Cipher Brief Expert and former CIA Deputy Director for Counterintelligence, Mark Kelton wrote for The Cipher Brief back in 2017 that, The Man in the Kremlin Must be Smiling, saying that “Vladimir Putin is smiling because he thrives on chaos, particularly in the camp of the “Main Enemy,” a term the Soviet and Russian intelligence services have long used to refer to the United States.” So where are we today and what have we learned over these past three years?
Vladimir Putin should be unhappy. His dreams of restoring Moscow’s preeminent world role notwithstanding, the Russian President finds himself playing second fiddle to his fellow authoritarian in Beijing in an “Axis of Autocracy” defined less by common interests than by a common adversary. The Russian economy - beset by sanctions - is stagnant. Those sanctions, engendered by Putin’s aggression against his neighbors, remain in place. The chief target of that belligerence, Ukraine, has received arms that will make continuation of Putin’s depredations much more difficult. Putin’s pressure on the Baltic States continues unabated; but so does their will to resist. His ongoing efforts to prop up a puppet regime in Venezuela have devolved into parasitical Russian exploitation of that country’s oil reserves for much needed cash. Despite the best efforts of the FSB, 2019 saw the largest anti-regime protests since 2012 as Russians braved repression to belabor the new Tsar with demands for real democracy in their country. And now, Putin must once again gerrymander the Russian constitution to ensure his continued hold on power when his term of office ostensibly expires.
Even in the face of all that bad news, I suspect he is still smiling. If that is so, the reason is surely the continued success of the 2016 ‘active measures’ operation the old KGB officer directed against his eternal ‘main adversary’. As I noted in these pages some three years ago, Putin could not have anticipated that such an operation – which must have been run on a relative shoestring in resource terms - would bear so much fruit for so long.
Admittedly, the consequences of that campaign have not all been positive from a Russian perspective. The Chekist in the Kremlin would surely have liked to have been able to engage the Trump administration on issues that are of interest to him, including arms control and sanctions relief. Potential political ramifications in the U.S. have, however, made regular meetings between Washington and Moscow on the most senior level, as the Russians like to say, much more difficult. On balance, l suspect Putin is quite satisfied with the havoc his operation has wrought, and continues to wreak, in the camp of the eternal ‘main adversary’.
That chaos has been considerable, inspiring a vitriolic partisan divide in the U.S. that at times seems unbridgeable. Predictably, the so-called “Trump Dossier” - granted unwarranted credibility for so long by so many - has proven to be a chimera. A mix of open source information, barroom rumor, speculation and probable FSB feed material, it was called into serious question by the findings of the Muller and Horowitz reports. The fact that it was given credence by many who should have known better is testament to politics superseding prudence.
Those who have pushed the Trump-Russia narrative refused to let it go even after the lengthy Mueller investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin and whether the President himself might be Putin’s hireling came up empty. A comment by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the recently concluded impeachment saga speaks to this. “This isn’t about Ukraine,” Pelosi said in December 2019. “It’s about Russia. Who benefitted by our withholding – withholding of that military assistance? Russia. It’s about Russia….All roads lead to Putin.” Putin himself, ever willing to stir the pot to keep a helpful narrative going, goaded the President’s accusers and the press by describing the impeachment charges as “completely made up” and impeachment itself as an effort to reverse the 2016 election.
The impact of Putin’s operation on the U.S. intelligence Community (IC) must bring him particular satisfaction. Since President Trump came into office, a torrent of politically-driven leaks have handed the Russians sensitive information they otherwise would have had to work hard to collect clandestinely. Building a productive relationship between this President and the IC was always going to be a heavy lift given the new President’s style and the fact that he had neither prior military nor government service. That task was rendered all the more difficult given that his initial experiences with intelligence involved salacious accusations and false claims that he was the Kremlin’s stooge. That some former intelligence seniors - whose predecessors comported themselves with quiet dignity after leaving government - have taken to twitter and the editorial pages to launch broadsides against the President has only made the work of their successors that much harder. Sadly, feelings among intelligence veterans about the Trump Presidency have reached the point where even polite clapping is misunderstood.
The irony that all of this continuing furor only serves to help a Russian leader to whom excessive power and influence is wrongly ascribed seems to be lost on all too many. In a reprise of the fantastical Cold War film “Red Dawn” or the “Call of Duty” videogame, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff warned that Russia must be stopped in Ukraine so “we don't have to fight Russia here.” Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee subsequently went to far as to suggest that Russia might have been responsible for the Iowa Caucus vote-counting debacle.
Such casting of Putin as a modern day “Baba Yaga” – a boogeyman – feeds into a narrative he very much wants to continue to exploit. Speaking to the House Oversight Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that while the FBI is not seeing “efforts to target election infrastructure like we did in 2016”, Russia is still “engaged in ‘Information Warfare’ heading into the 2020 presidential election”. The Russian methodology, Wray explained, is to “identify an issue that they know the American people feel passionately about on both sides and then they take both sides up so they pit us against each other.” Their goal, he concluded, is to “weaken our confidence in our elections and our democratic institutions”.
Given the impact of Putin’s ‘active measures’ campaign, we have no reason to expect that he - or other nations that have noted the operation’s effectiveness - will cease using what Wray termed a “pernicious and asymmetric way of engaging in information warfare” against us until we demonstrate we are no longer susceptible to it.
Perhaps the results of the upcoming Presidential elections will serve to dampen the continuing impact of Putin’s active measures campaign against us. If that is to happen – if we are to wipe that smile off his face - we will have to absorb the principal lesson-learned of this affair. However professionally skillful they may have been in executing this operation, Putin’s intelligence services only instigated the turmoil that has roiled our country since 2016. They have had to do little to keep that tumult going. That is something we have done to ourselves.
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