JUL 26, 2016
I cover conflicts, frontiers and upheavals mired in history.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
With relentless operators like Russian President Vladimir Putin, if you don’t stop them elsewhere you’ll soon find them inside your own walls. His unpunished 2008 invasion of Georgia launched a multi-year momentum that culminated in a leak-attack on the levers of American democracy yesterday.
You know about the open warfare stepping stones in Crimea, Donbass and Syria. You likely don’t know about the many more cyberwar incidents in between. Many experts already blame Russia for the flood of Wikileaks documents aimed at dividing the DNC opposition to Trump. In fact, Moscow has honed its skills up to this point by imposing on the elections of numerous countries, most of them American allies, through sophisticated digital and media interventions at critical moments. Should you harbor doubts about Russia’s hand in the recent document dump, consider other comparable examples.
I covered the Georgian national election in 2012 for Newsweek and saw the KGB’s handiwork close-up in Tbilisi where, some ten days before the vote, television channels broadcast mysteriously leaked videos of prison abuse. Pre-incited crowds hit the streets blaming the pro-Western government, creating chaos and instability. Meanwhile, on Russian-language channels, Russian military officials talked darkly of preparing to intercede in Georgia to restore order. Ultimately, conclusive information emerged linking the leaked video to pro-Kremlin Georgian mafia abroad–but too late to save the election for President Saakashvili’s anti-Kremlin party.
It was the first such exercise where Moscow deployed a highly sophisticated combination of timing and calibrated psychological pressure to beat the West at its own game of open democracy, indeed to show the West how easily our strongest suit–unfiltered freedom of communication–can become our fatal weakness.
Cut to Ukraine in 2014 when the corrupt pro-Kremlin stooge Yanukovich was overthrown and the country geared up for the national elections that ushered in President Poroshenko. Except that a few days prior to the vote, officials at the Kiev national election commission arrived at central office to find their computers hacked and their databases neutralized. As this 2015 article in the Wall Street Journal itemizes it was pretty clear that a shadowy Russian outfit had authored the attack in order to “cripple the online system for distributing results and voter turnout throughout election day. Software was destroyed. Hard drives were fried. Router settings were undone. Even the main backup was ruined.”
The article goes on to chronicle a relentless campaign of cyber dirty tricks waged by Moscow against Ukraine from hybrid warfare in the military arena to the leaking of sensitive emails by state officials. Always with the same ultimate goal: to reroute the destiny of a foreign country in line with Kremlin needs. And always with finely calculated targeting and timing, the most strategic juncture being the election period.
As the article says, “In just 72 hours, Ukraine would head to the polls in an election crucial to cementing the legitimacy of a new pro-Western government, desperate for a mandate as war exploded in the country’s east. If the commission didn’t offer its usual real-time online results, doubts about the vote’s legitimacy would further fracture an already divided nation.”
As it happens, the Ukrainians proved equal to the challenge on that occasion. They’d saved a copy of the program and database on a secure computer and were able, working round the clock, to reboot fully in time for the election. But you probably don’t recall an international furor around the incident or a loud and lasting cry of outrage from Western capitals sufficient to deter the Kremlin from future such adventures. Sure, the invasion of eastern Ukraine by Russian forces spurred sanctions but the cyberwar never ended, not in Ukraine or the Baltics or indeed in Poland where the shadowy game of tapes and leaks continued and sadly bore fruit.
In Poland, they used an additional method, very old-fashioned: a microphone at a restaurant table where politicians would meet to discuss matters. The tapes were leaked and the incumbent government, destroyed. One of the leading Kremlin-watchers of our time, Anne Applebaum, laid it out in the Washington Post yesterday. She knew about the events concretely because her husband was one of the targeted politicians who had to resign:
In Poland, hundreds of hours of tapings of political figures were arranged by a businessman who traded coal with Russia; to make them, he used waiters, one of whom later testified that he was explicitly promised a reward when a new government came to power. They were published by a magazine run by an ex-con who spent five years hiding from police in Russia in the 1990s. And yet just as in the United States, the Polish media focused almost exclusively on the details of the conversations, the bad language and jokes — none of which revealed any genuine corruption — rather than the motivations of the people who had taped and released them. Believe me, I know this story well: My husband was one of the politicians on the tapes.
As she points out in the article, nobody stops to ask who or why about such leaks. Or indeed how serious the actual offenses are. A media sensation occurs creating a kind of mob feeding frenzy followed by resignations and a paralyzed government. But oddly enough only the truly democratic are sensitive to the phenomenon. The Trumps and Putins merely brush it aside. If you’re bruised by it, you look guilty and the media never lets up. If you couldn’t care less, it’s the media that begins to look partisan and blameworthy.
Stop and think for a moment about the implications of that because the result is always the same: Populist leaders come to the fore and proceed to disarm the opposition news media loudly and openly at the head of a braying crowd.
In our divided political environments, factions who benefit from outside pressure don’t stop and think about the effects on the system as a whole. They just take the gift and ride it to power, thereby rewarding the Kremlin for dividing the country. Think about Trump publicly thanking “our friends” in Russia and China for the help. And think further about the overall picture. In Turkey a few days ago, Wikileaks dumped the personal contacts of innumerable women, a chunk of Turkey’s female population, into the public domain. The message was: You are not safe however obscure.
In fact, none of us are safe in the internet universe of open societies, not least journalists, academics, teachers, researchers, investigators, anyone criticizing power anywhere, especially Kremlin power. Our own media and even law-enforcement will happily take the gift of outside help against us because, if they didn’t, they’d have to explain why they kept quiet.
All this points to a problem far bigger than Hillary or Trump or Bernie or present partisanship. We’ve entered a time where it becomes virtually impossible to manage our country, or even ourselves, independently, free of outside pressure. In a globalized information system so porous, an entire lifetime of emails stands as a lever on any budding public figure. Remember what Anne Applebaum says: You don’t have to do anything bad, just embarrassing, for the threat to work. Democracies have legal controls, such as they are. Many regimes abroad don’t, and they effectively control the West’s destiny.
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