The Long Record of US and Russian Interference in Other Countries’ Elections.
When Great Powers Interfere in Foreign Elections: An Act of War
By Blake Fleetwood, a former New York Times reporter
A Great Power dispatched hundreds of secret agents throughout the United States determined to fix elections and manipulate public opinion. Millions of dollars were covertly spent to plant propaganda and misinformation in leading American newspapers and wire services. The most famous newspaper publishers, reporters and analysts were brought on board and spoon-fed fake stories, which in turn made their way into the mainstream media.
Independent radio stations were compromised. Senators and representatives, unfriendly to the cause, were targeted for defeat. Foreign intelligence agents tried to dig up dirt on US Assistant Secretary of State, Adolf Berle.
Up to 3,000 foreign agents and lobbyists were involved. Front groups were set up. Agitators and rabble-rousers were dispatched to disrupt speeches and harass their political enemies. Foreign agents seduced and otherwise worked their way up to the highest levels of the government, infiltrating the White House, the State Department, the military and our national security services.
A New York businessman with no previous political experience was promoted and eventually won the presidential nomination of the Republican party.
However familiar this sounds, the Great Power that was so bent on manipulating US elections and public opinion was Great Britain. This was in 1940 and 1941, when England was trying to convince a largely isolationist American public to join the war effort against Germany. By a large majority, the American public opposed any policy that might ensnare the country in another war.
The leading newspapers of the day — the New York Times, the Washington Post, and columnists like Walter Lippmann, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson — were fed misleading information and subtle propaganda. A fake telegraph purporting to prove an anti-US alliance between Germany and Mexico was widely distributed.
Alfred Hitchcock, Alexander Korda and Walter Wagner were induced to insert “suitable” messages into their films.
The story was kept secret for nearly fifty years, with only bits and pieces surfacing in different accounts. In 1989, the full tale first became public when David Ignatius of the Washington Post obtained an authoritative, 423-page document from 1945 — prepared by British agents and distributed to only ten high-level government officials. But even this report was highly sanitized (most of the original documents were destroyed) to omit “disagreeable” details that might hamper future Anglo-American sensibilities.
William Stephenson, the chief British spy, was so highly connected that he peddled bogus stories to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speechwriter Robert Sherwood, who in turn forwarded important foreign-policy speeches back to Stephenson before they were delivered.
Stephenson (who some say was the inspiration for James Bond) also encouraged FDR to appoint “Wild Bill” Donovan as coordinator of intelligence information. Donovan was later to head The Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. Stephenson was thus well-positioned to direct secret US operations around the world, in favor of the British effort.
The British secret papers noted that Americans, as a society, are laughingly easy to manipulate.
The 423-page account, as published, details what turned out to be the most effective foreign manipulation and propaganda effort in history. Fortunately, this campaign by foreign agents was mounted in what is universally considered a good cause.
Looking back at more recent history we can see that such interference in foreign elections, is not a deviation from the norm of Great Power activities, but more resembles the norm itself.
The lessons we can learn from the British 1940 disinformation campaign are even more relevant today: propaganda can alter history.
For more than a year, American politics has been electrified by allegations of Russian manipulation of the 2016 Presidential election. There is a large movement seeking to impeach President Trump for colluding with Russia and for obstructing justice by interfering in investigations of Russian meddling.
Both the Republican and Democratic parties have been paralyzed by sanctimonious expressions of “injured innocence” and shock that Russia would interfere with our democratic elections. Senator John McCain called it an “act of war.” Former FBI Director James Comey said, “They will be back… they are coming for America.”
As punishment, increased economic sanctions were imposed on Russia, crippling their oil industry and denying them advanced western techniques to drill for hard-to-get reserves. Russian embassy properties were seized and 35 diplomats were expelled a year ago.
The fierce uproar, from Democrats and Republicans, continues to dominate the news and paralyze politics to an unprecedented degree.
In a belated effort to counter the charges that Trump has been too soft about Russian interference, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump agreed to “cooperate” in setting up “a cyber security unit” to prevent foreign meddling in elections.
This holier-than-thou announcement from the major Great Power offenders is like letting foxes guard the chicken coop.
It brings to mind the scene in the movie Casablanca when Police Captain Louis Renault shouted “I am Shocked! Shocked! That gambling is going on…” to which a subordinate hands him an envelope and says, “Your winnings, Sir.”
Electoral interference by the US and Russia has been standard operating procedure for the last seven decades, as surely is well-known, and now conveniently forgotten, by politicians of both parties. This election meddling has been rigorously documented by political scientist Dov Levin (Institute for Politics and Strategy, Carnegie-Mellon University). He found 117 instances of election meddling around the world between 1946 and 2000 by the US and Russia. The US was involved in 69% of the instances and Russia 31%.
