The Rest Is Classified - 130. How Russia Made Trump: Putin Hacks The 2016 Election (Ep 1)

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

Did Russia really interfere in the 2016 US presidential election? Did the election of Donald Trump benefit Vladimir Putin? And how did the scandal begin? Listen as David and Gordon begin their exploration of the role of the Russians in the 2016 election and the dramatic rise of Donald Trump. ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign-up ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ ⁠⁠https://nordvpn.com/restisclassified⁠⁠ Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee ------------------- Email: [e-mail] Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified Video Editor: Joe Pettit Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books. Join the declassified club at the rest is classified.com. Did the Russians interfere in the 2016 U.S. election? Yes. And were Trump and Putin working together? Well, welcome to the rest is classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McCloskey. And you've just given away the whole series. Oops. That one's going to listen now. Spoiler alert. The Russians interfered in the election people. Case closed. Well, believe it or not, that is the subject we're going to be exploring in this series in a little bit more depth than just the one word answer that we just had from David. But I guess David, it's a big subject. It's a contentious subject. But it's also a really interesting subject from the rest of his classified perspective, because it's going to allow us to get into a particular type of Russian intelligence operation, what's called an active measure. We'll get into what that is in a few moments. The aims of these kind of operations, the deep mechanics of how they happen, and crucially, the consequences, how much impact do they actually have? And there is, as we'll see, a long tradition of this in Russia. But this is a really interesting case, which has drawn a huge amount of attention and controversy in recent years, hasn't it?

I think, Gordon, it's fair to say that this is the rest is class. lens on the 2016 election. And this is a story, really a spy story that shaped the politics of that really tumultuous year in American democracy. And I think we probably would be remiss if we didn't start with a brief word on the politics, which you alluded to, Gordon, which is this is a hugely partisan issue in the United States. Anything that has to do with the sort of nexus of Trump and the Russians is going to be hugely divisive. This is not a politics show. We don't claim to have the expertise of our friends at the rest is politics or the rest is politics, US. But yeah, we are going to look at the intelligence story. We're going to focus on the espionage here.

And at its heart is a Russian intelligence operation, a Russian active measure. Now, one of the major questions this story will raise is how do we make sense of Trump's connections to Russia? And we have a treat for members of our declassified club because we are doing a mini-series that is going to run alongside this sort of main series on the pod, examining Trump's ties to Russia and really helping, I think, in a very fact-based and chronological way, helping people make sense of the Trump-Russia connection. What's hype? What's actually fact?

How do you think about the relationship that Donald Trump has with Vladimir Putin and with Russia? Yeah, because it is one of the questions we both get asked. I certainly get asked almost every time I'm doing a public event or a Q&A is, is Trump a Russian agent question? What's the nature of the relationship? How we understand it. It's a question that comes up again and again. It's a complicated one. And it's one we're going to explore in that mini-series. But that does allow us to focus much more in this. series on what we know the Russians were doing to try and influence the election and some of the real details about the espionage and influence and intelligence side of things, particularly in terms of what the Russians were aiming for. That's right. So if you want to listen to that mini-series, go ahead and go join the club. Go to the rest is classified.com. Join the declassified club. We'll be putting out three episodes of that mini-series to run alongside this series on the Russian active measure. I think going back to that, Gordon, you could probably make the case that this Russian intelligence operation is one of the most consequential espionage operations ever conducted. It has massive impact, not only on the process

of the election. We'll talk more in detail about what exactly that means, but on U.S. institutions, on perceptions of our intelligence system and our political elite. And the ripple effect, And this is why I make the case that it's so consequential is we're still seeing the impact of it today. It has been almost 10 years. And I think a lot of the dialogue around a deep state, the Russia hoax, Russia Gate, all these terms will be familiar to, at least to Americans who are engaged in kind of the politics around this. They all originates in this 2016 operation. And in many ways, I think what's so interesting is it's an operation which has an operation. which has an outsize impact.

I mean, a far greater impact than I think even the Russians may have predicted precisely because of the way it plays into politics, into the psychology of Donald Trump, into American politics, and the way it has a tsunami of kind of fear and perception about what are the Russians doing, what might they be doing? Is the Russian hand everywhere? Is it nowhere? Is it being overstated?

