The FRONTLINE Interviews
Massimo Calabresi
Time
Massimo Calabresi is an American journalist who covered the collapse of the Soviet Union from Moscow and later served as TIME magazine’s Central Europe bureau chief from 1995 to 1999. Since 1999, he has worked for TIME’s Washington bureau.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk conducted on June 15, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.
This interview appears in:
TOP
Massimo Calabresi
Chapters
Text Interview:
Highlight text to share it
Putin Consolidates Power in his Second Term
… The man who ends up going to Munich to give that speech, that amazing declaration of war in some ways in the world, what does he say there, and how does the world react? And why is he saying it?1
1
… Putin’s view is that he has been making one concession after another to the West in the wake of the Cold War loss, that he as a KGB agent felt particularly keenly.The loss of the Soviet Union was not a small thing or a move toward—in the direction of progress for Putin.This was a catastrophic setback for Russia and for the Russian people.
He’s reached a point at which he has become convinced that the concessions that he has made have all been in service of an American expansionist agenda.Rather than being part of a project that will rebuild Russia, he has been mistakenly making the concessions to the West and being taken advantage of.He’s reached the point at which he will not tolerate it anymore.He has concluded that he’s not getting anything in return, and he will begin seeking—he will begin trying to reset the table.
Ultimately, this will lead to him taking back or insisting that he will take back all of the concessions he has made and rolling back his list of demands all the way to 2000, including demanding that NATO expansion be reversed, that all of the concessions he believes he’s made on Iran and other international issues are now open for negotiation again.
Putin Tests the Waters in Estonia and Georgia
One of the very first events that occurs is what happens in Estonia not two months later, three months later, in May of 2007.What happened?
There has always been tension between ethnic Russians in Estonia and ethnic Estonians.The focal point for these tensions in recent years has become a bronze statue of a Russian soldier who was there to memorialize, as it were, what Russia had brought to Estonia in the wake of World War II.Russians viewed that as liberation; Estonians viewed that as occupation.
There was a proposal to remove the statue of this bronze soldier, and in response to the proposal, what the Estonians have come to conclude was a covert operation was launched by Moscow to seed unrest and to launch a confrontation with the Estonians.2An information operation about the removal of the statue is launched.Violent protests ensue, and it leads to a direct confrontation over the [statue] that is really a sort of a test run of Russia’s new capabilities in disinformation in the post-Soviet era.
2
What did they do?
… During this period, Russian military intelligence has been building up its capability to fight cyberwar, to use tools on the Internet that can incapacitate an enemy without a shot being fired.The Russians unleash this capability broadly, not targeting just military objectives but targeting the whole of society.Estonia is particularly vulnerable to this because they have embraced early on the idea that government, commerce, many social functions will all be online in the future, so they have moved much of their society and government onto the Internet.
The Russian attack is directed very much at those capabilities.Banks that are online, servicing customers in ways that the West are still only beginning to embrace, suddenly are brought to a screeching halt.The government, its interactions between agencies, is suddenly brought to a screeching halt by these massive [Distributed] Denial of Service [DDoS] attacks.3
3
What is the lesson that Putin and the military take from this?
Well, Russia has always had a view of information warfare as an integral part of military operations.What they're learning is that in the post-Cold War period, they can engage in war along a continuum.It’s not as we view it in the West, [that] either we are at peace or we are at war, but that society is in a constant state of information conflict.… They can move along that continuum without launching an overt war against an enemy, but having the effect of furthering their political and diplomatic goals in very aggressive ways that traditionally might have involved direct military conflict.But they can do it now without ever having to launch a missile.
Exactly.Sending a message without firing a shot.
That’s right.Also, to some extent, having a kinetic and physical effect on the enemy.
So that’s ’07. During Georgia … one of the few successes, from their point of view, is cyber disruption when they alter artillery attacks.The guys are firing at the sea or whatever.… They do it militarily, but they also do some other things.It is a part of something that, over the next three years, as we are developing capacities as well, they are also adding this effort to their capabilities.
