The FRONTLINE Interviews

Evan Osnos

The New Yorker

Evan Osnos is a staff writer for The New Yorker, where he covers politics and foreign affairs. Osnos has written extensively about Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Russia's interference in the 2016 election. His March 2017 story, "Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War," co-authored with David Remnick and Joshua Yaffa, examined the motivations for Russia's interference – and what lies ahead for U.S.-Russia relations.

This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk conducted on June 12, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Putin’s Road to War

The Putin Files

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Intervention in the U.S. Election

Our film will start with the thing we call the cold open, which is the basic hacking of the DNC [Democratic National Committee] and then [Clinton campaign chair John] Podesta’s emails.So I’ll ask you a couple questions about that territory.We’ll get to it later in more depth, probably.

Yeah, I interviewed Podesta for this piece.¹

OK. So set the scene for me.What was that? What was happening?How surprising was it when it rolled out?Just tell me the story of what happened there.

When John Podesta was running the Clinton campaign, he was fully prepared for the possibility they might be hacked.This had become essentially expected over the course of the last presidential cycle or two.The Chinese had hacked into the Obama campaign. They had hacked into the Romney campaign.²

It wasn’t an unimaginable thing to happen.

And as John Podesta thought, he thought he had pretty good email hygiene in the sense that he knew not to click on things. ...John Podesta received an email that was a spear-phishing attack, essentially asking him to click on something which would then give a hacker access to his email.³

And at the time, he thought we have pretty good practices in place; we don’t click on things like that.But in fact, he had a staff that was reading his email, that was responsible for responding, because he was getting so much, and somebody in his office, as he puts it, clicked on that link, and that was the fateful moment.

And its impact?

By clicking on that link, in a sense it opened up all of John Podesta’s email to viewing by the hacking team.One of the interesting things is that John Podesta thought that he had been getting rid of his email; he had been archiving it.He thought that meant that it was inaccessible.In fact, all that meant was that it was out of view to him but was available to hackers.Once they got in, then there was the whole storehouse of campaign information going back months and months.

And what's in there?

Some of it was really kind of trivial.It was things like his recipe for risotto, which became a kind of pop culture phenomenon when it leaked.⁴

But other things in there were very damaging to the campaign. …

Essentially what it did was made clear all of the internal small-bore machinations within the campaign that ordinarily you would want to keep quiet.In a sense this began to leach out into the public, and people at first couldn’t differentiate what was serious from what was not serious.There was a bit of a fixation in the news, where reporters began to gravitate to these small, sort of silly stories.But by doing so, in fact, reporters were becoming in effect tools of the hackers, because the reporters were putting into the paper exactly the things that the hackers wanted exposed.

The drip, drip, drip of nightly news is impacting the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

Yeah, and what happened is really interesting, because in some ways, the most damaging effect of the hacking of John Podesta’s email was that it created this cloud called “email,” just this big, undifferentiated mass of headlines, which merged two unrelated themes of the campaign: one, her private server, which allowed her to keep email that was separate from her State Department email; and then two, this hacking of John Podesta’s email and campaign emails.Now, if you asked members of the public, “Do these things have anything to do with each other?,” a lot of people will tell you: “Well, sure.It’s all under the heading of email.”

From the campaign’s perspective, this was disastrous.What they began to conclude was that there was this menacing problem just known as “email,” and it was this combined effect of exposure, revelation and ultimately vulnerability.

When it’s discovered that it’s likely to be Russia, what do people think?

Initially, when this was discovered to be associated with Russia, people didn’t take it all that seriously.Even within the Podesta—even—let me say it—even within Clinton’s campaign, there was a feeling that, well, what real damage could this do?This was part of the puzzle of the Russia interference in this campaign, is that for a lot of people, it felt like an antique problem.Really, it was something out of the Cold War. The idea that Russia was interfering in a U.S. election did not feel like the kind of problem that we contend with in this day and age.

So they didn’t take it all that seriously.There were some people within the United States government who were concerned. They were very concerned. And this is when reporters started to hear about it.One of the things I find really interesting is that, in the fall of 2016, long before Donald Trump was elected, long before government agencies had really talked in any detail about the level of Russian interference in the election, I started hearing from sources in the government, in the Obama administration, in the Intelligence Community, that they were concerned that this story wasn’t getting enough attention.

This is unusual. I don’t usually get calls like that. I don’t usually get contacts like that.People were feeling as if the Russia story was being overwhelmed by the trivial details of the campaign, and people were not paying attention to what the professionals regarded as a serious national security threat.

Once it’s sort of out in the open, and everybody understands that it’s happening, what do they tell you the impact of it was?

Well, at the time, before the election, nobody was really sure how big this was going to be. Nobody knew what the impact could be.I think people basically felt that probably there might be some surface effects, it might alter a few people’s opinions, but it seemed inconceivable that it could actually have a meaningful effect ultimately on the results of the election.

But in fact, there were some people who were beginning to realize that there was going to have a more meaningful impact. ...One of the features of the Russian involvement was the creation of automated Twitter accounts, essentially bots, accounts with nobody behind them.⁵

It was hard to tell immediately what the effect was, but one of the effects was that during the debates, these bots would immediately amplify the messages that Donald Trump was saying and promoting.As a result, those would become trending topics on Twitter.And then old-school, conventional media, the print and broadcast journalists, would look at the trending topics as a basis on which to decide what to write about.So it was a cycle that the bots would promote a message, and then the conventional media would pick up on that message and put it into print and put it on the air.In a way that the public really wasn’t even aware of, the bots were having an impact already.

The impact being disruption? Chaos? Or victory?

The effect being distortion.It was distorting what was the true focus and center of gravity in the campaign.It was taking ideas that were perhaps not popular in their own right and making them popular by giving them this technical assist, by putting them out in front of the public in a way that—this is one of the puzzles of social media, is that it becomes very hard to know what is genuine and what is inauthentic, what is artificial and what is the real public mood.

All you can do is look online and look at the data.But in this case, the data itself was being manipulated by the creation of accounts that weren’t real.These weren’t real people. These weren’t real opinions, but they were having an effect, a distorting effect, on the American public.

What did Putin want? Why did he do this?

Chaos. He wanted chaos.Vladimir Putin saw, correctly and quite clearly, that there were fissures in American life that he could exploit.He could go in, and he could—you know, he saw an adversary, and that’s the way he views the United States, as a place that was already fragile, already weakened by disputes over ideology and class and opportunity, and he drove a wedge into those openings.In some ways, this is a classic tool of espionage and intelligence.It’s not that you go after a society in the places where it’s strong.You don’t go head to head against the United States.You look for the places in your adversary’s society where they are open to exploitation, and then you try to crumple them from within.That's what Vladimir Putin was doing.

Active measures.

