For seventy-five years, America and Russia have fought for dominion over the earth. In the twentieth century, America won the long cold war, and it seemed for a time that its triumph might endure, and freedom would flourish everywhere. The moment vanished. In the twenty-first century, Russia has fought back against America and its allies with stealth and subversion. Its stratagems have undermined American democracy, a political architecture that withstood a civil war and two world wars over the course of a quarter of a millennium. The outcome may determine if America will endure, and whether democrats or autocrats will rule the world. Great armies and navies and arsenals bristling with nuclear weapons have proved useless in this struggle. The battle depends on political warfare.
Political warfare is the way in which nations project their power and work their will against an enemy, short of launching missiles or sending in the marines. Its conduct requires the full spectrum of intelligence and diplomacy, from covert operations to coercive persuasion, and the skillful orchestration of these instruments by the president. The United States built a powerful machine for political warfare after World War II, and it sped the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the American engine sputtered at the turn of the century, and today it has all but died. The Russians have been using political warfare with skill and cunning ever since Vladimir Putin came to power twenty years ago. From 2014 onward, they have struck blows against the American political system, and in 2016 they helped elect a president in thrall to Putin, plunging democracy into danger. In 2020, they strengthened their powers of disinformation and deception and took aim at America again. We need to know how political warfare works before the next attack strikes. It is coming.
War is the state of nature in the world we have made. More than two hundred million combatants and civilians have been killed in the past century. The smoldering ruins of the First World War ignited the long fuse for the second, and out of the ashes of the second rose the toxic cloud of the cold war. Among the ideals shattered by these conflicts were the noble-minded rules codified early in the twentieth century: wars were fought between uniformed combatants, they began on one day with a formal declaration of hostilities, and they ended on another with the dignified signing of a peace treaty. Nations did not intervene in the internal conflicts of others. These proved to be empty promises for the thousands of American troops sent to Siberia to fight against the Red Army from August 1918 to June 1920, nineteen months after the Armistice; cold comfort to thirteen million Poles who woke up in September 1939 to discover that they were captives of the Russians, seized under a secret clause of the pact Stalin signed with Hitler.
Two laws of war still held in August 1945, after President Harry S. Truman dropped the bomb on Japan. One was fighting power—the will of a nation to sacrifice the lives of its soldiers. The second was firepower—the killing force of a nation’s arsenal. For the moment, though not for long, the United States had sole possession of the ultimate weapon. The destruction of cities reduced to radioactive rubble left the living to wonder what the Third World War would look like if Stalin had the secret of the weapon. In truth, he had it in hand, though no one in Washington knew it at the time. The Americans in charge of national security began to think about the unthinkable, and the advent of nuclear weapons changed the ways they thought. The wisest among them saw that if they were going to have it out with the Russians, the next war would destroy everything we wished to defend, and the living would envy the dead.
When the two sides failed to make peace between them, and set out to struggle for dominance over the nations of the world, they had to find a way to fight one another through the clandestine projection of power—spying and subversion, subterfuge and sabotage, stolen elections and subtle coups, disinformation and deception, repression and assassination. The Americans knew next to nothing of this way of war. The Russians had been at it for four centuries.
Ivan the Terrible, the sixteenth-century czar, had established a primitive secret police. Peter the Great and Catherine the Great had expanded Russian espionage, spying on foreign adversaries as well as on their own people. By the time Napoleon invaded in 1812, Czar Alexander I had strengthened Russia’s foreign intelligence and linked it with his military. The Okhrana, formed after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, spied on enemies within and without Russia in the decades when anarchists were killing kings and queens, princes and archdukes, and, in 1901, the president of the United States. But the Kremlin’s spies were crushed by the Bolshevik revolutionaries who seized Russia in 1917. In their stead, in that cold and pitiless December, Vladimir Lenin created his own secret police: the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage—the VChK, known to all as the Cheka. “We stand for organized terror,” the first leader of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, said in 1918. Stalin gave them unchecked power. In 1934, they instituted the Great Terror: one million people were murdered. By that year, Stalin’s spies were at work in the United States. By World War II, they had burrowed into the government—the State Department, the Justice Department, the Manhattan Project. In 1954, after Stalin’s death, the spy service was rechristened the Committee for State Security: the KGB. Charged with conducting espionage, subverting enemies with disinformation and political sabotage, securing the state, protecting its rulers, and crushing dissent, the KGB was a ministry of fear, combining the missions of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the cold-war CIA, and the Nazi Gestapo. It was the biggest intelligence service in the history of the world. If you, like Vladimir Putin, were born into poverty and hunger in the postwar rubble of mid-century Russia, and you aspired to power, the KGB was the place to be.
An immense statue of Dzerzhinsky stood in front of the Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters in Moscow, from 1958 until 1991, when it was toppled by protesters aiming to take down the crumbling architecture of the Soviet Union. The statue wasn’t recast and remounted, but Putin rehabilitated Dzerzhinsky as he revived the Soviet intelligence state. Chekist Day is now celebrated every December 20 in the Kremlin. And Putin is a Chekist to the marrow of his bones. What that means is what it always has meant: the preservation of the leader’s power, at all costs; the imprisonment and assassination of his domestic opponents; and the conduct of political warfare to mystify, mislead, and surprise his enemies, to trick them into acting against their own best interests, and to weaken their position in the world.
The United States never had a peacetime spy service until Congress created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947. Though we Americans have learned a great deal about the craft of intelligence in the ensuing years, often through embittering experience, at the outset we were amateurs in almost every aspect, particularly at political warfare, and especially in the dark arts of deception and disinformation. In its first days the CIA was only two hundred officers strong. Its mission was to fight the cold war and prevent the next Pearl Harbor. Its forces grew a hundredfold in five years, controlling covert armies around the world, running paramilitary missions from Russia to China, mounting coups, seeking to crack the Iron Curtain.
