About a year ago, I saw a Reuters photo of a bare-chested Vladimir Putin holding a gigantic rifle. He was wearing a silver cross and fingerless leather gloves and trudging through dry, junglelike terrain in the Tuva region of Siberia. There was sweat on the bald spot pushing back tufts of parted blond hair. His forehead was cinched, as if he was in deep concentration.1

The photo was taken in 2007, one of a rock-star-like portfolio bearing testament to President Putin's physical prowess. He is a hunter who often goes on research expeditions with scientists who track and tag animals. He has black belts in Kaikan karate and judo (he wrote an entire book about judo and his signature harai goshi moves). He was given the nickname “Abaddon” (“the destroyer” in Hebrew) by the high council of Russian bikers, and often brags about his prowess swimming for fun in frigid Siberian lakes.²

I had known Putin was a hotshot who often boasted of his athleticism, but something about that Reuters photo struck me as curious. It was an image that stuck in my mind and wouldn't go away. I couldn't figure out why. Perhaps the work was getting to me.

As an observer trying to gather information from well-placed law enforcement and intelligence sources, I realized things were becoming increasingly surreal. The movie I was watching unfold was definitely a thriller, a certain Hollywood blockbuster that involved espionage, cyberattacks, a presidential campaign, a reality TV star, and a woman being painted as unscrupulous, all entrenched with a Russian president who liked being photographed shirtless and armed.

I looked at the photo of the odd man who was at the helm of the US cyberattack, a man who led an invisible strike force of hackers, who swooped in, gathered intelligence, and slipped away undetected until it was too late.

It is truly impossible to understand the character of high-ranking political leaders. Their public and private personas become enmeshed. Their political actions are not their own but determined and undermined by a multitude of other people, motives, and storylines. In a perfect world, their political actions would speak for themselves. But this is not quite a perfect world.

The lineup for the 2016 presidential election could not have been more bizarre. Trump and Putin's rough public personas could at times seem (or be made out to be) driven largely by ego and machismo. While these qualities may make for fine actors or quarterbacks, when they come from political leaders, boundaries can be and often are crossed. There is no harm when that ego is sequestered from the political arena. For example, Putin was playing at a recent hockey game and the players let him score eight goals.3 I could understand that because all men know people like that. He's just a guy who has to win, who other people have to let win, because if he doesn't win, then everyone knows there is going to be a problem. And I have heard that Trump can also be like that, especially when he is playing golf.

Putin had been known to cross lines to intimidate political adversaries. For example, he brought out his giant black Lab, Koni, during a meeting with German chancellor Angela Merkel in 2007 about energy supplies.⁴ He knew she was terrified of dogs and had once been bitten. Putin remarked how big Koni was. Merkel joked in Russian that at least the pooch “doesn't eat journalists.”⁵ Former president George W. Bush has embraced his artistic side and painted a brooding portrait of Putin that he describes as “hollow.” Bush explained the inspiration for his painting was his bone of contention with Putin, who trotted Koni out at a meeting with Bush while mocking the size of Bush's late, prized Scottish terrier Barney. Bush explained that line of attack revealed Putin's character.⁶

The script has sure changed.

THE CONTEXT

It is hard to avoid creating caricatures out of leaders these days. A game is being played with our country and our lives, and the rules were never explained to us. Perhaps to understand Putin better we might examine the context. Russia's political system is counterintuitive to ours. Since 1999, Putin has been either Russia's president or prime minister. In 2018, he won his fourth term as president in typical fashion.7 Many believe he has maintained his status mainly by pushing limitations (regulated by the Kremlin) on election laws, intimidating potential rivals, and quelling independent news outlets.