Active measures.And it was tried and true.In some ways, the biggest surprise was, the United States had seen this kind of thing happen in other countries, small countries, in Estonia and Georgia.⁶

It never occurred to Americans, even at the highest levels of national security circles, that we would be vulnerable to the same techniques.

Vladimir Putin's Early Life

Let’s go back now and build the character of Vladimir Putin that puts him in a place to do what we’ve just talked about. …We in the film will start with him in Dresden as the Soviet Union is kind of collapsing.

Yeah, that’s natural. I think that’s great.

Who is that man standing there, slightly off center, out of the glasnost, perestroika that’s happening in Moscow and other parts of Russia, in Germany?At that time, the Wall has come down; the place is erupting. Who is that Vladimir Putin?

That Vladimir Putin is offended by what he regards as the weakness in Moscow, the inability to stand up to the forces of history that would have defended Russia’s honor.For most people, the fall of the Soviet Union was regarded as a great turn in history toward freedom and liberty, but to Vladimir Putin, this was a tragedy at the highest order.This was the latest humiliation in the Russian story.

And in a way that was not evident at the time, at least not to any of us over here, it was the beginning of a process by which he imagined he himself, he with his very hands, could restore Russian dignity.At that moment, there he is, shredding documents in Dresden.It would be a long time before he had the capacity to be able to go back and to begin to chip away at what he regarded as the American assault, the assault from the Western rules-based order against Russian power and pride.But that the battle had been joined at that point. That was the moment.

... After the fall, after communism breaks up, the esteemed David Hoffman tells us that a lot of the KGB guys, almost all the KGB guys are shipwrecked.⁷

They're just—

—at sea, yeah. They're lost. They don’t know what to do anymore.Yeah, the polarities had been scrapped.

Putin's Political Rise

And what is our man, what is life like for our man and other people like him in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia?

Well, let me put it in Putin’s terms.What Vladimir Putin watched was Boris Yeltsin becoming friendly to Bill Clinton.He became a sort of buddy. They would go and have these feel-good public events.Boris Yeltsin would come to Washington, and Clinton treated him with a sort of patronizing friendship.

But patronizing is not something that Vladimir Putin really readily accepts, and during this period, he is getting increasingly incensed.He’s getting more and more aware of the idea that Russia is not being treated as a great power.It is, in fact, being treated as a sort of low-grade ally or friend of the United States.He regarded Boris Yeltsin as an embarrassment, an embarrassment to Russia.He [Yeltsin] was often drunk on the public stage.⁸

He was not standing up for Russian power and muscular public presence.He was not the face of Russia that Vladimir Putin would want.

But Vladimir Putin was also very shrewd, and he maintained enough of a relationship with Boris Yeltsin, so that when the time came, he was in a position to be back in power.

Was that his style, from what you can tell?

I'm sort of grinning, but yeah, I think he was, you know—I always revert to Chinese cliches, but it’s avoid the overt confrontation, you know, if you can do it.

And Russia, the once-proud Russia, during Yeltsin, is in what shape?

It was on its back. ...The United States, with the cooperation of multilateral organizations like the IMF [International Monetary Fund], was imposing a set of requirements on Russia that were, in some cases, brutal.They were putting the economy through austerity measures that were painful and that were a reminder of the leverage that the West had on the once-great former Soviet Union. …⁹

So Putin is watching this and stewing and, in a sense, biding his time for the moment when he could be in a position to change the balance.

And thoughts about the rise of Putin through—anything about Chechnya?Anything about the apartment buildings going down? Any of that in your memory banks?

… What's interesting, something that began to shift, is in the early 2000s, the United States in Iraq embraced a powerful new idea, which was the concept of regime change.This was the idea that we would, both alone and with the cooperation of the United Nations when possible, we would go in and remove regimes that we found offensive.Vladimir Putin had, up to a certain point, tried to build a relationship with the United States, of a certain kind.You know, there were moments of—there were moments of cooperation.

But after the invasion of Iraq, Vladimir Putin concluded that this was an American system that could not be trusted.In some ways it was a return to first principles for him.He concluded that the United States, when possible, would use its power and leverage to depose leaders that it did not agree with, and from Vladimir Putin’s perspective, that was an existential threat.

Putin's Vision for Russia in his First Term

When he becomes president, the more you read about him, the more it becomes clear that he believes a sort of complete rule, complete idea.The Russian people need a strongman. They need an autocrat.They’ve needed that for thousands of years.They needed somebody who just pulls them together and tells them what to do, and he, I guess, felt like he was that guy.

Yeah, I think both for domestic reasons and because of his perception of how the world is truly organized, he believes that the only answer is strength; the only answer is a strongman.Anything short of being a “real man,” as he would put it, is a fantasy.You can't rule your own country that way.You're vulnerable to challenges from within, and you are certainly vulnerable to challenges from outside.

His answer always has been strength first.It is not the idea of forging cooperation with fragile friends or alliances with other countries with whom you might have fundamental differences.In a way, the mistake that the United States made was the belief that, at the end of the Cold War, that the principles which had organized Russian politics for so long no longer mattered. From Vladimir Putin’s perspective, they mattered just as much as ever.And it was about waiting until the right moment presented itself, when you had the right set of factors in American politics and in American life, when he could challenge us on our own turf.

My impression of Putin’s rise is, that when he meets George Bush, and George W. Bush looks in his eyes and sees whatever he sees, that it was, for him, a kind of moment of maybe we can share the world, or maybe there's detente; maybe there's something here.What happened there?

I return to Iraq, essentially.I think Vladimir Putin watched as an American president with whom he had some sort of fragile rapport embarked on a foreign policy adventure that the United States had not done in decades.This was something we hadn’t done quite that way ever before, where we marshaled the full power of American intelligence and our reputation on the international stage, and we turned it against a single man, Saddam Hussein, and used it to take down a government.

From Vladimir Putin’s perspective, that could not be tolerated, and certainly could not be cooperated with.You could never endorse or condone that kind of behavior in the world, because eventually it will turn against you.

Putin Consolidates Power in his Second Term

That’s right.He sees himself when he sees Saddam.

Absolutely.Well, and the other person—and this is—sorry, skipping ahead—but you know, ... people who pay close attention to what Vladimir Putin talks about with those around him began to notice that he talked about the fall of Libya over and over again.He would talk about the scene of Muammar Qaddafi, the great lion of Libya, reduced to a man hiding in a drainage pipe, cowering with his own gun in his hand, where he was dragged out by his people and was killed in a piece of video footage that circulated, which of course we all remember.

But that image of the once-dominant strongman, the person who ruled over his own country and could keep the West at bay, that person reduced to a man hiding in a ditch was an image of really indelible power on Vladimir Putin and on other strongmen around the world.I've been struck, you know, looking at a number of countries, how many places people talk about the power of the image of the fall of Muammar Qaddafi, as a moment of extraordinary influence on their own domestic and personal private calculations about how to use power.

