The Plot to Hack America

I started my career in Naval Intelligence when I entered as a Russian language interpreter sent to DLI, the Defense Language Institute. For years before my Navy enlistment I had studied the Soviet Union and the KGB’s history of political intrigue in preparation for a career in intelligence. Little did I know that two years of studying Russian on my own and four months of waiting at the Presidio of Monterey for my language school slot would result in my taking a completely different language. I was assigned to study Arabic, then I spent decades watching the Russian client states of Libya, Syria, Iraq, as well as their ties to European terrorist groups Red Army Faction, Action Direct, the Irish Republican Army, and the Combatant Communist Cells. No matter what my target was, the KGB cast a shadow across every spectrum of my operations. Whenever we conducted a mission involving Syria, we watched for Russian cruisers and destroyers heading to Tartus, or the IL-38 “May” surveillance aircraft that dogged us and kept a weather eye on the Soviet naval units in the Gulf of Sollum anchorage off the Egyptian and Libyan border. Russian “Illegals”—covert intelligence officers—would try to attach themselves to us like leeches in seedy strip clubs in Naples or when puking on the streets of the Marseilles red light district. We went to monthly counterintelligence briefings that explained how the KGB recruited assets, and how they manipulated even the lowest-level young soldier, sailor, or marine through heterosexual and homosexual “honeytraps.”

The formerly-classified briefings of Yuri Bezmenov, now posted up on Youtube.com, are where we learned of the targeting and recruitment techniques of the KGB. Until the fall of the Soviet Union the watchword was “Beware of the Bears. The Bears are everywhere.”

After the fall of the Soviet Union the KGB became known as the FSB. In the last ten years Russian intelligence melded all of its offensive techniques to create a new kind of war: Hybrid Warfare—a melange of hostile cyber, political, and psychological operations in support of their national objectives, whether during peacetime or in open war. It is now standard operating procedure.

A few months after the hacks, at the start of the Democratic Party Convention in Philadelphia, the WikiLeaks organization, led by the information transparency activist Julian Assange, leaked the stolen documents with the intent to “damage” Hillary Clinton. The information leak had the intended effect, as airing the DNC’s dirty tricks conducted against the Sanders campaign created a rift between diehard Bernie Sanders supporters, and led to the resignation of Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as Chair of the DNC.

Once the emails were released the source of the hacking became the number one question asked by global security and intelligence experts. The story was literally a Whodunnit? How did information from just one political party get released to the benefit of the unpredictable Republican nominee, Donald Trump? Civilian security specialists joined the US and NATO allies as they commenced a massive cyber-sleuthing operation. The United States Cyber Command, headquartered at the National Security Agency (NSA) on Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, as well as the FBI and their cyber subcontractors, detected the leak source: The FSB and its sister the GRU—Russia’s national and military intelligence bureaus. The metadata—information inside the emails showing the pathway from the DNC computers to WikiLeaks—led straight back to a suspected Russian intelligence organization, a conglomeration of cyber spying groups codenamed CYBER BEARS.

All of the old lessons of identifying Russian mantraps started to come back to me as the stolen DNC data was revealed. It had a pattern that was familiar and that virtually every other intelligence officer could recognize. The pattern showed that someone was playing 3 Dimensional chess with our democracy.

Russia has perfected political warfare by using cyber assets to personally attack and neutralize political opponents. They call it Kompromat. They hack into computers or phones to gather intelligence, expose this intelligence (or false data they manufacture out of whole cloth) through the media to create scandal, and thereby knock an opponent or nation out of the game. Russia has attacked Estonia, the Ukraine, and Western nations using just these cyber warfare methods. At some point Russia apparently decided to apply these tactics against the United States and so American democracy itself was hacked.