The FRONTLINE Interviews
Toomas Hendrik Ilves
President of Estonia, 2006-16
Toomas Hendrik Ilves is a politician who served as president of Estonia from 2006 until 2016. Ileves was in office in 2007 when a massive cyber-attack, believed to have originated in Russia, crippled online services in Estonia for weeks.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Jim Gilmore conducted on June 23, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.
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Before we go into the actual story of 2007, tell us a little bit of the history of Estonia and when Estonia joined NATO, why the country joined NATO, what the reaction of the Russians, specifically Putin, was to that.
Well, I don’t know how far back you want to go.
Well, 2004, right?
Well, I mean, getting to NATO was a long process.Joining wasn’t really the—that was the easy part.First of all, the crucial step politically was that—which I had to fight a lot of battles in ’96-’97—was that basically, I came to the conclusion that we would not join NATO unless we were also in the EU, because EU fellow, EU member states can't veto you for NATO.But we were not in the EU.So I had to get step one done.
When it became clear we were joining the European Union, the original objections from Germany, the U.K., sort of toned down.But it really was up to the United States to—the U.S. supported it.And, well, President Bush decided, yes, it was the—and the quote what I heard he said is, “It’s the right thing to do.” So that was on track.
Now the Russians were, up till about 1999-2000, said, “You can join the EU, but you can't join NATO,” and really sort of did a lot of lobbying against membership of the Baltic countries into NATO.But basically, if the United States decides, and the other ones can't veto, it kind of becomes a fait accompli. ...Clearly the Russians were not happy, but it really wasn’t theirs to decide.I mean, here, you can contrast that with their reaction to Ukraine applying for something as minor as an association agreement with the EU.An association agreement is nothing like EU membership—no real monies, no voting, nothing.You get basically a free trade agreement and student-teacher exchange.That’s what the association agreement amounts to.
There, you know, they went in and invaded the place in order to stop having an association agreement, whereas with us, on the EU side, they grudgingly allowed it, or didn’t object too much, saying that, “You can do that, but we don’t want you to go to NATO.”Anyway, in 2004, April, we joined NATO, and then on May 1, we formally became members of the European Union.So we were in both clubs, more or less, within two weeks.
Why did Estonia want to be members of EU and then part of NATO?
Well, for the EU, it’s just being—you want to be at the table.You really want to be at the table when decisions are made.So, well, that was kind of an obvious thing to do.And for NATO, I mean, we wanted to be part of the alliance that is probably the oldest alliance and functioning alliance.And we see today, with, well, the kind of revanchist, belligerent power that Russia has become in the past 10 years, I would say, that it’s a very good thing that we’re in NATO.There's an insurance policy.
Did you ever have meetings with Putin?
No, I had meetings with Medvedev, because in the first part of my presidency, Medvedev was president. Putin was prime minister.Then, when Putin came back in 2012, it was already such a sort of not very good atmosphere, that it was not really—there were no opportunities to do that.
Putin Consolidates Power in his Second Term
Of course he’s talked a lot about NATO encroaching on his borders.He’s talked a lot about—we’ll talk about 2007 in a second, outright attack.Does Estonia feel threatened?Did Putin himself sort of threaten? Was he a threatening presence in some of the statements he would make over the years?
Well, I think the actions are more threatening.They invaded Georgia; they invaded Ukraine, so I think we’re beyond statements.I mean, on part of encroaching or encirclement is more often the argument.If you actually look at how much actually NATO touches on Russia, it’s like this minuscule percentage of Russia’s borders.But this is just part of the language. I think it’s more for—it’s a propaganda ploy. There is no real reason.Even today, you know, when we have this enhanced forward presence of NATO units, what do we have?We have a battalion, basically, in each of the countries.I mean, 600 men, 700 men, whereas you have like 100,000 across the border.So it really is—it’s a ridiculous statement.Those 600 in each of the countries are more for—they were deterrence force the way that, you know, there were U.S., French and British troops in West Berlin.Clearly they weren’t going to be able to—they were completely surrounded by the Red Army.They would put up a resistance, but I mean, it’s more that we are here, and we’re not going to sort of tolerate encroachments on NATO territory.
You know, the statement is made a lot that Putin doesn’t have a real foreign policy, that everything that he does in foreign policy is defined by his needs for domestic policy. Is that your view?
