. From everything I’m seeing from today’s summit, I’m seeing a split within President Trump’s own administration now. You have two subject matter experts out in front saying essentially that Russia is at war with us, and the system is blinking red. I’m now going to wait and see where the political dialogue takes us, on the Republican side. I feel like the President missed an opportunity to lead our nation, and to lead his own party with some kind of strong policy, of the sort that we’ve become accustomed to with Republican Presidents, like Ronald Reagan. Today, we didn’t hear any evil empire moment. It would have been right for the President to make that kind of statement, and what better place than Finland to do it? The Soviets invaded Finland and it was only the heroism of Finnish soldiers fighting the Red Army that allowed them to maintain their independence after the war. And it’s really a lesson for all countries here in the region to resist Russian aggression and the United States needs to take the moral and strategic leadership, and that was lacking today.
The Cipher Brief: Final thoughts?
Hoffman: I can’t help but think that Putin knew this would further tear us apart, and frankly we’re allowing him to do it. I think that President Trump had an opportunity to put it rest today, in the interest of national security and the political discourse in our country, and I think that’s where history will not judge very kindly the results of this summit. He’s going to be dogged by this going forward, and it’s going to be absolutely fascinating to watch how this shakes out in American politics. I’ll add one more thing, for an intelligence officer, we’re used to doing our work in the shadows, and not being the subject of political infighting, both between our two major parties, and within parties. I can only imagine how unbelievably challenging, and uncomfortable that must be for my former colleagues.
