Putin could not do this with just smiles and comments. He would need to create an operational organization that would manage the U.S. elections. It could be based on the same Information Warfare Campaigns that degraded the Baltic States using the new Russian strategy of Hybrid political warfare. Hybrid war is an ever-shifting mélange of media propaganda, cyberwarfare, and touches of military adventurism that could help elect Trump and lead to the break-up of the European Union and NATO. Putin’s vision would be to use the sycophant Trump as President to subordinate America to the role of junior partner to a rising Russia.
How to make him the political frontrunner? No problem. Russia has quite a bit of experience in this field.
Master Class in “Kompromat”
In 1948, American diplomat George Kennan wrote a paper called “On Organizing Political Warfare,” where he defined Political Warfare as:
The employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures (as ERP [Economic Recovery Plan i.e. the Marshall Plan]), and “white” propaganda, to such covert operations as clandestine support of “friendly” foreign elements, “black” psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.50
His writings were taken very seriously by many in defense and academia but not so seriously as the Soviet Union’s KGB. The KGB was so adept at political warfare that Russians used a word for exploiting situations where blackmail can be applied, embarrassment can stifle activism, and words or images can defame those in power and limit their ability to respond to threats or even warfare. That word is Kompromat—which translates as “compromising material.” This can include both real and fabricated information, but it is always applied judiciously and maliciously. When hit with Kompromat, you have entered the big leagues of Putin’s animosity.
The Kremlin has harnessed the power of this tool to defeat its enemies both domestically and abroad. Amanda Taub wrote a brilliant primer on the subject in The New York Times. She explained the simple processes that can have a huge impact:
First, Kremlin insiders or other powerful individuals buy, steal or manufacture incriminating information about an opponent, an enemy, or any other person who poses a threat to powerful interests. Then, they publish it, destroying the target’s reputation in order to settle public scores or manipulate public events.51
Taub writes that after the DNC email leak—if Russia is indeed responsible—“we may be seeing one of the most sordid tools of its domestic politics deployed as a hostile weapon in foreign policy.”52 She argues correctly the same position held by the U.S. intelligence community: That the DNC hack is materially different from other hacks the U.S. has experienced. She wrote, “Rather than using the information seized for intelligence purposes, the hackers selected damaging excerpts from the cache of stolen data, and then leaked them at a pivotal moment in the presidential election.”53 In other words, a classic case of Kompromat.
Collecting and exploiting information in political warfare is so common among Russian politicians that there is a series of websites dedicated to tracking the incidents, such as kompromat.ru. This site is run by a Russian blogger who sells salacious stories gathered from the steamy political underbelly of Russians who use it to their own advantage on a local scale.
David Remnick, editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, writes that whether or not Russia was responsible for the DNC hack and subsequent leak to WikiLeaks, “what’s undisputed is that the gathering of Kompromat—compromising material—is a familiar tactic in Putin’s arsenal… For years, the Russian intelligence services have filmed political enemies in stages of sexual and/or narcotic indulgence, and have distributed the grainy images online.”54
In a previous article for The New Yorker, Remnick described one infamous case of Kompromat:
In 1999, on the eve of a national election, a prosecutor named Yuri Skuratov was investigating corruption at the Kremlin and among its oligarch allies. Now all that anyone remembers about Skuratov is the grainy black-and-white film of him attempting, without complete success, to have sex with two prostitutes; the film was broadcast nationally on state television, and that was the end of Skuratov and the investigation. (The head of the secret services at the time was Vladimir Putin.)55
Franklin Foer writes in Slate, “There’s a clear pattern: Putin runs stealth efforts on behalf of politicians who rail against the European Union and want to push away from NATO.”56 In an interview on Slate’s podcast “Trumpcast,” Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum also mentioned Russia’s “pattern” of interfering in elections of Western democracies, citing as one example Russia’s funding of Marine Le Pen, president of France’s National Front, a far right political party.57 Computer hacking adds another dimension to Kompromat. Applebaum said that the events unfolding in the 2016 presidential election seem to follow a pattern that other European countries have experienced when Russia has exerted its influence:
But I hadn’t thought through the idea that of course through hacking, which is something they’re famously very good at, that they could try and disrupt a campaign. And of course the pattern of this is something we’ve seen before: There’s a big leak, it’s right on an important political moment, it affects the way people think about the campaign, and of course instead of focusing on who did the leak and who’s interest it’s in, everyone focuses on the details, what’s in the emails, what did so-and-so write to so-and-so on Dec. 27, and that’s all that gets reported.58
Paul Roderick Gregory argues in an opinion piece in Forbes that a former KGB officer like Putin could capitalize on Clinton’s use of a private email address and server while secretary of state to either blackmail her into dropping out of the presidential race, or leak information that “would weaken the United States’ hand in world affairs throughout a Clinton presidency.”59 Furthermore, he notes the Kremlin doesn’t even need to have hacked or be in possession of Clinton’s emails to exert this influence, writing, “Those who follow Kremlin propaganda understand that it is not necessary for Putin to have Clinton’s e-mails to cause serious damage to a Clinton presidency. All he needs is that many believe he has Hillary’s e-mails.”60 He continues: