The New Yorker Radio Hour - How to Contain the Threat of Russia

Episode Date: May 11, 2018

Senator Mark Warner is the vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is trying to explore the possibility of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign while avoiding a partisan blowup. Warner fears that that, with Russia, we’re confronting twenty-first-century threats with twentieth-century tools. And Simon Parkin, who writes about gaming for The New Yorker, reports on how military officers and diplomats predict world events using a game that’s something like a cross between Dungeons & Dragons, Risk, and a rap battle. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is a road trade to the ballot. The observatory is straight of the block for West Boulevard and makes that right. They didn't break that, but they have pretty good access to those people. They're subconsciously mocked that lineage. So that's happening. It seems like an incredible story here on a many front. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

11. 11. Congratulations on a spectacular bit of diplomacy. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Today we're going to drop in as a group of British officials tries to figure out how to contain the threat of Russia, calling on an unusual means, a game.

Theresa May now has two choices. She's either strong enough to take Brexit forward. It's a strategic board game that's something like a cross between Dungeons and Dragons and Risk, and it's played by generals, policy experts, and diplomats. That's up later. Now, the threat of Russia is one thing, but here in the United States,

we don't even understand the damage Russia has already done to our democratic processes. And even to ask about Russian meddling, unfortunately is seen as a partisan move. The president denounces the Mueller investigation as if it were some sort of devious cover-up for Hillary Clinton's email troubles. And the House Intelligence Committee

just concluded its investigation with bitter disputes between the Republicans and the Democratic minority. But in the Senate, on the Intelligence Committee, members are working very hard to maintain at least a functioning bipartisan investigation. The committee's vice chairman is Mark Warner, Democratic Senator from Virginia. Few people in Washington are more up to speed than Warner on Russian exploitation of social media and the possibility, at least, of collusion by the Trump campaign. I reached Warner last week at the Capitol. What's been the most eye-opening part of the investigation so far? You've said that this is the most important thing possibly that you'll ever do in your public life.

You still feel that way? I do, David. I feel like maybe the most remarkable thing is how comprehensive the Russian effort was and how off-guard in many ways the American government, the American electoral system, social media companies, we were just not prepared. And a year and a half after the election, I worry that we're still not fully prepared in terms of election security. We still haven't sorted out a new set of rules, regulations, or frankly frame around social media. And the vulnerabilities we have in cybersecurity are still enormous. The thing we have determined, the three things

that there is broad bipartisan agreement on, at least in the Senate, is, you know, Russians massively intervened in our elections. They did it to try to help Trump and hurt Clinton. They end up then touching, at least, if not breaking into 21 of our state's electoral systems. And they also use social media in ways that were unprecedented to try to build active groups of followers to stir dissension and dissent. And in all three of these areas, they've not stopped. In matter of fact, if you look at what they've been doing not only in America, but France, the U.K. elsewhere, and you add up all the cost of the Russian expenditures in the French elections, our elections, and the Brexit vote, it's less than the cost of one new F-35 airplanes. So I

feel like they're getting a pretty good bang for the buck or bang for the ruble on this kind of active measures. Now, there are a couple of ways to look at the collusion question. One of them is just to think in terms of people on the Trump's side being schnucks, being inexperienced and too eager to hear bad things about Hillary Clinton. That's one very highly sympathetic way to do it. The other one suggests something so colossally awful that it beggars the imagination, or it goes far beyond any spy novel we've read, which is the idea that the Trump campaign knowingly, knowingly, and with some intelligence and foresight cooperating with the Russian government.

Do you still think that ladder is possible? David, I'm reserving my final judgment until we've seen all the witnesses we need to see and that we've gotten all the facts. So I'm going to hold off. I've been under enormous pressure for the last year for some folks who say, hey, shut it down. There's no there there. Al-a, Mr. Trump, there's others who want to try to say, oh, Trump is guilty from day one. I'm not going to weigh in until we've seen everyone. One of the things that has surprised me, though, is that, you know, here we are spring of 2018.

