In my preceding work, The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election, I outlined the resources that the Kremlin would have had to expend to achieve their goal of electing Donald Trump president. To further the goals of the Kremlin, they developed and carried out a strategic disinformation and influence warfare operation using computational strikes to the American social media system whereupon they hacked the mindset of the American public. To describe Putin’s larger strategic goals across Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, I have code named his effort Operation GLOBAL GRIZZLY. This plan was designed to use all assets in Russia’s power, from foreign policy interventions and oil deals to spy agency assassinations and covert invasions, to bring the Axis of Autocracy to fruition. The strategy is called Asymmetric or Hybrid Warfare. All resources short of open warfare would be applied to restore Russia’s power, world standing, and influence.
Putin’s Axis of Autocracy strategy began with the hacking of the 2016 American election. Placing Donald Trump into the White House gave Russia a firm argument that we were at the heart of the new global populism movement. An inner circle of anti-globalist leaders who could be convinced to abandon the American-NATO–led worldview would assist in revealing the massive cracks in liberal democracy. By 2017, NATO states including France, Spain, Turkey, Greece, Germany, the Netherlands, Britain, Poland, Hungary, and Ukraine would have major political parties poised to leapfrog into power under Putin’s plan. To support these efforts GLOBAL GRIZZLY resources are focused to support Kremlin-favored political parties and to push for nationalist referendums.
America was not alone in the political quagmire caused by Russian cyber warfare operations. The Russian methodologies of intrusion into European politics from the Soviet period to today is not particularly different.
In the post-war period, Russian intelligence was locked in an ideological war with the West for control of Europe. Because of the ability of both sides to destroy the other with nuclear weapons, they faced off with conventional military forces and engaged in a global war of espionage and influence. This was the Cold War—a face-off between two massive armies along the West German border. The Communist East created an alliance of the eight Soviet-occupied nations to rival NATO. The alliance included half of Germany (called East Germany), Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Albania, and the Soviet Union. Russia held these nations through military power and replaced their pre-war democratic governments with a local communist totalitarian leader essentially chosen by Moscow. These leaders were kept in check by the KGB, who managed their local communist intelligence agencies. Thus, half of Europe (including nations incorporated into the Soviet Union: Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) was occupied by Russia for 46 years. Russian was the lingua franca for military, government, and cultural affairs in the East.
The Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia stick particularly hard in Moscow’s craw. Invaded by the Soviet Union as part of the deal between Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler in the 1940 Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty, and then occupied afterward, these three tiny states were ardently pro-West and pro-NATO. They cut Russia off from the small ethnic Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. The first operations came at the hand of what could best be deemed MILITIA BEARS, or Russian citizen cyber-vigilantes.
Nations that crossed Putin were being attacked asymmetrically. For example, in 2007 Russia paralyzed Estonia with a national level Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack when the local government wanted to move a WWII-era Soviet army statue, the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn. Though it is believed to have been started by cyber-vigilantes, the Russian intelligence agencies, the GRU and SVR, leaped onto the attack and shut that small nation’s internet down… as a warning. Russian spies then started test-bedding more and more sophisticated cyber-attacks. Joshua Davies detailed in Wired what happened that day:
“The future was looking perilous. Ago Väärsi, head of IT at the Postimes newspaper, watched as automated computer programs continued to spew posts onto the commentary pages of the Postimes web site, creating a two-fold problem: The spam overloaded the server’s processors and hogged bandwidth. Väärsi turned off the comments feature. That saved bandwidth—the meter showed that there was still capacity—but what did get through tied the machines into knots and crashed them repeatedly. He discovered that the attackers were constantly tweaking their malicious server requests to evade the filters. Whoever was behind this was sophisticated, fast, and intelligent.”1
The next year Lithuania passed an anti-Soviet memorabilia law and again the MILITIA BEARS struck. Led by a group calling itself “hack-wars.ru,” they paralyzed the nation’s access to the internet.2 Former Estonian Prime Minister Toomas Henrik Ilves, who was tasked to investigate how and why the Russians carried out these attacks, noted that “The Russians are very aggressive everywhere, across Europe, and this is a problem that each country is struggling with on its own.… [W]hat they do to us we cannot do to them.… Liberal democracies with a free press and free and fair elections are at an asymmetric disadvantage… the tools of their democratic and free speech can be used against them.”3
The Estonian and Lithuanian cyber-attacks presented a new clear and present danger to NATO operations. It was clearly an attack in which the organization would have to clarify if Article 5 of the treaty, the mutual defense response, would be triggered by another event on a NATO nation. The headquarters in Brussels ordered a new cybersecurity warfare center to open in Estonia to be close to the threat both physically and operationally.
At the National Day march in Red Square, Vladimir Putin insinuated that anywhere that the memory of the Soviet army was sullied, Russia would remember: “Those who are trying today to… desecrate memorials to war heroes are insulting their own people, sowing discord and new distrust between state and people…”4
That same year, the Republic of Georgia was struck by a DDoS attack too when armed clashes broke out in ethnic Russian regions of South Ossetia as pro-Moscow forces tried to ethnically cleanse Georgians. Soon after, Kyrgyzstan was struck with a DDoS attack for allowing American forces to use an airbase in the Afghanistan war. The base was quickly closed. The political success of these attacks was followed up with more attacks on Kazakhstan, Ukraine, France, and the United States. Russia had learned there was financial and political value in cyber punishment. Denying service was efficient for making a political point without launching a cruise missile. Stealing data for Kompromat was next level, but cyber manipulations of social media with that stolen material? That was elite-level information war, a pinnacle goal of the Soviet intelligence apparatus—change minds to abandon their own governments. Now in the hands of Vladimir Putin, it would change the world.