Well, certainly, you could make a strong—I mean, I have no access to his mind, but I would say that the invasion and annexation of Crimea and entering into Donbas following that did not have—serving other purpose than sort of getting a sort of jingoist rah-rah feeling going in Russia internally.It’s just a huge burden, in terms of cost. It cost lives and lots of money.And it’s a feel-good factor for domestic politics, which is now or already has worn off.There was this big sense of jingoist superiority in, I guess in 2014-2015.It started waning in 2016, and today it’s not really doing much good in terms of its popularity with the big demonstrations against corruption in Russia. So I think the effect has worn off.
Putin Tests the Waters in Estonia and Georgia
All right, tell us the story of 2007, the way it’s been written up before is you get on the Internet one spring night in 2007….
Well, the background is that we had a Soviet-era statue in the center of town that basically people really resented and didn’t like and was then used by kind of these sort of revanchist Russian chauvinist sort of people that fly Soviet flags, especially around May 9.It was fairly offensive to most people in Estonia, and provocative, so the government decided it’s going to move it and put it somewhere else.We didn’t tear it down; we just simply put it into its proper place, which is a military cemetery. And that's what we did.
Of course the Russians tried to turn this into a big thing and were making all kinds of demands you don’t make of a democratically elected government:The government has to resign.Then shortly thereafter, we started—I mean, I couldn’t access my website or anything, the president’s website, government websites, the banks, the newspapers.They were not accessible, so I made some phone calls, and I said, “What's going on?,” because originally you thought, OK, my Internet is down. No, my Internet worked fine.OK, maybe there's some kind of problem with one place, but the problem seemed to be in every sort of major site.So then I called up, and they said: “Yes, we’re under attack. All the banks and the newspapers and the government sites are being overloaded.”
Well, I don’t know what else to say.Basically, people couldn’t access anything, and that in effect shut down the country in many ways, because being already highly digital and relying on the Internet for so many of our services that people couldn’t get to anymore, and that obviously caused problems.Most people were used to using electronic banking, and that didn’t work, so money didn’t move.You couldn’t get access to government sites, and you didn’t know what was going on because you couldn’t access the newspapers or the media.Basically, [it] was all sort of the public service, sort of radio and television.
Talk a little bit—just explain for our audience that doesn’t know how savvy Estonia was in this cyber world how much you guys jumped onboard a lot earlier than other countries.
Well, what we did—I mean, that’s a very long story in itself.But in 2001-2002, we just rolled out a system whereby most government services, and by now all government services, are digitally accessible and performable, so that you just get online.We do it in a highly secure way with a digital identity, which is different from the kinds of services you have, for example, in the United States, where you don’t really have that level of security and dependability.We were leaders then—well, I’d even say unfortunately continue to be the leaders in this field.Being so reliant on digital services, then we obviously were hit harder.
The kind of attack that was done is called a DDoS attack, which is—it stands for Distributed Denial of Service attack.What that means—I mean, it looks, from the victim side—is that your servers are being hit with so many signals that your server can't handle them, and it just sort of shuts down.How it works on the sending side is especially interesting, I think, which is that it’s done by the same people who send out spam.Spam—you can think of this as spam that just goes in all directions.Spam is sent out by bots, which are robots, from millions and millions and millions of personal computers that have been infected around the world, and when they’ve been infected, that means they effectively come under the control, when you're not using it, under the control of someone else.That’s where the bot comes in.
You can be anywhere in the world.You have an infected computer, and then, while you're not yourself sending an email, it’s sending out signals.Instead of shooting spam in all directions, from all of these millions of computers, they all are focused on certain addresses, and that’s where the overload comes from.
Now, why it’s an interesting case, and it’s a precursor to many of the things that we’ve seen in the past several years from Russia, is that these are criminal gangs that do this.Running spam operations or running botnets or networks of bots is completely illegal, but you can hire them. So they were hired.This became especially clear, because the high point of the attacks on Estonia came on May 9, the day that Russia celebrates the end of World War II.The rest of the world celebrates or commemorates May 8.