And in many ways we have at least more lines of inquiry in terms of outreach from Russians or folks that have mysterious background to individuals in the Trump or. But then we did, say, a year ago. Now, again, this may all be simply a set of coincidences or it may be, as you said, there was not the sophistication to realize what was happened. But the fact is Mueller has gotten, what is it, two or three guilty police already and, you know, 20 plus indictments counting a number of Russians in that category who have been using tools like social media and others to intervene in our elections. So there's a lot of material there that our legal justice system has to weigh through. Are you still getting new documents and evidence? We are still receiving additional information. We still have got ongoing challenges, for example, with the Trump transition,

where they claim a so-called executive privilege that we can't find any reputable lawyer that thinks they've got any validity, but we are still getting some documents there. We're still getting some documents connected with certain individuals who've popped up during the course of the campaign. So yes, I mean, I'm anxious for this to come to a conclusion,

but we owe the American public the full truth. Can you put a timeline on your work? I'm not going to put a timeline, but I'm hopeful that every 30 to 4,000, 45 days, we'll be able to put out additional sections of the report. As I said, we've got the first section of the election security where we've come out with bipartisan legislation where we got $380 million to beef up election security in this past budget.

This was a normal administration. You'd have a White House task force on election security, so instead we've been trying to push it bipartisan from the hill. We'll have that first product out in the next week or so. Can you get no interest? to a cooperation from the White House on at least protecting future elections? Well, there is, David, where it's,

that's where we get so darn frustrated. You know, Department of Homeland Security acknowledges that the Russians will be back. Dan Coates, our former colleague, Director of National Intelligence, has acknowledged publicly that the Russians will be back and are still back in terms of using social media right now

on a host of issues. We had the head of the NSA, all of Mr. Trump's appointing acknowledge this. And this is their public testimony. They have said none of them have received directions from the White House to make this a priority going forward. Now, the standard analysis of Putin's motivation is that he really couldn't stand Hillary Clinton. He saw Bill Clinton as the man who helped expand NATO.

And he saw Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State encouraging anti-Puton, anti-regime protests, and so on. But what could possibly be the motivation to want to have Donald Trump president, the master of chaos? Russians are anti-chaos. That's certainly characteristic of Putin, anti-caust, anti-caust, anti-revolutionary. Why want Donald Trump as president of the United States? Well, I think there are some people that have made guesses in that area, and I'm not going to get into questions around finances or others. as certain people of us asserted. You're suggesting that he might be beholden to Russia.

Listen, there have been, again, there are press stories on those accounts, but again, I'm not validating or invalidating anything until we're finished with the investigation, but there's obviously been press speculation. But the thing I would, might disagree with you on your premise is, you, I don't think the Russians were necessarily pro one party or another by any means, but they see that chaos in the West is good for Putin, both in terms of reasserting Russia's ascension and also pointing out to his own people, look, see how these democracies, they're not really functioning that well.

And if you want America's democracy not function that well, to bring in somebody with Mr. Trump's unusual style, and if you see the kind of chaos and dysfunction that's happened since that time, I would argue if their goal was to further splinter America, pretty good investment on the rubles. You could almost have predicted some of this with General Garamazov, I think, back in 2011, wrote the Russian military doctrine. He was head of their Joint Chiefs of Staff,

where he basically said Russia couldn't compete with the West in terms of tanks and guns and ships and planes, but in the realm of cyber and misinformation and disinformation, and used the terms that spread like radiation, Russia could be the West Pier or even greater. And if you think about it from a holistic standpoint, we just passed a budget, $700 billion defense budget. Russia's defense budget's about $68 billion.

I worry at times we're buying the world's best 20th century military when in many ways conflict in the 21st century may be in the realm of cyber and misinformation. And in those two areas, Russia is our peer. In other words, you're saying too many aircraft carriers, not enough cyber intelligence expertise. As a Virginia guy, I'd never say too many aircraft carriers. But I am saying maybe too much 20th century military when our systems are terribly vulnerable to cyber, when we've got this whole new realm of social media and misinformation.

And we're still grappling with fake accounts. What happens when we move to 2018 technology where we put David Remick's face on Mike Allen, another journalist's body, and you've got a suddenly live video stream of what appears to be David Remick saying things that is not him at all. You know, think about that in the political realm, or think about that if it was a Federal Reserve Chairman or a CEO. We're still catching technology, and I don't think we're fully prepared. And if you take the cyber domain, you know, for the last, and this is not just a problem of Trump. This goes Trump. Obama, Bush, you know, we've been afraid of cyber escalation for a decade plus because if we escalate in the realm of cyber, we're more

technologically dependent. If our system's shut down much more damage done than, say, if Moscow goes dark for 24 hours. So we've been reluctant to use a lot of those tools, and instead we've seen, we use them fine against Iran, North Korea, ISIS, you know, small states. But near peer adversaries like Russia and China, we've been reluctant to engage. and they have, from theft of our intellectual property to now intervening in our most core democratic process or elections, they've not been as unwilling to use those tools. I've read that you communicate over Signal, which is an encrypted app rather than just regular email or regular texting.

