Russia
Bottom Line: The Kremlin employs an array of often overlapping and competitive security and intelligence services to create multiple sources of intelligence, encourage risk-taking and keep a wary eye on each other. This has enabled Russian President Vladimir Putin to consolidate power by playing agencies off of each other to ...
During the leadup to the 2016 presidential elections, Russia bots, trolls and media outlets such as RT and Sputnik were actively messaging about the political contest that eventually resulted in the election of President Donald Trump. Cyberattacks on servers used by the two major American political parties were traced by ...
This article has been updated to include comments from Cipher Brief experts. On Monday, the U.S. and UK jointly blamed Moscow for cyber intrusions into the backbone of the internet – the routers and switches that are the gateway for internet access in major corporations and your home office. “Since ...
“The world has been more dangerous, but it has never been more complicated.” These were the words Michael Hayden, former director of both CIA and NSA, used to launch the 2018 Threat Report at The Cipher Brief’s Annual Threat Conference in Sea Island, Ga., on Sunday. Hayden first prefaced the ...
In the book “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy,” John Le Carré’s chief character, retired British intelligence officer George Smiley, is reminded of the danger of old spies staying too long in the game. To avoid that trap, Smiley vows to leave the secret world behind by retiring to the country where ...
Editor's Note: The Cipher Brief reached out to former CIA Director John Brennan for a response to the published op-ed, but he declined to comment. - Russian President Vladimir Putin has directed most of Russia’s military and intelligence resources against Russia’s “Main Enemy,” the United States, since he became prime ...
The West’s coordinated expulsion of more than 150 Russian diplomats in response to the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal is a sign, perhaps, of a reinvigorated transatlantic relationship – a relationship that pro-Kremlin social media accounts have actively sought to undermine. Until recently, however, most of the attention on ...
As Russia was announcing who it would kick out over the mass expulsion of Russian spies over a nerve agent attack in Britain, the U.K.’s National Security Adviser Mark Sedwill was in Washington Thursday, conferring with Americans on next steps to check Moscow’s aggression. “It’s mainly about a coherent approach ...
As the U.S., NATO and other allies move against Russia over an alleged nerve agent attack against a former Russian spy in Britain, bipartisan moves are afoot in Congress to strengthen U.S. ties to NATO. Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina ...
The United States has taken a number of steps in recent weeks to push back on Russian aggression, but they won’t deter Russia’s aggressive campaign to expand influence at home and abroad unless they take direct aim at the power and pocketbook of Russian President Vladimir Putin – and the ...
The U.S., EU and other Western allies announced Monday that they would expel a total of more than 100 Russian diplomats they claim are spies, in retaliation for the nerve agent attack on former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain. The U.S., UK and many other ...
The Trump administration has accused Russia of a coordinated “multi-stage intrusion campaign” to hack into critical U.S. infrastructure networks and conduct “network reconnaissance” while attempting to delete evidence of their intrusions. Homeland Security officials say they have helped the affected companies remove the Russian hackers from their compromised networks, but ...
In the latter part of the 18th century, not too long after an earlier annexation of Crimea by Russia, a Russian governor by the name of Grigory Potemkin hoped to impress Russian empress Catherine II by building fake villages along the banks of the Dnieper River. As Catherine’s vessel floated ...
Russia continues to wage hybrid warfare across Europe and the United States, and—for the most part—the West has been slow to respond, leaving some to ask – did the first Cold War ever really end, before this new conflict began? Former CIA and NSA chief Gen. (ret.) Michael Hayden joined ...
President Donald Trump’s unwillingness to publicly make plain that Russia is undertaking a large-scale active measures campaign against our democracy is forcing others in office to fill the void. It is leading lawmakers to press executive branch officials to make explicit statements about military war plans and intelligence community covert ...
President Donald Trump seized upon Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 37-page indictment with a tweet that the Russians were laughing over their successful information war against the U.S. For President Vladimir Putin, espionage against what he and his Soviet predecessors call their “Main Enemy” is no laughing matter. Relentlessly focused on ...
Bottom Line: Russia’s use of private military contractors in Syria lends the Kremlin deniability that becomes problematic when the U.S. tries to calculate how to retaliate against incursions again U.S. and coalition troops by the Assad regime. The problem reared its head earlier this month when the of U.S. conducted ...