I went to our Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) office after all this had ended. They wanted to do a big presentation.There was a graph of the attack, and it was basically sort of medium-level attack that was proceeding all the time.Then, at zero-zero midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, suddenly it went—just goes to the sky, and then it proceeds for 24 hours.At 24:00 Greenwich Mean Time, or midnight, it stops.I said: “Well, that’s not how it should work, because it should be a sort of a Gaussian normal distribution, you know, the way things are.”He said, “No, no, no.”I said: “Well, how is that possible?How is that possible?”He said: “Well, their money ran out.That’s what they paid for.”Then he explained to me that these gangs, that you can rent them by the day.Someone’s paying you to either spam or to do a DDoS attack, so that’s where I came up with the expression.It’s a unique form of public-private partnership.
The Russians tried to say, “Oh, this was civil society rising up in objection.”There's no civil society with botnet attacks.These are criminal operations. Someone has to hire them, you know.And you bet it wasn’t, like, your local whatever society.
So it lasts for one day.
Well, it lasted for many, many days.Actually, really about three weeks.But it hit its peak that was really just completely shut everything down on the 9th of May.
So the country was shut down.
Well, all the services that are IT-based.I mean, you could still drive a car; you could fill up your tank with gas.You could physically walk into a bank, but it wasn’t clear how much you could do that, because the computers were down.
So you realized that there were messages being sent.
Well, everyone realized it.As I've written about it later, I would say it’s—first of all, any history of cyber conflict, war, or whatever happens in the future, will always begin with this, in that it is the first time we know, at least publicly, in a public awareness, cyber was used to send a political message.It is in the sort of [Prussian general and military theorist Carl] von Clausewitz definition of war, the continuation of policy by other means.This was it. They continued policy using cyber means.
And that will remain. I mean, it’s like a fact you can't get over.
First time a nation state had been—
Yeah, the first time a nation-state.There have been attacks like this; there have been hackings.All of these had been done earlier.But first of all, they were generally surreptitious, sub rosa.The U.S. government had been hacked for 20 years by that time, but it had never been this public thing, that now we’re doing this.Now, the Russian government denied—wink, wink, nudge, nudge—that they had anything to do with it.But there is no way this could happen without the—within its actually being initiated and run by a government.There is nothing sort of, nothing like, “Oh, civil society rose up in protest.”No, that’s not possible. …
Would Putin had to have been the one that sort of approved this?And what would have been the purpose? Why do you think?Why? Was it just a practice run? Was it to send a message?Was it too big for their boots or what?
Yeah.I think there's—in any case, no matter what, there's a different attitude toward countries like mine, which are formerly communist, and they lay toward, at least at that time, toward countries more to the West.They're little guys.There's a whole amount of resentment, because we’re so much more successful than Russia.We’re by far the least corrupt country of any post-communist country.But we’re the least corrupt countries in Europe—I mean in the European Union, and they're, like, way back there.They're like 140 or something, and one of the most corrupt places.
So you have these little guys who are doing really well, and everyone likes them.They're not corrupt, and they're very successful, so let’s go teach them a lesson.Besides, they're really on this digital thing, so this will really teach them a lesson.I think that’s the kind of mentality that was involved.Whether it was authorized at the highest levels or not—well, if you read <i>The Washington Post </i>article on the forensics done for the hacking of the United States, well, it looks like those kinds of decisions are made at the very top.I mean, it might have been a quick, dismissive “I’ll let them have it” or something.The way that the Russian state works, there's not much in the way of sort of volunteerism.There is this kind of general sense that, OK, Putin doesn’t like these guys; OK, we can go and do something.It’s applied across all domains.It’s quite unlikely that the spate of murders that we’ve seen, or the polonium poisoning that we saw in the U.K., or the murder of Boris Nemtsov, I mean, those things don’t occur without at least a nodding approval of the man on top, because you just don’t go around killing political opponents on a freelance basis, because basically, you never know.Those things can all backfire, and then the man on top will be in real trouble.It very much behooves to maintain rule of law.So those decisions are the kinds that are made at the very, very top.
Did Putin say anything specific about the moving of the statue beforehand?
Putin himself did not. It came from the Foreign Ministry and foreign minister and defense minister. It was not Putin himself.
When the attack happened, did you guys go to NATO?
