Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 10 – Many in the
US and elsewhere are horrified by Vladimir Putin’s overt and covert efforts to affect
the outcome of the American presidential election, but they should be even more
horrified by something else: the exposure of his involvement is giving him a second,
larger but as yet unrecognized victory.
That victory is this: from now on,
at least as long as Putin is in power, Western elections are likely to be
affected by the danger, real or not, of Russian involvement, transforming the
campaigns into referenda on whether this or that candidate is Putin’s agent in
place and thus undermining the democratic process by raising suspicions about
the loyalty of this or that figure.
Some will see this as nothing more
than a restoration of the situation when in some countries, candidates for
office denounced their opponents as pro-communist, the kiss of death in most of
them. But this situation is far more insidious because it has less to do with
ideology than with the exacerbation of disorder.
The danger that this can and will
happen is on view today when former Lithuanian defense minister Rasa Juknevičienė warns that
Moscow will find and support its very own candidate for president when
elections are held in 2019 (eadaily.com/ru/news/2017/01/10/politik-v-2019-godu-kreml-vozmyot-post-prezidenta-litvy?utm_source=smi2).
She is not wrong to issue this
warning: it is almost certainly correct in the case of that NATO country
neighboring Russia. But the danger is that other officials, commentators, and
politicians in other countries will follow suit, poisoning politics in their
homelands whether Putin’s minions are directly involved or not.
Many currently assume that Putin can
only succeed in bringing to power his allies if he works covertly, noting that
he and his propaganda apparatus in Moscow and the West have repeatedly denied
that Moscow was involved in the American or other elections. But this view
misses the point in a double sense.
On the one hand, Putin is less
interested in bringing to power some kind of Russian version of the Manchurian
candidate than in creating chaos and confusion. Of course, he would like it if
he could have a president in another country who would without question do his
bidding. But he lacks the power to do that, at least in most cases.
Even if he backs this or that candidate
as he has been doing, the best Putin can achieve is bringing into office
someone who will start by being more sympathetic to Russia’s demands; but over
time, the imperatives of the countries these people head will prove more important
than the signals their new leaders get from the Kremlin.
Consequently, it is important to
recognize that Putin’s real goal is to delegitimize democracy elsewhere, to sow
discord, and to weaken his opponents, given that he is fundamentally incapable
of strengthening himself and his country except by aggression and bombast.
And on the other hand, there is
another aspect of Putin’s behavior, one rooted in his KGB past, that few in the
West understand or are paying attention to. Unlike Western intelligence services
who plan only for success, Russian secret services plan for failure and seek to
design their operations in ways that give Moscow benefits even when such
actions are exposed.
That has been Moscow’s modus operandi since at least 1921when
Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet Cheka, set up the Trust, a false
flag operation designed to penetrate, disorder and ultimately hamstring the
military wing of the first Russian emigration. (For a good introduction, see
the 35-page report at jmw.typepad.com/files/simpkins---the-trust-security-intelligence-foundation.pdf.)
Most leaders of the Russian
emigration and many European intelligence services fell for the Trust
operation, but not all did. And when the Trust was exposed for what it really
was in 1927, an exposure that it is possible Moscow even played an active part,
many assumed that the Russian intelligence services had suffered a serious
defeat.
At one level that may have been
true, but at another, it definitely was not. The exposure of the Trust as a
Soviet operation discredited all those who had believed in it, most prominently
perhaps V.V. Shulgin who was manipulated by it and whose influence in the
emigration never recovered. And that gave Moscow a second victory, even if many
didn’t see it at the time.
Countering Putin who is first, last
and always a KGB officer – as Captain Nikitin said, “there are no ex-KGB
officers just as there are no ex-German shepherds” – requires a recognition of
this danger. Exposing his criminal
activities is critical; but exposing them in ways that do not allow him to walk
away with a second victory is even more so.
That isn’t going to be easy. The Trust or operations like it have been the
bread and butter of Soviet and Russian intelligence operations at home and
abroad ever since the 1920s. Recognizing what Moscow is about is the first
task; explaining how Putin’s KGB tactics work is the absolutely necessary
second one.
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