The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West

317 Pages·2018·2 MB·English

by  Malcolm Nance

Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Malcolm W. Nance Cover design by Amanda Kain
Jacket photograph © Mikhail Klimentyev/Getty Images Cover copyright © 2018
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018939279
ISBNs: 978-0-31648-481-7 (hardcover), 978-0-31648-485-5 (ebook) E3-
20180521-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
SECTION I Cyber Bears
1. Shots Fired
2. Reporting to Moscow
3. Make Russia Great Again
4. Putin’s Philosophy
5. A Rising Russia, a Failing America
SECTION II Bullets, Lies, Laptops, and Spies
6. Active Measures
7. Fake News
8. Internet Research Agency & Russian Cyber Weapons
9. Hail Hydra!
10. The Axis of Autocracy
11. Operation GLOBAL GRIZZLY
SECTION III America Under Siege… from Within
12. Russia’s American Beachhead
13. The American Fifth Column
14. A Treasonous Aspect
Epilogue: “Freedom Is a Light”
Acknowledgments
Notes
Newsletters
Foreword
I
n 2016 the United States was attacked by a foreign enemy power. Unlike the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor or Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade
Center, the attack by the Russian Federation struck at the core of our democracy,
our free and fair election system. The purpose was to destroy our system of self-
governance that we have cherished and held up as an example to the world for
over 240 years. Carried out in stealth, using state-run news media and
intelligence agencies, Russia managed to influence the election with the express
purpose of aiding their preferred candidate, Donald J. Trump. The Kremlin took
advantage of our open society. And through social media and agents of influence
they deployed ex-KBG spies to spread blackmail, forgery, and propaganda.
Putin loyalists (neo-Nazis, fascists, and racist xenophobes) had and continue to
have but one mission: Use the freedoms afforded to us to halt, attack, and
destroy democracy from without and within.
With the election of a childish, self–dealing, autocratic narcissist, we see
evidence of the Kremlin’s success. Donald Trump’s contemptuousness of our
inclusive values, our norms, and the rule of law, along with his weak support of
NATO and the European Union, has elevated Russia on the global stage.
One of our founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, once wondered why
Benedict Arnold would sell out 3 million Americans to King George for 20,000
pounds. Today we face another question: Why would a failing real estate
developer turned reality show host cozy up to an autocrat who rules over a
kleptocracy? Will we come to find that 320 million Americans have been sold
out to the Kremlin for 20 billion rubles?
As of this writing, the United States and Europe have been standing up to the
attacks on the pillars of democracy. But we the people must be the strongest
pillar of all. And we must heed the warnings of the risks to our beloved system
of government that continue to come. To that end, we can have no better Paul
Revere than Malcolm Nance.
—Rob Reiner
Introduction
O
ne of the greatest dreams of the old Soviet Union was to put a highly
suggestible American ideologue into power who would do the bidding of the
Kremlin. For nearly a century, Russia wanted to change American policy in such
a way that its economy and alliances with NATO would be so damaged that the
Soviet Union would become the preeminent superpower in the world. The idea
of a Kremlin-controlled President would live on after the death of the Soviet
Union.
In 2012, the plan to subject the 2016 United States election to a massive
cyber influence operation, possibly in coordination with the Trump campaign,
was launched. It ostensibly started with the hacking of the Democratic National
Committees’ servers in order to steal critical information to knock Hillary
Clinton out of the running for President of the United States. The plan would
eventually work to the benefit of Russia’s chosen candidate, Donald Trump.
On November 8, 2016, the American presidential election culminated into
what could arguably be called the greatest intelligence operation in the history of
the world. In the Russian attack on the American election, a strategic adversary
influenced enough voters through manipulation of the internet to get their
preferred candidate chosen—and convinced more than 40% of the American
population that they had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
I was determined to track down other information to illustrate where Russian
intelligence used cyber warfare to influence elections, referenda, and political
opinion to their advantage. My investigation showed that Russian intelligence
had been using these advanced malware suites to attack other nations for almost
a decade. The 2016 election hacking was just window dressing on a larger goal. I
found there were many activities where the Russian CYBER BEARS—a
collective name for their national, criminal, and intelligence hackers—were
involved in shifting the goalposts. The 2016 hacking was the start of a global
campaign to imagine a “New World Order” and make it a “Russian World
Order.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) code named the Russian operation against the United States
GRIZZLY STEPPE. In my last book, The Plot to Hack America, I referred to it
as Operation LUCKY-7, considering the amount of luck the Russian spies would
need.
The next phase of their campaign—the plot to destroy democracy—would be
better described as GLOBAL GRIZZLY. The best plan would be to resort back
to a goal from the Soviet era, discredit and destroy Western-style democracy all
together. This time Americans would be curried through their hatred of Muslims
(and their first African-American President, Barack Obama) to align themselves
through cultural similarities, as opposed to Cold War politics. In the GLOBAL
GRIZZLY plan, tribal commonalities among white ethno-nationalists would be
cemented through a political order based on authoritarianism, anti-liberalism,
and anti-globalism, and lever the success of the super-rich.
By 2016, Operation GLOBAL GRIZZLY was occurring right before our
eyes. It was the full-scale implementation of a new form of asymmetric warfare.
Although Russia was a military superpower, it remained an economic dinosaur,
with the exception of fossil fuel production. In order to defeat a superior
economic entity like the United States, Russia embraced a new battlefront that
could cripple a democratic adversary. It would exacerbate the domination of the
information battle space.
In The Plot to Destroy Democracy, I will reveal the strategy the Russian
Federation put into effect to defeat the world’s biggest democracies and
challenge principal governance structures of the Western world. The singular
beauty of this plan, which has roots far back into Stalin’s Soviet Union, is that
the Russian political chess players have harnessed the West’s own technology
and liberty as the dagger to be plunged into the heart of democratic governance.
Russia saw opportunity to co-opt American and European political parties to
destroy democracy itself.
At its heart, The Plot to Destroy Democracy is a fast-paced cross between a
spy thriller and a National Intelligence estimate that provides a deep dive
assessment of the dangers that surround the nation where the enemies are both
foreign and domestic. However, the game remains in motion. All the pieces are
still visible, and a bulldog of an investigator, former FBI Director Robert
Mueller, is on the hunt. Make no mistake, democracy in the era of Trump and