All of those questions, you know, spring out of this very specific intelligence operation. And I think it's a really interesting case as well of how intelligence kind of spill into wider society and politics with an unpredictable impact, I think. Well, it also raises what I think is a very big and uncomfortable question, which we are going to attempt to answer throughout the series, which is, did a Russian active measure operation turn the tides in the election and help elect Donald Trump? Now, that question, in and in it of itself in some quarters, at least in the U.S. would be very incendiary, but I would say you don't have to argue that the campaign colluded with the Russians to make

that point. It should be an apolitical statement to argue that the Trump campaign may have benefited even indirectly from what we'll see as a Russian operation that is going to end up being designed in large part to weaken his opponent, Hillary Clinton. But I think that's a don't think it's a straightforward answer or as straightforward as some people think, actually, the impact. I think it is worth by the time we get to the end of it really kind of drilling down on that question of impact because I think sometimes it is maybe overstated. But that's one of the things we'll get to, isn't it? I mean, even the fact that we have to pose the question or that the question comes out of the discussion of a Russian intelligence operation, I think, is an

indication of just, you know, how big of a deal that operation actually was and is. I also think that the 2016 operation is a great example of a kind of newish sort of intelligence operation, one that, as we'll see, has a very long tradition, particularly in Russia, but in many ways it's the fusion of a very old school political warfare and disinformation campaign alongside modern telecommunications infrastructure and technologies. And the blending of those things together is something that I think very much defines the geopolitics of our world today. And we kind of see an early indication of this in this Russian operation in 2016. So again, we're going to focus on the espionage.

And as we've said, we've teed this word up a few times now. The thing we're going to look at is a particular type of operation. It's not a recruitment. It's not an assassination. It's an active measure. This episode is sponsored by HP. Most people are not counter-espionage experts, but that won't stop them getting targeted by cyber criminals seeking to extract their secrets.

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It gently cleanses, perfectly removes makeup, and provides 24-hour hydration. Clear away the evidence with the number one Missler water worldwide by Garnier. Okay, David, let's try to explain and explore what that is and what the history of it is, because I think it's really interesting and really significant for this case. Well, it's certainly better than a passive measure, isn't it important? If we have a measure, we want it to be active, right? Definitely. Definitely. That is something. You and I don't agree on much, Gordon, but we can we can agree on that.

So this is absolutely vital for understanding the entire story to come because an act of measure is a very particular type of intelligence operation. And I think it is one of the dynamics that really does distinguish Russian espionage from Western espionage. Because in a lot of the stories that we've done on this program, Gordon, we've talked about intelligence gathering essentially as going out in trying to steal secrets and in some cases, covert action. So you could think about, you know, the things that the CIA has done, well, in our first episodes, right, on Iran, covert action to overthrow the Iranian government. We think about intelligence as being sort of stealing secrets and those types of covert actions.

But the Russians think more broadly about influencing events and people. So that is an active measure. And it is so fundamental to the Russian understanding of intelligence that a retired KGB General by the name of Oleg Kalugan, who I think you've met. He said that this type of subversion has long been the, quote, heart and soul of Russian intelligence. And what it does is it aims to create division within an adversary country or between allies to weaken them. It can involve influencing politics and elections, sowing division in a society, discrediting opponents, and it often involves using fake documents and fake agents. So it is a massive kind of disinformation and political warfare campaign that is designed to soak chaos, essentially, in a target.

system, country, nation, whatever. Yeah. And it's got deep roots in Russia, and even pre-revolutionary intelligence. But in the Cold War, the KGB really did have a machine to do this. I mean, there was a whole part of the KGB Service A, which was dedicated to using forged documents and disinformation. In 1980, the estimate was that the Soviet Union spent $3 billion,

so about $2.5 billion a year on active measures. it was that intrinsic to the idea. And political KGB officers, based in embassies abroad, were expected to spend a quarter of their time doing active measures, as well as all the kind of political reporting, political espionage they were doing. I mean, it was that central to it. And I looked a lot into this when I was working on the Mitrokin archive, the KGB archivists who detailed many of these operations.