Georgia has been, as quickly as it can, trying to embrace Western military doctrine with the goal of getting into NATO and becoming a protected part of the NATO alliance.What was terribly embarrassing for Putin and the Russian military in particular in Georgia was to see how poorly their troops performed.The traditional military engagement was largely a failure for Russia in Georgia, yet the message that they take from these successful cyber measures, information war measures, is that they can have an asymmetric advantage against a more powerful military, including one that has been supported by Western powers and NATO, by deploying these information warfare tactics; that the West is, in some ways, vulnerable to and behind Russia in information warfare tactics, even as it’s much advanced in the traditional military sphere.
Putin and Hybrid Warfare
Talk to me about what happens in 2011 and how the impact of the Web is perceived and felt by Putin himself.
In late 2011 and early 2012, there are elections in Russia, parliamentary elections.There is an enormous upswell of protests led by a man named Alexei Navalny, who is a popular blogger, who uses his blog and Twitter and Facebook to organize massive nationwide protests in more than 70 cities and towns around Russia.This is perceived as a major threat by Putin to his hold on power.And indeed, the parliamentary elections are unexpectedly close.
His first order of business is to try to strike back against this Internet-fueled, social media-fueled popular political uprising.He does that using some new cyber propaganda tools.For example, the protesters at one point used hashtag #<i>Triumfalnaya</i> to organize some of their protests.Putin and his domestic intelligence services unleash a social media DDoS attack against that hashtag by bombarding it with nonsense tweets and anti-protester tweets that make it impossible for that hashtag to function as an organizing principle.
But once he’s gotten through the danger period of the uprising and has himself been re-elected later in 2012, he has recognized the power of social media and the Internet to organize political forces around ideas.He very decisively chooses to pursue that form of power for himself.Where previously information warfare had largely been the domain of the military and had been used in military conflict, now he tasks the military intelligence and his other intelligence services with adapting those techniques to domestic and foreign propaganda, a broader information war, beyond the traditional military techniques, and indeed specifically for the purposes of shaping and controlling political opinion around elections.
My sense is that he spends a tremendous amount of money at that moment to develop their capacity.
He goes out and hires or instructs his intelligence services to hire thousands of bloggers who then ultimately become trolls in service of the government.He expands the technical capacity of the military to wage this kind of war.They begin hiring hackers, even offering sentence reduction to hackers who have been arrested and charged with computer crimes, offering them amnesty in exchange for their willingness to work in service of the government and its intelligence agencies.
Explain the trolling, that part of it. What is it?
There are nominally independent companies that make small amounts of money by hiring thousands of people to generate traffic in service of ideas backed by the government.Some of the money they earn is advertising dollars.Much of the money they earn is coming from the government subsidies that pay these people to post stories and comments on issues relevant to government interests.4They're given a list of subjects and a list of positions to take, and that changes every day when they come to work.Sometimes those have nothing to do with government interests, and sometimes they have been directed from intelligence agencies.
4
Then, throughout the day, these people will, in regular eight-hour or 12-hour shifts, surf popular social media sites or other corners of the Internet, engage in conversation, engage in dialog on political issues, advancing not their own personal point of view, but the point of view of the government.5
5
And the success of this?
They do manage, sometimes, operating incognito, sometimes operating under handles that don’t indicate that they are actually working for the Russian government, to build up a significant following, to engage with other likeminded people in countries that are often antagonistic to Russia, to infiltrate themselves into the conversation in ways that can be influential.
So they try to get in for a little chaos and disruption in France and Germany and London, even the United States?
There are examples that we've come to learn about of actual employees of the Russian military pretending to be, for example, a housewife in Pennsylvania who’s participating in political discussions online, who in fact is a Russian soldier employed by the military in eastern Ukraine.
To what end?
The idea here is to try and advance.The goal is very much a traditional Russian propaganda and influence operation goal.Since the early days of the Soviet Union, Russia sought to find an influence, groups that could in turn influence public opinion in opponent countries.Famously, an intellectual infiltrated the Bloomsbury Group, not so much to get Virginia Woolf to become a propagandist for Joseph Stalin but simply to advance ideas that the Bloomsbury set would find politically appealing, but that also advanced ideas, political positions, international diplomatic agenda items that were in service of and of use to the Soviet Union.
