OPINION:
While we focus ruthlessly on beating the coronavirus, let’s remember our enemies have their sights set on our presidential election, only a few months away.
And if there is one thing we learned from the 2016 presidential campaign, it is that the U.S. intelligence community must play a key role in detecting and deterring Russia’s multifaceted interference in our domestic politics.
Start with RT, formerly known as Russia Today, the media website that is President Vladimir Putin’s principal propaganda arm. The Russian government is responsible for RT’s budget and closely oversees its staffing and content.
RT, especially its America affiliate, openly disparages the U.S. democratic process. Seeking to convince its global viewership that U.S. election results should not be trusted, RT has devoted considerable reporting to false claims of election fraud and voting machine vulnerabilities.
Leading up to the 2016 election, RT aired exclusive interviews with Julian Assange and collaborated with WikiLeaks, which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called a “non-state hostile intelligence service abetted by state actors like Russia.”
In September 2017, the Trump administration ordered RT America to register as a foreign agent with the Justice Department, a move strongly protested at the time by the Kremlin.
Still, Russian leaders have found a way to complement RT’s overt messaging with influence operations with not-so-plausibly deniable links back to Moscow, operations that are meant to be traced.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russiagate report offered hard evidence of Moscow’s “sweeping and systemic” interference in our democratic process, including Russian hacking and dissemination of data from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee; a sophisticated Kremlin propaganda campaign on social media; and efforts to hack into U.S. election infrastructure.
Mr. Putin calculated that a Kremlin return address would add just the right measure of conspiracy to the toxic fuel he was pouring on already fiery divisions between Democrats and Republicans.
The Russian president outsourced cyber attacks to the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency, and Russian operatives purchased political advertisements on Facebook with rubles. The June 2016 Trump Tower meeting and Maria Butina’s intrigues were also part of Mr. Putin’s discoverable influence strategy.
In the new book “Russians Among Us: Sleeper Cells, Ghost Stories and the Hunt for Putin’s Spies,” author Gordon Corera skillfully lifts the veil on one of the Kremlin’s deepest undercover intelligence operations, one which was never meant to be discovered. Mr. Corera delivers a detailed history of the Russian foreign intelligence plants, living in the U.S. without diplomatic cover, who posed as American and third-country citizens for years and even decades until the FBI arrested them in June 2010.
Mr. Corera’s masterful recounting of the case reads like a real-life spy thriller — which is what it was.
Personifying the Russian aphorism that there is no such thing as “former” intelligence officers, Mr. Putin purposely makes little attempt to hide his role in RT’s propaganda and the U.S.-targeted influence operations. But Mr. Corera’s comprehensive research demonstrates Mr. Putin, who served as a KGB agent in East Germany before the collapse of the Soviet Union, is not afraid to employ more traditional cloak-and-dagger spycraft as well.
Russian intelligence recruits, using the false identities of Donald Heathfield and his wife, Tracy Ann Foley, arrived in Canada in 1987, established their cover personas and moved to the U.S. a decade later. “Mr. Heathfield,” who earned a degree in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, developed a wide network of contacts and targeted both the Department of Energy and the 2008 presidential campaign.
In one clandestine communication the FBI intercepted, officials from the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, instructed the couple to “search and develop ties in policymaking circles in the U.S.”
“Cynthia Murphy,” another SVR plant, developed a relationship with a prominent New York financier who was close to Mrs. Clinton, then making her first run for president.
The most infamous SVR “illegal” was Anna Chapman, who managed with some success to develop useful contacts in New York’s financial community.
The FBI managed to penetrate the network’s covert communications system, including their use of a temporary private wireless network in which two laptop computers were paired with one another.
U.S. counter-espionage operations, as in “Ghost Stories” account and in the disruption of a renewed effort by the Internet Research Agency prior to the 2018 midterm vote, may have put the Kremlin back on its heels, but only until Mr. Putin’s spymasters could put their next operation in motion.
Our best defense starts with increasing vigilance against Russia’s pernicious attacks on our democracy, from the most overt to highly clandestine. For shining a scholarly light on Mr. Putin’s spying and the FBI’s exquisitely run counter-operation, Mr. Corera deserves the highest praise. Only if we are forewarned can we be forearmed.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the CIA. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. Follow him on Twitter @DanielHoffmanDC.
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