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has released the indictment of 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election. The indictment charges all of the defendants with conspiracy to defraud the United States, three defendants with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and ...
The U.S. Navy is facing tough challenges on an anemic budget: China and Russia’s growing Naval prowess; threats proliferating from increasingly advanced weapons systems; a force stretched too thin by an ever-expanding mission; and an inability to say “no” when asked to do more. The capabilities of the U.S. Navy ...
The U.S. coalition says in defending its own troops, it killed an estimated 100 pro-Assad regime fighters on Wednesday. This clash, which took place in Khusham near the Euphrates River, is the largest reported to date between U.S.-backed forces and pro-regime forces in Syria. Here’s what happened, according to public ...
Pentagon chief Jim Mattis defended the administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) as the right response to Russia’s rising nuclear capacity and its failure to abide by international treaties, in comments to the House Armed Services Committee Tuesday. The NPR calls for the creation of two new submarine-launched nuclear weapons: ...
In various and sundry NATO countries, the United States has stationed 200-plus B-61 tactical nuclear bombs, current and older versions of which have dial-a-yield settings that allow various explosive yields, one of which is as low as the equivalent of 300 tons of TNT, or 0.3 kilotons. That was one ...
CIA Director Michael Pompeo told Democrats that there is nothing “untoward” about meeting with Russia’s senior spy chiefs, following reports that he did just that last week. Russian media reported that Pompeo met with Sergey Naryshkin, chief of Russian foreign intelligence who is currently sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department ...
Just ahead of President Donald Trump’s delivery of the State of the Union, the State Department released a list of “influential Russians,” including several politicians and oligarchs, who could face sanctions in the future for their proximity to the Kremlin. The list was later determined to be pulled from Forbes’ ...
Bottom Line: The potential of economic development in the Arctic for a financially strapped Russia has increased the Kremlin’s attention to the security of its northern waters. The result is a push to bolster its military presence in the region. But against a backdrop of increasing geopolitical tensions between Russia ...
Bottom Line: Multiple rounds of peace talks aimed at ending Syria’s seven-year civil war have failed to yield results or relieve a catastrophic humanitarian crisis throughout the country. While the Trump administration throws its support behind a United Nations-led process that aims to deliver a roadmap for peace, Russia has ...
In the version of Aesop’s fable, “The Farmer and the Viper,” as recounted by Roman fabulist Gaius Julius Phaedrus, a farmer finds a viper freezing in the snow. Taking pity, he picks up the snake and puts it inside his coat to warm it up. True to its nature, the ...
President Donald Trump, concerned that investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections cast doubt over his legitimacy, has consistently dismissed and denigrated such probes. The decision by Dianne Feinstein, as the Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, to unilaterally release the transcript of closed testimony by Fusion GPS co-founder ...
Bottom Line: Russia and Iran have forged a strategic symbiotic relationship anchored in economic, defense and energy cooperation. And as the Trump administration ramps up both rhetoric and sanctions on key figures and entities linked to the Iranian regime, and threatens to impose more – Washington could end up pushing ...
Much has been written about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election – the theft and selective leaking of information, the attempt to tamper with state voting systems, and the weaponization of social media. Every day brings further revelations about Moscow’s still-ongoing information operations in the U.S. Yet little of this ...
Bottom Line: The U.S. and its NATO allies have warned that an uptick in Russian submarine activity near undersea fiber optic cables means Moscow may be plotting to disrupt or intercept sensitive or other critical internet communications in the event of a confrontation with the West. Their warning serves as ...
For this last week of 2017, we asked our experts to look back on key topics for this year, and predict what they see for the year ahead. Cipher Brief expert, CIA veteran and Russia hand Steve Hall looks ahead to U.S. relations with Moscow, as Russia gears up for ...
The United States Navy has achieved unmatched supremacy on the world’s seas, but Russia and China are diligently growing their naval capabilities, trying to close the gap. Should U.S. naval enterprises fail to match their rivals’ pace, then Moscow and Beijing’s maritime advancements could challenge U.S. geostrategic interests, including its ...