It’s very much that same approach, but writ large and at a grassroots level.You're employing thousands and thousands of individuals to advance—not to try and win an argument, but to try and bring along people who might be inclined to agree with items, ideas that advance Russian policy principles, and to get them all singing off the same sheet of music, and to then engage their own communities, online or elsewhere, and advance these ideas further.
Sort of to soften the edges of a debate or an argument.
That’s right.The topics are fairly clear-cut, that the U.S. is—they will, for example, argue that the U.S. is spending too much money on NATO, that NATO is a drag on the U.S. economy, that the U.S. should separate itself from NATO.Now there are many, and there have always been isolationist tendencies in the United States, and there have, from the founding of NATO, been prominent people who were skeptical about the U.S. commitment to defend European countries against Russia.So it’s not that that idea doesn’t exist; it’s just that it is being advanced and amplified by this covert online propaganda effort in service of the Russian agenda.
And is this also fake news?
Some of it can be fake news.Some of those fake news stories are originated from within the Russian intelligence services.But just as often, and perhaps more often, they find the fake news stories that have been introduced, that further their own aims and then amplify them, either by having their paid trolls take and circulate those stories among their own followers and social media communities, but also by employing the more advanced and complicated automated techniques that they have deployed throughout the Internet.
There are networks of automated computer accounts, either Facebook accounts, Twitter accounts, other social media accounts, that can be ordered or commanded at will to like or recommend or pass along to other followers these fake news stories.
This is what bots are.
Bots, and then a whole network of bots is called a “botnet.”The Russians have, according to the U.S. intelligence services, by far the largest and most widely deployed bot network, botnet of any of the adversaries of the U.S. around the world.These number thousands and even tens of thousands of computers that have been illicitly infected with malware and can be used to influence these social media conversations without the owner of the computer ever knowing.
Has it become, by 2014, a significant component of the Russian war machine?
By the time Ukraine erupts in 2014, Putin and the Russian intelligence services have spent not just time and money but intellectual energy developing this capability, and indeed, the Russian military intelligence services are chomping at the bit to deploy this new weapon.They have already developed a broader military theory of hybrid warfare that views warfare in the Information Age as occurring along a broad spectrum of capabilities, not just military, where they fall well behind the West and know they can't catch up, but also information warfare, political organization in opponent countries, economic warfare, some of it covert, some of it overt.
They have built this new asymmetric strategy of warfare, from their perspective, on the basis of experience, because they believe that these tools have been used against them, and that they need now to use them against their adversaries.
On the arc from Estonia to Ukraine, it’s been quite a learning curve? They’re very capable by the end?
What we see in Ukraine is a dramatic improvement in Russian capabilities from what we saw in Georgia.There, they relied much more on a traditional military response, with some information warfare filigree added to it.In Ukraine it’s exactly the opposite.There are real military elements to Putin’s response to the crisis, important military elements.They are largely in service of and married to a larger information operation that has unleashed both against Ukraine itself [and] against the international community that is seeking to respond to Russia’s efforts to push back against the pro-European movement in Ukraine.
Can you give me a sense of specifically what they did, what they use it for?
The first big example is the election in Ukraine in April 2014.On the three days before the election, the entire central electoral system was brought down.The officials in charge of running the election had organized a very centralized computer-driven system for collecting and tabulating the vote.And immediately before the election, they came in one morning, and everything was down.Not only would the computers not function, they wouldn’t even turn on.When they did get them turned on, all the hard drives were wiped.The entire electoral system of Ukraine had been eradicated.
The first strike, as it were, was a total annihilation of an election that Russia didn’t want to see happen.Now, the Ukrainians worked very hard to get their system back up and running and succeeded in re-establishing it in time for the election.But even on election day, Russia engaged in cyber operations against the Ukrainians by taking over the screens of the reporting networks and posting fake results, or attempting to post fake results.Those fake results were then taken and broadcast on Russian media to suggest that right-wing pro-Nazi parties were doing better than they in fact were in the election.
Anything else?
On Ukraine?
Yeah.