Are you an outlier among your colleagues to other members of Congress also communicate on Signal? Well, I don't always communicate on Signal. I go back and forth, but I frankly think I should. probably improve my cyber hygiene. I do have dual authentication. I do try to make sure that I'm careful because we're in an area in a realm where whether it's having your information broken into or whether it's having the data you give up willingly on social media can be used and abused in ways that I don't think most folks would have predicted. And clearly, and I say this with some trepidation, And a lot of my colleagues showed how little they understood social media when they interviewed Mr. Zuckerberg. I think it was that point when Orrin Hatch wondered how Facebook made money that we kind of lost hope.

Not going there. Now, Senator, you've got – and we all have a problem of not partisanship, but just something much more extreme than that. If you were to type the words Russia investigations, say, into Twitter, you're confronted with two entirely alternate, universes and reactions, don't you worry that no matter what you find in your probe, a sizable portion of the country, maybe even approaching half, just won't believe it. You're darn right. I am very worried about that. It's why I got to try to go the extra mile to keep this bipartisan. I've got to believe there's enough Americans who, at the end of the day,

if you've got joint agreement from both parties, people will start to accept it. And to point to your point about if you would have typed in, Russian intervention on Google, on election day in 2016, four out of the first five stories were not Fox News or CBS. They were of Russian origin. It was Sputnik. It was RT News. And it was a series of other Russian fronts that even on Google's algorithms popped up at the top.

That's a pretty scary notion. It's incredible. And a related piece of business. It was just reported in our pages that AIDS of President Trump, possibly might have been AIDS, but we don't know who that was. Someone hired an Israeli intelligence firm called Black Cube to investigate former Obama administration officials in the hopes of turning up something which would discredit the agreement. Is that kind of tactic consistent with anything you've learned in your Russia investigation, these kind of dirty tricks? Well, again, we're not aware whether that is true or not. I've seen those same press reports.

but it goes back in my mind to respect for rule of law. I think one of the most damaging outcomes of this whole episode is you've got a whole lot of folks who are out basically in attacking the integrity of the whole FBI, attacking the integrity of the whole Justice Department, when you've got political figures threatening to fire or investigator like Mueller or Rosenstein, who are career officials, and in those two cases, both lifelong Republicans, that gets America into uncharted territory around respect for rule of law. Forgive me, Senator. You're being polite in a sense. You're saying a whole lot of folks. You're

saying various people. What you mean is President Trump. Do you think President Trump doesn't care, damn for rule of law? I hope that is not the case. But you think what? I'm going to leave it. I've made my statements report. repeatedly that if it would cross a red line if he gets rid of the Mueller investigation or indirectly gets rid of it by getting rid of Rosenstein. I hope and pray that doesn't come to pass. I think it would be a disaster for our country. But I'm going to give my colleagues a chance if God forbid that happens for them then to make their decisions about how history is going to judge them. Senator Warner, thank you so much.

David, thank you. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Let's take a quick recap of the international news of the past week or so. The presidents of North Korea and South Korea had an unprecedented meeting. Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. And we have a new Secretary of State, which is good since we may or may not be in a trade war with our partner

and rival China. If the headlines give you panic attacks, and maybe they should. Think for a minute about the people who have to respond professionally to all of these developments in real time, hour by hour. The complexity of world events can't be easily modeled by some flow chart or an algorithm. So diplomats and policy analysts and senior military officials sometimes turn to unusual tools to understand how things may turn out. Here's contributor Simon Parkin, reporting from the UK.

There's a story from the Second World War that you probably haven't heard before. It's about U-boats. They were the Nazi submarine fleet, and they were causing a great deal of trouble for the British. This is not addressed-up propaganda story. It's telling you that this U-boat, one of the wolves that hunting packs in the Atlantic, is as dangerous to your home as a thousand-pound bomb from the air. The Germans were using the U-boats to sink convoys of soldiers.

supplies en route to England and an alarming rate, sometimes hundreds each month. Winston Churchill came to believe that the outcome of the entire war rested on dealing with the U-boats. So he called up a retired naval captain named Gilbert Roberts. Roberts was a tactician and outside of the box thinker. And at a secret naval base in Liverpool, he came up with an unusual plan to help the Navy sink those U-boats. Battle ship! He designed a game.