And there's many interesting cases where the KGB is doing things like, spreading conspiracy theories. For instance, the extraordinary conspiracy theory that the CIA might have been behind the JFK assassination. Which has infected your brain, Gordon. Yeah. I'm still reading books about that. But what's so interesting is you go back to the 60s and the KGB is covertly financing books to be published in America within a year of the assassination using its agents who are publishers to push the idea the CIA's behind it. Also in the 60s trying to discredit J. Edgar Hoover, stir up racial tensions in the US. They try and discredit Martin Luther King. They hope more radical divisive voices in the civil rights movement will come

to the fore. I mean, they even go so far. I mean, sometimes active measures goes from information to action, because they even at one point plants small bombs in black areas, African-American areas of New York, and fake claims it was Jewish groups to try and spread division. So this is something which is deeply rooted and a real core part of particularly KGB doctrine. There's an author named Vladislav Bitman who wrote a book on active measures called The Deception Game. And he noted that when he was working for an Eastern Bloc intelligence service, that the key was mixing kind of accurate details with forged ones.

This is kind of another feature of many active measures campaigns is there might be a measure of truth that swirled into the disinformation. that is coherent and sort of partially responds to reality or at least accepted views. And so it can look initially credible. And then this is interesting, you know, because he's writing decades before the 2016 operation that we're talking about is he explains how leaking stolen documents had been a standard procedure in disinformation activities. So again, you can you see this long, long tradition of many of the sort of elements of

an active measure go back decades. And in fact, listeners to the rest of classified will know Gordon that you are very fond of when I have long set up sections that go deep into the history. Gordon Carrera loves to cut them. Mentions of family. Listeners to the Bin Laden series will know that I had extensive things prepared about bin Laden's wives that Gordon was completely disinterested. We kept living.

I had examples of, I guess you could say, active measures adjacent activities that had been conducted by the Tsarist intelligence services, the Cheka in the first years of sort of the revolution. Gordon, U.N.D. mercilessly struck them from the script as usual. I put in some more recent examples. Slightly more relevant points, allegedly more relevant, yeah. Because you made that point about stolen material. There's a good case, I think, in the 70s, where a U.S. classified military manual gets stolen, and then they copy it. And insert some extra lines into a genuine classified military manual, suggesting that the US intelligence services might be willing to plot violence amongst allies in allied countries

as false flags to blame communists and build support for the US military presence in those countries. And this is in the 1970s when there's a lot of suspicion about US intelligence post-Watergate and some of the revelations. So you can see that's the modus operandi. They're One of the realities, though, we should say, is that they weren't always effective, partly because the KGB wasn't always that subtle in its understanding of how the media space or how the information space in the West works. Often they would fall flat. I do remember Oleg Kalugan, the former KGB general, who left for the West at the end of the Cold War, told me that they actually used our friend Kim Filby to help them. Yes. Friend of the pod.

friend of the pod. They'd run things by Kim Filby and they said, look, we're planning this active measure against Britain, this piece of false information. And he would say, oh, that won't work. That sounds too Soviet. So you can see how they need some help to work out how to plant information. Because they're cultivating journalists or intellectuals to push out these stories, information laundering. It would be the modern word. There's one, I think, really interesting example, which was something called Operation Denver. I'm not sure why. It was named Denver, whether it started there. But it spread the idea that secret US military researcher, Fort Dietrich, was behind the creation of the AIDS virus. And this is in the 1980s when AIDS is just emerging. And the challenge was getting that story out. And they plant it in a small journal in India first, which is funded by the KGB in 1983. And it takes years for it to be picked up. It takes another couple of years before Soviet news outlets start to push it, citing the Indian journals.