In the run-up to the 1980 West German elections, the Soviet KGB spread fabricated stories that connected CDU leader Franz-Josef Strauss with right wing extremists. A recent example of US meddling is our involvement in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, which resulted in the overthrow of Ukraine’s corrupt Russian-influenced President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych was replaced by a Western-influenced, corrupt puppet President four years ago.
When Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she endorsed and encouraged dissidents in the 2011 and 2012 Russian elections, which so enraged Vladimir Putin that some speculate that the Russian meddling in US 2016 election was his form of direct payback.
One of the most thoroughly documented interventions occurred in 1996, when President Bill Clinton personally directed a massive campaign to ensure the reelection of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who was involved in the dissolution of Communism in the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism throughout Eastern Europe.
This US effort was heralded in great detail in the July 15th, 1996 issue of Time magazine with an exclusive cover story:
By the time Yeltsin announced that he was running for second term in 1996, he had become the most despised figure in Russia. This was the result of the catastrophic privatization of Russia’s economy, a 50% decline in GDP, hyperinflation, out-of-control corruption, increasing violent crime, plunging medical services — a first-time decline in life expectancy — food and fuel shortages, non-payment of wages and pensions.
Yeltsin dissolved the parliament and shelled the parliament building, which resulted in more than 2,000 deaths. Fearing that a right-wing nationalist leader of the Communist party would win, the oligarchs and generals who supported Yeltsin urged him to cancel the election.
But then, in what Time heralded as a “Yanks to the Rescue” operation, Bill Clinton saved Yeltsin’s presidency. Three American political consultants, George Gorton, Richard Dresner, and Joe Shumate, were dispatched secretly to Moscow in February 1996, under the cover of selling thin-screen televisions to Russians.
They had their work cut out for them. Initial polling had Yeltsin favored by 6% of the electorate and was trusted by an even smaller proportion. Joseph Stalin had higher positives and lower negatives, boasted Dresner.
“60% of Russians believed that Yeltsin was corrupt; more than 65% believed he had wrecked the economy.”
The International Monetary Fund, at the urging of the US and President Clinton, granted a $10.2 billion loan (equivalent to $16 billion in today’s money) to Yeltsin’s government that allowed Yeltsin to pay long-overdue back wages and pensions to millions of Russians — with checks conveniently arriving shortly before the election.
But despite billions from IMF (with American Funded Loans) and the millions spent in negative ads and dirty tricks, Yeltsin was still losing. Yeltsin resisted much of the American consultants advice. President Bill Clinton was called in directly to help. Political guru Dick Morris, who was meeting with Clinton every week at the time (and later became a critic), said in an interview that Clinton called him and explicitly told him: “I want to get Yeltsin elected.”
During their weekly meetings, Morris and Clinton would go over the Russian polling and pick up the hotline and talk to Yeltsin and tell him what commercials to run. Clinton basically became Yeltsin’s political consultant. The American intervention succeeded and Yeltsin was re-elected.
“Make The Economy Scream” — Richard Nixon
I was in Santiago, Chile in 1973 and witnessed first-hand the devastation that — the equivalent of $200 million in today’s dollars — CIA money — can accomplish in a small country to destabilize elections and eventually succeed in overthrowing a democratically elected President — eventually replacing him with a brutal, corrupt dictator.
From 1964 to 1973, the CIA meddled in every Chilean election pouring in millions of dollars trying to prevent Salvador Allende from being elected, When that failed, they sought to destabilize the economy in every way possible; they wanted to “make the economy scream.” That’s what Nixon ordered and got, according to his secret tapes.
On the streets of Santiago, I could see that the economy was in freefall. Food was impossible to get. The local currency was worthless. The black market was everywhere. A US dollar was worth ten times the official rate. Slabs of beef, subsidized by CIA money, were trucked in to reward opponents of Allende. The CIA worked its dark magic by subsidizing strikes by truck drivers, taxi drivers and, shopkeepers and other middle class professionals.
In a disinformation campaign to spread fake news, the CIA also poured millions of dollars in bribes and support to five leading journalists and the publisher of the country’s leading newspaper, El Mercurio.
With the country in economic turmoil, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger encouraged friendly generals to stage a military coup which resulted in 3,200 civilian deaths, 80,000 imprisoned, and 200,000 political refugees which was followed by the 18-year terrorist reign of Army General Augusto Pinochet. This disgraceful episode was meticulously documented by the Church Committee Senate Report of 1976.
Decades later Henry Kissinger admitted in his memoirs that President Allende was in no way a threat to the US, but in a memo to then President Richard Nixon he also justified his actions by saying:
“The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an
impact on — and even precedent value for — other parts of the world, especially in Italy. The imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our position in it.”
From 1946 to 2000, Professor Dov Levin estimates that in the 117 instances of election meddling he studied, the US interfered 81 times in foreign elections and Russia intervened 36 times, not counting military coups or other kinds of regime change efforts.
In 59% of the elections, the US-backed candidate emerged victorious 53% of the time, although overall the electoral interventions only swayed the vote by an average of 3%.
