Rethinking Russia--Part One

By David K. Shipler

                Imprecise thinking about Russia has afflicted the United States in the wake of the 2016 election. The lines between fact and speculation have been blurred. The evidence of Russian misdeeds has been expanded into broad, unproven theories about Moscow’s motives and the impact on the election results. Legitimate contacts between Americans and Russians have been clouded with suspicion. And together, all these parts—both Russian activities and American reactions—have hobbled the ability of the United States to engage Russia in the kind of fruitful relationship that would promote American national interests.

                The election interference was only part of a broad deterioration, notes Kenneth Yalowitz, a veteran diplomat who served many years in Moscow, and then as US ambassador to Georgia and Belarus. It was preceded by a series of damaging episodes that broke down dialogue. “The bureaucracies have no connections anymore,” he said. “There’s no systematic conversation any longer. We don’t know each other. Given the very difficult state of the relationship, this is the time we should be talking to each other.” Instead, he said, “Our policy is just sanctions and breaking agreements.”

The downward slide can be mapped with landmarks of hostility: the West’s expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, which ignited historic Russian fears of close encirclement; the European Union’s courting Ukraine, the home of defense industries and a Russian naval base; American support for street protesters’ ouster of Ukraine’s elected, pro-Moscow president; then Russia’s thinly-disguised invasion of eastern Ukraine and overt annexation of Crimea, which reanimated Western fears of aggressive expansionism; a Russian tit-for-tat maneuver in America’s back yard to help prop up the anti-US regime in Venezuela; Russia’s military intervention in Syria, which restored Moscow’s foothold in the Middle East; Moscow’s violations of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and President Trump’s scrapping the agreement instead of renegotiating; Russian backing for right-wing racist parties in Europe; Moscow’s cyber intrusions into politics and elections in Estonia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Germany, France, and Austria; and Russian money to support Brexit, seen as part of a grand plan by the Kremlin to break up European cohesion.

                It’s a grim and dangerous list. When the election is added, with the surrounding political anger, the rigor and clarity required to evaluate what has happened is going to be hard to achieve. Trump, who campaigned on improving the relationship, has handcuffed himself by appearing unduly pro-Russia. He has fawned over President Vladimir Putin, downplayed the election interference, tried to thwart Mueller’s investigation, and left real policy to such hawks as National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

                Moreover, the American debate has been muffled, thanks largely to Russia’s having cemented its standing as an adversary. Unorthodox voices have been marginalized as they question conventional wisdom and hold Washington at least partly responsible for the rising tensions.

                The election experience illustrates the problem. The toxin of Russian cyber intrusions has spread into related questions, poisoning the capacity to avoid guesswork and assumptions.

For example, if we accept the conclusion of the Mueller report and US intelligence that Russia hacked Democrats’ emails and impersonated Americans online to exacerbate the society’s fissures, does that mean that they threw the election to Trump? Since Putin said publicly last July that he had hoped Trump would win, does that mean Trump’s campaign coordinated? Since Trump has been so pro-Russian, does that mean that he’s being blackmailed? And since Putin has directed broad cyber intrusions at other countries, does that mean that he seeks to undermine American-led liberal democracy?

Until the Mueller report, and perhaps since, many of Trump’s critics would answer yes to these questions. But each one deserves a critical look. And to do that, it’s worth hearing from some of the skeptics who have been largely ignored in the discussion. Some of their arguments are implausible, dismissive of Russian wrongdoing, and insufficiently outraged by a foreign government’s attempt to distort our most sacred political enterprise. But as John Stuart Mill wrote, considering an opposing view enables “the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

This, Part One, examines the first three of six key issues, reports on the dissenters without endorsing their positions, and distills the findings of the Mueller investigation.

                1. The hacking of prominent Democrats, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was traced by some US intelligence officials to the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU. To a non-technical eye, the detailed evidence that has been publicized looks persuasive, but much of the methodology, labeled “investigative technique,” is blacked out in the Mueller report. Documentation supporting the conclusions remains classified.

                Skepticism has been expressed by a group of 19 former intelligence officers, who believe that purloined emails could have come from an inside leaker rather than an outside hacker. They wrote in March: “We recently discovered that the files reveal a FAT (File Allocation Table) system property. This shows that the data had been transferred to an external storage device, such as a thumb drive, before WikiLeaks posted them.”

According to Bill Binney, a computer expert who held a prominent position at the National Security Agency, metadata in the emails posted by WikiLeaks indicated that they had been downloaded at much higher speeds than would be possible over an internet connection—49.1 megabytes per second as opposed to 12 megabytes per second, which was the fastest transatlantic internet speed he and colleagues could achieve. That supported his conclusion that the download was not done remotely.

                Binney’s doubts caught the attention of President Trump, who requested that Pompeo, then CIA director, meet with him, which they did on July 24, 2017. Pompeo asked Binney if he’d talk to the FBI and the NSA, and Binney agreed. But the agencies didn’t follow up.