So when things like the color revolutions start rattling and coming his way, take me there. What is Vladimir Putin seeing?

The wave of color revolutions which swept across Central Europe and Central Asia were felt in Russia and in other capitals, in Beijing, for instance, as the natural extension of the regime-change impulse.This was soft regime change.This was the idea that you could use the tools of American NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], you could use tools of American media, American technology, and begin to remove leaders who looked, up until that very moment, strong.That was a terrifying prospect if you were the strongman who was running Russia.

I think one of the things that the color revolution demonstrated was that the United States could support the end of a regime without ever firing a shot. That’s how it was felt.You know, part of this was that Vladimir Putin and others sometimes overestimated the degree of American involvement, often overestimated it.You know, they regarded these as CIA plots.And in some cases, there was a level of American involvement, but it was very rarely what they imagined it to be.What they felt was that the United States, using these new tools of influence and power, were reaching into their backyard and toppling dictators one after another, and that was very threatening.

That and a lot of the Eastern bloc and NATO and movement in that direction as well, he has ample proof, I suppose.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, he had the feeling of encirclement, because the United States... had essentially promised or soft-promised to not to expand NATO beyond the point where it was.¹⁰

Now Vladimir Putin felt as if it was, in fact, expanding eastward right into his sphere of influence, and that was something he couldn’t tolerate.This is why Ukraine eventually became such a sort of signal moment for him.¹¹

It’s the line he draws in the sand, I suppose.

That was the line he draws in the sand.Here you have, right in the heart of the Slavic world, an uprising in favor of the expansion of NATO, against the expansion of Russian influence.He simply could not allow that to continue.And that was—Ukraine and the protests at the Maidan were the moment when Vladimir Putin said, “We will now use the full range of tools at our disposal, modern tools and ancient tools of statecraft, to make sure that we protect our interests.”

The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister

Let’s bring Barack Obama on the stage, and of course Hillary Clinton.How does it go with those two?It’s a funny thing. You watch Putin over time—Clinton, Bush, Obama. It’s like he reinvents the same process with the same result over and over again.What happens with the Obama crew when they look across the chasm and see Vladimir Putin over there?

Well, there is that moment, early on in the Obama administration, they believe they could strike up a better relationship with Vladimir Putin.There was this famous moment when Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, gave a gift to the Russian foreign minister, which was a red plastic button, which was purportedly supposed to say “Reset.”It didn’t say “Reset,” unfortunately, which was a kind of metaphor for the failure of the strategy. It was ill-conceived.And in a sense, this was the problem that beset a number of presidents.They would come in, and they would think to themselves, I can do better than my predecessor.Certainly I can do better, because that couldn’t have gone worse.And what they would find each time is that Vladimir Putin would endure, and he would read them, and he would come to a conclusion about how to manipulate them, and he would ultimately outlast each of them.

What does he fear?I still can't get at what he’s after.I guess respect, all the usual.

Yeah.But I think that it’s sometimes easy to shorthand it as just him wanting respect.But it’s a profound fact about his worldview, that from his very earliest moments of his professional life, he has regarded himself as involved in a mighty struggle, the struggle to defend and assert Russian pride on the world stage and to check the inevitable efforts of the United States to humiliate and defeat Russia.From his perspective, that struggle is enduring and hasn’t changed, and has, if anything, intensified.

I think that’s a huge fact, because in some ways we take it for granted.But there aren’t a whole lot of other countries with which we have that kind of very specific relationship.We don’t have it with the Chinese. We certainly don’t have it with anybody in Western Europe. We don’t have it with anybody in Latin America.This is almost a unique American dynamic, where we are locked in this long-running psychodrama and national security struggle with a single person.That’s a remarkable fact.

And that person then, who is that person in 2008-2009? Who has he become?

He is experimenting in 2008 and 2009.He’s beginning to try out new techniques.In 2006 the Russian intelligence services officially authorized the use of assassination to kill opponents of the regime overseas.¹²

At the time, it didn’t generate much attention, but in retrospect, it was a profound fact, because what it reflected was a sense of vulnerability and aggression on the part of the Russian national security state, where they felt that they had to shift into a higher gear.

As a result of the color revolutions, as a result of the regime change, policies in the United States, Russia couldn’t afford to sit on its heels and wait for the challenge to come.They had to go abroad. They had to venture further and begin to snuff out attacks where they might originate.And this is where you begin to see the use of cyberwarfare, which had really never been a part of—it had been talked about.Now cyberwarfare had been the stuff of sci-fi. We had always been talking about it in the future tense.There will come a day, we would say, when countries will be able to attack foreign countries through their infrastructure or their banking systems or their voting systems.But it was never something that actually happened.

But actually, it was already happening. We just weren’t paying attention.In the first case, the first case where this was really utilized, where Vladimir Putin and his intelligence services put this into effect, was in Estonia in 2007, ’06?

’07.

’07.I mean, we can tell that story whenever it’s useful.

Putin Tests the Waters in Estonia and Georgia

Go ahead. This is the time. That was my very next question.

So, you know, in the spring of 2007, the president of Estonia was at home one night, and he tries to sign onto his email, and he tries to sign onto a bunch of commercial websites, and everything was failing.Everything was down. At first he thought, well, there must be some sort of computer glitch.And he started making some calls, and it became quite clear that it was not a computer glitch, that something major was happening.As he said to me later: “You don’t naturally assume that you are under attack. You assume that there's some sort of technical fault.”But in fact, Estonia was under attack.¹³

What was interesting was, it was the perfect weapon with which to attack Estonia.It’s known as E-stonia in technology circles, because it’s the birthplace of Skype and a number of other technology companies.It has one of the highest levels of Internet penetration of anywhere in the world.

At the time, Estonia and the Kremlin were locked in a battle.It was a symbolic fight about the location of a statue in the Estonian capital.What had happened was, the Estonians had said, “We want to remove this statue which celebrates Russian victory in World War II,” and Russia had said, “If you do that, this will be regarded as an act of aggression.”Estonia did it anyway. Days later, they came under attack. They came under attack through the Internet.On Russian-language Internet forums, instructions were circulated on how to use your own computer to attack Estonian institutions.Then there were also formal attacks on banks and on government ministries to the point that it immobilized the Estonian government and the Internet for several days.

In the West, nobody was really paying very much attention.It seemed like an obscure, esoteric battle between Russia and one of its former satellites, but in fact, it was a preview of something that would become very relevant to us here.

The idea of weaponizing the Web in Putin’s mind, from what you know, I mean, is he involved in this?Is there a light-bulb moment? Is Estonia that moment where he says, “Jeez, this is good stuff, and I don’t have to lose anybody, and it’s an incredibly powerful weapon we can use.”

Well, the irony, of course, is that the world leader and pioneer in cyberattacks, in cyber technology, was the United States.We were early to this. We originated this. We explored it within the National Security Agency.We had teams that were developed in order to create the kinds of tools that could be used in the event of a conflict.

