COLLUSION OR RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION?….HOW MOSCOW MANIPULATED U.S. MEDIA, LAWMAKERS AND INTELLIGENCE SERVICES INTO PROPAGATING A WILD THEORY.
It is hard for Americans to grasp that in the eerie world of Russian intelligence, it would be normal to discredit a U.S. leader by depicting him as a friend and to support his opponent by depicting her as an enemy. But this is the reality.
I first became acquainted with Russian disinformation while working from 1976-82 as a Moscow-based newspaper correspondent. In 1979, the Soviet authorities threatened to expel me. They accused me of traffic violations and rudeness to guides from the official travel agency, Intourist. I had wide contacts in Moscow, and these innocuous charges made me think the KGB knew little about me. In fact, they had detailed knowledge of my activities, as I learned from the way they followed me and the arrests of my contacts. But information from wiretaps and shadowing is not acknowledged openly. It is used for disinformation, conveyed by intermediaries.
One of my friends in Moscow was a gay Swedish correspondent who had a Soviet lover. Homosexuality was a crime in the Soviet Union, and my friend regularly criticized the authorities. At first officials simply objected to his articles. Then, at a USA and Canada Institute reception, a Soviet academic told the Swede he had met a “fascinating” friend of his and gave the name of his lover. The correspondent left Moscow the next day.
The Mueller report shows that the techniques of Russian disinformation have not changed. The Trump-Russia affair began May 6, 2016, when George Papadopoulos, a Trump adviser, reportedly told Alexander Downer, the Australian high commissioner in London, that Moscow had compromising information on Hillary Clinton. Ten days earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told by Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor who boasted of high-level Russia contacts, that the “dirt” consisted of “thousands of emails.” Mr. Mifsud had returned from an April 18 meeting in Moscow of the Valdai Discussion Club, which the Mueller report said was “close to Russia’s foreign policy establishment.”
In fact, the Valdai Club, established in 2004, is Russia’s most important center of disinformation. The club gives Western journalists and academics the opportunity to question President Vladimir Putin and other officials in a supposedly informal setting. Participants, anxious not to offend their hosts, engage in self-censorship. Circulating in the crowd are persons who claim to share confidential information and explain what the Russian leadership is thinking—as at the USA and Canada Institute in Soviet times. The Valdai Club would be a key node in any Russian effort to cause chaos in the U.S. election.
Mr. Mifsud introduced Mr. Papadopoulos to Ivan Timofeev, a member of the Russian International Affairs Council, who told Mr. Papadopoulos in an April 25, 2016 email that he had shared plans for a meeting between the Trump campaign and the Russian government with Igor Ivanov, the council’s president and a former Russian foreign minister.
In October 2016, Mr. Papadopoulos was fired from the campaign. But Russian intelligence had achieved its objective. The FBI had been informed of Mr. Papadopoulos’s remarks to Mr. Downer, and a counterintelligence investigation aimed at the Trump campaign was under way.
Another attempt to compromise the Trump campaign was the June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort and a Russian group opposing the 2012 Magnitsky Act. The meeting was arranged by London music promoter Rob Goldstone, who wrote to the young Mr. Trump that the Russian “crown prosecutor” (a nonexistent title) wanted to share incriminating information about Mrs. Clinton.
It’s remotely possible the Russian delegation—headed by Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer with high-level Moscow connections—believed that they could gain the Trump campaign’s support. It’s likelier that the meeting was part of the effort to inflame U.S. politics by creating the impression that candidate Trump was a Russian pawn.
Donald Trump Jr. was foolish to agree to the meeting. He did, however, have the sense to decline to discuss the Magnitsky Act. Mr. Kushner described the meeting as “a waste of time.” Yet it was a media sensation, and some of President Trump’s detractors accepted it as proof of collusion.
Then there was the dossier that purportedly contained information on Mr. Trump himself. It was prepared by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, supposedly based on information from high-level Russian intelligence sources. It said Mr. Trump had been a Russian asset for at least five years and had been monitored in Moscow engaging in “perverted sexual acts.” When the dossier was released, Mr. Steele disappeared, claiming to fear for his life.
In fact, the dossier was transparently phony. It claimed Mr. Putin had a “desire to return to Nineteenth Century ‘Great Power’ politics anchored upon countries’ interests rather than the ideals-based international order established after World War Two”—echoing hackneyed attempts by Russian spokesmen to divert attention from the regime’s connections to terrorism and organized crime. Its statement that Mr. Putin “hated and feared” Mrs. Clinton reflects the standard Kremlin practice of reducing policy differences to personality. Russia had attributed tensions between the U.S. and Russia to Mr. Putin and Barack Obama’s mutual dislike. The idea that Russian intelligence agents would share genuine intelligence as opposed to disinformation was in the realm of fantasy.
The Trump-Russia affair did lasting damage to the U.S. For the first time, it became acceptable, even common, to accuse political opponents of treason. The media, Congress and the intelligence services have all undermined themselves by repeating wild and unsubstantiated charges provided for them by Russian intelligence.
During the campaign, there was legitimate concern about the competence of Mr. Trump and those around him on the subject of Russia. Since taking office, however, he has approved the provision of defensive arms to Ukraine and coordinated diplomatic retaliation after the attempted murder in Britain of a former Russian intelligence agent, Sergei Skripal.
In any case, the disinformation attack directed at Mr. Trump had nothing to do with his policies. The ultimate target was American society. Moscow’s tactics were striking in their deviousness and the result was the greatest triumph of disinformation in the history of Soviet and Russian active measures.
Mr. Satter is author of “Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union.”
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