The White House and the Kremlin ordered their spies and diplomats to manipulate at least 117 national elections all over the world during the twentieth century. They fought to control nations across Africa and Asia and Latin America and the Middle East, buying allegiances with guns and money but never coming directly to blows. Each side shored up strongmen and despots, and subverted the other’s favorite regimes, covertly backing guerrilla armies and underground movements and pliant political leaders. The United States fought the war on communism in the jungles of Vietnam, and the Russians smuggled arms and ammunition to America’s enemies in Southeast Asia. The Russians seized Afghanistan, and the CIA shipped billions of dollars in weapons to the Islamic holy warriors who fought them. Americans beamed news and propaganda over the Iron Curtain via Radio Free Europe. The Russians fought back with torrents of disinformation disseminated by the KGB.
And in the end, after trillions of dollars spent on armaments in Washington and Moscow, and millions of lives lost in the nations where the great powers had contended, the Soviet Union collapsed under the dead weight of its self-deceptions. The Kremlin could not sustain its founding falsehood, the big lie that Soviet communism was more noble an experiment than American democracy. “Imagine a country that flies into space, launches Sputniks, creates such a defense system, and it can’t resolve the problem of women’s pantyhose,” Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, lamented after the hammer and sickle was furled for the last time. “There’s no toothpaste, no soap powder, not the basic necessities of life. It was incredible and humiliating to work in such a government.”
The dream of the Americans who fought the cold war had been realized: the map of the world had been remade by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The tide of liberal democracy had risen, and the nations of Eastern Europe had been freed from the suffocating grip in which Stalin and his successors had held them. And another war had been fought and won, when the United States crushed the Iraqi army in 1991. The Gulf War was a shockwave in which the Pentagon wielded new weapons of strategic deception, perception management, and information warfare. They proved as devastating as smart bombs and cruise missiles.
The United States bestrode the earth like a colossus in those days, as it had after World War II, and the prevailing wisdom in the high councils of Washington was that the world was going our way. “There weren’t any foreign policy problems” when George H. W. Bush left office in January 1993, said his secretary of state, James A. Baker III. “Everybody wanted to be friends with the United States.… Everybody wanted to embrace free markets. Everybody wanted to embrace democracy, with the sole exceptions of North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, and Libya. Everybody was ours.” Everybody loved America—including the Russians. Or so we wanted to believe.
Wiser minds, though not many, were wary about the spirit of strutting triumphalism ruling the day. The warrior-statesman Colin L. Powell, by turns chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state, quoted the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz: “Beware the vividness of transient impressions.” Few looked beyond the fleeting events; fewer still envisioned how the conflicts of the cold war could be rekindled in the twenty-first century. “What we did not realize was that the seeds of future struggle were already sprouting. There were early stirrings of future great power rivalry,” wrote Bob Gates, then a former director of Central Intelligence and a future secretary of defense, who served presidents from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama. “In Russia, resentment and bitterness were taking root as a result of the economic chaos and corruption that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union”—along with the American push to expand the NATO military alliance eastward to Russia’s border—and “no Russian was more angered by this turn of events than Vladimir Putin.” The Russian leader had been a KGB lieutenant colonel watching from his post in East Germany as his nation’s empire crumbled. He knew something about the practice of political warfare.
When he rose to power at the turn of the twenty-first century, he took the shattered components of the old KGB and reconstructed a new version of the Soviet state in which he controlled not only soldiers and spies but manipulated television and the internet to invent perceptions of reality. After he won his third term as president in 2012, Putin focused the full spectrum of his powers, readied his forces, and took aim at America. In the words of Mike Morell, a former acting director of the CIA, he “turned significantly back towards what was essentially Russian behavior during the cold war, which is to challenge the United States everywhere you can in the world, and do whatever you can to undermine what they’re trying to accomplish. Do whatever you can to weaken them.”
Americans tend to see war and peace as night and day. Russians see a never-ending battle. They may be right, for while the circumstances of combat change, the nature of war is immutable. For twenty years, Putin has used the power of his military and intelligence services to create new strategies and tactics for political warfare against the United States. Their counterattack slowly came into force, a blitzkrieg unseen until after it had struck at the heart of the American body politic.
Not long ago, on a winter’s night in Moscow, a senior adviser to Vladimir Putin named Andrey Krutskikh, an expert in political warfare who now serves as an ambassador at large of the Russian Federation, delivered a stark threat at a public forum. “You think we are living in 2016,” he said. “No, we are living in 1948. And do you know why? Because in 1949, the Soviet Union had its first atomic bomb test. And if, until that moment, the Soviet Union was trying to reach agreement with Truman to ban nuclear weapons, and the Americans were not taking us seriously, in 1949 everything changed and they started talking to us on an equal footing.
“I’m warning you,” he continued. “We are at the verge of having ‘something’ in the information arena, which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals.”
Now we know what that weapon was. We have to understand its origins and its history, and we have to understand that it threatens permanent damage to American democracy, and the potential for its downfall. We are reliving a moment that began a lifetime ago, when the great powers began to clash by night, and the fate of the world was at stake. One great difference stands between then and now. America is bereft of a strategic vision to replace what it had in the cold war. And where there is no vision, as the Book of Proverbs says, the people perish.
But in 1948, America had a strategy to fight fire with fire. It was the work of a single solitary figure who made his voice heard around the world. It guided ten presidents, it governed the decisions and the stratagems of diplomats and spies, and it spurred the destruction of the Soviet Union.