Well, I'm going to have to remind myself of the timing on all of this, but when Russian-backed troops in eastern Ukraine shoot down the Malaysian airliner [MH-17], almost immediately an information operation is unleashed to say that the airliner was shot down by pro-Western Ukrainian forces.This is a propaganda line that continues to this day.The mistake in shooting down and killing of all of these people was almost immediately flipped into a tool for advantage for the pro-Russian forces.
Likewise, the military intrusions that Russia would eventually admit to undertaking in eastern Ukraine initially were denied.But the forces that the Russians were supporting in rising up against Kiev were said to be doing so in service of an anti-Nazi, anti-right-wing effort in the country, and to add credibility to that argument, Russia and Russian-backed intelligence services spread wildly fake items about right-wing groups operating in Ukraine.
When President Putin and his generals look back at Ukraine and the arc of—the trajectory of success and failure, it’s almost like they’ve had a dress rehearsal for something there they end up doing in 2015.
2014 is a huge validation for Putin’s view and Gerasimov’s view and Russian military intelligence’s view that intelligence warfare gives Russia the tools it needs to fight back against a stronger enemy in an effective way.6It cements the commitment of Russian leadership to this new kind of warfare.
6
Intervention in the U.S. Election
As we now know, they begin an attack on America.When the first hints of it are captured, [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper talks about “We had stuff; we didn’t know what it was.”To the extent that you can, can you take me through the early days of the discovery of the attack and what people thought?
Sure.In retrospect, the timing has become much more extended as people look back and see the presence of Russian intelligence services in our political parties and in the computer networks of our political and electoral system.In fact, the Russians had always traditionally collected intelligence, including the computer networks of our political parties.They had done that in 2008; they had done it in 2012.And indeed, relatively early on, they were found to be doing that in 2015 and 2016.Both on tips from foreign intelligence and through their own counterintelligence work, U.S. intelligence services, domestic and foreign, found Russian actors, known agents of the Russian state, to be hacking into the political parties in the United States, both the personal accounts of individual political figures and the accounts of the parties.This began as early as 2015, summer of 2015, and continued throughout.
All the way up until the first intrusions by Russian state actors into state and local political organizations, U.S. officials assumed that this was simply intelligence collection, very much of the sort that intelligence services do all over the world, and that indeed the United States does regularly, even in friendly countries.
Espionage.
Basic espionage to collect intelligence, to inform decision making, to understand the decision making in other countries, something that intelligence services do regularly and that is considered almost par for the course.
With the intrusions into state and local electoral systems, the domestic counterintelligence officials started to see something else.There was probing into the ways in which voting occurred in America that wasn’t consistent with the idea of collecting intelligence on how the election might come out.It suggested an interest in how votes actually were cast, how voting machines worked, how people were given permission to vote, voter rolls and so on.
There was interest in campaign finance, and this started setting off alarm bells.Even at this early time in the spring and late spring of 2016, it was not clear to even the most concerned Russia watchers that Russia was up to something.In May 2016, the United States intelligence services became aware through sources of a Russian military intelligence official bragging about how he and his services were going to cause chaos in the upcoming election and that this was going to be payback for the U.S.’s interference in Russian elections in 2011 and 2012.
But even under those circumstances, the U.S. intelligence officials didn’t know the context and weren’t prepared for and didn’t understand what was about to happen.It was only really when the Russian intelligence services released, through WikiLeaks, the emails that they had stolen and been seen stealing from the Democratic National Committee the prior spring that officials at the White House and throughout the Intelligence Community really realized that Russia was going to launch active measures, a real effort to disrupt the election and potentially alter the outcome of the election, rather than just fiddle around the edges and collect information about the political process in the United States.7
7
When the warning bell actually finally goes off, tell us the story of how the Obama administration reacted.
The first thing after the dump of the emails and the state election intrusions that happens is a kind of moment of terror, when they realized that the Russians might actually try to physically alter the outcome of the core exercise of democracy in the United States; that they might try to change the vote.8They pretty quickly realize, through their own assessment of how votes are tallied in America and their consultation with voting experts, including some who, by chance, happened to be on staff, that actually altering the physical vote count is very difficult, almost impossible in the United States, because the process of voting and collecting and tabulating votes is so dispersed all the way down to the county level.Each county collects votes in a different way.