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Funny, that. The Soviet and Russian intelligence services have been doing exactly the same thing against us for decades, but this time it finally worked. Why? As most Americans are aware ...
The military withdrawal from Syria that President Vladimir Putin touts is less than it seems. The stakes are high because leaders in Moscow see the intervention as crucial to their nation’s status as a global power. Moscow faces a dilemma, but there is a way out, if it will only see ...
A coordinated operation is underway between the White House and Republican members of Congress to undermine Special Counsel Robert A. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, just as the inquiry begins to zero in on President Trump and his closest advisers. Their joint campaign is ...
Russia’s annexation of Crimea, intervention in eastern Ukraine, and meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election have escalated distrust and rancor between the U.S. and Russia to levels unprecedented since the Cold War. For two decades, President Vladimir Putin has driven a resurgent Russia to assert its interests globally, often ...
New FBI Director Christopher A. Wray is signaling that he takes the possibility of future Russian meddling in U.S. elections seriously, and he plans to run a bureau of “integrity and professionalism” to tackle such threats –despite President Donald Trump’s continuing effort to slap the label of “FAKE NEWS” on covert ...
Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to exploit open and free U.S. cyberspace, which serves as a force multiplier for commerce and freedom of expression, with hacking and discoverable influence operations. Conducting all-source forensics following these Russian attacks on our democratic process, U.S. social media networking sites are in the ...
The blowback over forcing Russian news outlets “Russia Today” (RT) and “Sputnik” to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) has raised questions about whether the law does enough to track foreign influence in the modern media age – or whether it’s the wrong tool to use in the ...
It’s always the cover-up. That was the starting point for unraveling Nixon’s Watergate and Reagan’s Iran-contra affair. I covered both scandals and believe special counsel Robert Mueller III is going down the same path taken years ago by special prosecutors Archibald Cox (Watergate) and Lawrence Walsh (Iran-contra). The pattern is ...
The Trump administration wants you to know that Syrian strongman Bashar Assad isn’t doing as well as he, or his Russian and Iranian allies want you to think, and that’s why they’re going to have to agree to some concessions at U.N.-sponsored talks in Geneva, rather than retaking the country ...
The Cipher Brief asked former CIA Russia hand John Sipher to react to the news that Trump administration National Security Adviser Michael Flynn admitted to lying to the FBI, making him the first Trump White House official to face criminal charges in the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. The ...
Moscow may increasingly look toward private military companies (PMCs), known in Russia as Chastnye Voennie Companiy (ChVK), to exert plausibly deniable and economically and politically sustainable military influence abroad, according to experts speaking to The Cipher Brief. Unlike relying on proxies such as ragtag local militias or organized criminal groups ...
For this year’s Thanksgiving Day feature, The Cipher Brief revisits its coverage of the Kremlin’s strategic use of blackmail to silence dissent at home and undermine opposition abroad. Known in Russian intelligence lexicon as kompromat, or compromising material, blackmail has long played the role of leveraging personal information for political ...
The revelation that Donald Trump Jr. was in contact with WikiLeaks throughout the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign is just the latest in a long catalog of leaks and discoveries about previously hidden contacts between surrogates of both the Trump campaign and Russia. A media frenzy naturally follows each new disclosure, ...
Speaking to the Russian Federal Assembly in March 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin defended his country’s annexation of Crimea and forcefully presented his national security strategy to gain the upper hand in Russia’s rivalry with the United States. He blamed the U.S. for seeking regime change through “color revolutions” and the ...
Concealment, imitation and disinformation - tactics known as maskirovka – were part of a Soviet doctrine used by their military and intelligence services – namely the KGB and GRU. The principal military purpose of maskirovka is to mislead an enemy regarding the disposition, composition and intentions of its forces. Under ...
Bosnia and Herzegovina has been held together under two separate entities ever since the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995 ended the civil war and created the present-day country: The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, made up of Bosniaks and Croats, and Republika Srpska, home to the country’s Serbs. But the ...
President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday announced their commitment to defeating the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, in Syria and agreed “there is no military solution to the conflict in Syria,” they said in a joint statement. "The Presidents affirmed their commitment to Syria’s sovereignty, unity, ...