Given the attention accorded to Vladimir Putin’s efforts to undermine American politics, one might think that Russian intelligence has the most accomplished spooks and computer geeks in the world. That is surely not the case. Its successes in the United States surrounding the 2016 election have much more to do with American weakness—how much liberals and conservatives loathe each other—than with Moscow’s prowess and planning. It’s an excellent guess that Putin’s men had no idea that their actions would become such grand theater.
We need to decompress and soberly assess the threat that Moscow actually poses to the foreigner-resistant, gladiatorial sport that is American elections. Driven by the shock of Donald Trump’s victory, many Americans are caught in an Internet nightmare in which Russians ruthlessly attack and we lamely defend. Whatever the investigations of special counsel Robert Mueller reveal, this mania is, unfortunately, likely to get worse.
A historical perspective: During the Cold War, nonmilitary covert action—clandestine operations that seek to advance a political mission—was a peculiar endeavor. Intelligence services had to invest time, effort, and sometimes significant amounts of money in work of very uncertain return. The Central Intelligence Agency usually had a pretty sensible approach to this in the “golden era” of covert action before the 1970s: It would find anti-Communist democrats and simply let them do what they did, just with more money to do it.
The Soviets were more brusque and certainly more controlling, though how much handling fellow-travelers needed is debatable. In the Old World, in the twilight of European empires, militant leftists were everywhere. Conversely, this probably made it more difficult for Moscow Centre to assess its operations. We know from defectors and reflective former operatives that by the 1970s the KGB’s intelligence reporting and covert action were often based on assets who were recruited in a numbers game to further the careers of case officers (the CIA, a more honest, self-critical organization, experienced the same phenomenon). Recruited agents often offered little to no value.
Even though the Soviets likely outspent the United States in such activities, they certainly lost the capacity to seduce, propel, or guide decisive numbers of Europeans and Third Worlders. The sins of the USSR were too large and the soft power of an American-led West, always fortified by the United States’ resilient military, was too great. The American left may have become blasé about countering Moscow by Jimmy Carter’s presidency, but this was not because the Soviets were masters of propaganda. Operation for operation, the CIA may well have beaten the KGB in effective actions. We will never know, of course, how crucial any of these machinations were to the denouement between the free world and Russian communism.
Which brings us back to current Russian operations. Do email hacks, bots, and social media trolling really add a new history-changing dimension? Does the technical ease of these operations translate into greater effectiveness? In and of themselves, no. The unspoken premise behind greater Russian success is that a bigger slice of the American electorate, because of the Internet, is more susceptible to foreign distortion. American history, with its regular eruptions of conspiracy-fond, religiously driven populism, certainly suggests that Americans can be credulous—but now more than they have always been? The Internet highlights well that vast matrix of the American character, especially its darker side, but it’s by no means clear that the Internet makes thoughtful people less discriminating, the intellectually inquisitive hidebound, or the patriotic America Firsters. It is amusing how many folks in Washington, particularly on the left, believe that the social media are a Rasputin-friendly game changer, although they, as a class, probably spend more time on the Internet absorbing information than others. Those most likely to be susceptible to Russian falsely flagged propaganda are not people who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016, that is, the mostly middle-class Americans who decided the election. Those who stroll the Internet and its social-media platforms the most are the young, who aren’t, as a rule, politically and culturally savvy. They weren’t, however, notable fans
of Trump.
Who really cares whether ardent right-wingers became, because of stolen emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, more animated? To be effective in America electorally, Russian covert action would have to move significant numbers of people from one political column to the other. But as Curt Levey pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, the Internet in the United States offers such a smorgasbord, from the estimable to the calumnious, that Russian provocations can easily disappear like “a drop in the ocean.” “Their content is intentionally indistinguishable from the authentic ads and political expression we hear and see every day in our democracy, making their marginal impact something like adding a marble to a jar of marbles.” Or as an ex-KGB officer more wryly put it to me in Moscow when I queried him about how his former employer approached all the exuberantly non-syncretic, sometimes warring, Communist parties in India, “If they hated America and China, that was good.” At best, Russian influence-peddling via the Internet is a game of unknowable small gradations; Democrats and some Never-Trump Republicans, however, somehow see covert-action certainty in the last election.
Russian malice on the Internet—and it’s always good to realize when talking about their malign actions how crude the Russian political and security elites are—seems like small potatoes compared with more old-fashioned Russian efforts to fund political parties in Europe, seduce through their greed the British or Czech political and monied elites, or use dirty tricks against truly annoying European politicians. Because of our rules and the nature of America’s expensive, free-for-all politics, such small-scale targeted operations just don’t work well across the Atlantic.
If the Russians could break into American voting machines and change the ballots of thousands, that would be a threat to our democracy. If they could engage in effective character assassination of likely presidential candidates, that would be something, too. So far as we know, they haven’t been able to do either—probably haven’t even come close. Nevertheless, Putin, who is a bold, aggressively malevolent former KGB officer, now operates in an almost ideal setting. His intelligence services benefit enormously by just being traceable: Large segments of America’s political and intellectual classes freak out when Moscow’s hand is detected. Convulsing American politics through open “covert” actions is a gift President Trump and his critics have given Putin. Adults in the administration—and there are more than a few—just can’t talk soberly about Russian covert action (how it is and is not a threat) given the behavior of Trump towards Putin and the president’s continuing fascination with the “realist” fantasy of a Russo-American entente.
Russian money may well have saved Trump, the oft-bankrupt real-estate developer. Mueller may be able to answer definitively legitimate questions about possible ties between the president and Russia. But we need to get a grip on our conspiratorial imagination. CNN and MSNBC really do seem, at times, unwitting accomplices of Moscow. It would be healthier for the nation if these networks, and others, just thought that half the country were blithering idiots than that the decisive voters in 2016 were also rats in a Russian-run laboratory.