Britain was to be the test bed for the Russian strategy of perception management. Why did the Russians see an opportunity to influence the British? The systems being developed for the United States by Russian intelligence agencies would need a smaller test model to validate the programming of the bots and test the efficiency of the data collection process handled by Cambridge Analytica.
Britain was America’s strongest ally and it was also a lynchpin for the European Union. Removing it from the Union would not seriously damage it like a French withdrawal. Britain would also not be likely to sever its ties to NATO. Russia saw that a successful British referendum would give the American right wing a symbol to point at and say, “if they can do it we can too.” The European nationalist conservative networks had successfully permeated the belief that defending conservatives meant being anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, pro-white, and pro-Moscow. Disrupting Britain was the closest thing to disrupting the United States. For this, Putin would need allies in the UK, who would not even know they were working for him. If the British referendum could be made successful, then the RF-IRA and Russian intelligence operations would be expanded to attack the United States directly.
Euroscepticism in England dates back in many ways to the post–World War II effort to rebuild Europe after the destruction of the war. Winston Churchill suggested a “United States of Europe”5 was called for, with France and Germany working together to create a way to ensure peace and cooperation. However, he did not envision the United Kingdom as a member of this new body necessarily.
From post-WWII until the 21st century, the relationship between Britain and the effort to unite Europe had been an intermittent love affair. The Treaty of Dunkirk united Britain and France in 1947. Then, in 1948, the Treaty of Brussels brought the UK into a defense agreement with Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands that created the Western Union Defense Organization, or the WUDO. In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created with Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, and the US.
In 1951, the economic needs of the European countries signed to the Treaty of Brussels were addressed in the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), with the signing of the Treaty of Paris by the same countries, but now joined by West Germany and Italy. In 1957, the Treaty of Rome established the European Economic Community and the Euratom Treaty created the European Atomic Energy Community. These treaties helped form the first foundation of what would become the European Union. Subsequent treaties resolved jurisdictional and administrative issues, including the signing of the Brussels Treaty of 1965, the Schengen Agreement and Convention of 1985, and the Single Europe Act signed in 1986.
Led by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, previous attempts by the British to join the European Community from 1957 to 19636 were rejected under pressure from French President Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle considered the British too adversarial to the interests of the European Community to accept Britain being admitted.7 After all, it was France and others who had led much of the existing progress in rebuilding Europe, with Britain abstaining from many important treaties along the way. But as Britain stood by to watch the progress of Europe under French and German recovery, its economy was becoming mired in stagnation.8
For all the effort of Harold Macmillan to join the European Community, however, there was Labor Party member Hugh Gaitskell who opposed this entry claiming that it would rob the UK of its independence. This paradigm of choices would repeat itself for the next 20 years as the relationship between the UK and Europe continued to evolve.
In 1973, the United Kingdom joined the European Communities, a predecessor of the European Union with the ratification of the Treaty of Accession in 1972.
ONLY TWO YEARS after joining the European Economic Community (EEC), the British people were given a referendum to continue this new relationship within the EEC in 1975. Created under the Referendum Act of 1975, the June 5th vote was the first-ever countrywide referendum in the 20th century. Brits voted overwhelmingly to remain members of this new alliance.
In 1992, the Treaty on European Union,9 also known as the Maastricht Treaty established the framework for what would be called the European Union. Under the guidance of German leader Helmut Kohl and French leader François Mitterand, the newly formed EU would advance European integration in banking and security, create European Union citizenship for citizens in member countries, and lead to the creation of the euro, the official currency of the European Union.
In late 2009, the Greek debt crisis had taken a toll on the Greek people; austerity measures and rioting by Golden Dawn, fueled by disinformation, gave momentum to the possibility that Britain would exit the EU, given that some economists believed Greece would be stronger without the EU.
In January 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron decided to call the question on whether Britain should remain in the EU after years of discussions, bickering, and pandering. He stated he would support putting it up for a vote. Again, in November 2015, he says that “Britain’s best future lay within a reformed European Union” and that if re-elected he would keep the promise that “we would have an in-out referendum” on whether to stay or leave the EU.10 This led to the European Union Referendum Act of 2015.11 On February 22, 2016, Cameron announced the in-out referendum would occur on June 23, 2016.12
Driven by anti-immigrant sentiment, the Eurosceptic politicians like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage pushed the referendum for the UK to leave the EU. Dubbed “Brexit,” the effort was a portmanteau of “Britain” and “exit.”
The push to leave the EU was largely orchestrated by two campaign groups, the Leave.EU group, backed by Nigel Farage,13 and the Vote Leave group, founded by Matthew Elliot and Dominic Cummings in October 2015. Vote Leave had support from several parties and was led by former London Mayor Boris Johnson, a member of the Conservative Party.