There had been an ongoing debate within American technology and national security circles about when and if we would ever use cyber technology as an offensive weapon.Vladimir Putin was unencumbered by some of those kinds of debates.From his perspective, if it was available to you, it should be used, and part of this is that Russia felt self-conscious and defensive about being late to the Internet.

Well, into the 1990s, the Internet was still difficult to access around Russia, but there was a view within some national security circles that this was a tool that was available.And when the time came, they used it. …

He’s always played the information propaganda game, even as a KGB person.Even personally he’s feathered his own image in documentary films being made about him all the way back to Petersburg.

Good point.You know, in some sense, cyberwarfare was just the latest iteration of a classic technique of disinformation, which is that you go in, and as much as you can, you monkey around inside the conversation of your adversary.You confuse, and you slow them down, and ultimately, you weaken them. And this provides a range of new opportunities.

Putin Returns to the Presidency, Sparking Protests and a Crackdown

I also think there's a moment, which we’ll talk about now, this notion of the West and the Web being a weapon.It’s an awful lot about what he does that is in reaction to a perception that there's something else going on out there, that may or may not actually be going on.I think of the protests in 2011 and Hillary’s role in that and his feelings.Tell me that story.

Well, there were protests in Moscow in 2011.¹⁴

This was in anticipation of Vladimir Putin returning to the presidency, and he felt those protests very personally.From his perspective, they were an attack on him, and not only an attack on him, but an attack directed by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.So from his perspective, he was now in this very personal struggle within America.What he felt was that the United States was using the tools at its disposal, the Web, all the powerful tools that the Internet provides, in order to mess around in his backyard.

Over and over again, Vladimir Putin has been able to tell himself and his people: “We are doing nothing wrong. We are doing only what our adversary has already done to us.”That’s a huge part of his psychology, because it not only provides permission, but it also gives you a sense that you, the weaker power, are challenging this greater power, using their own tools against them. What is greater than that?

Especially when you're a judo maven ever since you were a little kid.

Well, literally.You know, it’s become a bit of a truism on the subject, but the idea, particularly for a career intelligence officer and of course a judo champion, the idea that you could use a larger, more powerful adversary’s weight against him is glorious; that you could, by being crafty, by waiting for the right moment, by putting yourself in a position where you take advantage of that opponent being off balance, and then you send them crashing to the floor, that’s the best kind of victory from his perspective.

Putin and Hybrid Warfare

When the cyber force, speaking of active measures, when the cyber force is being developed, tell me about the development of it.What is it?The trolls, the whole business?This is probably the time where we should go through it.

Sure.I just thought of one thing, by the way, and this may be useful for an earlier point in the biography.Should we talk a little bit about active measures as a concept and how it had been used?

Well, sure. I mean, if you insist.

Well, I just found that—I've always found that interesting. …The idea of active measures is—there's nothing new about it.Going back decades, Russia believed that it could use the open society of the West against the West, that by planting stories in Western media, by spreading rumors, by creating lies that eventually turn into received truths, that you could undermine the West.

Going back to the ’60s, for instance, Russia circulated the rumor that the U.S. government had been involved in killing Martin Luther King.¹⁵

During the ’80s, they spread the rumor that the United States government had created the HIV virus and spread it in the African American community.And there have been studies that the U.S.—I've read studies done by the military that looked at the effect of those rumors, and they were remarkably effective. …

Active measures rests on a powerful concept, which is that even if most people regard this idea that you're circulating as ridiculous or implausible, some people will believe it, and another group of people will be left confused about what to believe at all.And that’s the essential ingredient: It generates chaos within the information culture of your adversary.

That was the same in 1985 as it is, ultimately, in 2015, and that’s what they recognized.They just used different tools to achieve it.

So what are the tools?

In the current era?

Yeah, now we’re now.

Well, there were three tools. …One of the features of Russian political life was the use of disinformation, where you would manipulate or create a narrative using surveillance footage or using overheard conversation or wiretapped phone calls or email.Then you would reconfigure it and release it to the public in a way that was inflammatory.By doing so, you’d generate doubt.

That’s what this is about. It’s about generating doubt about the sanctity of a process, about the integrity of the election.What you want is for the public to believe that nothing is believable, nothing is trustworthy. There is no dry land.The world is a place in which nothing can be trusted, and that is enough.I mean, that is enough to generate the kind of chaos that you need in in an election to affect the result.

So in 2014, the United States was, for the first time, the victim of this kind of technique.Victoria Nuland, who was assistant secretary of state, heavily involved in trying to broker peace in Ukraine, was wiretapped on a phone conversation with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, and a piece of that conversation was then leaked to the public. …¹⁶

It leaked a piece of a wiretapped conversation in which the United States was criticizing the EU for not supporting an American plan to create a transitional government.What that did was that it—the Russians knew that … it would complicate and weaken the relationship between American negotiators and EU negotiators, and that was enough.You know, they didn’t need to scuttle the plan; they didn’t need to come up with a better plan.All they needed to do was to undermine the relationships that were at the core of the process, and that's what they did.

But at the time, you know, this was in 2014, when Victoria Nuland’s phone was wiretapped and the contents were released to the public, it generated some attention within the circles of people who pay attention to U.S.-Russia relations, but it wasn’t a five-alarm fire.In retrospect, some people think we should have taken this a lot more seriously than we did.

Because?

Because it was the first demonstration that Russia was willing and able to use techniques against the United States that it had previously not dared to attempt.At that point, it was a long way from imagining that what they used in Ukraine could eventually be used in the U.S. election, but in effect, the fundamental concept was the same.

For the United States, the question was, how do we respond to the advent of cyberwarfare as a new technique? How hard do we want to hit back?This was a really difficult problem, because the United States, on some level, wanted to retain the option to be able to use some of the same techniques or similar techniques.So there was a strategic problem, because if the United States came back and counterpunched against the Russians very hard, it would have a lot of effects.One effect was that it would mean that it would be very hard for us to do the same thing.

Another effect was, we needed the Russians for various diplomatic initiatives.We were trying to get the Russians to work with us on an Iran deal, to try to counter proliferation in Iran.That comes later, but the concept is the same.I later asked Mike McFaul, who was the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, how did the United States respond to Victoria Nuland’s phone being wiretapped and being exposed to the public?And he said, “We didn’t respond at all, and that was probably a mistake.”¹⁷

For a long time, there was a feeling that, you know, that that was, in a sense, fair game.This was part of the problem with cyberwarfare.Cyberwarfare was so new that the rules of the game were not clear yet, and the United States didn’t know what was the kind of thing that should merit a full-throated response and what sort of thing should be accepted as routine espionage and intelligence gathering.It was just too new, and we didn’t know how to respond to it.

Was he practicing?Were there places where it felt like they were getting their act together before they threw it at the United States?