Yes, we went to NATO.There's a lot of nonsense written about it.We didn’t ask for Article 5, but we did ask for this to be discussed under Article 4, that you actually have consultations on these matters.NATO, at that time, Estonia had been urging ever since joining in 2004 that more attention should be paid to cyber issues. Basically, to be blunt, we kind of got the brush-off.What we thought would be a good idea would be a center for the study of cyberwar.NATO has about 40 of these centers around NATO countries on dealing with all aspects of more academic centers, or sort of—not operational, but looking at how certain things work.In Germany, there's a Center for Military Operations in Closed and Shallow Waters [Centre of Excellence for Operations in Confined and Shallow Waters (CSW)].Immediately after the attack, we got this big, “OK, OK, let’s establish a center for cybersecurity and do it in Estonia.”So it takes a while to react. When this happened in 2007, this was not on the agenda, really, outside of geekdom.Clearly the NSA and the Pentagon have been worrying about these—if you read any of the history, they’ve been worrying about these things for ages, but at the military-political level, no.
To show you how slow it was, the premiere security conference or get-together in the Western world is the Munich Security Conference.The first time cyber was even a panel discussion at the Munich Security Conference, which is—I mean, we’ve got hundreds of specialists there—was 2011. That’s how long it took.I'm not blaming the security conference, but rather I'm saying this is how long it took for the issue to percolate to the level of policymakers in a way, in a big enough way that they would actually have a panel on this, panel discussion on this.
Clearly, the people who dealt with it and the various ministries around the world were aware of these things, and even dealt with these things for years, but at the policymaker level, it didn’t really get them.
Did NATO go to Moscow and complain to Putin?
Well, NATO doesn’t do that.I think they were—
Well, the presidents of countries, or the president of the United States.
Well, I know that Germans and the United States basically sort of said, “Don’t do that.”But it wasn’t—I mean, NATO itself doesn’t do that.Individual allies will make a bilateral sort of—it’s their bilateral decision, and during—in that whole sort of mess, they also—they attacked the ambassador, Estonian ambassador in Moscow.They attacked the car of the Swedish ambassador to Moscow.Certain countries were more active than others.
It seems to me, as an outsider point of view, is that you guys are on the border; you guys are formerly part of the Soviet Union.There are threats made in certain ways, and this certainly, when shutting down the electronic aspects of your country during this period, is a pretty good threat.Yet the rest of the world kind of looked at it and sort of said, “Oh.”
Well, I think it’s a bigger issue that people have a hard time thinking that what is digital is real.It’s kind of considered not real; it’s virtual.You could see it all over.Look at the— … completely different realm, but political.In 1972 the DNC was broken—the Democratic National Committee [headquarters] was broken into.OK, the guys got caught, but had they gone in there and stolen something, what U.S. newspaper would have actually published those purloined letters?I don’t think any of them, or at least nothing respectable, whereas when you go in digitally and steal the contents of someone’s—I steal someone’s mail, but now they're in digital form, well, then you just go read them with glee, and voyeuristic glee, and say, “Wow, look what we find here.”
We don’t take digital threats as seriously.We don’t understand that you can digitally—well, you can knock out an Iranian … uranium-processing plant.You can, as has been demonstrated now at least twice in Ukraine, take down a power system.Those are all fairly easy things to do.
We don’t give it the same weight as something that in the physical, kinetic, to use the proper term in the world, … that we give.If you shoot a missile, and you can actually see them on the radar, a missile coming in, hits power plant, blows up, electricity out, OK, we know who did it. Bad.Well, at first it takes a while to figure out why your power plant has been taken down, and you can't find any reason for it until you finally start looking at the software and see that you have been infected.And the forensics on this takes a while. The forensics are not nearly as difficult as people think, but you can basically ascribe responsibility after a certain amount of research.And you’ve taken these things—you’ve taken down in Ukraine, twice, power plants, and other things as well.But that has been, because it’s a war zone, studied more carefully.
It’s a learning curve, it seems.And let’s talk about that a little bit. The next year, when the attacks on Georgia took place, the invasion of Georgia, they used the same tactics.They used cyber tactics. They also used disinformation tactics.They used this hybrid war strategy that had been sort of developing.When you see Georgia happen, and you see what happened, what are you thinking? Are you saying, “Well, they learned from us, and now look what they're doing”?