But they were not the only groups. Better Off Out (BOO) had been around since 2006, pushing for a departure from the EU. Formed by the Freedom Association, a right-wing libertarian group that had been around since 1975, the group described itself as a “cross-party campaign group.”14 Others included Grassroots Out, or GO, led by Conservative Party leader Peter Bone, who went on to found Leave Means Leave in July 2016. Grassroots Out was largely run by Conservative Party members, but notably Russia Today host George Galloway’s group, the Respect Party, joined in on February 22, 2016, as announced by Russia Today. The Respect Party dissolved in August 2016. Notably, former MP Galloway had interviewed Nigel Farage about the aspects of Brexit in an interview for Russian propaganda outfit, Sputnik.15
Some critics argued that the body of the EU formed a single market zone that controlled member countries and thus robbed Britain of its economic sovereignty. Additionally, they argued that immigrants could travel too easily between EU countries, putting British jobs at risk. They claimed that Britain was losing its identity, especially in terms of immigration. The most vocal proponents of this effort often invoked the idea that their culture was under threat and that removing the control from Brussels was the best way to handle this. They wanted to let Britain go it alone.
Aaron Banks was the single largest political donor in UK history. The businessman from Bristol was co-founder of Leave.EU, and he put almost $10 million (£7 million) into the referendum to withdraw from the EU. He, along with Nigel Farage, former leader of UKIP, Raheem Kassam, London editor of Breitbart, and Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s director of communications, called themselves the “bad boys of Brexit.” Each in his way was a follower of Steve Bannon’s Duginist philosophy of ending democracy via tying European and American extremely conservative groups into a worldwide network, in which Breitbart was the key node.16
On May 7, 2015, Brits elected a Conservative majority. By February 20, 2016, Cameron told the British media that the EU deal gave the UK “special status” in renegotiating trade deals. London Mayor, Boris Johnson, was the impetus behind the Leave EU campaign on February 21.
On June 16, 2016, tensions were high in the UK over the referendum.
A Remain advocate was out campaigning when confronted by an unemployed xenophobic gardener, Thomas Mair. Labour Party Member of Parliament Jo Cox was a young 41-year-old former humanitarian worker and mother of two children. The 52-year-old Mair laid in wait outside of a constituent meeting. He confronted her, and then stabbed her with a knife. Her aides tussled with Mair. He then drew a makeshift handgun and shot her to death. Thomas Mair was a National Front supporter and English Defence League member. The Southern Poverty Law Center says he was also a longtime supporter of the American neo-Nazi National Alliance, and had spent a total of $630 on their publications. One of the books was how to build a homemade single-shot pistol, the design of which killed Cox. Mair shouted “Britain First!” when he killed Jo Cox and repeated it proudly as police led him away.17
Seven days later, the Brit Leave EU campaign irreverently won by 4 percentage points. The referendum saw over 30 million people turn out to vote in favor of leaving with 51.9% in support and 48.1% against. David Cameron was forced to resign as Prime Minister.
On July 11, 2016, Conservative Theresa May became Prime Minister. By October 2, 2016, she announced that the formal British exit from the European Union would begin in March 2017. Many Conservatives and Labour Party members never supported Brexit; it was an undesirable shock, like the 2016 election result in the United States six months later.
Now that the matter was settled, Prime Minister Theresa May had to follow the guidelines of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty of 2009.18 The article stated that any member state could leave the EU, and the member country that wishes to leave must provide notice of intent to leave, then negotiations of withdrawal were to be arranged by members of the EU. However, the departing member state loses the option of deliberations of the European Council. The UK could not participate in rescinding this effort without approval of the remaining member states.
Brexit was the opening of a Pandora’s box for the UK. US Former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, knew this and wrote an article in the Ukrainian paper Kyiv Post titled, “How Brexit is a win for Putin.”19
McFaul stated that the success of the Leave EU campaign was “a giant victory for Putin’s foreign policy objectives.”20 Tempers flared. Many could not believe that the extremists had won. There was a palatable feeling that democracy under fire and the murder of Jo Cox were signs of things to come. On the street, there was a rise on the demonization and harassment of Muslims.
According to the British Supreme Court, by January 24, 2017, a Parliamentary vote was necessary before Article 50 to leave the EU could be implemented by the British government. By March 13, 2017, British Parliament approved a bill to designate government authority for the use of Article 50.
The Brexit was coming. Theresa May did not dare cross the conservatives who had voted for the exit, even as UKIP fell completely apart and was almost consigned to the waste heap of history. On March 28, 2017, she signed the “official letter to European Council President Donald Tusk, invoking Article 50 and signaling the United Kingdom’s intention to leave the EU.” The following day in Brussels, the formal execution of Brexit was initiated as the Article 50 Implementation letter was handed by Tim Barrow, Britain’s ambassador to the EU, to Donald Tusk, European Council President.