Some of the chess moves he has made during his most recent term in office that were controversial and detrimental to the US government include granting asylum to Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee and government contractor who leaked classified National Security Agency (NSA) information. The classified information included details Snowden believed the American public should know about, such as global and domestic surveillance programs. One of the most controversial things he leaked was an NSA program that required US phone companies to give them every single customer's phone records.⁸

Snowden was charged with violating the Espionage Act. But he has been recognized as a hero by some and a traitor by many of those I've spoken with who work in the area of national security. Accordingly, some folks in the government believed Putin's harboring of Snowden was an aggressive act.⁹

Putin has been widely criticized for international human rights violations in the physical (non-cyber) world. The United Nations and organizations like Human Rights Watch have condemned Putin's practices, which include torture, the killing of at least ten thousand people, and the illegal transport of thousands of residents of Crimea to Russian prisons. Crimea is a peninsula in the Black Sea that was snatched from Russia by Ukraine in 1954, and later occupied by Russia and annexed in 2014.¹⁰

Global protest has followed Putin's stringent anti-gay laws, which include making it illegal for gay couples in Russia to get married or have children. Russia's crackdown on terrorists has also led to violations against Muslims in Russia. For example, in the North Caucasus region of Russia, reports surfaced that Putin was ordering saliva samples to be collected from Muslim women purportedly to locate “black widows,” or female suicide bombers.11

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad to a working-class family. His father was a factory foreman, and he grew up in a communal apartment shared with three other families.¹² He was born in 1952, five years after the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West began.

To place Putin's formative years in context, the Cold War is a phrase that essentially describes the tricky relationship between the United States and its NATO allies, “the West,” and the Soviet Union or what was officially termed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1945 to 1989 (or 1991, depending upon your perspective). The USSR included fifteen republics comprising a gargantuan swath of land that made it the biggest country in the world in territory. Its capital was in Moscow from 1945 to1989. The conflict was essentially an ideological one—communism versus capitalism, democracy versus dictatorship—with both sides zealously promoting their way as correct. Although each side had substantial power (nuclear and otherwise), no actual fighting occurred between them. Rather, they used the world as their chessboard, each having spheres of influence with client states duking it out on their behalf. Most notably North Vietnam was pro-Communist, and its arms were supplied from Russia or China. South Vietnam was anti-Communist and received its weapons from the United States and its allies.

Putin graduated from Leningrad State University with a degree in law in 1975. He served in the KGB for sixteen years, rising through the ranks to become a lieutenant colonel. In 1991, he retired from the KGB and returned to his hometown, which had been renamed Saint Petersburg, and entered politics.¹³

The revolutions of 1989 included millions of people protesting on the streets in countries across Eastern Europe (what had come to be called the Soviet Bloc). Major events included the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which marked the division of Europe; cutting down barbed wire fences marking borders in Hungary; and the end of Communist rule punctuated by candlelight vigils all over Europe. Many note the end of the Cold War as occurring in 1989 at the time of the widespread revolutions against Communist rule, while others note it as having taken place in 1991 when each republic succeeded and the Soviet Union formally dissolved. During that year Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth president of the Soviet Union, resigned and handed the reins of power over to Russian president Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin appointed Putin as prime minister in 1999. He was then made president, when Yeltsin retired in 2000.14

Putin's cyber strategies have been described by many of my sources as “very Russian.” This means that the Russians have their own elaborate strategic system, developed over years, of provoking conflict in a country by using stealthy former spies, mathematicians, and current spies. Russia's citizens know they live in a country where it is a given that people are often under government suspicion, particularly outsiders. Although many of my intelligence sources have studied Russian operatives, nobody seems to have suspected they would gain such unfettered recent access to our cyberspace. Many admit that the United States is ill prepared because we don't really understand the context in which Putin is operating.

Laura Rosenberger of the Alliance for Securing Democracy explains how foreign Russia's strategy was viewed by the US intelligence community at the time its military occupied Ukraine, beginning in 2014 (and including the annexation of Crimea). She describes how difficult Russian political culture is to understand, even for the experts.

I was at the National Security Council at the White House when we were dealing with Russia's intervention in Ukraine. We were really looking at other things that Russia might do along its periphery and elsewhere with this asymmetric tool kit. One of the things that was clear to me was that theirs was a playbook that we in the national security community in the United States, at least at the time, were not really equipped to fully wrap our heads around, nor to respond to in a comprehensive way.

Its asymmetric and cross-cutting nature doesn't sit well with how our bureaucracy is organized. That sounds like a very bureaucratic answer. But the reality is that if we aren't able to analyze, understand, and respond to the tool kit in a way that is just as comprehensive as what we're getting on the incoming side, we're just going to keep playing whack-a-mole.

That's a very long way of saying that, “No, I don't think that we have a responsive playbook, because I don't think we really yet fully understand the threat that we're facing.”15