MOSCOW
— Spies are usually thought of as bystanders who quietly steal secrets
in the shadows. But the Russian version, schooled in techniques used
during the Cold War against the United States, has a more ambitious goal
— shaping, not just snooping on, the politics of a nation that the
Soviet-era K.G.B. targeted as the “Main Adversary.”
That
at least is the conclusion of a declassified report released on Friday
that outlines what America’s top intelligence agencies view as an
elaborate “influence campaign” ordered by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia aimed at skewing the outcome of the 2016 presidential race.
But
the absence of any concrete evidence in the report of meddling by the
Kremlin was met with a storm of mockery on Saturday by Russian
politicians and commentators, who took to social media to ridicule the
report as a potpourri of baseless conjecture.
In a message
posted on Twitter, Alexey Pushkov, a member of the defense and security
committee of the Russian Parliament’s upper house, ridiculed the
American report as akin to C.I.A.
assertions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction: “Mountain gave
birth to a mouse: all accusations against Russia are based on
‘confidence’ and assumptions. US was sure about Hussein possessing WMD
in the same way.”
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Margarita
Simonyan, the editor in chief of RT, a state-funded television network
that broadcasts in English, who is cited repeatedly in the report,
posted her own message on Twitter scoffing at the American intelligence community’s accusations.
“Aaa,
the CIA report is out! Laughter of the year! Intro to my show from 6
years ago is the main evidence of Russia’s influence at US elections.
This is not a joke!” she wrote.
Even
Russians who have been critical of their government voiced dismay at
the United States intelligence agencies’ account of an elaborate Russian
conspiracy unsupported by solid evidence.
Alexey
Kovalyov, a Russian journalist who has followed and frequently
criticized RT, said he was aghast that the report had given so much
attention to the television station. “I do have a beef with RT and their
chief,” Mr. Kovalyov wrote in a social media post, “But they are not
your nemesis, America. Please chill.”
The Kremlin, which has in the past repeatedly denied any role in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee
computer system, had no immediate response to the declassified report.
Mr. Putin instead made a show of business as usual, attending a church
service to mark the start of Orthodox Christmas.
The
report provides no new evidence to support assertions that Moscow
meddled covertly through hacking and other actions to boost the
electoral chances of Donald J. Trump and undermine his rival, Hillary Clinton, but rests instead on what it describes as Moscow’s long record of trying to influence America’s political system.
“Russia,
like its Soviet predecessor, has a history of conducting covert
influence campaigns focused on U.S. presidential elections that have
used intelligence officers and agents and press placements to disparage
candidates perceived as hostile to the Kremlin,” the report said. This
campaign, it said, blended covert activities like hacking with public
action by “Russian government agencies, state-funded media, third-party
intermediaries and paid social media users or ‘trolls.’ ”
The
public report did not include evidence on the sources and methods used
to collect the information about Mr. Putin and his associates that
intelligence officials said was in a classified version.
Mark
Galeotti, an expert on Russian intelligence agencies at the Institute
of International Relations in Prague, said he was skeptical of the
accusation that Mr. Putin had ordered the hacking. All the same, he
added, Russian spies, like their Soviet predecessors, “don’t just
collect information but try to assert influence.” United States
intelligence operatives, he said, have often done the same thing but the
Russians, convinced that the United States orchestrated protests in
Ukraine in 2014 that toppled the pro-Moscow president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, and other popular uprisings in former Soviet lands, “have a more aggressive approach to meddling in other people’s politics.”
Particularly
since Mr. Yanukovych lost power after protests in Kiev’s Maidan square,
Mr. Putin and his circle, Mr. Galeotti said, “have a different sense of
how the game is played. They genuinely believe that Maidan was
engineered by the West” and because of this “all bets are off” in their
view, a shift that has legitimized “the principle of regime change or at
least regime disturbance” through mischief making in the United States
election.
That
Russia considers it possible to influence United States elections has
been evident since at least 1968 when, according to Moscow’s former
longtime ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, the Kremlin decided
that Richard M. Nixon was “profoundly anti-Soviet” and must be
prevented if possible from winning the presidency. Mr. Dobrynin, in his
1995 memoirs “In Confidence,” said he was ordered by Moscow to offer Mr.
Nixon’s Democratic rival, Hubert Humphrey, “any conceivable help in his
election campaign — including financial aid.”
Mr.
Dobrynin related in his memoirs how he thought this was a bad idea but
nonetheless made an oblique offer of help to Mr. Humphrey during a
breakfast at the Democratic candidate’s home. “He knew at once what was
going on,” Mr. Dobrynin recalled, and made it clear he had no interest
in receiving any Soviet assistance.
To
try to bring about change that suited Moscow’s interests, the K.G.B.
set up a special department dedicated to “active measures.” This unit
went beyond collecting intelligence and embraced measures aimed at
changing the course of events around the world. These included
disinformation and subversion, often involving various front
organizations and Moscow-funded fringe parties that worked to shape the
politics of foreign countries.
While
propaganda and disinformation have long been key elements in efforts by
both Moscow and Washington to shape events, Moscow, at least during the
Cold War, went to extraordinary lengths to try and undermine foreign
political figures it viewed as hostile to Soviet interests.
The K.G.B. fabricated a bogus F.B.I.
report that Henry Jackson, a strong critic of the Soviet Union who
tried unsuccessfully in the 1970s to secure the Democratic presidential
nomination, was a homosexual and attended gay sex clubs with Richard N.
Perle, another anti-Communist hawk who was loathed by Moscow. Another
target was President Carter’s Polish-born national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
This
tradition of maligning Moscow’s foes on the United States political
stage continued in the prelude to the November election with
state-funded Russian media outlets, particularly the television network
RT, which broadcasts in English, giving extensive coverage to negative
news and allegations about Mrs. Clinton.
“What
we see now is a modernized version of the old tool kit of the
U.S.S.R.,” said Laurant Gyori, an analyst with Political Capital, a
research group in Budapest that has studied Russian efforts to shape
political events in Europe. He added that Russia’s intelligence
services, after a long lull following the collapse of the Soviet Union
at the end of 1991, had in recent years again switched from “just
getting information to also getting influence.”
But
Mr. Galeotti, the intelligence expert in Prague, cautioned that this
mission to influence foreign politics was not a uniquely Russian
phenomenon but had also been embraced in the past by the C.I.A., which,
in the 1950s, sought to shape and subvert politics in countries like
Iran and Guatemala.
He
said the United States intelligence report on Russian meddling in the
November election had gone too far in projecting Cold War attitudes onto
today’s reality. He said it was a mistake to suppose that Mr. Putin had
from the start conducted “a Machiavellian conspiracy” aimed at bringing
Mr. Trump to power.
More
likely, he added, was that Mr. Putin was not involved or even informed
about initial efforts to hack into the D.N.C. computer system but,
informed after the fact about what had been done, “decided to act
opportunistically” and make use of the hacker’s harvest of emails to try
to tilt the election.
“I
don’t think the Russians believed for a minute that Trump could really
be elected,” Mr. Galeotti said in a telephone interview. “They were
convinced that U.S. elites would ensure that one of their own would win.
They thought they had a chance to do a bit of mischief but I think they
were amazed, even aghast, at what happened.”
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