Russia’s Information War & What To Do About It

J Michael Waller

November 5, 2016 

Editorial Board Member at NATO Defence Strategic Communications Journal 

My latest from the Center for Security Policy’s new book, Putin’s Reset. Here’s an excerpt:

Russia’s new information war is a logical outgrowth of the way Vladimir Putin engineered his rise to power. As the security minister and designated successor to the ailing and alcoholic President Boris Yeltsin in 1999, Putin engineered the bombings of apartment buildings in southern Russia and blamed the slaughter on Chechen rebels. His “propaganda by deed” provided the pretext to launch a new war to smash the Chechen rebellion. Both created the mass outrage that called for strong and decisive leadership, manufacturing and focusing public demand his quiet ouster of Yeltsin on the night of Y2K.

Seen through that lens, the Kremlin’s weaponization of information is a logical, proven, cost-effective means of domestic political action, internal security, and international power projection. It succeeds because neither the Russian public nor the West demanded a public accounting of Russia’s Communist past the role of the former KGB as the sword and shield of the Soviet state. Both were willing to suspend their belief for their own purposes.

Inaction from three successive American presidents empowered Putin and unwittingly gave the otherwise weak Russia an enormous capability to wage war, sometimes without firing a shot. Information, properly applied, gives leverage to the materially weaker side. The Kremlin’s new information warfare and propaganda capabilities, while innovative for a government, merit concern mostly because of the West’s flaccid and delayed response.

The capabilities and actions present a strategic challenge. With the grave but unsurprising exception of subversion of the U.S. political system, they hardly merit the breathless reportage and commentary from many political observers, because they have been building up visibly for more than a decade.

Putin’s unnecessarily aggressive info-centric actions give the U.S. and its partners the pretext to exploit the potentially profound vulnerabilities of the secret-police regime, and the fragilities that, if exploited, could widen many existing splits within the Putin leadership itself and the Russian Federation at large.

All this, of course, lowers the threshold of conflict to the level of classical espionage, propaganda, and subversion, at which the Kremlin has excelled for the past century, with a modern digital twist. The U.S. and its allies generally have opted not to engage, out of the quaint “gentlemen don’t read other people’s mail” principle, or more likely, simple ignorance about what to do or how. After a long period of not wanting to see, the West finds itself surprised and alarmed at being on the receiving end of what historically is a simple and manageable method of statecraft.

PROPAGANDA, INFORMATION WARFARE, AND INFORMATION WAR

Different but complementary methods define Russia’s information war. The first is propaganda: the content of messaging and other communications methods to influence and manipulate the perceptions, thought processes, opinions, beliefs, and ultimately actions of target audiences. Propaganda includes deeds meant to be seen (or perhaps unseen) for the same purposes. “Disinformation,” a literal translation of the Soviet-era Russian word dezinformatsiya which refers to deliberately false information, is an element of propaganda. For decades, the U.S. has liked to pretend that only its enemies and adversaries engages in or should engage in propaganda. For that reason, and with some exceptions, the U.S. has done its own propaganda poorly or not at all, and never quite grasped the essence of how its adversaries do it – and how best to counter it.

Properly done, propaganda is waged in concert with other methods of persuasive communication like diplomacy, public diplomacy, journalism, education, marketing, entertainment, and other messaging to influence perceptions and attitudes. Those methods are executed most effectively through subversion of institutions and values, and advanced for calculated psychological effect to shape cognition within the human brain. They also are carried out through political action and political warfare to provide direction and move the targets toward the perpetrator’s desired outcomes. This combination is summarized in a magnificent Soviet portmanteau of agitation and propaganda into the official Communist Party term “agitprop.”

Elements of these actions include what the Russians call provokatsiya, or “provocation,” to manufacture incidents that justify action in a predetermined direction, or to goad a domestic or foreign opponent into making a self-defeating action or reaction. An extreme form of provokatsiya was the series of apartment bombings in Moscow, Buynaksk, and Volgodonsk in September 1999 that killed 293 and injured more than a thousand people. Investigative journalists found beyond doubt that the FSB internal security service, which Putin headed as minister of security and first deputy prime minister, planted the bombs in the high-rises. The bombings provided the pretext Putin needed to push Yeltsin from power.

Russian political culture, as expected, birthed a splendid term for this spectrum of conflict – agitation, propaganda by word, propaganda by deed, provocation, disinformation, and controlled violence – literally translated as “active measures.”

Today’s Russian political and security culture, then, is steeped in a century or more of its own words that create their own universe of thought and deed. The U.S. has no similar terms of its own origination, because it never was seriously in the game.

“Propaganda” was common and official term in Soviet tradecraft. But the Putin regime recognizes the limitations among Western audiences, and the idea that only the bad guys do it. In today’s Russia, propaganda is bound by its own limits. What the Kremlin used to call propaganda, it now calls “information war.” This is an important change for practical reasons beyond the aesthetic: the Machiavellian and nationalist Putin revived the concept that politics is war, information is a weapon of war domestically, and that his regime can wage this type of war externally in what the West still considers peacetime. Information war of the Russian strain is not to be confused with “information warfare” of the American variety.