First of all, what they did with Georgia—and this is actually described in two long articles in the <i>Small Wars Journal</i> by people who study this—is that they not only did this, what they did to us, but they did it in combination with, again, what are called kinetic attacks nowadays.Before bombing an area, they would blacken it out so no one had any—I mean, you're really in the fog of war, at least digitally. You have no idea. Nothing is working.And then you start bombing.So this heightened—it was sort of this pincer movement.
Since we had in 2007 a fairly good idea of what to do already, before the attacks, because we had gamed an attack like that, we just had not been prepared for the level of attack. It was just much more intense.We had gamed it earlier because we actually had our first digital voting in Estonia about two months beforehand, and we assumed that any hacker would want to disrupt it, so we built up our defenses based on just that kind of attack on one system, not everything being attacked on such a massive level.
But when we figured that one out, and then when Georgia was attacked, we then offered, based on our experience, we sent some experts there.We put up mirror sites, meaning that you could still access Georgian sites, but they were hosted on our servers so that you couldn’t access the Georgian sort of in situ server.But if you wanted to get something, you would then be able to access that service from a server that we hosted in our own country.
But was it clear to you that you guys had been a stepping stone, and they were learning as they went along?
Oh, quite, yes.
Explain.Just explain that.
Well, since it had never been done until us, and then a year later it happens again, moreover corroborating our initial beliefs that it was the Russians, same methodology, but then, combining that with more than just taking down servers, but also taking the servers down in conjunction with actual physical military attacks.It’s just a new level that they applied to Georgia. …
Putin and Hybrid Warfare
... Let’s talk about Ukraine. ...You’re watching Ukraine, the taking over of Crimea, the use of “little green men,” of disinformation, of fake news, of hacking.What are you seeing? Are you surprised? What's the lessons that we should be gathering from this?
Well, the first thing is that we really need to be surprised, because there hasn’t been anything like that since World War II.The thing people forget is that the entire world, or at least Europe, U.S., transatlantic, Russia, Soviet Union, that security architecture has been in place since 1945, and has been refined.Already the U.N. charter that everyone signed is that you can't change borders through use of force or even threat of use of force.
This is reaffirmed in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975: no change of borders in Europe through use of force, and even more substantially reinforced with the CSCE [Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe] at the time, Paris Charter, that says every country has the right to decide what its security arrangements are, meaning if you want to join either the EU or NATO, it is your right, not to mention you can't change—again, change borders through use of force.
Probably the weakest document, but the one with the greatest implications for perhaps a century, is the Budapest Memorandum, where Ukraine, which had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world— U.S. one, Soviet Union/Russia two, third was Ukraine—they got rid of all of their nukes, and countries—the U.K., United States, Russia—promised in perpetuity to maintain the territorial integrity of the Ukraine.
First of all, this long treaty, series of treaties that we’ve all ascribed to—and then you finally had this thing, which, as I said, will come to haunt us for decades and decades and decades, but what rogue nuclear state would sign a document on anything, or believe any promises, after what happened to Ukraine?Ukraine would not have been invaded if it had kept their nuclear weapons.
Anyway, this is the context in which we see this first massive violation of the principles of security in Europe or in sort of the transatlantic space, to be more precise.From that point on, once you violated, anything can happen. That’s the first lesson.
The second lesson is that there is a country that’s willing to use force, and we’d better start dealing with that country that does these things, because the rest of us are still abiding by the rules.But there's one country that doesn’t abide by the rules, so you have to start really thinking seriously about them and what we have to do, because they're not predictable, because the old rules do not apply apparently in their case.
Some people say that if the United States, if NATO had been more vociferous in attacking what happened in your country, had been more vociferous and had done more after Georgia, that perhaps a message would have been sent.
I think so.It’s Lenin who said, you know, if you have a bayonet, if you hit mush, keep pushing; if you hit steel, pull back.This is very primitive thinking, but I think, you know, when they're told no, you can't go any further, you can't do this, they won't.And I think they're constantly pushing our limits.Unfortunately, what I would say [is] the reaction on the part of both the European Union as well as occasionally by NATO has been far too accommodating and sort of bending over backward to say, “Well, let’s try to work this out, folks.”And it hasn’t worked. I mean, they see that it worked. What works is pushing and doing things in violation of established principles.
