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There’s a Bear in the Woods

During Obama’s second term, when I was out of office, things did indeed go from bad to worse. When popular protests in Ukraine forced the country’s corrupt, pro-Moscow leader to flee, Putin swung into action. He launched an operation to subvert and seize Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, a vacation destination for wealthy Russians. That was followed by further efforts to destabilize eastern Ukraine, home to many ethnic Russians, eventually leading to a protracted civil war.

Watching from the sidelines, I was struck by the sophistication of the operation. It was much more effective than Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. Nationalist propaganda on television, radio, and social media radicalized ethnic Russians, while cyberattacks muzzled opposing voices. Undercover Russian paramilitary special forces swept into Crimea to organize protests, seize buildings, and intimidate or co-opt Ukrainian officials. Meanwhile, the Kremlin denied it all, despite the fact that the whole world could see photos of Russian soldiers carrying Russian weapons, driving Russian vehicles, and speaking with Russian accents. Putin called them indigenous “self-defense groups.” Ukrainians called them “little green men.” Once the occupation was a fait accompli, the Russians staged a rigged referendum to give themselves a patina of popular sovereignty and then annexed the peninsula, formally making it part of Russia.

The Russians did one other thing, which didn’t get enough attention at the time but in retrospect was a sign of things to come. In early 2014, they released on Twitter and YouTube what they claimed was an audio recording of a private conversation between two veteran American diplomats, our Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoff Pyatt, and my friend and former advisor Toria Nuland, who was then the top State Department official for Europe. On the Russian tape, Toria used colorful language to express her exasperation about European foot-dragging over Ukraine. Moscow clearly hoped her words would drive a wedge between America and our allies. The incident didn’t have lasting diplomatic repercussions, but it did show that the Russians were not just stealing information for intelligence purposes, as all countries do; they were now using social media and strategic leaks to “weaponize” that information.

In the wake of Russia’s Ukraine operations, I expressed my concerns to some of my former national security colleagues. Moscow had clearly developed new capabilities in psychological and information warfare and was willing to use them. I was worried the United States and our allies weren’t prepared to keep up or respond. I knew that in 2013, one of Russia’s top military officers, Valery Gerasimov, had written an article laying out a new strategy for hybrid warfare. In previous generations, the Soviet military had planned to fight large-scale conflicts with massive conventional and nuclear forces. In the twenty-first century, Gerasimov said, the line between war and peace would blur, and Russia should prepare for under-the-radar conflicts waged through propaganda, cyberattacks, paramilitary operations, financial and energy manipulation, and covert subversion. The operations in Crimea and eastern Ukraine (and, I would argue, the harboring of NSA leaker Edward Snowden) proved that Putin was putting Gerasimov’s theory into practice.

Sometimes these tactics are called “active measures.” Thomas Rid, a professor of security studies at King’s College London, offered a good primer in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in March 2017. “Active measures are semicovert or covert intelligence operations to shape an adversary’s political decisions,” he explained. “The tried and tested way of active measures is to use an adversary’s weaknesses against himself,” and the rise of the internet and social media has created many new opportunities. As Senator Sheldon Whitehouse put it, “The Russians have been at this for a long time,” and now “they’ve adapted old methods to new technologies—making use of social media, malware, and complex financial transactions.”

I was also alarmed to see Russian money, propaganda, or other support aiding right-wing nationalist parties across Europe, including Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, Alternative for Germany (AfD), and Austria’s Freedom Party. According to the Washington Post, the Kremlin has also cultivated leaders of right-wing American organizations such as the NRA, the National Organization for Marriage, and individuals like the evangelist Franklin Graham. Putin has positioned himself as the leader of an authoritarian, xenophobic international movement that wants to expel immigrants, break up the European Union, weaken the Atlantic Alliance, and roll back much of the progress achieved since World War II. People laugh when Putin has himself photographed riding horses shirtless, winning judo matches, and driving race cars. But the macho stunts are part of a strategy. He has made himself an icon to traditionalists everywhere who resent their increasingly open, diverse, and liberal societies. That’s why he formed a close alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church, passed vicious antigay laws, and decriminalized domestic violence. It’s all about projecting an image of traditional masculinity, Christian morality, and white nationalist purity and power.

During the campaign, I asked my team to start working on a more aggressive strategic approach toward Russia. I didn’t want to be dragged into a new Cold War, but the best way to avoid conflict and keep the door open for future cooperation would be to send Putin a message of strength and resolve on Day One. It’s been said that he subscribes to Vladimir Lenin’s old adage: “Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw.” I wanted to be sure that when Putin looked to America, he saw steel, not mush.

I wanted to go further than the Obama administration, which resisted providing defensive arms to the Ukrainian government or establishing a no-fly zone in Syria, where Putin had launched a military intervention to prop up the murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad. I also intended to increase our investment in cybersecurity and pursue an all-hands-on-deck effort to secure cooperation between the government and the private sector on protecting vital national and commercial infrastructure from attacks, including nuclear power plants, electrical grids, dams, and the financial system.

All of this is to say that I had my eyes open. I knew Putin was a growing threat. I knew he had a personal vendetta against me and deep resentment toward the United States.

Yet I never imagined that he would have the audacity to launch a massive covert attack against our own democracy, right under our noses—and that he’d get away with it.

Since the election, we’ve learned a lot about the scope and sophistication of the Russian plot, and more information comes to light every day. But even during the campaign, we knew enough to realize that we were facing, in the words of Senator Harry Reid, “one of the gravest threats to our democracy since the Cold War.” And it just got worse from there. I won’t try to provide you a definitive account of every twist and turn of this saga—there are plenty of other sources for that—but I will try to share what I experienced, how it felt, and what I think we need to do as a nation to protect ourselves for the future.