President Trump says he doesn’t trust U.S. intelligence, and people believe him. That distrust makes it easier for bad actors — like Russia and other adversaries — to sow discord and division. Now, Moscow is doing that with talk of biological weapons.
In Helsinki, standing next to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump said that Putin told him he didn’t interfere in U.S. elections and he believed him. U.S. intelligence sources had made it quite clear that Putin was lying.
More recently, Trump issued a statement about the murder of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He indicated, despite CIA findings that clearly and directly implicate the Crown Prince in the murder, that he is not sure the crown prince gave the order for it.
In each of these instances, the sitting president has taken dictators at their word over reports from those who have sworn to protect the United States.
While some dismiss these gaffes as a Trumpian approach to foreign policy that might yet get results, many of those listening to the president doubtless believe what he says without the qualification and explanations heaped on by commentators.
That distrust of intelligence services woven into the discourse championed by the commander in chief paves the way for Moscow to perpetuate its falsehoods — such as a U.S. biological weapons program.
A recent article published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists written by Filippa Lentzos, a senior research fellow at King’s College London, highlights the dangers of a Russian disinformation campaign around biological weapons.
After Moscow orchestrated the attempted murder of a former double agent living agent in Salisbury, England, using a Soviet-era nerve agent, Russia’s biological weapons have faced increasing international scrutiny.
To head off inquiry into its own behavior, Russia has instead suggested that the Pentagon is engaged in its own biological weapons program and is establishing weapons labs on its borders. This fall, a Russian special forces official claimed that the Lugar lab in Georgia is part of a U.S. plot to bolster the U.S. ability to wage biological warfare. The chair of the Russian parliament’s committee on defense said, “Russia will take diplomatic and military measures in response to the deployment of the large-scale US military-biological program in states that border the Russian Federation, in particular Georgia,” as quoted by Lentzos.
But the labs that do exist, like the Richard Lugar Center for Public Health Research in Georgia, named for a U.S. senator who pushed for rebuilding labs in former Soviet States, are not secret bio-weapons bases but a legal, high-containment lab that studies lethal human diseases.
Lentzos, as well as several others, visited the lab implicated by Moscow and found nothing amiss, no weapons under development, and an entirely legal and compliant operation.
In short, Russia was spreading misinformation about biological weapons, drumming up fear and governmental distrust and, perhaps, sowing the seeds for an eventual push-back against fabricated U.S. aggression.
Russia doesn’t want the president or the American people to trust U.S. intelligence agencies or scientists. In fact, the more distrust there is, the better in the eyes of Moscow. And with his groundless skepticism of expert intelligence analysis, Trump is playing right into Putin’s hands.