Absolutely.Yeah, you see this very clear progression, where they started in Estonia and then they perfected their techniques in Georgia.Then they perfected them yet again in Crimea and Ukraine, all of this in the seven or eight years leading up to the U.S. election, so that by the time the U.S. election comes around, Russia was quite proficient at this.They’d tried it elsewhere; they had had proof of concept; they had refined their techniques, and they were at the top of their game.

I think—

I mean, in Georgia, I’ll give you an example.Georgia was interesting. …So in 2008, Georgia and Moscow are in a battle over territory, and for the first time, Russia married conventional military techniques with cyberwarfare.¹⁸

At the same moment that tanks and planes were heading toward Georgia, the Kremlin was also involved in orchestrating an attack on Georgian government websites and shutting down the Internet, just enough that they could complicate the ability of the Georgian government to be able to send orders to its own military commanders.They generated a level of chaos within the conflict that was meaningful.

At the time, it caught the eye of American military strategists, but it was still sequestered in this small pocket of conversation.It hadn’t yet become the kind of thing that you would see on the front page of the newspaper, because it just didn’t feel to us as if it was hugely relevant to the United States.

Yeah, I mean, generally speaking, we were sort of—

Yeah, think back to where we were.You know, if you think about where we were in the summer of 2008, you know, the United States was caught up in the excitement of the potential election of our first black president.Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Russia was perfecting a set of techniques that had never been used in warfare quite this way, but would come to be enormously consequential.

The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister

He—that is, our main character—does a little dance about being president, then prime minister, then president again.Tell me what was going on there.Tell me the story of that and a little bit of what you think was happening.

Mine will be a little patchy, so I’ll just sort of say what I know.

That’s all right.

Vladimir Putin is—he sort of leaves the stage. He goes off and cedes ground to his protégé.For a while, he and [President Dmitry] Medvedev had a good working relationship.There was a way for them to—he allowed Medvedev a certain amount of authority and autonomy.But Medvedev was more inclined than Putin was to pursue a relationship with the Obama administration, so there was a rapprochement of a certain kind.There was a day in which Medvedev in Washington went with Barack Obama to go get hamburgers.They took their suit jackets off, and there they were at the burger shop. …

But you know, there was, after a few years of the Obama administration, there was this very clear stylistic break, and ultimately a strategic break, in the way in which Medvedev wanted to deal with the United States and come up with some sort of companionable working relationship and the way that Vladimir Putin regarded this relationship as fundamentally adversarial.

This came to a head in 2011.The United States went to the U.N. to get approval to attack Libya, and the crucial vote came down to whether or not Russia would oppose the United States’ effort to get the U.N. on board to attack Libya.¹⁹

Medvedev abstained, and by abstaining, in effect, he gave the go-ahead to the United States and the U.N. to take out Muammar Qaddafi.This was one of the first public demonstrations of a breach between Medvedev and Putin.At the time, Putin, who was prime minister, did the unusual thing of saying to the press that he didn’t approve of that decision.He thought it was reminiscent of the Crusades, that the United States was going to go out and take out Muammar Qaddafi.

But the message was very clear in Russian terms.This was also him disapproving of what Medvedev had done, and that was a sign that that relationship had begun to founder.At that point, then, it was not until 2012 that Putin comes back on the scene, that Putin comes back to the presidency.When Putin came back to the presidency in 2012, he was, by most accounts, something of a changed man.He was more focused on his sense of an adversarial relationship with the United States.He believed that the United States could not be trusted, that in fact it was, in one form or another, seeking to undermine Russian sovereignty and stability.

An American official who met with Putin in that period remembers, he’d seen him before he was president, and now he was back in the presidency.Vladimir Putin’s mood was very dark at this point in 2012.His views of the United States had been in effect poisoned by the downfall of Muammar Qaddafi and by the accumulative effect of regime change and color revolutions, to the point that he now felt that he was in an existential struggle against Washington.

This is really the—if you think about something like the Arab Spring, Egypt, the way the Obamas viewed it and the way despots in the world viewed it were completely different things. …

Right.The Arab Spring—and its way slotted in naturally into what Vladimir Putin always thought about the United States, which is, we may be friends with you at one moment, but at the time when democracy asserts itself, well, we will abandon you to the crowds.That is a very personal problem for him, personal enough that he would be willing to do just about anything to prevent that idea from being left unchallenged.

This is the part that’s always been so fascinating about Russia’s involvement in the election.Whatever they might have imagined they could have achieved, fundamentally they believed they were operating with the weapons of the weak.This was an asymmetrical conflict against a much more powerful country, a much more powerful country.You know, this was a country that had this long-running—the United States had a long-running tradition of elections in which we had been able to triumph over all kinds of disruption and unpredictable events, like the election of 2000 that ended in a dispute.

The idea that Russia could actually have a meaningful effect on the election of 2016 was beyond even the Kremlins’ most wild and fanciful imagination.But of course it was true.And you know, I think if you could somehow get Vladimir Putin in a moment of genuine honesty, and you asked him what he made of this turn of events, I think he would have to say it was the most successful intelligence operations of all time, I mean, if you think about it, as a career KGB officer.

I’ll say.

Yeah.

Putin and Hybrid Warfare

When we were talking about cyber, we moved away from—and we never got back to other dimensions.I've just read so much about the trolls and the troll factories and stuff, maybe you could just give me a sense of what that is.

... Sure, yeah.So Russia did not invent trolling, but it perfected the art of it. And trolling is very simple.It’s the idea of playing the role on the Internet of a provocateur, of a bully, of a critic, of somebody who meddles in public issues, who pipes up and says something provocative and shifts the debate online.You know, it’s a position that really didn’t exist much before the advent of social media or online digital conversation, but once you had this world in which people were going online every day and gradually forming their opinions, the role of the provocateur, the troll, became very powerful.

Inside Russia, this became an institution long before it was something that was politically meaningful in the United States.There were, in fact, troll farms, as they're known, which are wholesale businesses, either with or without the backing of the government, that were set up in order to affect the outcomes of political events.²⁰

In Russia, for regional elections, you could hire somebody.Just the same way that you would hire a PR firm, you could hire essentially a troll farm who would go out and seek to accomplish your political objectives, either promoting your candidate or criticizing your opponent.This became just part of political commerce, and in some ways, people discounted the impact of it.They said, “Well, how much impact could it really have?”

But one of the—this became visible to people in the U.S. presidential campaign long before it was really visible to the press and the public.I spoke to an activist for Bernie Sanders who ran a forum out in San Diego.This Bernie Sanders forum in San Diego was a Facebook page in which anybody who liked Bernie Sanders could go on and make comments and talk up their candidate and criticize their opponents.