By June 2017, Twitter Inc. decided to be proactive by launching “the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism” (the GIFCT), a partnership among Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Microsoft. The purpose of GIFTC was to “facilitate information sharing; technical cooperation; and research collaboration, including with academic institutions.”21 As a result of a fused network of research findings, Twitter announced on October 26, 2017, that they “would no longer accept advertisements from [Russia Today] and will donate the $1.9 million that RT had spent globally on advertising on Twitter to academic research into elections and civil engagement.”22
Five days later, Halloween 2017 would prove scarier than normal. Twitter’s corporate leadership informed the House Intelligence Committee of its suspension of 2,752 accounts in relation to the 2016 Presidential election, due to the fact that aggressive Russian digital interference had been noted.23 That same day, the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, reserved time for the testimony of Sean Edgett, Acting General Counsel of Twitter, to address the spam and automation of the social media platform and measures they took to investigate the disinformation campaign that utilized their platform. Edgett testified almost one year after the initial discovery of the keystone automated account @PatrioticPepe. This fake Twitter bot responded instantaneously to any and all @realDonaldTrump Tweets. It was the nexus for flooding the network with obvious spam content. In technical speak the responses were:
“… enabled through an application that had been created using [their] ‘Application Programming Interface (API).’… We noticed an upward swing in such activity during the period leading up to the election, and @PatrioticPepe was one such example. On the same day, we identified @PatrioticPepe, we suspended the API credentials associated with that user for violation of our automation rules. On average, we take similar actions against violative applications more than 7,000 times per week.”24
Figuring out @PatrioticPepe revealed that the Russians had figured out a way to game Twitter and amplify any message they wanted to that exceeded Twitter’s ability to stop it.
British cyber and computer security researchers were alarmed. As the Americans found out too late, Brexit was most likely not a free and fair vote. Leading up to the referendum voting day, data researchers at the University of California-Berkeley and University of Swansea concluded that over 150,000 accounts traced to Russia posted Brexit Leave campaign content when they had previously posted content on Crimea. The pro-Russia, pro-Putin, pro-Brexit content was seen most often.25 The British themselves retroactively investigated if a Russian hand had swung the internet in favor of the Leave campaign during the Brexit vote. According to the director of neuropolitics research at the University of Edinburgh, Laura Cram, at least 419 Kremlin-linked troll accounts tweeted about #Brexit a total of 3,468 times.26 Cram’s research showed in the data from the 2,752 accounts (now deactivated) that were in possession of the US Congress, that the automated cyber-attacks on the UK (before the Brexit referendum) and on the US from 2014 up until the 2016 Presidential Election were from the Kremlin-linked Russian Federation-Internet Research Agency (RF-IRA).27 Russian intelligence through the RF-IRA specifically targeting UK for Brexit with the numerous hashtags #Brexitvote, #PrayForLondon, #BanIslam, and #Brexit.28
On November 13, 2017, Theresa May accused Russia of “seeking to weaponize information” and to “sow discord in the West and undermine our institutions.”29 Like in the United States, it was too little too late… but who knew at the time? The only common denominator was a company in Britain called Cambridge Analytica.
In 2017, Farage too was named as a person of interest in the possible conspiracy between the Trump administration and Russia. Farage held very close ties to Trump and Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. It should be noted in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s victory, Farage was one of the first to fly to New York to guide Trump on his policies. Farage once said that Putin is “the statesman I most admire.” He also had a dodgy relationship with Julian Assange. On March 9, 2017, Londoner Ian Stubbings was walking near the Ecuadorean embassy where Assange was stationed when he saw Farage slip into the building. He tweeted that he saw him. A Buzzfeed reporter saw the tweet and arrived in time to catch him leaving the embassy 40 minutes later. That both were now under US federal investigation into the electioneering by Russian intelligence is far more than coincidence.
The strategy of the Russians appeared simple: break up the United Kingdom and damage the EU. Russian agencies would stoke the British Leave campaign and give it every assistance using cyber warfare and perception management efforts. They would also sow discord and dissent in populations of white Britons who hated Muslims, immigration, and saw White Christendom under fire. Done right, the referendum could force the breakup of the UK. Then when Scotland wanted leave the United Kingdom, the RF-IRA would use its web power to push the Scottish Referendum Leave narrative. Over a few years the effort would reduce the United Kingdom to just Wales and England. It almost worked.
Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister, announced plans for a second Scottish Independence referendum sometime between late 2018 and early 2019. The incentive for the second referendum was more than likely fueled by Kremlin-paid trolls and automated bots, which is why digital researchers at Swansea University and the University of Edinburgh were motivated to sleuth as well. According to the Sunday Post in Scotland, 400,000 tweets on the second Scottish Independence Referendum were fueled by bots and trolls from spurious accounts. At Swansea University, it was noted by digital researchers looking for unusual activity in algorithmic sequences that from May 24 through September 24, 2017, an alarming pattern existed in the propping up of the Scottish independence narrative, “there were a total of 2,284,746 tweets containing at least one of the following keywords; ‘scotland,’ ‘scottish,’ ‘sturgeon,’ ‘indyref,’ ‘scotref,’ and ‘snp.’”30 A total of 388,406 were messages sent by bots, according to researchers. These findings corroborated the widely held suspicion that like the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US Presidential election, bots and paid trolls were doing the dirty work of Putin’s Kremlin.
Despite the best efforts to stave off a withdrawal from the EU, the referendum passed. The British market immediately suffered a 30% loss in its value and since then corporations have started heading to the door to leave London and set up in Paris or Brussels. By all accounts the Leave campaign should have lost but, like Trump’s election, it won by the slimmest of margins. Russian’s amplification of the message that leaving the EU would help the British public was exponentially more impactful due to Russian enforcers rather than the strength of the argument. Those percentages would likely have been reversed had Putin not launched his information war attacks.