8
After about a week, they realize that the vote itself is going to be safe, but that Russia has any number of other ways in which they can potentially cause trouble.They can, on the day of the election, impede voting by getting into voter rolls around the country, potentially, and making subtle changes to the voter registration rolls.Then, on Election Day, when people show up to vote, they aren’t on the list, and they're not allowed to vote in the regular way, and they have to be given a provisional ballot.The lines waiting for provisional ballots could stretch to hours in length. The voting places could run out of provisional ballots.An aura of chaos could consume the election, thereby undermining the credibility of the vote.
They could come out the day after the election with fake news or individual actual examples of them fiddling with voting machines that could then be used to claim that they had meddled with the vote more widely, so a disinformation campaign designed to undermine the credibility of the vote the day after the vote.There are a number of other potential things that the Russians show themselves capable of doing that the U.S. government then needs to start figuring out how they can combat it.
The U.S. Response to Russian Measures
The options available—diplomatic, counterstrike, whatever the measures are that are available to the president of the United States at that moment are what?
A debate begins inside the administration about how to respond to this Russian effort.9The span of options runs from doing nothing and assuming that the vote-being-dispersed event across the United States will come off without a hitch to public verbal warnings to direct warnings behind the scenes to sanctions to cyber measures that can be taken to penalize and deter the Russian behavior.10
9
10
The first big debate is whether or not to say publicly that the United States government believes that Russia is interfering in our election campaign.The concern in the White House is that doing so will simply do the Russians’ work for them, that it will be an admission that Russia has somehow been able to get into our electoral systems and undermine them, and that this will further erode credibility in the election and its outcome in a way that furthers the primary goal of the Russian operation.
The next debate is about whether or not to take cyber countermeasures to strike particular targets in Russia using U.S. cyberweaponry.For much of the past 10 years, the United States has been focused on the kinetic effects of cyberwarfare, the possibility of using computer networks to incapacity physical operations, whether it’s banking operations or military operations or political operations, rather than the psychological and the influence operations that Russia has been increasingly focused on.
The debate is whether or not to use those kinetic powers to punish Russia.The fear that the president and his close advisers have is that whereas with normal military conflict, there are decades of processes and channels of communication that allow a conflict to be slowed down as it begins to develop, that allows for deconflicting and avoidance of escalation, in the cyber realm there are no rules; there are no standards of communication.The possibility of cyberwarfare escalating rapidly and out of control is a great concern.
It’s particularly a concern for the U.S. because they know that Russia and Russian intelligence services have been probing critical infrastructure areas in the United States, including the electrical grid and other areas.
There's also, I guess, going public and saying to everybody, including Putin, “We know it’s you; don’t do this”; maybe getting Trump to stand next to the president and Hillary and say—but one of the things that happens is Trump’s response, which is interesting, isn't it?
This is a crucial amplifier for the Russian operation.Rather than having the Republican political candidate, as would traditionally have happened, join with the Democratic candidate and say, “Any effort to undermine the core exercise of democracy in the United States by any power is an attack on all of us,” Trump almost embraces the Russian operation.He calls on Russia to release any emails that it may have hacked from the Democrats.He denies, at the same time, that Russia is behind the hacking and says that, in fact, nobody can prove that Russia is the source of the intrusion and source of the operation against the election.
This puts the White House in a very difficult position, because to the extent that Obama himself or his political appointees come out and point the finger at Russia, it will be perceived in the American electorate as having a political component.That again does the Russians’ work for them by making it seems as if the whole system is driven by politics rather than by larger national security concerns of the country.
By then it’s clear, as we approach Election Day, that—I guess it’s clear.I guess we don’t know whether they're going to get in and flip the switches on Election Day, but it’s pretty clear that they're about disruption, chaos, fake news; Hillary has an illness; guys are carrying EpiPens around; about—
Throughout August there had been a barrage of Russian activity.This included accelerating intrusions into the state and local election systems, an acceleration of the propaganda effort, the use of trolls and botnets to advance fake news and other stories that damage Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump.And there's been a broader set of activities by Russia in public to further their goals.
