PerspectiveSpies, Election Meddling, And Disinformation: Past and Present

Published 27 February 2020

Calder Walton writes that following Russia’s “sweeping and systematic” attack on the 2016 U.S. presidential election—which was intended to support Moscow’s favored candidate, Donald J. Trump, and undermine his opponent, Hillary Clinton—the media frequently labeled the operation “unprecedented.” “The social-media technologies that Russia deployed in its cyber-attack on the United States in 2016 were certainly new,” he writes, “but Russia’s strategy was far from unusual. In fact, the Kremlin has a long history of meddling in U.S. and other Western democratic elections and manufacturing disinformation to discredit and divide the West.”

Calder Walton writes in the Brown Journal of World Affairs that following Russia’s ‘sweeping and systematic’ attack on the 2016 U.S. presidential election—which was intended to support Moscow’s favored candidate, Donald J. Trump, and undermine his opponent, Hillary Clinton—the media frequently labeled the operation “unprecedented.”

“The social-media technologies that Russia deployed in its cyber-attack on the United States in 2016 were certainly new,” he writes, “but Russia’s strategy was far from unusual. In fact, the Kremlin has a long history of meddling in U.S. and other Western democratic elections and manufacturing disinformation to discredit and divide the West. Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, has reconstituted and updated the KGB’s old Cold War playbook for the new digital age.”

Walton writes that Moscow’s successful 2016 interference campaign in support of Trump fits a broad pattern of Russian – and, before that, Soviet – information campaigns to improve the Russian/Soviet global position by weakening Western democracies, chief among them the United States:

These “active measures” were the covert offensive instruments of Soviet foreign policy aiming to systematically disrupt relations between other nations, discredit Soviet opponents, and influence policies of foreign governments in favor of Soviet plans and policies. Aktivnye meropriyatiya (active measures) included a range of underground activities: media manipulation, the use of front groups, document forgery, “influence operations” (through the use of bribery, blackmail, and by discrediting targets), and “special actions” involving various degrees of violence. In short, they constituted what Moscow called the art of “political warfare:” dirty tricks to undermine and confuse the United States and its Western allies, split Western alliances, and sow seeds of distrust within Western democracies and discord among allies. By doing so, Moscow believed that it would hasten victory in its Cold War ideological struggle against Western powers: the weaker those powers were shown to be, the stronger Soviet Russia would become. Throughout the Cold War, the Kremlin referred to the United States as its “Main Adversary;” it was the principal target for KGB active measures.

Active measures lay at the heart and soul of the KGB (these activities have now been taken over by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service) – and as the U.S. intelligence community reports, the United States will be the target of “active measures” in support of Trump – and, more broadly, for the purpose of sowing chaos and deepening polarization and division — in the run-up to the 2020 elections. Except that these measures will be more sophisticated than those Russia employed in 2016.

Beyond political contests, and beyond specific policies, Russia’s persistent and effective information campaigns against Western democracies force these democracies to confront and even deeper, and more disturbing, problem” “Disinformation poses fundamental challenges to societies about issues like what constitutes a fact. Such questions will need to be tackled through broad education and social efforts rather than through spies and their clandestine weapons,” Walton writes.