UKIP’s promises on a new independent and wealthy Britain immediately vaporized the moment the referendum was won. Promises that the National Health Service would receive hundreds of billions to assist an aging population because of the withdrawal did not last 24 hours after the vote, and party bosses conceded that virtually nothing would happen except that the UK would now be “independent” of the common market. They somehow did not factor in the possibility that it could also lead to the breakup of the United Kingdom as Scotland and Northern Ireland wanted to remain in the market and started eyeing their own independence. Propaganda always requires a bit of truth to hold a lie.
Britain was stuck with the disaster of Brexit but, unlike the American government, the British intelligence community was sounding multiple alarm bells that the process of independent information was under attack. Its new conservative leadership heeded the warnings. In December 2017, Prime Minister Theresa May told an audience that Russia was on notice for their activities:
“This has included meddling in elections, and hacking the Danish ministry of defense and the Bundestag [German parliament], among many others… It is seeking to weaponize information. Deploying its state-run media organizations to plant fake stories and photo-shopped images in an attempt to sow discord in the west and undermine our institutions.”31
Emboldened by the success of their influence campaign removing Britain from the European Union in the Brexit vote and their American victory, Russian intelligence now directed their efforts on European elections. The next election was France. If Putin managed to get his preferred candidate in power, the Western world order established in 1945 would quickly collapse. A win in France would break the primary pillars of American-European dominance: withdrawing France from NATO and breaking up the European Union. Brexit proved that a nation’s democratic process could be changed by influencing social media at the margins, particularly when these elections would be won or lost within a point or two. In France the rules were different. Their information warfare teams could push a candidate but the laws that blacked-out political campaign information from being released in the last 44 hours before an election would require a precision shot.
Russia was banking on being able to release Kompromat at the last possible second using third party assets that were willing to use their social media distribution system to circumvent French laws. The last thing on the minds of the general French public will be whatever Russia chose.
2017 certainly was not the first time Russia interfered in a French Presidential election. However, the older traditional methodologies were slow, relied on print news media distribution, and centralized TV news media. In 1974, the KGB launched a covert propaganda campaign to disgrace the pro-NATO Gaullist Valery Giscard d’Estaing and got socialist François Mitterrand into office.32 In what was believed to be a victory for Moscow, Mitterrand brought into French government four French Communist Party members and made them ministers. American President Ronald Reagan was mortified until he learned that Mitterrand was running one of history’s greatest spy missions inside of Russia. Operation FAREWELL was a French-paid spy in the form of KGB Colonel Vladimir I. Vetrov, who helped channel massive amounts of technical intelligence to France. Once Reagan learned of the Mitterrand operations all was forgiven.
However, it was later learned that Russia wanted either of the two candidates and preferred the hard-line anti-Soviet D’Estaing. Their principal method of influence was manipulating journalists and news articles. In 1987, a former KGB political warfare officer Ilya Dzhirkvelov told the Paris-based magazine for the Russian émigré community, Russkaya Mysl, how it all played out:
“In 1974, when the elections for a French President were coming up, at a meeting of the Central Committee, at which I was present, department chief and Central Committee secretary [Boris] Ponomarev said that we should make all possible efforts so that Mitterrand was not elected. These are not empty words. I will not name the newspapers and publications which we used, but we used two large French newspapers and three newspapers outside of Paris with publication of materials extolling Giscard d’Estaing as a close comrade-in-arms of De Gaulle and a man striving for peace. I cannot say how much this material helped Giscard d’Estaing’s election as President, but the fact itself is important. It surprised us, of course, that the Central Committee of our Communist Party was against the socialists and for the bourgeois party. Ponomarev explained to us that any bourgeois politician was much more useful than any social-democrat or socialist. We used newspapers not only in France, but also large newspapers in the United States, Italy, Japan, and Germany.”33
The operations that old political war spies of the KGB were rudimentary, but for their era they were effective. Russia was no longer the Soviet Union, and technology was changing the speed of belief. However, the KGB had only changed names and a young spy in East Germany who had been tasked with stealing that technology was now the ruler of Russia. He remembered the old ways could bring brilliant results if executed with modern technology. His test beds convinced the Russians that elections could be affected, and he was determined to try to put his preferred candidate in power.
The 2017 French elections were held in two stages. The first round of voting occurred on April 23, 2017. The two top candidates facing off were the young Emmanuel Macron, and the mainstay of the French conservatives, Marine Le Pen. On May 7, 2017, the run-off election was held to choose between the two.
Macron was the leader of a relatively new party called La République en Marche (LREM, or Republic on the Move!). He had worked as an economic advisor under President François Hollande for two years and served as an economy minister until 2016. He launched LREM in April 2016 as an alternative to the other major centrist and liberal parties.
Macron was young, 39 at the time of the election, and very charismatic with boyish good looks and oozing with personality and charm. He had dispatched Jean-Luc Melonchon of La France Insoumise (LF) Party, and François Fillon of the Republican Party in the open primary voting. As the winner, he faced off with Marine Le Pen. As I mentioned, she built close ties to Moscow in what she referred to as “Regional Solutions.” Her defense platform focused on working with Russia against Middle East terrorism. Second only to Donald Trump, she was the perfect Russian-backed candidate for Putin’s vision of an autocrat-led Europe. But first, she needed to win.