Toward the end of the month, President Obama meets on the sidelines of a G-[20] meeting with Putin and warns him directly that any interference in the U.S. election will have consequences, that tampering with the exercise of democracy in the U.S. is unacceptable, and warns him fairly sternly, without going into specifics, not to meddle in the election.
That then follows a period of relative calm in September, when the intrusions into the states stop, the propaganda effort tails off, and then in October, it picks back up.There are new attempts at spear-phishing attacks against election officials.There is a renewed propaganda effort in social media by the trolls and the botnets.As Election Day approaches, the concern is rising again that not so much an attempt to physically manipulate the vote but an attempt to undermine the credibility of the vote might be launched by Russia on and about Election Day.
Obviously, we all know the results of the election.We know that, in that period following his victory, the Intelligence Community comes forward.11There's a report; it’s definitive.Obama offers sanctions that seem to be definitive.12And other things take place from the Trump side.What's happening over there?
11
12
Trump’s election is a belated wakeup call for much of the U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence community.They suddenly realize that what had been in the view of many of them a sideshow or an annoyance could possibly have made a difference in the election, that Russia’s influence operation could have changed minds and driven voters in a particular direction; certainly could have undermined overall credibility in the validity of the vote.
This launches both renewed activity to understand what Moscow was doing at that moment, but also a review of all the raw intelligence that had come in over the previous year, to look for what had actually been going on that they had missed.Suddenly this generates, in the period of November and December, a slew of new intelligence products, finished intelligence products, that take raw intelligence that has come in and turn it into analytical products for decision makers.
It’s in this period that you begin to get the first reports showing undeclared meetings during the campaign and during the transition between Trump campaign officials and Russians.These are alarming to the intelligence and counterintelligence officials who discover them and put them in the finished intelligence products, and it’s also alarming to the decision makers in the White House during the transition.
Putin and Trump
What we’ve now discovered is there were efforts to back-channel to the Russians.The president-elect says—the essence is, “Why can't we all just get along?” What are those signals that are being sent?
All of this is taking place in the context of a very different strategic view of Russia among President-elect Trump’s closest advisers.There is an idea espoused, especially by his closest National Security Adviser, retired Gen. Michael Flynn, that a new strategic alliance can be struck with Russia; that the antagonism between the United States and Russia is an unnecessary holdover from the Cold War; that the real strategic threat that the West and the United States especially faces is now from radical Islam, and that we have a natural ally in Russia in that fight.
Despite traditional foreign policy consensus that, on both the right and the left in Washington, that Russia is still an adversary, potentially the greatest adversary that the U.S. faces, there is this strategic idea among Trump’s closest advisers that a deal can be struck.Gen. Flynn pursues this idea in conversation with his Russian contacts, and Trump embraces it at various points throughout the campaign and indeed during the transition.
As soon as they take office, in fact, the interagency process is put in service of coming up with a potential plan for how a rapprochement, strategic rapprochement grand bargain with Russia might take place.
In fact, we've talked to people who work at the State Department who said in those transitions in the past, it’s always been pretty collegial and interesting.It’s one of those places you don’t do gigantic gear shifts during the transition.You pick up where we’ve left off and maybe retool it here and there.But in this case, they weren’t particularly listened to, in some cases not listened to at all.[They] never met [Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson or any of the top staff people, and when it came to the sanction regime and other things were shocked to discover that there were discussions about how—
… from the period of President Obama’s confrontation with President Putin in late August through the imposition of sanctions in January, the U.S.diplomatic machinery has been very focused on how sanctions and other measures can be brought to bear against Russia to punish it for its interference in the election and to deter it from pursuing those kinds of activities again in the future.The entire Russian foreign policy system has been moving in the direction of punishing and confronting Russia.The Trump transition comes in, and they're moving in exactly the opposite direction, looking for ways to ease the confrontation with Russia.
… Are our intelligence services noticing that they are continuing to play the game?