Then they can claim they're not the source. It comes from this Indian Journal. And then you see it start to spread. And by 1987, over 40 countries are reporting this claim. But it's taken four years to get it spread. But it does have a real impact eventually in how people see the potential for US malfeasance behind AIDS. Well, and that's another theme, I think, of this series, is that that 40-year stretch from the KGB initially. planting the story to it really catching fire is no longer kind of a feature of the active measures

and disinformation landscape, right? Because our modern technological infrastructure, the internet, social media, allow these kind of claims to spread to go viral much more quickly and effectively than the tools the KGB had at its disposal in the 1980s. I also think, I mean, Gordon, it's worth mentioning that, you know, political interference has long been a part of active measures. I mean, getting agents or intelligence officers to infiltrate campaigns and using information as a weapon. I mean, this was the case, for instance, in 1968, when the Russians use this against Nixon, they fake Nixon's too hardline and anti-communist. The KGB, not a big fan, also of Ronald Reagan. So they want to undermine his campaign in 1984. KGB issues orders to do whatever they can to

stop him, you know, work with any other campaign, use front groups, use journalists, another feature of an active measures campaign to kind of attack and stop Reagan, right? So I think the 2016 campaign that we're going to talk about can seem like it's unique, but the reality is that the Russians have attempted to politically interfere in U.S. presidential campaigns going back, you know, decades. One of the things to say as well, David, is that we don't always learn from the history. I think we forgot the history of what the KGB was up to at the end of the Cold War. We thought it was over. And in fact, there is this continuity in Russian intelligence operations, in its desire to use active measures, to influence, to undermine, to sow dissent.

It continues. Now, maybe it's a bit quieter in the 1990s. But as you hit the start of the 21st century, you've got two things really. One is technology is going to transform the ability to do active measures because you've got the internet, which is going to offer this new vector to spread information. And of course, in Moscow, in Russia, there's a new leader, Vladimir Putin. And so there, David, with Vladimir Putin coming to power in the Kremlin in 2000, let's take a break. And when we come back, we're going to see how Putin is driven to to use active measures in a new, potentially transformative way and eventually directed against the United States.

Hello everybody and welcome to the Book Club, a new podcast from Gollhanger, hosted by me, Dominic Sambrook. And me, Tabitha Syrodd. As some of you may know, I've been Dominic's producer on The Rest of History, and we even did a mini-series last year about all things books. And since we enjoyed that so much, we have decided to roll it out as its own show. So it'll be coming out every Tuesday.

We'll be doing a different book each time and digging into all the stories behind them. And we are going to be talking about the historical contexts behind some of the greatest and most famous books of all time. We're going to be digging into the remarkable people behind them, the unexpected stories behind the stories, and also unraveling the plot of each book a bit and delving into the depths of the story. Now, you don't have to have read the books to listen to the show, but we hope that by the end of each episode, you will be able to pretend. to people that you've read them, that is the key thing. And either way, whether you read them or not,

we hope that you'll learn lots of fascinating facts, you'll do lots of great stories, and maybe Tabby, the odd laugh. We will be looking at thrilling, gothic bodice rippers like Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein, as well as iconic stories like The Great Gatsby or Little Women. And then also some more modern stuff. So Game of Thrones, normal people, the Hunger Games, Hamlet,

all manner of exciting stories. Please join us on our journey into all things books, wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for The Book Club every Tuesday and hopefully we will see you there. Well, welcome back. Vladimir Putin has come to power in Moscow in 2000. We looked a bit at his rise, didn't we, in the mini-series we did for club members with Mark Galiotti, the expert, at the formative experiences for this former KGB officer and what molded him. And it is the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the chaos and humiliation of the 90s, which really shapes him. It's interesting because a lot of people, I think, in the KGB blamed the CIA for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

They thought that actually the CIA had been secretly trying to divide and undermine the Soviet Union, which of course was a multi-ethnic, multinationality state at that time, and that it broke up into its constituent, parts, Russia being only one of them, Baltic states, Ukraine, all these others. And I think it's true that many KGBA officers thought this was all the result of an American active measure, if you like, although the Americans wouldn't call it of an active measure. Now, that's not necessarily the case, but that was part of the perception, I think. The Soviet Union would have definitely held together if it hadn't been for the CIA. It wasn't because you couldn't make toilet paper or anything like that. But right, this is the mentality, right, of Putin and the KG.