Just before the 44-hour political news blackout on the eve of the election, nine gigabytes of emails were allegedly stolen from the Macron campaign. The emails were quickly posted across the internet. Approximately ten thousand of Macron’s personal documents and emails had been hacked and leaked by Russia. According to Macron’s digital data team director Mounir Mahjoubi, most of the emails were innocuous documents including invoices, speeches, statements, and routine administration.34 There was a reason for that. The French government’s domestic intelligence agency, Directorate of Territorial Surveillance (DST), in cooperation with the American National Security Agency, had been laying a trap for Russian hackers.
Director of the NSA, Admiral Michael Rogers, spoke about the ambush they had laid out for the Russians:
“We had become aware of Russian activity, we had talked to our French counterparts prior to the public announcements of the events that were publicly attributed this past weekend and gave them a heads up, ‘Look we’re watching the Russians, we’re seeing them penetrate some of your infrastructure. Here’s what we’ve seen, what can we do to try to assist?’ We’re doing similar things with our German counterparts, with our British counterparts, they have an upcoming election sequence.”35
Security firm Trend Micro also found the digital fingerprints of the Russian intelligence agency, Advanced Persistent Threat-28, the FSB’s FANCY BEAR malware that was used in the attempted hacking of the US election just the year before.36 The method of attack was phishing—a false link that takes the person signing in to what they believe is a trusted website but is in fact a Russian intelligence server. In this instance, a false Macron webserver was established as a honeypot by the NSA and France’s DST. When Russian cyber war systems attacked they were actually being lured into a trap that France and the NSA controlled.
Interestingly, two American conservative extremists were implicated in the Russian operations. They seemed to have been standing by for the release of the Macron documents. Once released, they immediately created the Twitter hashtag #Macronleaks and started disseminating tweets to spread the stolen data. French intelligence blocked their information and it played little, if any, part in the election narrative. Yet here was proof that Americans had teamed up with Russian intelligence to impact a foreign election.
In the end, Macron won a majority margin by 66% and Le Pen lost with almost 34% of the vote.
After her failure to win and being disparaged publicly by her father, she stepped down as leader of the party.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria was a terrifying and brutal terrorist group. They exercised national-level power when they created their small but less than resilient terror state. One area in which they did exercise a measure of success was their global cyber propaganda projection. They formed both centralized and vigilante social media distribution teams that spread their special brand of hatred across the globe. They were arguably masters of the cyber world. The Cyber Caliphate Army (CCA) was led by a young British hacker named Junaid Hussein, a member of the Anonymous offshoot Lulzsec, a black hat group that created cyber mischief. He migrated to Syria and was quickly chosen as the “Cyber emir” who led the social media campaign for ISIS in 2014. For some time, the CCA dealt only in “Script Kiddie” (aka skiddie) or prefabricated and easily launched viruses. That was the limit of their capability and had little evidence of real hacker skills.
Yet sometime between April and May 2015, 16 gigabytes of email data were stolen from the computer servers of the German Parliament (the Bundestag).37 The ISIS flag logos and Arabic graffiti left on the Bundestag website was that of the Cyber Caliphate Army and for a period it was attributed to ISIS.
However, the follow-up forensic analysis indicated an old foe—the attack was unmistakably performed by the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU. Cybersecurity researchers found electronic fingerprints associated with the GRU malware suite FANCY BEAR. The Russians were conducting a rare “False Flag” operation to make casual observers think ISIS was responsible and that they had simply performed web vandalism. The KGB had a name for it—Maskirovka, masking the true perpetrator. The Russians stole data to weaponize it.
Not surprisingly, the hacked data were the emails of the political leftist bloc of the Bundestag, although all 20,000 computers were considered penetrated.38 The attack was not focused on low-level staffers. The accounts associated with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s offices and 6 members of parliament were infected.39 The information that the GRU found must have been well worth the effort. In 2016, the center-left Social Democratic Party’s parliamentary group in Bundestag and Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union in Saarland were attacked by the GRU.40
In the Bundestag attack, the GRU set up a fake server in Latvia and conducted a phishing attack. As before, they created a fake website to look like the Bundestag office website. The phishing emails encouraged German workers to click on the link and sign in—except they were signing in to Russian intelligence servers and giving away their password. This was exactly like the attacks the Russians used on the White House, the Macron election attacks, and dozens of other attacks.
But these attacks were more like cyber cruise missiles. Angela Merkel was a strong leader. She was sharp and powerful. A skilled politician and a brilliant thinker she was more like Hillary Clinton and reflected many similar policies. Merkel and Barack Obama were also ideological bedfellows. Bringing Le Pen into power would be a great blow to Europe but getting rid of Merkel would be its death knell. By 2016, Putin thought he had a German beachhead to do what he needed to destabilize the political scene.
But Germany took election security seriously. Because the German election system uses paper ballots there was no chance to hack and swing votes. President of the Statistischen Bundesamtes, the Federal Statistics office, which monitors elections, Dieter Sarreither said, “the entire network infrastructure has been overhauled and modernized since the last election in 2013.”41 Additionally, a highly conscientious office existed to monitor exterior threats. The German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology (BSI, or Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik) and the SB agency monitor the system in real time.
