Sunday, February 18, 2018
Scott Shane, Feb. 17, 2018, New York Times; original article contains links.
uncaptioned image from article
Bags of cash delivered to a Rome hotel for favored Italian candidates. Scandalous
stories leaked to foreign newspapers to swing an election in Nicaragua. Millions of
pamphlets, posters and stickers printed to defeat an incumbent in Serbia.
The long arm of Vladimir Putin? No, just a small sample of the United States’
history of intervention in foreign elections.
On Tuesday, American intelligence chiefs warned the Senate Intelligence
Committee that Russia appears to be preparing to repeat in the 2018 midterm
elections the same full-on chicanery it unleashed in 2016: hacking, leaking, social
media manipulation and possibly more. Then on Friday, Robert Mueller, the special
counsel, announced the indictments of 13 Russians and three companies, run by a
businessman with close Kremlin ties, laying out in astonishing detail a three-year
scheme to use social media to attack Hillary Clinton, boost Donald Trump and sow
discord.
Most Americans are understandably shocked by what they view as an
unprecedented attack on our political system. But intelligence veterans, and scholars
who have studied covert operations, have a different, and quite revealing, view.
“If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do
something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all,” said Steven L. Hall, who retired in
2015 after 30 years at the C.I.A., where he was the chief of Russian operations. The
United States “absolutely” has carried out such election influence operations
historically, he said, “and I hope we keep doing it.”
Loch K. Johnson, the dean of American intelligence scholars, who began his career
in the 1970s investigating the C.I.A. as a staff member of the Senate’s Church
Committee, says Russia’s 2016 operation was simply the cyber-age version of
standard United States practice for decades, whenever American officials were
worried about a foreign vote.
“We’ve been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947,” said
Mr. Johnson, now at the University of Georgia. “We’ve used posters, pamphlets,
mailers, banners — you name it. We’ve planted false information in foreign
newspapers. We’ve used what the British call ‘King George’s cavalry’: suitcases of
cash.”
The United States’ departure from democratic ideals sometimes went much
further. The C.I.A. helped overthrow elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala in the
1950s and backed violent coups in several other countries in the 1960s. It plotted
assassinations and supported brutal anti-Communist governments in Latin America,
Africa and Asia.
But in recent decades, both Mr. Hall and Mr. Johnson argued, Russian and
American interferences in elections have not been morally equivalent. American
interventions have generally been aimed at helping non-authoritarian candidates
challenge dictators or otherwise promoting democracy. Russia has more often
intervened to disrupt democracy or promote authoritarian rule, they said.
Equating the two, Mr. Hall says, “is like saying cops and bad guys are the same
because they both have guns — the motivation matters.”
This broader history of election meddling has largely been missing from the
flood of reporting on the Russian intervention and the investigation of whether the
Trump campaign was involved. It is a reminder that the Russian campaign in 2016
was fundamentally old-school espionage, even if it exploited new technologies. And
it illuminates the larger currents of history that drove American electoral
interventions during the Cold War and motivate Russia’s actions today.
A Carnegie Mellon scholar, Dov H. Levin, has scoured the historical record for
both overt and covert election influence operations. He found 81 by the United
States and 36 by the Soviet Union or Russia between 1946 and 2000, though the
Russian count is undoubtedly incomplete.
“I’m not in any way justifying what the Russians did in 2016,” Mr. Levin said. “It
was completely wrong of Vladimir Putin to intervene in this way. That said, the
methods they used in this election were the digital version of methods used both by
the United States and Russia for decades: breaking into party headquarters,
recruiting secretaries, placing informants in a party, giving information or
disinformation to newspapers.”
His findings underscore how routine election meddling by the United States —
sometimes covert and sometimes quite open — has been.
The precedent was established in Italy with assistance to non-Communist
candidates from the late 1940s to the 1960s. “We had bags of money that we
delivered to selected politicians, to defray their expenses,” said F. Mark Wyatt, a
former C.I.A. officer, in a 1996 interview.