In the United States there was a big debate.We’ve talked to a lot of different people on both sides of it.In the Obama [administration], [there was the idea] that what we needed to do was we needed to help arm the Ukrainians when the attacks began, after Crimea had already fallen.Yet there was a decision not to go in that direction, to go the sanctions route instead.Yet there was a debate that no, we have to send a message here.What’s your overview of that?
Well, I argued, and I still do argue, that sanctions are good.But if you want the Ukrainians to—you have Ukrainians, I mean in the early days, they're basically wearing sneakers and using old, old Soviet rifles against the latest technology that the Russians have developed.I mean, it’s a slaughter—that we minimally needed to give them defensive weapons, meaning anti-tank TOW [Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided] missiles, things that, you know, where you're on your own territory, but you have these tanks coming at you in your own country.Well, you ought to be able to take them out, frankly, and they didn’t have that.And they were poor, and they couldn’t buy anything. They were in a very tough situation.
Why didn’t NATO and Obama decide to do that, to go that direction?
I don’t know. You ask them.The Germans have been recalcitrant for decades, and I think it’s only in the past year that they have begun to sort of—when they are under threat, as they have been with all of the cyberattacks, or the hackings into German systems, they have become much tougher.And the French, I think, have become tougher.I really don’t understand the United States response personally, but that’s the way it was.
The methods used, the hybrid warfare, the lies about what was going on at the time it was going on, the statements by Putin in his Crimea speech afterward, what's your understanding of how this seemed to have been the next step, and in fact, you know, once more, we didn’t get it?
Well, the fake news is—I mean as a tool of warfare—has been there for decades and decades and decades.It was never very well done until really the Ukraine, though I would say that the Russians used to complain about fake things to say the State Department.When I was ambassador in the first half of the ’90s, there are a whole series of things that they would lie and say, “This is the case,” and then the State Department [is] always thinking: “Oh, well, let’s go see. Was this true?”And no, it’s not true. Then they’d investigate and say it’s not true.So this kind of use of lie basically tied us up nicely, and we had to deal with things that we weren’t planning on, because you have to debunk a lie. It takes time.But that is losing some of its effect, because I think the West has mounted a fairly good response to this.Now it’s all kind of laughed at.We see that even with most recently—there are a whole spate of fake news articles about German troops in Lithuania and Canadian troops in Latvia, not to mention Ukraine.
Ukraine was the first time that you saw this on a massive scale, and I would say that Western media, especially Germany and the U.K., bought it in the beginning, in a sense of—I mean, it is utterly fake, horrible stories, you know, crucified children or something.Then they—in the balance, they will—on the one hand, Ukrainians say this, and then the Russians say that in fact when it was completely fake.This kind of sense of “Let’s balance the fake with the true”—I mean, let’s face it; they failed.
But it was effective from the Russian point of view, because it did paint for a while this picture of this kind of crazed Ukrainian Nazi regime, which was a completely outrageous argument. That we've learned.I don’t know how much it helps for the Ukrainians, but certainly NATO now actually takes debunking fake news very, very seriously.There are more think tanks working on fake news today than there have ever been.It never was a topic, and now all kinds of people are dealing with it.
One thing which is a kind of a silly meme is the “little green men.”I've heard many times, “Oh, what if the little green men show up in the Baltic countries?”The people are forgetting that little green men work once, because it was like, you know, Putin says: “Oh, you can buy those insignia-less armed men showing up in what look like uniforms. You can buy that in an Army-Navy store.”Well, yeah, OK.You did that once. It’s not going to work again. …So I'm more worried about hunters in my country who happen to put on Army-Navy store military-style clothing with guns.I'm more afraid of what's going to happen to them than I am worried about real little green men.It’s like you can't fight the last war over and over again.It’s like, it worked once; this time it won't. …
Did the United States learn anything from what you guys went through in Estonia?Is this sort of what happened in our elections?Does the responsibility [lie] to some extent in our leaders’ inability to understand what had happened before and the danger of what might happen to us in the future?
I think that what—not specifically the cyber part, but certainly I would say that not only the United States, but certainly Western Europe discounted much of what countries like mine said.The premium military think tank in the U.K. is called RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute.It’s like a military, and the head of that, Jonathan Eyal, said this wonderful quote: “For 25 years we told the East Europeans that they were paranoid, that they saw things that weren’t there, and that Russia is just a normal country, and now we have to admit that they were right.”
