RIGGED
America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference
By David Shimer
On Election Day 2016, the United States braced for a crippling sneak attack by a foreign power. “It was very high alert,” Barack Obama’s deputy adviser for homeland security, Amy Pope, recalled for David Shimer, a journalist and current graduate student at Oxford, whose extraordinary and gripping “Rigged” not only reveals the drama on that fateful day and the weeks that led up to it, but is also the first book to put the story of Russian interference into a broader context.
The attack that President Obama and his lieutenants most feared — a Kremlin effort to engineer chaos by deregistering voters or altering outcomes in swing counties — didn’t occur. But, as most of us know, an enormous and consequential Russian mind-bending intervention — involving hacking Democratic servers, releasing politically embarrassing materials and using social media to spread disinformation — did. In a sense, having feared a nuclear attack, Washington watched as Moscow won a conventional battle instead.
Shimer provides a subtle and evenhanded portrait of a White House in an unprecedented crisis. President Obama’s Cold War predecessors would have envied the quality of intelligence available to him at this time. After the public release of emails stolen by hackers from the server of the Democratic National Committee in June 2016, the American intelligence community quickly determined that Russian intelligence was responsible for the hack and, even more strikingly (thanks to a still highly classified source), that President Vladimir Putin had ordered it.
[ Read an excerpt from “Rigged.” ]
Confidence in Putin’s complicity raised the stakes enormously, sparking debate within the Obama administration over whether to go on the offensive. Among the options, Shimer reveals, was a deniable media attack on Putin himself that would involve releasing vivid information about Putin’s lavish lifestyle and the ill-gotten gains he had hidden from ordinary Russians. Secretary of State John Kerry discussed this option with the White House. By August 2016 Obama had said no to any retaliation before Nov. 8.
With the pacing of a thriller and the insight of a superb work of history, the book paints an understandable yet dismaying picture of a missed opportunity. We have heard before about two of the reasons behind Obama’s actions — the likelihood that Hillary Clinton would be elected and the likelihood that a defeated Donald Trump would claim he had been cheated.
But these well-known concerns hardly explain the absence of a covert cyberattack or any other countermeasure before the election. In part, Shimer discovers, it was because the Obama White House initially underestimated the scope of Russian mischief. Although it had identified Putin’s complicity quickly, it was slow to connect the dots of Russian intelligence’s multiplatform assault, which ultimately reached about 220 million Americans on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Michael Morell, then the second in command at the C.I.A., calls it “an intelligence failure.”
The failure was not just of counterintelligence, but also of analysis. The administration had no understanding of the damaging effect of digital disinformation on our democracy. “It was kind of a shock to me personally how disconnected I was from flyover America,” Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said. But it has never been the job of American intelligence to assess the effect of foreign disinformation on our society. That’s the job of elected leaders. The Obama team worried less about what Putin had done than what he could do, and, as a result, they missed the fact that Russia’s interference represented the greatest degree of Kremlin risk-taking aimed at the United States since the Cuban missile crisis.
“Our overriding objective was to prevent Russia from doing more and worse than they had already done when we discovered it[s] operation,” the national security adviser, Susan Rice, recalled. Obama “was always worried about escalation,” the former assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland added. In the Cold War, the most successful foreign policy presidents were those who didn’t overestimate the Kremlin’s capabilities. To give just two examples: Harry Truman defied Stalin’s blockade of West Berlin and Dwight Eisenhower ignored Khrushchev’s threats toward that same city. But in 2016, as Shimer reveals, President Obama concluded the United States would lose in a game of tit-for-tat risk-taking with Putin.
To contextualize the mind-sets of Obama and Putin and their secret warriors in the fall of 2016, Shimer skillfully reconstructs the history of how both Washington and Moscow got into the business of election interference in the first place. While not breaking much new archival ground, he provides a powerful primer, at the same time avoiding the reflexive “whataboutism” that mars so much analysis.
Intervening in other countries and covertly supporting allies was in the Bolsheviks’ DNA in 1917. It would take another generation and a second world war for Americans to start playing the same game. Fearful that the Communists would win enough votes to dominate the Italian parliament, the United States intervened to help the anti-Communist Christian Democrats to a landslide victory in that country’s 1948 election. The Truman administration didn’t just pour money into the effort. Foreshadowing the microtargeting of the Facebook era, Shimer recounts how Italian-Americans were encouraged to participate in a huge letter writing campaign. An estimated 10 million messages were sent to relatives back home warning of the dangers of Communism.
America’s successful covert intervention in 1948 became a touchstone for the C.I.A. The Italian example was, in the words of the agency’s official historian, David Robarge, “a template” that would be energetically applied to Cold War elections elsewhere. Meanwhile the Soviets were having some successes in Europe by focusing on individual politicians. But they had little success at influencing American elections. Unlike the C.I.A., the K.G.B. had no feel for how democracies or election campaigns worked.
Once the Cold War ended, the Kremlin and the White House gradually developed divergent views on the utility of interfering in elections. For the United States, covert electoral interference would become, in the words of the C.I.A. veteran Douglas Wise, “a tool of last resort,” whereas Russia not only developed a new taste for it but also a broader skill set. After Russia gobbled up the Crimea in 2014 and President Obama joined Europe in trying to stop the Kremlin’s expansionism, Putin ordered this tool kit to be used against the United Kingdom during the Brexit campaign, and against us.
The book’s concluding section is sobering. The vulnerability of America’s patchwork quilt of 50 separate electoral systems contributed to the Obama administration’s fears of Putin’s “escalation dominance” in 2016, and there is no reason to believe our election infrastructure is any less vulnerable to attack today. In refusing any federal assistance four years ago, Georgia’s secretary of state (now governor) Brian Kemp explained, “They now think our whole system is on the verge of disaster because some Russian’s going to tap into the voting system.”
Some of the same voices are now opposed to mail-in-balloting, the safest way to avoid both the coronavirus and Putin’s hackers. And the Kremlin can be sure there will be no threat of retaliation as long as Donald Trump remains in office.
But beyond the Trumpists, we are all the biggest reason for the continuing vulnerability. American conspiracy thinking is as old as the Republic. Add the disappointments caused by the worst income inequality in a century, a health care system whose inequities are highlighted by the pattern of Covid-19 lethality, and the virulence of bigotries and you have a petri dish for both multidirectional hatred and democratic apathy. The pot the ideologically blinkered Soviets couldn’t figure out how to stir is now being roiled by their pragmatic successors.
The Russian assault on America in 2016 could be considered the original sin that begot the Trump years. On the eve of our national referendum on Trump and Trumpism, this book is nothing less than essential reading.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
