RIGGED EB

David Shimer

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780008415808
• eBook ISBN: 9780008415822
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Histoire du 20ème siècle

'This pioneering and judicious history of foreign intervention in elections should be read by everyone who wants to defend democracy now.' Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny

The definitive account of covert operations to influence elections from the Cold War to 2016 – and why the threat is greater than ever in 2020.

Russia's interference in 2016 marked only the latest chapter of a hidden and revelatory history. In Rigged, David Shimer tells the sweeping story of covert electoral interference past and present. He exposes decades of secret operations – by the CIA, the KGB, and Vladimir Putin's Russia – to shape electoral outcomes, melding deep historical research with groundbreaking interviews with more than 130 key players, from former CIA directors to a KGB general.

What Americans should make of Russia's attack in 2016 is still hotly debated, even after the release of the Mueller Report and years of media coverage. Shimer shows that Putin's operation was, in fact, a continuation of an ongoing struggle, using familiar weapons radically enhanced by new technology. Casting aside partisanship and sensationalism, Rigged reveals new details about what Russia achieved in 2016, how the United States responded, and why Putin has also been interfering in elections across the globe in recent years.

Understanding 2016 as one battle in a much longer war is essential to understanding the critical threat currently posed to America's electoral sovereignty and how to defend against it. Illuminating how the lessons of the past can be used to protect our democracy in the future, Rigged is an essential book for readers of every political persuasion.

Part One

THE HIDDEN HISTORY

Chapter 1

ENTER LENIN

In 1952, Oleg Kalugin, then seventeen years old, graduated from a Soviet high school seeking meaning, adventure, and the chance to combat capitalism. So he joined the KGB, his state’s security and intelligence service. Kalugin spent the next six years training at spy facilities in Leningrad and Moscow, after which he moved to America. He was stationed in New York until 1964 and then, after a brief interlude, was transferred to Washington, D.C., where he worked through 1970, eventually as acting station chief. (As his cover story, Kalugin presented himself as an inquisitive foreign correspondent.) He then returned to Moscow, rising to become the chief of counterintelligence and, in 1974, the KGB’s youngest-ever general. His job was to penetrate the “intelligence and security organizations of the world,” he told me, “and, of course, number one was the United States.”¹

One summer day in 2019, I spent four hours with Kalugin in Rockville, Maryland, about sixteen miles from the White House. His home is modest, nestled in a quiet neighborhood. Paintings and memorabilia line the walls. On display are a photograph with William Colby, a former CIA director, and a signed copy of a book by Michael Hayden, another former CIA director. Since Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, Kalugin has criticized aspects of his regime. The feeling is mutual: In 2002, a Russian court tried Kalugin for treason and sentenced him in absentia to fifteen years in prison.² If Kalugin lived in any other country, he coolly pointed out, Putin would have him killed.

Sitting in his living room, however, Kalugin had many stories to tell about covert electoral interference. The roots of such operations run deep, he explained—back to the very founding of the Soviet Union. To any leader in Moscow, foreign elections present opportunities to redirect nations. The democratic process of succession practically invites interference. “What we did all around the world,” Kalugin said, “was provide money and support to people who we thought would be friendly and would change the foreign and domestic policies of their countries.”³

The Soviet Union first targeted foreign elections a century ago. The historian Tony Judt argued that the Cold War began in Europe after World War I, when Vladimir Lenin consolidated control over the ruins of the Russian Empire and Communist Moscow first clashed with Western democracies.⁴ Lenin, who distrusted the United States, possessed a comparative advantage in the area of covert action: Unlike Moscow, an isolationist Washington had no peacetime foreign intelligence agency.⁵ As Americans looked inward, Lenin surveyed the globe. His grand ambition was for foreign Communists to seize power, shed their preexisting governments, and abolish their nations’ borders. Through covert electoral interference, he could help.