In your words, what is the reality, what you guys understood, and unfortunately what the Western Europeans and Americans did not understand?
Well, I would say the veracity of what was being done to us.They thought we were exaggerating because they didn’t experience that, not understanding that there was a completely different approach taken to countries like mine or countries like Poland or any of those East European countries, where they allow themselves far more aggressive behavior than they would have allowed themselves toward a Germany or a France or the United States.Then what we've seen basically is the kind of stuff that we experienced in the late ’90s, early 2000s, now being applied in a more sophisticated but more robust way against you.
... What's your response to how the United States reacted? …
Well, I think it’s naive to think that you need to respond with something to show you know.They know you know.It’s just naivete to think that “Oh, well, if we send them a message, they’ll know we know.”No. They know you know. In fact, they’ve done it in such a blatant way they want you to know who’s doing it. …This sending a message part, it comes really back to that, in cases like this, it’s a primitive schoolyard-bully thing.They will keep bullying you or pushing until you get punched in the nose, metaphorically, so you have to do something.
Sanctions work over time. They do work, but it takes years for them to have an effect.But you can do that, say, with—I mean sanctions, in the case of the annexation and occupation of Crimea, basically say, “Well, as long as you're going to be in there, you're going to be denied these things, and you won't be able to travel to us,” and all that.When it comes to really offensive actions that are an attack on you, you basically attack back and say, “OK, now we’ll sanction these three people, and they can't visit their apartments in Miami,” it doesn't really have an effect.It really does not.You need to have a far more robust response, because the lesson that right now is drawn from these actions is that “Yeah, well, we got away with it, and look, we got a good result. Who cares?”Germany, surprisingly, which had always had been a very kind of—great word—<i>zurückhalten</i> in German, meaning holding back on everything, that’s basically already in the fall.They had more forthcoming statements than you were getting from the FBI or CIA about being hacked by the Russians.They were very worried. They're angry.Now we saw something just a month or two ago where the German, again, the equivalent of the FBI said, basically said, “Well, we’re going to take the position, if you hack us, you steal our information, we’re going to hack back and steal it back, or we’ll fry your servers.”That’s kind of what they said, is kind of more a refined way, but that’s kind of boiling it down.I mean, they were saying, “We’re not going to take this.”
The United States has not said, “We’re not going to take this.”They might have said it privately, but you have to be forceful. …
But the bottom line on this is that—about Vladimir Putin has been very successful using these tactics.
Yes, quite successful.But the success comes for the acquiescence of the other partner, or the lack of action, or being wimpy.
And the hope that you have for the near future is?
Well, hope springs eternal.Actually, Alexander Pope has the Anglo-Saxon positive take—in all other languages, it’s the same—as expressed by “Hope dies last.”What I mean, I want people to wise up. Just wise up.The evidence is all there. Look at it and say, “What is going on?”This is also part of why this post-truth stuff is kind of worrisome, because it basically says evidence doesn’t matter.Well, we have the evidence. They did this; these are hostile acts; these were attacks against our democracies.You don’t fight that with “Oh, don’t do that again.”It’s affected the political process.Most likely it affected Brexit. I don’t know—I mean, it affected Brexit.The referendum, whether it was enough to affect to sway the vote, either in the case of the British referendum or the United States elections, I cannot say.I do not have—I don’t know if it’s even knowable.But certainly there was an attempt to sway the election in the case of the referendum in the U.K.; the referendum in Italy probably; certainly the Dutch referendum last year on Ukraine; the British referendum; the French election, oh, very overtly.I mean, really sort of full force. It backfired.They have penetrated repeatedly the German Parliament, German major think tanks.In Germany, parties have think tanks. The big parties all sort of fund these very effective, very smart, bright think tanks. They have been penetrated.
So it’s happening. And the question is, what will the West do in response?That we don’t know, because we haven't really seen much yet.The only response we’ve even had at all has been the sanctions that were enacted only sort of, what, five months ago.But that’s not a—I mean, my personal, strictly personal [opinion], is that if someone really tried to undermine the basis of my country, I would do more than simply sanction. ...
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