The Mueller report does not directly address Binney’s assessments of download speeds or the FAT file, but it does suggest that after the Russian hacking, the email transfer to WikiLeaks could have been made in person “by intermediaries who visited [WikiLeaks head Julian Assange] during the summer of 2016.”

                2. Several Russian entities created false identities online, in which fake organizations and users posing as Americans promoted demonstrations and carried out “a social media campaign designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States,” according to the Mueller report. It’s not clear how much reinvestigation was done by Mueller’s office. The report appears to rely mainly on the intelligence agencies’ intercepts and cyber tracing whose specifics remain classified. Mueller identifies the main purveyor of the disinformation as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), based in St. Petersburg, which “received funding from Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin and companies he controlled,” the report states. “Prigozhin is widely reported to have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

Putin confirmed his preference for Trump over Hillary Clinton in July 2018, when he answered a reporter’s question at the Helsinki summit by saying that he wanted Trump “because he talked about bringing the US-Russia relationship back to normal.” So the intelligence agencies had gotten that right at least 18 months earlier, when they reported Putin’s wishes.

Nevertheless, doubts about the agencies’ conclusions, in their assessment released in January 2017, were raised last June by Jack Matlock, a lifelong Russian specialist and former US ambassador to the Soviet Union. The merits of the assessment are difficult to judge, since the unclassified version contains no sources or documentation to support its findings. But Matlock was puzzled by the process, which relied on a discreet task force of the CIA, FBI, and NSA, isolated from the broader agencies where contradictory analysis might have been heard. Particularly odd, he wrote, was the exclusion of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, which is the “organ most expert on the GRU,” and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), which he called the most competent to assess foreign intentions and political actions.

“In my day,” Matlock said of the INR, “it reported accurately on Gorbachev’s reforms when the CIA leaders were advising that Gorbachev had the same aims as his predecessors.” Without inputs from the State and Defense Departments’ intelligence agencies, Matlock noted, the report could not be considered an assessment by the entire “intelligence community.”

The process bypassed a system established after intelligence agencies had incorrectly reported that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction—the pretext for the 2003 US invasion. Called “analysis of alternatives,” it was not used in the Russian study, which raised a red flag for Scott Ritter, a former Marine intelligence officer who helped oversee the disarmament of Iraq’s WMDs after the first Gulf War and became a United Nations weapons inspector. He called the approach on Russia “eerily reminiscent of the analytical blinders that hampered the US intelligence community” in assessing the Iraq case.

Nevertheless, neither Matlock nor Ritter nor any other respected specialist has effectively rebutted the conclusion that Russia sought to sway voters.

                3. Did Russians tip the balance to Trump in a tight race? Some of the president’s critics think so. “They subverted and sabotaged our election,” Mark Shields declared on the PBS NewsHour. But that’s a leap of logic. They tried, yes, but no reliable research was done to trace attitudes of Trump voters back to Russian-inspired bots, tweets, or Facebook posts.

The hacked emails were mostly benign, with some mildly embarrassing content revealing the Democratic National Committee’s strong tilt toward Clinton and away from Bernie Sanders. That paled in comparison with other campaign issues.

More important might have been Russians masquerading as Americans, duping real Americans into retweeting, liking, forwarding, and even following appeals to organize demonstrations promoted by Kremlin-backed players. That contributed to the general atmosphere of division and bigotry being promoted by Trump. But while “Facebook estimated the IRA reached as many as 126 million persons through its Facebook accounts,” the Mueller report states, the election analyst Nate Silver has played down the likely impact. “If you wrote out a list of the most important factors in the 2016 election,” he said, “I'm not sure that Russian social media memes would be among the top 100. The scale was quite small and there's not much evidence that they were effective.”

                The Russian effort “blended into the background and had a cumulative effect over the entirety of the campaign,” Silver wrote, so its impact is hard to measure. It struck the same negative themes about Hillary Clinton as the Trump campaign and mainstream media coverage, “adding fuel to the right fire,” Silver said, portraying her as “dishonest and untrustworthy” and contributing to a decline in voter turnout among African-Americans. That drop “may have been inevitable,” he added, since black turnout had been buoyed in 2012 by Obama’s presence on the ballot.

                Still, Silver called himself an agnostic on whether there was an impact. The disguised Russian campaign “could easily have had chronic, insidious effects that could be mistaken for background noise but which in the aggregate were enough to swing the election by 0.8 percentage points toward Trump — not a high hurdle to clear because 0.8 points isn’t much at all.”

                That feeds into the intelligence report’s undocumented conclusion:  “We assess the Russian intelligence services would have seen their election influence campaign as at least a qualified success because of their perceived ability to impact public discussion.” Therefore, the Kremlin will continue to do it, the intelligence agencies predicted, “because of their belief that these can accomplish Russian goals relatively easily without significant damage to Russian interests.”

                Next, Part Two: Trump’s responses and Putin’s motives.