In the West, information warfare is the use of computers and other information systems to disrupt or destroy targets within or alongside a kinetic military conflict. Many in the U.S. will differ with this definition based on their responsibility or perspective, or due to confusion about the meaning among competing authorities in the military. But the fact is that the official term did not exist before the digital age. Information warfare can include the neutralization or destruction of civil communications or military C3I networks, banking and financial systems, navigational systems, energy power grids, and logistics and supply chains through electronic or physical manipulation of information systems. The military terms “cyber warfare” and “information operations” are components of information warfare. This is mainly the 1’s and 0’s of digital communication and processing, and the flow of electrons in software that operate computing, sensory, and mechanical systems. This chapter pays little attention to cyberwar capabilities as understood in the West. The point is that Russia under Vladimir Putin has shown a new and creative capability in the propaganda and information warfare spaces, combining elements excellent Soviet tradecraft with modern tools and methods.

REINFORCING PUTIN’S PERSONAL POWER BASE

Russia’s new offensive capabilities for waging both propaganda and information war abroad occurred as Putin built a cult of personality around himself domestically to be the only viable leader of Russia. Building that cult required stamping out most independent news and information for the domestic population.

The process meant doing away with Russia’s unfinished experiment with objective reality, and manipulating reality, as Orwell warned in 1984, into something new and contrived. That meant manipulating the past to shape the future, and controlling the present to control the past. To keep the regime in power, which was the purpose of seizing it in the first place. One of the most distinguished surviving observers of Putin’s rise amid the apartment bombings, journalist David Satter, encapsulated how Russians look at their past in the unusual title of his book, “It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway.” His latest work about the Putin era captures the mentality today: “The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep.”

Which brings us back to the information war. Putin combined domestic propaganda with enforcement mechanisms to impose self-censorship and to destroy the viability of any threats to his political power. His regime built an information warfare capability used on at least two major occasions to date to launch cyber attacks on foreign sovereign governments that Moscow believes should remain part of its historically entitled space, as one would launch a military attack but without provoking a kinetic response. It also built a modern cyber espionage capability to spy on domestic and foreign targets, and use the products of that espionage for propaganda and political warfare purposes at home and abroad.

Building those capabilities coincided with a centralization and personalization of political authority in Russia, to further weaken the already weak federal system by appointing regional governors instead of allowing citizens to elect them, and to suck economic wealth from the regions to finance the central regime. As the ultimate enforcement, Putin used domestic intelligence collection for propaganda purposes to destroy his opponents politically, financially crippled them so they would flee Russia for good, co-opted them internally through positive incentives or neutralized them through intimidation, physically incarcerated them through selective criminal prosecution.

The most stubborn holdouts wound up dead through gangster-style hits in St. Petersburg apartment stairways or driveby-style shootings on a bridge to Red Square, targeted hit-and-run “accidents,” aviation malfunctions, bombings, poisoning by chemical and exotic polonium radiation, defenestration, and old-fashioned blunt- force trauma. These assassinations not only eliminated opponents; they were propaganda-by-deed in modern Russia’s information war to spread the word about crossing the boss.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE OLD SOVIET GLOBAL NETWORKS

Old Communist networks are effectively gone. Russia no longer maintains the old Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) overt and semi-overt active measures networks of controlled party organizations and international front groups. The command-and- control system, CPSU Central Committee International Department, long disappeared, though some of their younger functionaries (and their adult children, trained for the purpose) remain active. Those Communist parties and fronts, with national units around the world, were means of coordinating and executing action- oriented Soviet active measures campaigns globally. Their organization embraced specific themes, such as peace and disarmament, youth and students, clergy and laity, organized labor, women, Afro-Asian solidarity, and national self-determination.

The Moscow-funded national communist parties whose controlled cadres ran the host-country chapters of those fronts have largely evaporated or morphed into different parties and movements in their respective countries. Recruitment efforts for younger successor personnel are believed to have died out.

KGB and its successors survived. While the old Soviet Communist Party front organizations are gone or ineffective, the covert machinery and tradecraft of the KGB, a state institution, survived. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev reluctantly split the KGB into separate services in late 1991, and Russian President Boris Yeltsin preserved them along with their Chekist bureaucratic culture. Yeltsin resisted calls to abolish or purge the old KGB services, reveal their past crimes, or establish civil oversight mechanisms, and there was no pressure from the U.S. and other democracies for him to do so.

The KGB’s active measures division, Service A, sat within the KGB First Chief Directorate for foreign intelligence, as was Service S to handle “illegals” operating under deep cover, and the service for handling recruited agents among citizens of targeted countries, including and especially the United States. The First Chief Directorate spun off intact and un-reformed in late 1991 to become Russia’s present External Intelligence Service (SVR). In addition to espionage, the SVR continues to run influence operations worldwide through controlled agents in mainstream news organizations, business, religious organizations, universities and think tanks, political parties and movements, official government positions, and private companies that contract their services to the government.

The FBI and CIA no longer issue unclassified reports for the public and Congress about Russian influence campaigns (nor did Congress call for those agencies to issue them), so little is public about this issue from the U.S. intelligence community. The community often leaked or openly commented about the aggressive nature of Russian espionage, characterized as being as intensive, if not more, as at the height of the Cold War. But Western counterintelligence services, apart from a short- lived experiment after 2001, generally did not perform the full field of their missions. They concentrated on counterespionage – against spies who steal secrets – but rarely against agents of influence. They did not appear to collect or analyze much intelligence on Putin’s information war, and are not known to have targeted SVR assets for propaganda and disinformation, until about 2015. This blind area presents a combination of “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” that stymies a solid assessment of Russian propaganda, information war, and subversion, and how to build proper countermeasures, defenses, policies, and doctrines. Fortunately, enough open source material exists to develop a strong public understanding. Click here for the full text.