B officers around him. Now, we talked a bit in our series with Mark Eliotty about how Putin in those first few years in office, I mean, takes power in 2000. He's relatively solicitous of the West, at least not openly confrontational, and then it flips. And it doesn't flip overnight, but there's a series of events that I think kind of reshape the relationship between Putin and the U.S. and the West more broadly. There's, of course, the Iraq War, the invasion of Iraq.

in 2003. There's criticism from the West, I think rightly so, Putin's extremely brutal war that he's prosecuting in Chechnya throughout much of the early 2000s. There's NATO expansion, which, as we see, Putin is not a fan of. So by 2008, Putin becomes the prime minister rather than the president. Dmitri Medvedev is the president for four years between 2008 and 2012. and there's maybe some speculation that Putin might fade away and let a new generation take over. Oops, that did not happen. In 2011, there are elections for the Duma, Russia's parliament, and those elections are absolutely rife with manipulation. Now, one of the things that I think is interesting, Gordon, is that essentially the Russian intelligence services perform an active measure on the Russian population.

itself. I think the initial petri dish for a lot of what we're talking about actually originates inside Russia. Because Putin's party doesn't perform very well. Protest break out. It's clear that there is opposition to Putin returning as president. And Putin is very shaken by all of this. And again, that mindset that we're talking about of all of this being a CIA, a Western plot. The KGB, Parano. mindset, isn't it? He basically sees this as another domino in these color revolutions that had been sweeping ex or former Soviet states and kind of the Russian near abroad. So places like Georgia, in Ukraine in 2004, there had been these so-called color revolutions bringing to power

political parties and politicians that were anti-Russian. And again, Putin sees all of this not as a sort of expression of the popular will that the people around Russia or even some Russians inside Russia don't want to be subjugated by Putin and the people around him. He sees this as a CIA plot. This is the CIA using active measures against Russia. And I think that's a really important point for the mindset that's going to frame the 2016 election is that wrongly, I would argue, Putin. has come to the conclusion that he has been the victim of a very elaborate CIA and Western

active measure already. And it's really interesting, isn't it? Who he blames specifically for inciting some of the protests and supporting some of the protests. It's the U.S. Secretary of State at the time, who is Hillary Clinton, Obama's Secretary of State. And he views her as having legitimized and supported some of these opposition groups and protests, even the idea she might have been giving signals to them through their speech to rise up and protest against him. And so I think this is where some of the very personal antagonism

starts between Vladimir Putin and Hillary Clinton. When Putin actually announces his presidential campaign in 2011, he's sitting around a table speaking to all of these kind of stony-faced political allies. And he says that Clinton, quote, set the tone for certain actors inside the country, meeting the protesters. She gave the signal. There's kind of two big points here, right? One of them is that Putin believes he has been the target of an ongoing series of U.S. active measures. And two, he sees Hillary Clinton as being, to some degree, the mastermind of those active measures. During Putin's presidential campaign announcement. He's sitting at a table speaking to a group of political allies, and he says,

Putin says, quote, that Hillary Clinton had set the tone for certain actors inside the country. He's referring to the protesters who are angry that Putin is going to return to power and that he's, you know, in his party have essentially rigged the election. She, Clinton, gave the signal. There's kind of two big points here. One of them is Putin by the time you get to 2011, in 2012, believes strongly that he has been the target of an active measure. And I think it's not just Russia, but his control, his political control over Russia has been the target of a CIA or Western active measure. And then the second point is that one of the primary Western politicians behind this is Hillary Clinton. Those are two very important points to frame what's going to happen

in 2016 is he's been victimized and he's been victimized by Hillary Clinton. That's right. And now he's back as president, as leader of Russia, and it is a different Putin. I think it took a while for people in the West to understand it was a different Putin after 2012. He's more aggressive. He's more nationalistic. He's reaching deeper into social conservatism, into religious currents. And he's starting to see Russia as in conflict maybe not war, but a conflict with the West, and he's more willing to use aggressive tools, what are sometimes called grey zone activities against the West. It's interesting because as we get into 2013 and the run-up to 2016,

Putin has been worried that the internet, that technology, that a free information space, is a threat to his hold on power. He views the Internet as dangerous. He famously calls the Internet a CIA project. at one point. And by that, I think he means, you know, it was created by the US government to spread Western ideas. It's a vector for subversion and protest, for Western information warfare. And he's starting to think about how to fight back against that and looking for ways and tools of doing it. And you get this very interesting article in 2013 by General