The Russians are absolutely continuing their information warfare and their influence operations.As recently as March, they launch an enormous and more sophisticated spear-phishing attack not against emails but against the Twitter accounts of more than 10,000 Defense Department officials.The targeted Defense officials receive a seemingly innocent Twitter message that is tailored to their particular interests, either sports or the Oscars which have just occurred.If they tweet on the link embedded in the Twitter message it takes them surreptitiously to a Russian-controlled server that downloads malware onto their phone or computer, giving the Russian intelligence services control not only of the device, but of the Twitter account of the target.
So not only is Russia continuing its attempts to establish cyber control and expand its ability to launch influence operations in the United States, but they're becoming better and better at it all the time.
Are we at war with Russia?
There is a very robust debate going on inside national security circles about whether or not this should be called war.The consensus is settling on the idea that it’s a mistake to take what has been the traditional Western approach to the problem and view us either in a state of peace or in a state of war, but that we would be wise to adopt the Russian view, which is that there is a continuum.Operations that traditionally might have been considered in furtherance of goals that cross the line into open warfare, now in the information arena, fall somewhere this side of open conflict, but nevertheless represent a real and ongoing conflict with Russia.
Given what we know about Putin, KGB guy, a judo guy, all the way up to tinkerer of things, information warfare specialist, active measures, a believer, how do you think Putin feels about what happened here? What does he walk away with? What does he think about this? Was this a success for him?
Well, there are two sides to that.It’s a complete validation of the theory that Russia can make itself, once again, a major and important player on the international stage through the use of these new techniques, these new cyber information techniques.The payoff for that operation, again, its primary goal being undermining the credibility of the West, continues to this day.Every twist and turn in the drama of President Trump and his confrontation with investigators, and the challenges he faces in Washington with constant questions about the validity of his presidency, all perfectly serve the larger goal that Putin was advancing, the primary goal of undermining the credibility of U.S. democracy.That’s the upside for Putin.
The downside is that he has ended up with a president who is difficult to predict, may not ultimately follow through on any of the great strategic ideas that he notionally embraced during the campaign.And worse, just as Ukraine served as a massive moment of rebirth for NATO, recommitted all of the countries of NATO to the idea that there was a real threat from Russia to their sovereignty, so the Russian interference in the U.S. election, outside of the circle of Trump, has galvanized the idea among leaders of both parties and indeed much of the American population that Russia is a real danger.
What Putin has done unwittingly is he’s both shown that he has this new power, but he has also made it quite clear to the West that he’s willing to use it in ways that present new challenges and threats that they are now awake to [and will] find ways to respond to.
Very good.Let’s see what these guys [have for questions]. Anything?
Intervention in the U.S. Election
Want to give us a fake news story that you thought was used during the election that helps define how they were doing it? You write about Pizzagate. …13
13
The Intelligence Communities are still tracing the network of Russian operations in the cybersphere, still trying to understand the ways in which they used fake news stories to advance their influence operation.Investigators on Capitol Hill and in the counterintelligence community have come up with a long list of fake news stories, including crazy but widely circulated stories about alleged pedophile rings operating out of the basement of a pizza parlor in northwest Washington; stories about Hillary Clinton having Parkinson’s disease or other illnesses; stories that may or may not have originated with Russian agents but that were advanced and amplified by the Russian cyber influence operation and its tactics.
For example, they have found that at moments when Trump was particularly vulnerable, including on the release of the <i>Access Hollywood</i> tapes, that in which he admitted to groping women, that fake news stories would suddenly receive a burst of attention and, as it were, cyberbroadcasting from botnets controlled by Russia.14This would get them more widely read.The assumption is, help to divert attention from stories that were hurting Trump.
14
One of the things about the fake news, which is amazing, is that it makes you not believe anything. That’s the great advantage of it.It’s just literally, what can I believe? You hear people saying it all the time, especially as they discover things that they really believed were baloney.
Again, one surprising reason why that can be so effective is because Trump himself has broken norms of credibility by reversing positions on issues himself, even in a matter of hours, undermining the idea of a consistent, agreed-upon set of facts that all Americans can use to make their decisions.