It's loaded with action and suspense. Imagine a game of battleship, but the board is the size of an entire room. One person plays the U-boat commander, and the other plays the convoy commander. They give their orders from the side of the room, and aides draw out the battle in chalk on the floor. Here's Major Tom Moat.

He's an expert on war games. The movements of the escorts and the convoy were done in white chalk, and the movements of the German submarines were done in brown chalk that was exactly the same colour as the wood so that the escort commanders who were giving orders for their ships couldn't see where the submarines were. A lot of the naval staff was out at sea commanding escorts, so the players in Roberts game were mainly new recruits

to the Women's Royal Naval Service. These Wrens, as they were known, were mostly 18, 19 years old. Every day they played out different. naval battle scenarios in Robert's game. After a few months, an admiral, one of the most successful submarine commanders of the First World War, in fact, went to Liverpool to see what progress, if any, Robert's group was making. He said, I'll have a go.

I'll be the submarine commander and I'll play against the convoy. And he was sunk six times out of six. So he said, who was commanding the escort? and it was one of the 19-year-old Wrens. Her name was Janet O'Kell, and she was actually 18. By playing this war game, she and the other women had come up with a strategy to sink German U-boats. And it worked.

Now, there's a moment there where, you know, the senior officer could get very crusty and very angry. But he didn't. He was like, that's incredibly effective. That was then made in to naval instructions and radioed out to the convoys. And two hours later, they sank their first U-boat. Before one could say, hell Hitler,

the escorting warships closed in around their precious charges and proceeded to teach the Nazis a lesson. It's a story that probably deserves a Spielberg movie, but it's not unique. For hundreds of years, war games have been powerful tools for military commanders and diplomats. Even today, they are played at the highest levels all around the world. I've played Matrix games in the USA.

I have played Matrix games in China. Haven't done it with the Russians. Don't think I'm going to get permission. But Tom's games aren't about drawing lines on the floor. In the era of ISIS and fake news, you need a new kind of war game. Matrix games are very simple games based on oral arguments. And Major Tom is an expert on Matrix games. If what the Wrens were up to in Liverpool looked like battleship,

Tom's games looked like a cross between risk, Dungeons and Dragons, and a rat battle. I visited Tom at the Defence Academy of the UK, where he teaches young officers how to wage international war on a tabletop. Could you just tell me a little bit about, so we've got on the table a board about the size of a picnic blanket that sort of got Ukraine at the top and goes all the way down to Egypt? Is this something you use in various? Tom's games, each player represents a country.

You all sit around a map, and when it's your go, you say one thing that you'd like your country to do. A facilitator, which is kind of like what the military calls a dungeon master, asks the other players if they think that'll work. Because, of course, the academic theory behind it is crowdsourcing the result. There's a debate about whether you'll succeed, and if you can't all agree, well, that's where the dice come in. I tend to use casino dice, just in case, so they're properly balanced.

Tom takes dice very seriously. Now, of course, some people go, oh, you're rolling dice, it's just a game of chance. Well, if you think that, then you don't understand risk. And if you don't understand risk, then perhaps you really ought to be in another job. Major Tom's games have a simple framework, but they do allow players to bring an almost infinite amount of complexity to the table. You can do anything you can imagine, or at least anything you can make an argument for.

That flexibility makes these war games very useful for untangling the complicated reasons why countries act the way they do. I talked to David Shlapak. He's an expert in wargaming at the RAND Corporation in Washington. I've been at this for a very long time. I go back to the Cold War, and so we use them to look at global nuclear war and how you get into it and how you manage not to get into it. The major success for us is do we move the needle on policy? Do folks take what they learn from the games and use it to change what they do when they go back to their day jobs?

when we were first starting to imagine a world where North Korea had nuclear weapons. And so we set up a series of games where we asked the question, what would it mean for North Korea to have a small number of nuclear weapons? And we brought in a very senior player, a very smart man, a very good friend of mine, actually, who had done time in the Department of Defense as a senior policymaker. And he walked into the room at the start of the game and said, Look, I don't understand why this is even a problem. They have two, three, five nuclear weapons.