Valeri Garasimov, who we encountered in our Progoshin series, didn't we? It's a key figure. It's still there as the Chief of General Staff and head of the Russian military. He publishes this article, which in a relatively obscure journal, but it becomes seen as a definitive article about what gets called the Gerasimov doctrine. Now, Mark Galiotti, who we've spoken about, is one of those who comes up with that term. And he thinks it's been slightly overstretched as a term. But the key thing to know is Garasimov is arguing, isn't he, that the West is using new tools and information warfare against Russia. And there is a new information environment, thanks to things like the internet and social media, which is allowing a new form of warfare

to be waged by reaching out to populations and mobilizing them potentially for protest, as seen just a couple of years ago in the Arab Spring, which would be really 2011, 2012, hadn't it? The interesting, I think again, to the Putin mindset is as he's realizing and his intelligence services are beginning to kind of use information warfare quite broadly, he again, I think sees himself as being a target of these exact same tools on the part of the West. Now, you remember Gordon in the spring of 2016, the Panama Papers when that kind of scandal broke, which is basically this massive document dump from a Panamanian law firm called Mossack Fonseca that showed the techniques that Putin himself and a lot of other wealthy people used to kind of hide money.

It showed in some cases Putin and Putin affiliates, including, I think, was it a violinist or cellist with the St. Petersburg orchestra who had accounts, you know, in the Caribbean that were worth millions and millions of dollars. And it's sort of where did this come from? And it's quite obvious to Cameron Putin. So Putin was was angry to say the least about this document dump. And he's asked at a press conference in April of 2016. So just as this election interference story is going to is going to start, he's asked about the release of those papers. And he says, officials and state agencies in the United States are behind all this, right? The Americans, Putin says, are trying to weaken Russia from within. It's spread distrust for the ruling authorities and the bodies of power within the society. So

it's an active measure in his mind. And what's so interesting is there isn't any evidence I've seen that it was an active measure. Like so many things we're talking about, Russia interprets it as such, because you've got a KGB officer who's trained in active measures running the country and a bunch of other security officials around them, they are obsessed with active measures because this is what they've spent their career doing. So when they see these Panama papers, they assume it must be. As far as I'm I know, and I could be wrong, there could be a hidden hand somewhere in it. It was just someone who worked in the company leaking this information.

But it is an example where Moscow and Russia and Putin are becoming paranoid. You also get, we glossed over one character as well, who we should probably just mention briefly, which is a friend of the show Edward Snowden, who also makes his appearance in Moscow and ends up after leaking lots of American intelligence secrets in Moscow. But I guess the crucial thing about Snowden is not so much the fact he ends up in Moscow, but the fact that he reveals the extent to which the US is controlling the Internet and has the ability to spy on the world through the Internet, which again feeds into this idea that the US is using information as a weapon. That's the mindset which has grown, isn't it?

That's right. And I'll refer listeners, those who might be new to the program, We did a six-episode series on the Edward Snowden debacle. I think it was last spring. And Gordon, throughout that series, expressed a very worrisome affection for the young Edward Snowden. That is a mischaracterization. It's all on tape.

It's all on tape. And you can go, you can go listen to it. Go judge for yourself. I mean, the other thing that we probably shouldn't gloss over is that in 2013, 2014, there were massive protests in Ukraine about essentially whether Ukraine would be looking toward the EU or would be looking back toward Russia. And there was a massive people power movement that came out into Medan Square in Kiev to essentially say, we don't want to live under the Russian thumb. And at that point in time, there was a quite pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych,

who essentially makes a decision to take, I think, what you could call more or less a cash bribe from the Russians, from Putin to scrap an EU association agreement. And that triggers this protest movement. Putin sees, again, a U.S. hand behind those protests as being yet another active measure against Russian power, control and influence. in Ukraine. I think we should say, your point, Gordon, on, we've been talking about Putin's mindset here for a bit. I think one of the very interesting themes of this entire story is that both sides, the Russian and the American side,

because they conduct intelligence work in very different ways, there's a very different culture and mindset and historical experience with intelligence. intelligence in both countries. The mirror imaging that is done in both societies makes it very hard to analytically understand what's happening. So in Putin's world, he's been victimized by U.S. active measures going back to the mid-2000s, right? Which I think is not true. But he's interpreting all of this to the lens of the way that he is a former KGB officer and the way that the Russian intelligence services operate, which is active measures are a big part of what they do.