Covert propaganda has also been a mainstay. Richard M. Bissell Jr., who ran the
agency’s operations in the late 1950s and early 1960s, wrote casually in his
autobiography of “exercising control over a newspaper or broadcasting station, or of
securing the desired outcome in an election.” A self-congratulatory declassified
report on the C.I.A.’s work in Chile’s 1964 election boasts of the “hard work” the
agency did supplying “large sums” to its favored candidate and portraying him as a
“wise, sincere and high-minded statesman” while painting his leftist opponent as a
“calculating schemer.”
C.I.A. officials told Mr. Johnson in the late 1980s that “insertions” of
information into foreign news media, mostly accurate but sometimes false, were
running at 70 to 80 a day. In the 1990 election in Nicaragua, the C.I.A. planted
stories about corruption in the leftist Sandinista government, Mr. Levin said. The
opposition won.
Over time, more American influence operations have been mounted not secretly
by the C.I.A. but openly by the State Department and its affiliates. For the 2000
election in Serbia, the United States funded a successful effort to defeat Slobodan
Milosevic, the nationalist leader, providing political consultants and millions of
stickers with the opposition’s clenched-fist symbol and “He’s finished” in Serbian,
printed on 80 tons of adhesive paper and delivered by a Washington contractor.
Vince Houghton, who served in the military in the Balkans at the time and
worked closely with the intelligence agencies, said he saw American efforts
everywhere. “We made it very clear that we had no intention of letting Milosevic stay
in power,” said Mr. Houghton, now the historian at the International Spy Museum.
Similar efforts were undertaken in elections in wartime Iraq and Afghanistan,
not always with success. After Hamid Karzai was re-elected president of Afghanistan
in 2009, he complained to Robert Gates, then the secretary of defense, about the
United States’ blatant attempt to defeat him, which Mr. Gates calls in his memoir
“our clumsy and failed putsch.”
At least once the hand of the United States reached boldly into a Russian
election. American fears that Boris Yeltsin would be defeated for re-election as
president in 1996 by an old-fashioned Communist led to an overt and covert effort to
help him, urged on by President Bill Clinton. It included an American push for a $10
billion International Monetary Fund loan to Russia four months before the voting
and a team of American political consultants (though some Russians scoffed when
they took credit for the Yeltsin win).
That heavy-handed intervention made some Americans uneasy. Thomas
Carothers, a scholar at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace, recalls arguing
with a State Department official who told him at the time, “Yeltsin is democracy in
Russia,” to which Mr. Carothers said he replied, “That’s not what democracy means.”
But what does democracy mean? Can it include secretly undermining an
authoritarian ruler or helping challengers who embrace democratic values? How
about financing civic organizations?
In recent decades, the most visible American presence in foreign politics has
been taxpayer-funded groups like the National Endowment for Democracy, the
National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which do
not support candidates but teach basic campaign skills, build democratic institutions
and train election monitors.
Most Americans view such efforts as benign — indeed, charitable. But Mr. Putin
sees them as hostile. The National Endowment for Democracy gave grants years ago
to Aleksei Navalny, now Mr. Putin’s main political nemesis. In 2016, the endowment
gave 108 grants totaling $6.8 million to organizations in Russia for such purposes as
“engaging activists” and “fostering civic engagement.” The endowment no longer
names Russian recipients, who, under Russian laws cracking down on foreign
funding, can face harassment or arrest.
It is easy to understand why Mr. Putin sees such American cash as a threat to
his rule, which tolerates no real opposition. But American veterans of democracy
promotion find abhorrent Mr. Putin’s insinuations that their work is equivalent to
what the Russian government is accused of doing in the United States today.
“It’s not just apples and oranges,” said Kenneth Wollack, president of the
National Democratic Institute. “It’s comparing someone who delivers lifesaving
medicine to someone who brings deadly poison.”
What the C.I.A. may have done in recent years to steer foreign elections is still
secret and may not be known for decades. It may be modest by comparison with the
agency’s Cold War manipulation. But some old-timers aren’t so sure.
“I assume they’re doing a lot of the old stuff, because, you know, it never
changes,” said William J. Daugherty, who worked for the C.I.A. from 1979 to 1996
and at one time had the job of reviewing covert operations. “The technology may
change, but the objectives don’t.”
Scott Shane is a national security reporter for The Times and a former Moscow
correspondent.
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