US. election-meddling started immediately with the beginning of the Cold War. In 1948, the local Communist Parties were wildly popular in many European capitals, and they relied on Soviet financial support. The newly established CIA was having convulsions that the Socialists/Communists were about to establish a beachhead on what a White House memo described as the “most ancient seat of Western Culture,” according the history of the CIA by Tim Weiner.
Operating under a secret NSA directive, without approval from Congress, the CIA poured millions of dollars into establishing bogus political fronts, supporting anti-communist politicians, and funding Catholic opposition groups.
The moderate Italian Christian Democrats won handily, and the CIA was so encouraged by the purchased victory that they repeated the process, often with bags of cash, over the the next seven decades, in elections around the world.
Ironically, that very same year, during the US presidential election of 1948, Joseph Stalin tried to manipulate the American electorate by promising in a public letter to end the Cold War, hoping to aid third-party presidential candidate, Henry A. Wallace, according to an article in the New York Times.
Indeed, in dozens of countries around the world, the CIA and its allies (the State Department, the Pentagon, and various NGOs) have conspired, mostly in secret, to influence elections with misinformation and payoffs. The list of meddling in elections even includes American allies such as: Canada, France, Germany, Britain, Israel, Australia, Japan and Italy. As well as other countries: Venezuela, Chile, Bolivia, Kenya, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Cuba, Haití, Guatemala, South Korea, Iran, South Vietnam, Ukraine, Lebanon, Syria, Iceland, Granada, India, Brazil, Afghanistan, Laos, Romania, Philippines and Mauritius.
As tabulated by Levin, the USSR/Russia has limited its electoral interventions to mostly Western and Eastern Europe: West Germany (5 times), Finland (4), Italy (4), France (2) and India (2). This list does not include the many former Warsaw Pact countries where Russian intervention has been rampant since 2000.
In the 1984 US presidential election, the KGB made it its mission to discredit Ronald Reagan in any way it could. They succeeded in planting various articles in European papers threatening that the election of Reagan would surely lead to war. It was not very effective. Reagan coasted to a landslide victory.
Professor Levin defines intervention in the study as “a costly act designed to determine election results in favor of one of two sides.”
The methods include funding favored political parties, dissemination of misinformation or propaganda, public threats to cut off foreign aid in the event of victory by the disfavored side, among others.
But past Great Power election meddling will seem like child’s play compared to what may be coming up in the future. The internet is a phenomenal means of communication. Given our ever increasing dependence on Facebook, Google, Twitter, Social Media, and unfiltered Internet news, electoral interference will be an increasingly grave issue. These powerful new tools are now mostly in the hands of Great Powers (the US, Russia, China), countries with the growing technological and social media expertise to dominate the emerging media.
Cyber attacks, disinformation, massive election funding, and technological advances loom as a global assault on “free” elections all over the world. It has become increasingly difficult for voters to distinguish between objective truth and fake news disinformation.
Instead of invading another country with troops and armed forces, the Great Powers can, and will use technological prowess, cyber warfare, and cash — the Achilles’ heel of free elections — to bend other nations to their will. It does not succeed in every instance, but history clearly demonstrates that meddling can influence elections in too many cases.
Recently Robert McNamee, in The Washington Monthly, explained the Facebook-Twitter-Google dynamic that led to the surprising Brexit vote, when all the polls predicted that the “Remain” side would win. Russia has long been trying to disrupt the economic power of the European Union and a team of researchers reported last Fall that more than 150,000 Russian language Twitter accounts posted pro-”Leave” messages in the run up to the referendum.
Such interferences are insidious and, ultimately, just as, or even more damaging to national sovereignty as invasions with guns and bombs. According to one influential Russian general, Valery Gerasimov, future wars will be fought with a four to one ratio of non-military (mainly cyber) to military measures. Such interferences are indeed an act of war.
If the US wants Russia, or other nations to stay out of our elections, our government must promise to stay out of their politics, and the elections of all independent nations. Easier said than done. There is a obvious double standard at work. For if election interference is an act of war, the US has declared war more than 80 times around with world with impunity according the figures compiled by Professor Levin.
Just with nuclear warfare, chemical weapons and poison gas, all civilized nations should adopt a code of conduct, perhaps via the United Nations, to condemn and desist from such odious meddling.
If we can’t come to an international understanding of respect for the electoral process and stop using information as a weapon of war, all independent nations will face a crescendo of escalating cyber warfare which will undermine democracy and distort and destabilize national autonomy everywhere.
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Blake Fleetwood
cell 917 514 6958:
jfleetwood@aol.com.
Blake Fleetwood was formerly on the staff of The New York Times and has written for The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Village Voice, Atlantic and the Washington Monthly on a number of issues. Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blake-fleetwood
Sources:
https://www.amazon.com/Selling-War-Propaganda-Campaign-Neutrality/dp/0195111508
http://www.worldinwar.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/30894f4e5f758d946bbddee0850e9ac4e8