We'll see as we get to it in the U.S. response that I think one of the reasons why we struggle to understand what actually happened is we don't have a long tradition of active measures in this country. I think we're actually quite bad at information operations. It's not ingrained in the sort of intelligence DNA. Culturally, it's different. And so when we are facing down a Russian active measure, we don't see the full scope of it. because we view intelligence work as well, you're stealing secrets and it goes far beyond that. So both sides, I think, really throughout the story, we'll have a very hard time grappling with what they're dealing with because of that mirror imaging.

A lot of this does go back. We're picking up that point and also going back to that issue of Ukraine and Maidan and the change of regime in Ukraine. Of course, then you get the start of the first wave of the Ukraine conflict and Russia seizing Crimea. What you also get is a sense within Russia, that it is in conflict with the West at this point, something which I don't think the West recognises on our part, because we don't recognise what they're willing to do. But Ukraine is important. It will be important to our story in lots of ways, because you can start to see as well, can't you, that Russia will start to fight back and use information operations and active measures in the context of that conflict in Ukraine. That's where things

are starting to heat up as we get through 2014, isn't it? That's right. In one instance, the Russians intercept a phone call between a very senior State Department official named Victoria Newland, who I believe was the most senior State Department official on Russia at the time. She's talking to the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, and Victoria Newland on the call says, bleep gun, Becky, the EU. And then the Russians collect this.

Unbelievable. Well, that's why I asked Becky for the bleep gun. Well, I meant the sentiment. Oh, the sentiment. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, the EU can be very frustrating, Gordon. Let's, we can all. Let's not get into that.

We'll get into whether there was a Russian hand in Brexit. Yeah. It's Alastair Campbell's big thing. But yeah, sorry, back to the story. And Victoria Newland, by the way, is the one who, during the protests, wasn't she like handing out muffins to some of the protesters? And the Russians just latched onto that as like evidence of U.S. support is. you know, Victoria Newland is handing out baked goods to protesters on the Maidan.

Anyhow, the Russians take that intercepted phone call. They dump it out on the Internet and put it up on YouTube. And I think it's a great example of an old school intel collection method. Obviously intercepting phone calls. That happens all the time. But the new one, which is let's put it out there. Let's put it on social media. Let's make it available to create tension with the EU.

So make it hard. for Victoria Newland to deal with, you know, in the State Department more broadly, to deal with European officials and create a political kind of wildfire around that content as opposed to what the Russians are actually doing in Ukraine. And it's picked up by obviously Russian TV stations, but ultimately a bunch of American and European news agencies who are just all over it. Yeah. And it's, I think it is the first sign we get of Russia. And it's often in Ukraine, as we'll see also with cyber hacking as we come to it, that Russia trials a lot of these techniques, as you said, sometimes domestically to try and sway opinion at home to support

the regime, but often in Ukraine abroad as the first place they try things out. And then they're going to try it further afield. So by the time we get to 2016, you can see that Putin is getting paranoid. He thinks the West is trying to undermine him. He thinks it's using the internet to do that. He thinks he's in a conflict with the West, and he particularly hates Hillary Clinton. That's right. And interestingly enough, Gordon, some of the first inklings, I think, of what is going on in the run-up to 2016 come from a contact of the U.S. State Department. Now, we have not spoken much on this podcast about diplomatic reporting, have we, Gordon? We've mostly talked.