We have 1,500 nuclear weapons. I can do this math. And then we played the game, and he walked out of the room going, holy Christmas, this is a gigantic problem. This changes everything. So to see firsthand how wargaming can change your perspective, I sat in on a game Major Tom was running at the Defense Academy. It was kind of a big day in international relations.

You may remember it. The British Prime Minister Theresa May has explicitly blamed Russia for the poisoning of the former double agent Sergei Kli Pahl and his daughter and has expelled 23 Russian diplomats in response. Come on in. No, we haven't actually started yet. So who would you like to be with? I'd like to be with Russia.

I thought you might. Grab a seat. Like many people, I spent a fair bit of time worrying what Russia is up to. And this seemed like a pretty good way to get some insight. Now, for security reasons, all the players have to remain anonymous. But I can say that the guy playing Russia looked to me like a friendly university professor. He didn't much resemble Vladimir Putin, but he certainly had a talent for Putin's style of diplomacy.

Okay, Russia, what do you want to happen this, though? I'm going to make a public televised announcement. Well, we're basically going to indicate that the UK is a, a, third-rate power is throwing a tantrum in order to distract attention from its own political problems at home. That idea was debated by the group. Very few people believe Russia anymore and they know and they believe full well that it's just obfuscation.

Does anyone think that that's going to make the UK government look worse or better? I think it's very arguable. And the dice came out. So, that was a four. So the way it would be interpreted in the game is that Putin's attempt to discredit Theresa May actually increase her standing in the rest of the eyes of the world. So sadly that one didn't work very well.

Ukraine, what are you up to? A setback. But it didn't discourage our Putin much. The next turn he made a similarly gutsy move, offering to send humanitarian aid convoys to eastern Ukraine. Now, you may remember that's the part of Ukraine that's sporadically under attack by Russia. When I say a humanitarian aid convoys, the urge to put air quotes around it is overpower.

Okay. Now, Ukraine, will you accept these aid convoys? Absolutely not. Last time they sent aid convoys in, they were full of little green men that suddenly all had a clash. They cough up the jumper. Turn after turn, the other countries in the game tried to hemrush her in. The tactics they used were worryingly creative. Also demand that the Russian ambassador attend the Secretary of State when we get any one.

I'm taking Russia to the International Maritime Court. We will conduct joint operational trials. Chechen sympathizers and separatists. Fire bomb and attack Sotchy naval base. It could be easy to forget how complicated international relations are until someone gives you a seat in the situation room. 11. 11.

Congratulations on a spectacular bit of diplomacy. I don't know who you got to run it, whether it was Bill Gates. When the game is over, Tom asks everyone what their nation's goals were. Okay, Russia, what were your objective? Well, the first one, you could take it one of two ways, full of three ways, is to ruin Britain's international reputation. That, on the face of it, went completely wrong. Yeah, that's that.

But. Yes. Theresa May now has two choices. She's either strong enough to take Brexit forward, which means job done for us. Yes. Or she's strong enough to take hold of our own party and stop Brexit from happening, which means job down for us. One of those two things will happen. The second one was to basically maintain the position of our good ally Assad in Syria.

So basically, the Russians have managed to manipulate events to achieve their goals. even with five extremely creative antagonists and some bad luck with the dice, Russia still kind of won. They controlled the game. This, Major Tom tells me, is not unusual. Outside the realm of professional sports, with their stratospheric salaries and primetime TV coverage,

games are usually viewed as frivolous, something that should be set down after childhood, probably only picked up again in retirement. But those who work at the highest levels of defence and national security view games pretty differently. Here they are seen as perhaps the most efficient, tactile way in which theories can be tested and refined. And through which vital, potentially life-saving experience is gained.

In war games, the actions of nations, armies and diplomats can be understood, maybe even predicted. And as warfare grows ever more complex, ever more frightening, the war games adapt, and the knowledge, the understanding they provide, could mean the difference between victory and defeat, even between war and peace. Simon Parkin reports for The New Yorker on gaming and other subjects, and you can find his work at new yorker.com. And that's our show for this week. I'm David Remnick, and I want to thank you for joining us, and I hope you'll join us next time. Be sure to keep in touch on Twitter,

and you can always find us at New Yorker Radio. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garvis of Tune Yards with additional music by Lexus Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon, Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Fralman, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, Mithelie Rowe, and Stephen Valentino. With help from Susan Morrison, Emma Allen, Corey Shreple, Michelle Moses,

Emily Mann and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.