Putin Returns to the Presidency, Sparking Protests and a Crackdown
… You talked about the May 2016 GRU [Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian Federation] officer conversation that they picked up that was specific to Clinton.Then going back to 2011 and the demonstrations, just sort of set up—
Sure. As the protests in the streets of 70 cities and towns around Russia are peaking, Putin calls an emergency meeting of political allies and brings in the media to witness it.He declares that the United States has played a key role in fomenting these public demonstrations and that then-Secretary of State Clinton herself has been involved.He accuses her of sending a signal to the protesters.He says that the State Department under her played an active role in getting them out onto the streets and was key to making the protests happen.
He publicly accuses Clinton of interfering in Russia’s own electoral process.15What we learned through diplomacy and engagement with Russia over the ensuing period is that this wasn’t just a device that Putin was using to try and get himself out of a political jam; he really believed it.He really believed that the U.S. had executed an influence operation not just against Russia but against him in particular, to try and weaken his political power.That really forms the basis, we later learn, and U.S. intelligence later learns, for the vehemence with which he is willing to go after candidate Clinton in the 2016 electoral cycle.Indeed, the very first indication that U.S. intelligence has that Russia is not just collecting intelligence on the political process in 2016 but may intend to actively interfere with the election comes with the report of a conversation that a Russian military intelligence official has with a colleague, in which he brags that the GRU, the Russian military intelligence, has gained the ability to disrupt the election and intends to disrupt the election, and that this will be a way of paying Clinton back for her interference in Russia in 2011 and 2012.
15
Another small thing which is interesting is you write about the use of algorithms to really focus in on thousands of subgroups in order to pinpoint audiences and possibly change votes in key states.
In 2011, the Defense Department begins studying the possibility that foreign powers could use social media to advance propaganda.They fund 260 studies into how a propagandist might use the new medium of social media to advance the old goals of propaganda.They find that by using mathematical formulae, you can target and manipulate people in ways that a traditional propagandist never could.You can, again using mathematical formulae, segment populations into groups of likeminded people, either according to religion, according to geography—some of this is traditional and not hard to accomplish—segmenting people by sex or income, things that would be available from census data or other polling sources.
But because people are willingly giving up all sorts of information about themselves every day as they surf the Internet, every time they click, they're leaving a little record of their own choices and interests and even convictions and belief, all of those digital convictions being collected and stored and ultimately used largely by commercial interests in the U.S. to try and sell products to them.What the Defense Department researchers found was, just as Yahoo or Toyota or another company could try to sell you something based on your Internet browsing history and your social media history, so a propagandist could try to sell you ideas.
The way they would do that is by segmenting populations into groups according to their beliefs and interests, then targeting those people who, in social media arena, are more likely to change their opinion from one position to another if presented with a strong argument or, say, if presented with something scary.
All of those people can be identified, and then a propagandist can, with that group targeted and reachable through social media, they can then develop a message specifically designed to try and influence the behavior and beliefs of that person.
What U.S. counterintelligence found during the 2016 election cycle was that the Russians were in fact doing just that.They were taking specifically tailored messages and broadcasting them to populations that they believed were particularly vulnerable to that message.The latest example post-election is this Twitter hack in the Defense Department, where in order to gain access to Defense Department computers, phones and other devices, they tailored Twitter messages specifically to the demonstrated interests of their targets. …
The U.S. Response to Russian Measures
Do you know anything about the hotline call that they made? Tell us what happened.
In the days before the election, eager to reiterate the idea that physical tampering in the vote would be unacceptable to the United States, the president authorizes the secretary of state to use the red line channel that has been established for nuclear deconfliction to send a message, not so much to Putin himself, but to the Russian military.This channel is an open channel that’s maintained at the State Department, and that message was sent in the days before the vote.
What did it say?
Again, he used the word “unacceptable.” It said that any tampering in or meddling with the execution of the vote in the United States would be unacceptable to the United States.
Any response?
The message was received, and there was no specific response.Throughout the campaign, the Russians almost with a wink and a nod said, “Oh, we’d never dream of doing something like that, and we’re certainly not doing it now.”
Thank you very much.
My pleasure.
Latest Interviews
Latest Interviews
Policies
Teacher Center
Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation
Koo and Patricia Yuen
FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
