Putin

The problem here is that counterintelligence operations are typically long and drawn-out, taking months, even years—the FBI has already been looking into Russian meddling since July 2016. That means for the foreseeable future, the White House will be under a “gray cloud” of suspicion to use the expression of Devin Nunes, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Mike Morrell, the former acting director of the CIA who made no secret of his support for Hilary Clinton or his disdain for Donald Trump, used a different metaphor: “There is smoke, but there is no fire at all.” In any case, whether it’s gray clouds or smoke, it is clear that we’re in for a long spell of obscurity that can only make the current climate of jittery uncertainty all the more so.

Another point where clarity is of the essence is in assessing Putin’s psychology and forestalling his actions, for there is general agreement that the Russians will strike again.

In his opening remarks, Chairman Nunes said: “A year ago I publicly stated that our inability to predict Putin’s regime and intentions has been the biggest intelligence failure since 9/11 and that remains my view today.”

There are many reasons why America is constantly outwitted by Putin. American categories of thought about Russia are too neat and clean. To the American mind government, crime, business, and the secret police are four quite different things. In Russia they easily shade into one another and it could be argued that at various times, Putin has had his hand in all of the above. Another reason is that the U.S., for all it shortcomings, remains a country of laws while Russia is a more Darwinian society where the law of the jungle, or, as the Russians call it, the law of the wolf, tends to prevail.

For Putin the game of power has only three rules—attain, maintain, retain—and all the rest is nonsense and pretense. Putin views American lack of historical memory not only as the naiveté of a young culture, but a convenient means for eluding responsibility. American can partake in the assassination of leaders—Allende, Hussein, and Gaddafi—and thereby change regimes, but when Russia does anything of the sort it is a crime against humanity.

To Putin the Orange Revolution that broke out in Ukraine in 2004 was no spontaneous uprising of the people but an integral part of the West’s campaign to outflank and weaken Russia. In Putin’s KGB-conditioned worldview, there are very few spontaneous events and the few there are immediately coopted and exploited by those quickest afoot. Someone is always behind everything, every organization is a front.

The expansion of NATO between 1999 and 2004, now flanking Russia from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and the uprising in Ukraine in 2004 were not discrete events but part of a pattern his training and experience had taught Putin to recognize. In interfering in the U.S. domestic political process, Putin was just doing unto others what others had already done unto him, and, if anything, feeling a little guilty about being so remiss in retaliating.

Does Putin have any particular power over Trump and how long have the Russian intelligence service been taking an active interest in Trump? The second part of the question is easier to answer than the first. Trump began making noises about running for president as early as 1988 having switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party the year before. That alone, along with his wealth, celebrity, and later attempts to do business in Russia, would have been more than enough to open a file on him.

Putin made his career by gathering sexually compromising video on Russia’s attorney general, who had launched a potentially ruinous investigation into the economic wrongdoings of President Boris Yeltsin and his family. Saving Yeltsin won Putin the president’s ultimate trust in the deal in which Yeltsin gave Putin power in exchange for immunity. So, Putin needs no convincing that compromising material can be important, even decisive. Does he have any such material on Trump, who has been so fulsome in his praise of Putin and so woefully slow to accept the intelligence community’s assessment that the Russians had conducted politically motivated hacking during the 2016 campaign?

The largely unsubstantiated dossier compiled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele claims that Trump hired prostitutes to urinate on the bed in the presidential suite in the Moscow Ritz Carlton where Barack and Michelle Obama slept, thereby to defile it. “The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.”