With little chance to affect the vote directly, Russia’s strategic goal was to encourage right-wing, conservative white voters such as the German populist Alternative for Germany Party. In their effort to swerve Germany back toward the Motherland, Putin would again harness social media, independent news, and, not surprisingly, Americans who supported Trump to damage Angela Merkel and make gains for the German right-wing through active measures.
According to a Brooking University report titled “The impact of Russian interference on Germany’s 2017 election,” Russia was trying to punish Germany and once again it was about the financial sanctions America had spearheaded after the invasion of Crimea. The report stated that Germany “… orchestrated the European census on sanctions against Russia.”42 For Putin, that was enough to build a new right-wing political order that would overturn all the decades of liberal decadence and multiculturalism in this American-designed democracy.
With the German federal election scheduled to happen on September 24, 2017, the German government was on guard. France had just had a fortuitous bullet-dodge by working with the NSA and catching Russian attempts to use fake propaganda and distribute campaign materials just before the political news blackout. In Germany, the operations were more insidious and democratic. The Russian campaign appeared to be designed to turn out the Germans and ethnic Russians in the former East German states of the now-unified Germany.
The first signs that something was afoot were bots’ repeated messages in German and Russian languages on German social media sites, particularly in the Eastern part of the country. A large bot network (Botnet) was found on Russian-language Twitter accounts subscribing to Russian-educated Germans.
An analysis was done and revealed that 2,480 accounts were algorithmically found to be publishing exclusively pro-Kremlin propaganda. According to a report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), the Digital Forensics Research Lab at the Atlantic Council saw sixty of these pro-Kremlin accounts were reprogrammed to automatically pump out pro-AfD advertising of commercial or pornographic messages.43 The ISD issued a seminal report titled “Making Germany Great Again” noted the Russian hacker paid to distribute pro-AfD data asserted:
“15,000 pro-AfD posts and retweets would cost 2,000 euros; After negotiations, a discounted package included 15,000 pro-AfD tweets and retweets ‘guaranteed’ to make a pro-AfD hashtag trend. The hacker stated that the posts would ‘come from at least 25% “high-quality” bots that would not be so easily identified as fake accounts.’ He estimated he would need to send 80 tweets per minute to make a pro-AfD hashtag trend.”44
A Russian hacker on Vkontakte, the Russian social media version of Facebook, claimed that they sent out thousands of pro-AfD messages in the run-up to the election. He also claimed that numerous right-wing groups worldwide were coordinating to achieve a similar goal in their elections and were working together.45
Nikolai Alexander, the German far-right activist and internet social media star who posts videos under the name Reconquista Germanica (an allusion to a Germanic reconquest of Muslim lands by Christians), attempted to create an extreme-right channel on DISCORD, the voice and chat app, to disrupt the German elections. There are 33,000 Alexander followers all over the world on the DISCORD channel. The principal reason for this channel was to ensure a strong showing for the AfD in the Bundestag.46 Alexander outlined the mission of the new channel:
“The aim of the first campaign is to hoist the AfD as much as possible into the Bundestag. Today we will also start the meme war in the Bundestag against the race of mutts.… [and] to go after failed conservatives like [Markus] Pretzell and other hypocrites and strengthen the Höcke wing.”47
Interestingly, DISCORD was used in 2017 to coordinate American neo-Nazis in the Charlottesville protests with their European counterparts to spread the message of a rising American neo-Nazi movement.48
On September 24, 2017, the German election was held. Chancellor Angela Merkel, leader of the center-left Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union, won a fourth term with 32.9% of the vote. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) won 20.5%. AfD won 12.6% of the vote and became the third largest party in Germany.49 The right-wing AfD now had 94 out of 630 seats in the Bundestag… for the first time since World War II.
Sweden may technically be neutral toward Russia, but Russia treats them like a major NATO country and has started to interfere in electoral politics using active measures. Swedish authorities have accused Russia of flooding the nation with fake news, disinformation operations, and attempting to smear the government with forged, false documents. The Russians main goal is to discredit NATO and keep Sweden from formally joining the alliance.50
The Swedish Institute of Military Affairs published a study in 2017 detailing the effects of Moscow’s active measures. They claim that “Moscow’s main aim was to ‘preserve the geo-strategic status quo’ by minimizing NATO’s role in the Baltic region and keeping Sweden out of the international military alliance.”51
Interestingly, Russian intelligence used forgeries of documents purported to be from the Ministry of Defense outlining a conspiracy between Sweden and NATO. Other forged letters included one to major industrial groups to implicate Swedish companies, such as Bofors, of selling weapons to Ukraine. No such weapons sales were happening. The documents were done on Ministry letterheads. Another was supposedly a letter from the Chief International Public prosecutor dropping charges against a suspected war criminal. All 26 letters were “released” to Swedish and Russian language websites. Russian news media is a major component of spreading disinformation in Sweden. The Guardian reported 4,000 fake news stories were disseminated by Sputnik News in Sweden in just a one-year period.52
Swedish Prime Minister Sefan Löfven warned that Russia could directly interfere with the 2018 Swedish election. He told local media “We should not rule it out and be naive and think that it does not happen in Sweden. That’s why information and cybersecurity is part of this strategy…”53 Löfven detailed the eight biggest threats to Sweden and the first five were about Russia, with cybersecurity as second only to Russian military activity in Swedish waters. The government has gone so far as to propose creating a cybersecurity defense unit specifically to defend the integrity of the elections.54
A component of Russian hybrid warfare is to use all forces short of open warfare to effect a political result. In late summer 2016, two GRU Russian military intelligence spies, Eduard Shirokov and Vladimir Popov, were deployed to Serbia. On October 16, 2016, a group of Montenegrin and Serbian nationalists would storm the Parliament dressed as policemen, kill the pro-Western members, and seize control of government. They would then ask for Russian assistance in consolidating control of the country. If successful, Russia would get a submarine-capable naval base and airbase, as well as an ally in the Adriatic Sea. Their mission was audacious and risked serious European-wide tension if discovered. If successful, they would shift the strategic balance of the Adriatic and Balkans dramatically.