We've talked about SIGINT. We've talked about humans. Embassy reporting, state department reporting, in some ways is quite similar to human, right? I mean, it is a state department officer in a foreign embassy, you know, a political officer and economic officer who has contacts in that society, right? In that country, they could be business leaders. They could be Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials, right? They could be kind of members of the sort of cultural, political business elite, whomever. The difference are they're going to go out, the state department officers will go out, and they'll meet and talk to these people. And then they will write that up in cables that are usually classified secret. But what differentiates that from kind of the human that CIA collects is that it's usually not collected clandestinely. The host government understands that the Americans are meeting with members of their

government. And even if it's not information that is going to be made public, it usually is not, it's not clandestine. You're not stealing a secret from the foreign government. And folks who want to look at state cables, there have been a bunch that have been leaked over the past decade, which can be, obviously, they can be quite embarrassing because the diplomats will write up reports and send them back to Washington. And sometimes those reports include details on foreign leaders that are not particularly flattering. Yeah, and we'll get to the leaks. We'll get to the leaks maybe soon. a bit further on down the story, yeah.

That's right. Now, this story comes from a terrific book on the Russian active measure called Russian roulette by Michael Isikoff and David Korn. And they write in their book that in early 2014, a U.S. diplomat assigned to the U.S. embassy in Moscow reached out to some what they call it a secret source in Russia. I'm not quite sure what to make of that because, again, usually these contacts are, you know, known to the host government. And this diplomat was trying to understand Russia's plans toward Ukraine and Crimea.

Again, it's not a paid source, but this person had ties into the Kremlin and had provided useful information in the past. In the spring of 2015, so the State Department officials had a bunch of interactions with this person, the source comes back with something that's particularly interesting. And he tells the State Department official that the Kremlin is planning a wide-ranging campaign to attack Western institutions and undermine Western democracies. So again, it's an active measure. It would include cyber attacks, information warfare, propaganda, social media campaigns, the source offered general reports on Russian penetration of media organizations, lobbying firms, political parties. It's interesting because I think while it, in retrospect, paints a picture of what is going to come, it's not particularly surprising at the time to U.S. officials. Again, consider the history.

history we talked about. Russian active measures are just sort of part of the game, but State Department wrote that the size and magnitude and the seriousness of their intent was disturbing because it showed this kind of growing capacity for mounting influence operations and active measures against the U.S. Now, the U.S. official who's meeting with the source ends up filing more than a dozen embassy cables with this intelligence. I think these are what are called notice cables, Gordon, no dissemination, very limited kind of distro. Like usually if a diplomatic cable was sent back to Washington and then got distributed at CIA, it would be quite easy to access because, again, it's usually just classified secret.

The notice cables would sometimes, if my memory is correct, come to you just hard copy and be harder to get, they'd be harder to get your hands on because it would typically be written by the ambassador or a very senior official inside the embassy and would include information that would be particularly sensitive. So kind of getting closer to humant, but not, not quite. And it would see it as significant and an interesting reporting, but it maybe doesn't feel like it has the impact you might expect. I can understand why it wasn't really acted upon, because on the one hand, it is giving kind of high-level plans and intentions for what the Russian government intends to do. It's explaining that an active measure is coming or underway.

But it doesn't give you enough specificity about the targets, I think, or maybe even the broader intent in order to be able to stop it. It's not particularly actionable and does seem to fit in line with what at that point must have seemed like, you know, just an ongoing wave of Russian active measures that are directed against the U.S. and the West. That's right. And I think there was a bit of complacency about, well, the Russians might try and do this kind of thing, but it Never really has much impact. Doesn't work. Won't sway anything. I just think that there was a complacency about the potential impact of these kind of operations at the time.

Well, that's right. And one of the U.S. official later said, anybody who had any doubt about Putin's intentions just wasn't reading what we reported. And I think it's maybe not quite true. Because to your point, there was a sense that, well, we understand Putin's intentions. it just might not make much of an impact in speaking with a number of former CIA and former FBI officials who were involved in the story, the complacency point was a big one. Because whether it was a failure of an imagination, an intelligence failure, we just didn't,

we didn't see this coming. But in any case, the stage is set for a very audacious Russian active measure, one that is going to end up targeting all of American society. And maybe there, Gordon, will end this first episode exploring Russian active measures in Vladimir Putin's intentions. And next time, we will see how that active measure is unleashed on the United States. But of course, if you don't want to wait for that next episode, you can hear it right now and the rest of the series. And you will get access to the very special bonus series looking at Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. and 2016. All of that, if you join the Declassified Club at the Rest isclassified.com. Lots of other

benefits there as well, including your weekly newsletter. But otherwise, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.