Such pronouncements would give Putin every impetus to find alternatives to her worldview. And surprisingly, seemingly out of nowhere, Putin managed to find and ally himself with the one man in the United States who believed precisely as himself: Donald J. Trump. Trump himself believed that NATO was obsolete and should be disbanded, that Crimea should be given to Russia, and that America should adopt an isolationist foreign policy. In the interim, NATO member states that didn’t pay their full share of the alliance financial commitments would be ignored if they had a military crisis. Who would have ever thought that Russia could be so lucky to find that a major party nominee in America would align himself so closely with the new Russian worldview? Who could have dreamed that a potential American President would imply that the United States would corrupt NATO’s mission to a protection racket that essentially extorts its members? Forty percent of the American electorate indirectly approved this high-stakes international racketeering.
Trump’s positions on NATO would also meet the strategic political objectives of the Kremlin simply by mainstreaming ideas and concepts that were far afield of hawkish Republican positions since the beginning of the Cold War. To the Republican Party, NATO was the United States. Until the rise of Trump there had never been any discussion as to the viability, militarily or financially, of the United States position in that alliance. It was unthinkable for the potential United States President to actually enunciate a position in which the necessity of the alliance was questioned.
It was bad enough that Trump was essentially giving assurances to Putin that Crimea was off the table, but he also appeared to not be the best surrogate, since he did not seem to understand the timeline of Ukraine’s crisis, either. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos Trump said, “he’s not going into Ukraine, OK, just so you understand. He’s not going to go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down. You can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want.”
“Well, he’s already there, isn’t he?” Stephanopoulos responded, in a reference to Crimea, which Putin took from Ukraine in early 2014.
Trump replied, “OK—well, he’s there in a certain way. But I’m not there.”20
If NATO wasn’t coming to the rescue in Georgia, Ukraine, or Crimea, then a Donald Trump administration could almost be relied upon to validate or even explain away a Moscow invasion of the NATO Baltic republics. For Putin, it must surely be a dream come true to put a major party candidate espousing these policies into the White House.
LUCKY-7: The Information Warfare Management Cell (IWMC)
Russia would need to task out the Kremlin staff, the SVR, GRU, FSB and all aspects of the State propaganda organs to meet the Spymaster-in-Chief’s goals. We may never know the actual discussions of how an operation like LUCKY-7 started, but it must have developed in a circumstance where Vladimir Putin used his instincts and information from his acolytes and spies to see something in Donald Trump that virtually no one was seeing in 2012.
Once the candidate was positively handled by the office of the President and his allies in the oligarchy, the intelligence community would form an information warfare management cell (IWMC). The LUCKY-7 joint task organization would be needed to directly respond and advise the Kremlin on how to best support a mission of this sensitivity. Though each agencies’ staffs would be compartmented from the rest of the FSB and GRU, such an operation would absolutely require a joint information operations office.
Centered in a secret location the IWMC would be a hub where the specialties of each agency could be brought to bear. The collection of data and its dissemination would be necessary to quickly influence the news cycles, be supported by State media and send tips and advice to their candidate though direct, official comment by Putin or indirectly through specially tasked senior SVR case officers.
Putin, his chief of staff, and the Director of the SVR would be the only senior staff to be aware of what outcome the President desired. Based on past strategic intelligence missions, only a few—perhaps no more than five or six case officers—would be assigned to manage a mission of this political magnitude. By virtue of the clandestine nature of their work, these would be the most trusted intelligence officers in the FSB; officers who work for Putin personally.
An overall IWMC Commander would be the controller for the entire mission. He would have a subordinate executive officer from the Special Communications and Information Service of Russia (SCISR), Russia’s version of the National Security Agency, to ensure the fusion of HUMINT and CYBER into the operation went smoothly. For the FSB side, there would be a senior manager to oversee the SVR contribution to the IWMC. An FSB-SCISR cyberwarfare officer would manage the SVR’s FANCY BEARS cyber hacking team and a second officer would control the GRU’s COZY BEARS cyber commandoes as an alternate, sometimes parallel collections team. A third cyberwarfare officer from the Scientific & Technology directorate would be the operations manager to run a black propaganda support team. When necessary, a fourth liaison officer could task and collect from the Russian mafia-run CRIMINAL BEARS. At the Kremlin level, all liaison with state media and statements by the President himself would be handled by the Russian Foreign Ministry.
To advise the President on the behaviors and opportunities to manage their candidate, the SVR’s political activities branch would assign perhaps three or four of the best field officers in the SVR and GRU. They would be read into the program and isolated at the IWMC. These officers would have to possess a proven track record on turning the unwitting into active spies, whether they wanted to be or not. Due to the nature of the mission, the officers would need to be fluent in American English with experience working as “illegals,”—deep cover covert operations officers—who served in the United States and understand both business and the political process. Perhaps one political warfare advisor would be allowed to know the full scope of this mission, remotely evaluate the target of the mission, and advise the cell operations managers as to the day to day effects of the entire process. If events required other officers to be brought in, they would be assigned compartmented tasks from the pool of the IWMC staff.
Phases of Operation LUCKY-7
Until a friendly American administration was elected all of these goals would be pies in the sky. Nothing could be effected without risk and the launch of this operation would be the least risky of all operations. The right man was running for President, he was managed by a close ally, and his foreign policy/intelligence chief was literally on the Kremlin Payroll of Russia Today.
PHASE 1: Make Contact, Befriend, and Encourage the Asset
PHASE 2: Make Asset Feel Indebted to Russia
PHASE 3: Conduct Covert Cyber-Intelligence Preparation of the Battle Space
PHASE 4: Prepare the Political Battle Space
PHASE 5: Develop and Sustain Supporting Political/Propaganda
PHASE 6: Fund and Manipulate a Cut-Out Asset to Disperse Kompromat information.
PHASE 7: Execute Kompromat Operations
Phases 1 through 4 had already been put in place. Phase 5 would be the easiest. By using Russia Today TV to blast Hilary Clinton on an international scale and tacitly express support for Trump, Putin has been able to get Donald to tout his connections to Russia as a positive for America.