Montenegro is part of the former Yugoslavia and was one of the small countries to declare its independence after the brutal Serbian wars against Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. After the 1999 US-NATO-Serbian conflict, Operation ALLIED FORCE/NOBLE ANVIL, a pro-Western government in Serbia came into power and helped track down the Serbian leaders Slobodan Milošević and Ratko Mladic. Both pro-Moscow leaders were wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes related to the Bosnian genocide. Montenegro left their union with Serbia in 2006 after a referendum for independence. They formed a pro-Western government that decided to join NATO while under constant bombardment of Russian threats. Pro-Russian ethnic Serbs make up 29% of the population of the nation and are concentrated along the Serbian and Croatian borders and Kotor Bay.
The coup was thwarted when an informant, former Montenegrin policeman Mirko Velimirovic, walked into the Ministry of Interior offices to confess that he had been hired by Russian nationals to participate in a coup. He was asked to purchase 50 machine guns with 30,000 euros and secure a safe house for Serbian nationalists. The Russians delivered the money. The mission was to help the Serbians storm the Montenegrin Parliament building, kill the legislature members, start an internal crisis that would stop Montenegro from seating the pro-West Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic, and install a pro-Moscow government. The government alleges that sophisticated Russian surveillance equipment was used to plot the movements of the Prime Minister to facilitate his assassination during the coup.
Anti-Western activist Aleksandar Sindjelic was part of the plot. He had volunteered as a fighter in eastern Ukraine. He claims the two GRU officers approached him in Ukraine and suggested the plan. The GRU officers came to Serbia and organized the attack. NATO intelligence agencies had the Russian under surveillance, and once the plot was foiled, they released photos of Sindjelic and Russian spies Shishmakov and Popov conspiring in a park.55 The Russians entered Serbia with official passports made out with aliases. Shishmakov had once been made persona non grata and was expelled after being found conducting espionage in Poland.
The Russian spies gave the plotters three encrypted telephones with preprogrammed numbers. One of the participants said they were to not to use the second listed number. Velimirovic, the police informant, tried it and it was answered by a Russian in Russia.
The pro-Moscow political party, the Democratic Front, warned against joining NATO. The DF had received millions from Moscow. Russia itself had threatened Montenegro against joining the alliance. According to Mr. Velimiovic, two officers of the infiltrated Montenegro had contacted them. Members of the Democratic Front, the ultra-right-wing pro-Russian party were part of the plot.
The plan was for members of the Democratic Front to stage a mass sit-in at the parliament. While police were distracted by the protest, the coup plotters would infiltrate the area dressed as police, then storm the government building, capture and kill the prime minister, and then declare a coup. The Montenegrin Minister of Defense said:
“There is not any doubt that it was financed and organized from different sources or different parts of Russian intelligence, together with some Montenegrin opposition parties, but also under the strong influence of some radicals from Serbia and Russia.”56
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson confirmed some of the details to the British press: “You’ve seen what’s happened in Montenegro where there was an attempted coup in a European state and possibly even an attempted assassination of the leader of that state.… Now there’s very little doubt that the Russians are behind these things.”57
Animosity toward America and NATO by pro-Russia factions continues in Montenegro. On February 21, 2018, an unknown assailant tried to bomb the American embassy in the capitol of Podgorica with an explosive device, but it misfired and killed only himself.58
These European cyber-attacks happened nearly simultaneously with the American hacking and election, and it’s not an accident. Russia reached back into the darkest depths of its history of communist political and ideological propaganda warfare to effect a state plan where not just the United States would do their bidding, but they would reengineer Western conservatism to become willing assets who would create the conditions to put into leadership men and women who understand that democracy has had its day. The Kremlin would ensure that each nation under his tutelage would share a common bond that would erase borders, unify messages, and solidify a new order in Western culture. They would create an alliance of nations that would be led by strong authoritarian leaders. The alliance would use their own powerful tools of democracy—free and fair elections, freedom of speech, right to assembly, and other constitutional rights of citizenship to dramatically eliminate those same rights once in power. One by one the West would become a democratically elected version of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Once in office, their own financial self-interest and access to a super club of the elitest of the global elite would naturally override any guardrails their national laws could impose. Those rules, laws, and shouts would simply be ignored. With Moscow’s cyber-espionage tools, Putin believed it was on its way to being reengineered from a squabbling coop of dysfunctional liberal democracies, into an economically powerful Axis of Autocracies. With an allied America and the Western pillar using Moscow’s playbook, the end of the Atlantic alliance was now close to a reality.