In the summer of 2016, right around the time that Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were getting into a more acute confrontation about whether or not the DNC had been siding with one or the other, all of a sudden this forum took a turn in a surprising direction, where there were these new players, new people on the forum—trolls, in effect.They were faces and names, but very often they had no friends; they had no background; they had no history.These were creations on Facebook, and they would go into these forums, and they would begin to say very provocative things.They would say that Hillary Clinton and her campaign had tried to sabotage Bernie Sanders.

The goal was very clear. It was to try to suppress the vote of the Bernie Sanders supporters.What's interesting about it is, sometimes we assume, well, you know, in order for a troll to be successful, they have to shift your vote from one candidate to another, but that’s not the case at all.What the Bernie Sanders activists were discovering is that somebody—and they didn’t know who at the time—was trying to suppress the enthusiasm of their voters at the very moment that the Democratic Party was trying to consolidate Bernie supporters behind the nominee, Hillary Clinton.

That was huge.In retrospect—and it only became clear after the fact when you could chart how often these trolls were going onto these Bernie forums and making comments—it was a very important moment, because you had a lot of Bernie supporters, a lot of Bernie voters who were ambivalent about their candidate, and here you had people going on and telling them that they were right to be ambivalent.

So now we’re back in some ways; we’re headed into the 2015-2016 election, and we’re back again at the question of why.What's the motivation for President Putin to decide to get inside our electoral process? By 2015, what is that motivation?

By 2015 that motivation is, he does not like Hillary Clinton.He has not liked Hillary Clinton for a long time, partly because he regards her as having promoted the opposition against him in Moscow and partly because she is, in his mind, a continuation of the Obama administration with which he had serious confrontations, serious conflicts, over Ukraine, over Syria.If there was something that he could do to throw gum in the machine and make it harder for Hillary Clinton to win, he would do that. …

Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term

Let’s back up.I think I just skipped a phase here that I want to just see if you know anything about.

Sure.

Let’s go to 2014.The year, if ever there was a year, if you said to me, “You can only make one film about Vladimir Putin,” I would make it about the year 2014.

Right. It’s like 1989 as a signal moment, yeah.

It’s unbelievable, right?Sochi, Crimea, all the way down, all the way down to the 300—whatever it was, three-hour live press conference in December.Take me on that journey a little bit with Putin to the extent that you know.First, what was the Sochi Olympic show all about?

This was a coming-out party for Putin’s Russia.This was the opportunity to show that it is a great power sitting at the table with the United States and the others. …In the run-up to the Sochi Olympics, Vladimir Putin had to be careful about what he did on the world stage, because he was going to be under all of this scrutiny, under all of this attention.That’s what the Olympics is. You know, the Olympics is, on the one hand, an opportunity to show that you're a great power.But on the other hand, you have to be very careful not to do things that inflame the world’s attention.

Very soon after the Sochi Olympics, Vladimir Putin made the decision to invade Crimea and to take that territory as his own. …²¹

You know, that set in motion this whole series of events that drew the United States and Western Europe into this area which he regards as his sphere of influence, Crimea and the Ukraine, and created a fundamental confrontation between not just the United States and Russia, but really between the Western rules-based order and a classical notion of power, as Putin sees it, which is that he has a natural claim to this part of the world.That is his area of influence, and for the United States to interfere is the improper act.

That became, in a sense, the predicate for then him to involve himself in the United States election, because he was only, after all, in his mind, doing what we had done to him.

… That thing, the sweep of sanctions and everything that happens in that year, it’s beyond Hillary Clinton.

Oh, yeah.You're absolutely right.

You know, whether he likes her or doesn’t like her, it’s something much more fundamental.

Yeah.Now I absolutely understand what you mean, that it was, in a sense, 2014 was the confluence when Vladimir Putin, on a strategic level and on an ideological level felt that he could no longer abide Western influence at his doorstep.He had the United States, he had the EU interfering, in his mind, in the Ukraine, which was, by his rights, his. It was his, and we should not be there, “we” [being] the United States.

If you add it all up, you know, 2014 was both the end of something and the beginning of something.It was the final culmination of a series of events that began with the invasion of Iraq, through the color revolutions, though the Arab Spring, all the way up to the moment when now the United States and the West was on his doorstep.Then it was also the beginning of something which was, from his perspective, the right, the permission to now begin to bring that assault back to these Western capitals.

That’s right.It’s fascinating, when you watch him in that press conference, and you think about what he’s about to unleash, or may have already unleashed, it’s an amazing moment.

The way I've always thought about the election interference is that it was not like there was one signal moment, the light-bulb moment, where he’s sitting in his office and says to himself: “You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to interfere in the U.S. election to harm Hillary Clinton and support this outlier candidate.”It wasn’t like that.It was like almost like ambling into an extraordinarily effective intelligence operation, because it was just the natural result of all of these things he had been planning and refining over the years.

Intervention in the U.S. Election

… I think we’ve covered an awful lot of the good stuff already here, but let me just ask you: Now we’re domestic.He’s done it. The FBI, the intelligence agencies are starting to get a little bit of a glimmer that there's something.We haven't done Cozy Bear, so let’s do that now.Let’s do the moment where an FBI guy calls the DNC and says—and gets the help desk. …

In September of 2015, the help desk at the Democratic National Committee received a phone call, and on the other end of the line was a man saying he was an FBI agent, and he was saying that the DNC had been hacked.²²

At the time, the help desk didn’t know what to make of it.They didn’t know if it was authentic. They didn’t know if this person was who he said he was.And frankly, they were utterly ill-equipped to deal with it.You know, this was a help desk that was an outside contractor that had been hired to provide the most basic form of security for the DNC. But the DNC never regarded itself as a prime target.But in a way, they were almost the perfect target, because the DNC sat in a middle ground between a government agency and a private organization.They didn’t have the full protections of a government agency, but they had much more valuable information than an ordinary private organization. They were the perfect target waiting to be hit.

So the DNC gets this call in the fall of 2015. And in effect, it does very little.This begins to slowly work its way through the DNC.The person at the help desk put it down on paper that he had received this call. There was some email traffic about it, but nobody regarded this as a crisis.They assumed this was routine.

In a sense, we had all become kind of inured over the years to the idea that you might be hacked, or you might get a warning that your email was vulnerable.They didn’t respond aggressively.So for months, the hackers were inside the DNC, working away, burrowing in, collecting information and transporting it overseas.They didn’t know at this point who it was. It would be several months before they could figure out exactly who it was.Now I have to remember what happened next.But they eventually, they get—the FBI did get back in touch.

The guy comes, finally goes over there.

Visits them, yeah.

But I think it takes six months, five months, something.It’s a long time before an actual FBI agent arrives.

Yeah.

Shows a badge and says, “I'm your guy.”

Yeah.

Why, I don’t exactly understand.But like you said, maybe nobody paid attention to these things anymore.

