The Kremlin specializes in fabricating narratives (such as the U.S. intent to steal Siberia) that are false but may contain a small kernel of truth. Putin’s army of “information technologists” (propagandists) can release fabrications to its numerous clandestine sources throughout the world. Clinton might ignore or deny those narratives (which cannot be traced to the Kremlin), but the mere idea that Putin has her e-mails will lend the necessary credibility to the story.61
Professional Assessments of Putin’s Recruitment
The Putin Strategic Kompromat & Recruit strategy is so scripted and so clearly a FSB/KGB styled political warfare operation that members of U.S. intelligence quickly saw through it. The current members, including the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Director of the CIA John Brennan, danced around the subject on the DNC hacks, as they are sworn to secrecy about the origins and sources.
Former acting Director and former Deputy Director of the CIA, Michael Morell has served six presidents—three from each party—and has voted for both Democrats and Republicans. He has kept his politics to himself throughout his thirty-three year intelligence career, until now. He takes a dim view of the entire Russian constellation of “coincidences” that surrounds Donald Trump. We may recall the U.S. intelligence community’s observation that “coincidences take a lot of planning.” The Trump coincidences seemed to bear the hallmarks of the sword and the shield of the FSB.
In August 2016 Morell wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which he explained why he will no longer remain politically silent during this election. It had little to do with Trump and more to do with his professional intelligence assessment of the threat to the United States:
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated… In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.62
5
OPERATION LUCKY-7: THE KREMLIN PLAN TO ELECT A PRESIDENT
How to Organize an Election Theft
To help elect Donald J. Trump to President of the United States, the Russians would need to draw from their experience in the art of compromising the integrity of a selected person or political party that they wanted to influence or deter through the Russian strategy of Kompromat. If Vladimir Putin, the Russian intelligence apparatus, and its underground global hacking wings sought to destabilize the West, break up NATO, and reestablish the global order, they would need to lay out a strategic hybrid warfare plan.
Hybrid warfare is the new Russian model to harness the strength of all aspects of Russian intelligence, propaganda, cyber operations, and Kompromat to support battlefield preparations before ordering terrorism, special operations, and full-scale military warfare. In this case, the FSB would be tasked to plan a cyberspace-based strategic political warfare operation to influence the U.S. elections though the theft of emails and materials from the Democratic party and make selective releases through a third party surrogate, called a cutout, that does not know or care that the source is the FSB.
With this election, Vladimir Putin, the former director of Russia’s intelligence agency, sees the election of Donald Trump as the fastest way to destabilize the United States, damage its economy, as well as fracture both the European Union and NATO. These events, which start with the election of Trump, would allow Russia to become the strongest of the world’s three Superpowers and reorder the globe with a dominant Russia at the helm.
Operation Plan LUCKY-7
(Operatzia Paveslo Sem—Операция Повезло Семь)
For the purposes of this analysis we will refer to the Russian operation as LUCKY-7. Seven is the international calling code for Russia. To pull off such an enormous political warfare operation successfully would require at least seven phases. The number is not only a universal symbol of luck, but it is also consistent with Russian superstition and harnesses the iconography of the seven sacraments in the Russian Orthodox Church.
To conduct an operation at this level would require a level of organization far greater than any had been done before anywhere in the world. A political and cyber mission of this magnitude would require every component of the Russian cyber and intelligence arsenal. The mission would seem daunting at first, until one recognizes that it would simply resemble a Kompromat-style political warfare operation, but with far greater delicacy.
The 2011 treatment of Trump by President Obama at the White House correspondents’ dinner sent him out in humiliation. A powerful man like Trump would need to be handled carefully, like all of those old East German academics Putin recruited to infiltrate West Germany. They were all the same: Full of themselves and possessing an unquenchable thirst for recognition and fortune. For the Spymaster-in-Chief it must surely have flickered across Putin’s mind that this was an asset that could be recruited, groomed, and handled. To what end originally, we may never know. But it would not hurt to have a powerful, rich, American blow-hard who could inspire the common man in one’s pocket. This was a man who enjoyed being a showman on the wrestling entertainment circuit, who had a wildly-popular show in which he behaved exactly like a Russian oligarch. To the FSB spies it must have been especially enticing to use their skills for the spy-in-chief to bring this man into a position of favor; a man like this in the White House could be very helpful indeed. But that would take a great measure of work, care, and feeding. Trump would need to first feel at home with Russia. The runway for this approach would require the first word of the MICE recruitment strategy be dangled before his eyes, and to which he was particularly susceptible: Money. The FSB could easily arrange for a billionaire wanting to earn money in Russia to meet the Kremlin’s own mutli-billionaires. Like all intelligence operations, it comes down to a Go-No Go decision by a top spy. It would involve so little effort that Putin would have to think, why not?
The Strategic Objectives of the Kremlin for LUCKY-7
The first objective for the covert operations officers of the FSB’s SVR division to meet the goals initiated by Vladimir Putin would be to bring the selected candidate into a position of favor in the American media. With almost minimal effort the Russian state could harness its own global media machine and collect strategic intelligence, in an effort to determine faults in the opponent’s policies in advance. Additionally, acquisition of the Clinton opposition research would be the highest priority. This research would not only give insight into the candidate from the opponent’s perspective, but would also be able to contribute to the overall assessment as to the suitability of the preferred candidate to meet Moscow’s goals. For an old spy, all information is good information. Information from other Republicans or Democrats could help LUCKY-7 adjust their strategy and deploy new tactics as needed. All dimensions of political and intelligence knowledge that could help meet the Kremlin’s goals would be of value, when the stakes for Russia are so high. The effusive praise that Donald Trump heaps upon Putin and the Kremlin may have been seemingly innocent in his eyes, but to the spymaster and the LUCKY-7 operations team, every utterance, every positive commentary, would put Russian objectives in a position of dominance over current and potentially future US policy.