Well, I mean, part of it was, the DNC, from their perspective, had other priorities. They were involved in this very complicated early political campaign where you had Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in a much more robust competition than they ever expected.You know, they were focused on the politics. They were focused on trying to beat the Republican Party.So the idea that the FBI was saying that somebody was sniffing around, it didn’t seem to them to be a crisis, because after all, the Chinese had hacked into Obama’s campaign in 2008.They had hacked into Mitt Romney’s campaign and previous elections. And the world had kept spinning.So, from the DNC’s perspective, this was not something that merited full attention.

There was some email and phone calls back and forth. The FBI at one point left voicemail messages with the technician in charge of the DNC’s computer security.Eventually, the FBI visits the DNC and sits down and explains to them just how serious this crisis is, but by that point, in many ways the damage was done, because the most critical information, the private emails, the things, the internal communications had already been siphoned out. …

By the spring of 2016, things were getting much more serious.At that point, there was a second hacking group, also believed to be operating on behalf of Russian intelligence, which had also breached the DNC.That was the point when the DNC realized, we have a serious problem.They were beginning to—and I think it was—I'm not sure when the very first emails began to go out, whether it was on the DCLeaks or Guccifer.²³

Well, the first big splash that we’re going to play with happens right before the DNC convention.

Oh, OK.So right before the Democratic National Convention, emails begin to pour out, and the emails are very damaging, because they had been quite clearly and carefully selected to do the most damage.These were emails that showed, for instance, that DNC staffers were clearly trying to beat back the challenge that Bernie Sanders posed to Hillary Clinton.In a sense, these emails were perfectly chosen to exploit the vulnerabilities within the Democratic electorate, to sow doubt among Bernie Sanders voters who were not inclined to support Hillary Clinton in any way.

And they sent the DNC leadership into crisis.I spoke to [DNC Vice Chair] Donna Brazile and interviewed [DNC Chair] Debbie Wasserman Schultz.By the time that it reached the desk of the leadership of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, it was really in a very advanced state of a problem. At this point, emails were either starting to go out or had already gone out.But it became quite clear, at that point, that Debbie Wasserman Schultz could not stay on as the head of the DNC, and she resigned, partly to try to put an end to the story. But that wasn’t enough.²⁴

The story was metastasizing, and it was taking hold on the Internet, and it was becoming a meme, the idea that the DNC had a finger on the scale and that it was trying to help Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, this at the very moment that the Democratic Party is trying to consolidate support.You know, they're having their convention, and instead, they're going into their convention wounded.

This is the definition of disruption and chaos that Vladimir Putin would have wanted.

It really is. It was—you know, what's brilliant about it is the idea that it doesn’t take a digital atomic bomb. What it takes is small blasts around the battlefield that sow chaos and confusion and distrust, makes it hard for people at the bottom to know who to trust at the top.

Putin and Trump

Help me understand what Putin saw in Donald Trump. …

Well, for a long time, long before he was a presidential candidate, Donald Trump had a kind of fascination with Russia and with Putin personally.When Donald Trump went over—just to mention the early part.

Go ahead.

You know, even going back to the 1980s, in the midst of the Cold War, Donald Trump thought about and talked about going to Russia, trying to build properties in Russia, which was a provocative thing to do at the time on its own terms.But that was Donald Trump’s persona. That was his brand, was that he was going to do the outrageous thing, like building a building in Moscow.

Trump Tower in Moscow.

Trump Tower in Moscow.²⁵

From his perspective, that would be the ultimate Trump thing to do, go to the place that others won't go, befriend the man that others can't befriend.I mean, Putin was at this point still a long way off, but what I always—but I do think it’s interesting to talk about that early period, because on a level that even predates the election, Donald Trump saw something culturally and stylistically appealing about Russia.He liked the strongman ethos. He liked the idea that it was a country that didn’t like to be pushed around on the world stage.And he also, just the same way that Donald Trump regarded himself as the one who was able to bring the Trump family in from Queens to Manhattan, he wanted to be the one who would bring the Trump brand and American branding and style to Moscow.This was really at the origins of how he wanted to do things.

Then over the years, at the time when really nobody was paying attention to Donald Trump as a political entity, when he was an entertainer, an entrepreneur, he would say things that were very flattering of Vladimir Putin.When he went to Moscow in 2013 to bring the Miss Universe Pageant, in advance he said, “I hope that Vladimir Putin will be my best friend.”At the time, nobody paid much attention to it.It was bizarre, and it didn’t really seem to matter very much, but it did reflect an approach that Donald Trump found something fundamentally interesting and alluring about kinship with Russia.It had been part of his life for a long time.

I can't remember what your original question was.

Putin, what Putin saw in Donald Trump.We know Trump—and by the way, let’s finish Trump up while he’s over there.Does Trump do business? Are there hints of billions and all of that coming out of the Russia aspirations?

There is—of course, there's a lot we don’t know about the nature of Russian business involvement in Donald Trump’s empire.But the Trump Organization has given some very clear indications of the ways in which Russian money was meaningful to them.In 2008, at the very time that Donald Trump and his empire are looking for money, they need financing, Donald Trump Jr. is telling people in the real estate community that they're getting money from Russia, is how he put it.²⁶

Over the years Donald Trump and his family had tried to build businesses in Russia and the former Soviet Union, with mixed success.They had tried to broker deals that might build them a big property in Moscow. It hadn’t worked.But in Azerbaijan, for instance, they had been able to build a property that was going to carry the Trump name. It was a Trump-branded building.²⁷

Bit by bit, they were beginning to put down a bit of a network in the former Soviet Union.But it was never very clear to the outside, because they're a private company, [and] they keep very close control over their financial documents, what exactly was the full extent of Russian involvement.

And what would Putin have seen in Donald Trump?

Vladimir Putin saw in Donald Trump a sense of opportunity.Here was somebody who was not a politician.He didn’t come out of the traditional Cold War spirit of the Republican old guard, and yet he also didn’t come out of the new Democratic Party commitment to promoting transparency and open government around the world.He was something else. He was his own man.And on top of it, he had expressed a long-running interest, almost a fascination, with Russia, so he presented an extraordinary set of opportunities that Vladimir Putin couldn’t have designed better himself. ...

When Vladimir Putin looked over at the U.S. presidential election, he saw one candidate who was voicing positions that were very consistent with what Russia would have wanted in the world.Donald Trump was talking about reducing American support for NATO.²⁸

He was talking about reducing sanctions on Russia.He was talking about really reimagining the level of American involvement in the world in a whole range of ways, withdrawing to what he called an “America First” policy.All of this was broadly consistent with what Vladimir Putin would have wanted in his own presidential candidate. …

... You’ve been telling the tale of DNC.What's happening at the Obama White House while all this is going on?They don’t seem to be—they seem to be maybe worried about it or having discussions about it, but not exactly on it. Why? …

... Once the Obama White House becomes aware of the level of Russian interference, there was a debate.²⁹

And the debate consisted of—there were some within the Obama White House who said, “We need to be careful about speaking out too strongly about the fact that Russia seems to be interfering on behalf of Donald Trump’s candidacy, because that will be regarded as a partisan gesture.”

At one point, the Obama administration went to [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell and said to him, “Will you sign onto a joint statement to the state-level election officials, saying that we need to be vigilant against Russian interference in the election?”Mitch McConnell said that if they did that, this would be regarded as a partisan gesture, so the Obama White House did not do it.This was—you know, in a sense, then there was another reason.

At the end of the day, to be perfectly blunt about it, Obama administration officials will concede that one of the reasons why they were quiet about Russian interference was that they basically believed that, in the end, Hillary Clinton would probably win, as the polls indicated, and if they talked too much about the level of Russian interference, that this would delegitimize her victory and undermine the integrity of the election, which would, in effect, be accomplishing the Russian objective for them.

This has got to be amazing to Putin, who does things like grab Crimea and then holds his breath and says, “Are they coming?”Nobody’s coming, right?This has happened to him over the decades.And here we are again, caught red-handed.We know who they are.They’ve left their signature inside.We know Cozy Bear.We know where it’s coming from.And yet Obama does nothing.

There was one encounter where Barack Obama comes face-to-face with Vladimir Putin at the G-20 and says to him: “Cut it out.Stop interfering in the election.Don’t affect the overall outcome of the vote, or that will cross a line that we cannot tolerate.”What we now know, of course, is that the Russians continued to interfere in the election.But by that point, exactly as you said, there had been all of these previous moments when the United States could have interfered, could have done something to check Russian adventurism overseas, whether it was in Crimea or in Ukraine, or when they leaked the contents of Victoria Nuland’s phone call, but at every point along the way, American politics and policymaking had introduced all of these legitimate debates, counterarguments, about why we shouldn’t come back on Russia too hard.At each point along the way, the United States had not reacted the way that Vladimir Putin might have assumed we would.

So then the big one.It’s the [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper and others had been ringing the bell saying, “Hey, this really matters.”

Well, I’ll tell you one thing, actually, just because it’s very much on that, which I haven't reported, but I think is reportable because it’s—that, you know, in the summer and fall of 2016, there is a growing sense of alarm within the Intelligence Community.An intelligence official has told me that CIA Director John Brennan was having weekly meetings with members of his staff who were involved in monitoring Russian interference, and he was growing increasingly concerned.But that concern was not translating over into the Obama White House.

Why?

There were a lot of reasons in the—fundamentally, the Obama White House was concerned that if they reacted too strongly, if they talked about Russian interference too much, that it would undermine the integrity of the election and delegitimize the result.

But they could have stopped it in one move.He could have called a press conference and said, “Ladies and gentlemen.” No.

... Let me put it this way.Hillary Clinton’s campaign, to this day, is haunted by the sense that the Obama administration could have done more and chose not to.This is [what] one adviser said to me: “This should have been a five-alarm fire, and I still don’t understand why it was not.”

You know, the other reason why the Obama administration didn’t do more, there was a voice within the Obama administration that [said]: “If we come back too hard on Russia now, we’ll escalate this confrontation, and maybe they will do more.Maybe, in fact, they will monkey around with the vote totals themselves.”So there was a—they were—the Obama administration was gambling.They were gambling that they could run out the clock by brushing Russia back a little bit here and there, without provoking a full-scale confrontation, and they were wrong.

Where is [FBI Director James] Comey on all of this?Was he—I know that he wrote an op-ed piece that they didn’t want to run, sort of a ringing the bell.

That’s right.There was the op-ed.I don’t remember all the details.… But in the summer and the fall of 2016, there is this growing sense of alarm among some within the government; in the Intelligence Community, some within the FBI, that there is a much more serious risk here and that they're not doing enough about it.

By the fall, there are—There's the classic fake news stuff is really full blast about Hillary, the false illness of Hillary, just seems to be, if we were going to pick one to put in the film, that seems to me or us to be the one.

Yep.

Describe.

[There was] this vast universe of false stories, “fake news” as it’s now know, that were circulating online.One story that had begun to take hold within portions of the Republican electorate particularly was the idea that Hillary Clinton was ill, that she was sick, and that she was concealing an illness.This idea bounced back and forth between some of the far-right websites and places like Alex Jones’ Infowars, which is a very popular conspiracy-based site.

By the fall of 2016, you had this very sharp divide among voters.There were certain voters who were absolutely convinced that Hillary Clinton was gravely ill and was hiding her illness, was shielding it from the American public.And when they went online, when they went onto their Facebook pages, when they read what their friends were writing, when they went on certain news sites or conspiracy sites or sort of semi-news organizations—that’s not even really what they are; they're fake news organizations.There was this steady diet of false information.It was not true, the idea that Hillary Clinton was sick.But you could go on.Because of the way in which you were experiencing the news and what you reading, you could spend your whole day being fed information that reinforced this belief that Hillary Clinton was hiding something.

You know, there was a completely crazy conspiracy theory that took hold that a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., became known as Pizzagate, was somehow supporting and shielding a child prostitution ring.³⁰

It was a really crazy idea, but it circulated within these websites.It circulated on Facebook and other social media sites to the point that there was a certain number of people who absolutely believed this to be true. ...

Putin and Hybrid Warfare

Let’s start with [Gen. Valery] Gerasimov and the idea of the plan and what they saw working, and where it fit into the militarization and the other aspects of it.

By 2013, Russian national security strategists were beginning to form a theory that the techniques they had used in places like Estonia and Georgia and elsewhere were beginning to come together into what they called “hybrid war,” or what became known as the Gerasimov Doctrine.It was named for a senior Russian military figure.… In 2013 a senior Russian military figure named Valery Gerasimov published an obscure article which outlined an idea, and the idea was what he called “hybrid warfare,” or what became known as “new-generation warfare.”That was something quite simple in its own way, which was to use the full spectrum of tools at the disposal of the state, everything from cyber all the way to conventional warfare, to defeat enemies, rather than just relying on the traditional tools of tanks and aircraft.

Hybrid warfare or the Gerasimov Doctrine, as it was known, really was the blueprint that they used in Crimea and Ukraine.This was the idea of going online and doing cyberattacks to interfere with banks and government institutions.It was the idea of what became known as the “little green men.”These were paramilitary or military involvement where it wasn’t clear who they were working on behalf of. …

How impressive was it in Crimea?How important was it in Crimea?And how [did] the world ignore it?

From the West’s perspective, when the West looked at what was happening in Crimea, it looked, in a sense, like a version of a very old kind of conflict.

... At the time, it wasn’t clear that what was happening in Crimea was as consequential as it was.In fact, the use of paramilitary forces, the use of cyberwarfare, the use of conventional military, all of that—and disinformation—amounted to an entirely new form of warfare, what became known as “hybrid war,” or the Gerasimov Doctrine.

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Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation

Koo and Patricia Yuen

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