Secret funding is perhaps the oldest form of covert electoral interference. It enables political campaigns to better target, turn out, and manipulate the masses. In March 1919, Lenin laid the groundwork for such operations at a pivotal conference in Moscow. The summit attracted delegates from more than two dozen countries, who together established the Communist International (Comintern), a transnational organization charged with uniting the Communist Parties of the world—and fomenting revolution abroad. “Particularly for the majority of the western European countries, spreading of the soviet system is a most important task,” Lenin told his guests. “America is the country that is most ripe … for a real socialist revolution,” said Boris Reinstein, the only American citizen present.⁶ The attendees, despite their limited means, had set their sights on a historic end: toppling the international system.

“The purpose of the [Communist] International is shown to be to propagate revolution and communism throughout the world,” warned a front-page New York Times article in 1920. That year, as the Red Army marched westward, the Comintern’s Second Congress attracted over two hundred representatives from thirty-seven countries.⁷ Lenin seemed poised to change the world.

The Comintern’s mission was publicly known, but its finances were shrouded in mystery. We now know that its Department of International Communication covertly distributed directions, propaganda, and money to foreign Communist Parties. The Soviet government provided the funds. In return, Lenin expected obedience. “Any person taking money” from the Comintern, Lenin said, “is warned that he is obliged to implement absolutely scrupulously all instructions of the [Executive Committee of the Communist International].”⁸ Beginning in the spring of 1919, the Comintern financed various Communist groups, including in the United States, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia, Austria, Poland, Holland, and Britain.⁹

But a global Communist revolution was not, in fact, imminent. The Comintern’s early operations coincided with an ongoing war between Polish and Soviet soldiers. In August 1920, the Red Army lost at Warsaw, preventing Lenin’s forces from advancing across Europe. The Treaty of Riga instead forced the Soviet Union to establish itself as a state with defined borders. Western democracies, meanwhile, had not abandoned their political model for Lenin’s. Now seeking to deter foreign interference in its affairs, Soviet intelligence spread disinformation exaggerating the strength of its military.¹⁰ With this deception campaign under way, Lenin died in January 1924, not knowing where his Communist experiment would lead.

Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin, initially forbade foreign Communist Parties to ally with social democrats. This strategy proved self-defeating. In parliamentary democracies, politicians often obtain power through coalition building. By insisting on ideological purity, Stalin inadvertently empowered his rivals by isolating his friends. In Germany’s July 1932 and March 1933 elections, for example, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists succeeded at the ballot box in part because Germany’s Communist Party would not stand with the Social Democrats.¹¹

After Hitler’s rise, the Comintern shifted its strategy: It began supporting electoral alliances against fascists. At its Seventh Congress in 1935, the Comintern endorsed so-called popular front coalitions of antifascist parties. Some successes followed. In Spain, the Communist Party, whose Comintern representative had written Moscow requesting its “promised sum … for the [1936] electoral campaign,” joined a Popular Front coalition, which prevailed at the polls in February of that year.¹² In France, where the Comintern was funding as much as one fourth of the Communist Party’s budget, a Popular Front that included the Communist, Socialist, and Radical Parties also won in 1936. Outlawed Communist groups received covert assistance, too, as the Comintern smuggled funds into fascist Italy and Germany.¹³

Still, the Comintern struggled. None of its foreign Communist Parties, with the exception of China’s, had more than thirty thousand or so members.¹⁴ In the interwar period, the specter of Russian interference thus mattered more as an idea than as an actual mechanism for change. “The call of the Comintern,” writes the historian Odd Arne Westad, “was heard throughout a world that was tired of war and colonial oppression.” The Soviet Union was founded on the premise of catalyzing global revolution; the Comintern sought to execute this mission. As foreign governments searched for signs of its meddling, prudence gave way to paranoia. In the United States, the first Red Scare unfolded from 1919 to 1920.¹⁵ A few years later, a similar crisis enveloped the United Kingdom.

Four days before Britain’s 1924 election, the Daily Mail published a letter that Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Comintern, had allegedly sent the British Communist Party (which the Comintern had been covertly funding for years).¹⁶ Taken at face value, the letter constituted direct interference in the affairs of another nation. It instructed Communist Party officials to “strain every nerve in the struggle for the ratification” of a treaty between the Soviet government and that of Ramsay MacDonald, the first-ever Labour Party prime minister, and to “stir up the masses of the British proletariat.” The Daily Mail ran the headline “Civil War Plot by Socialists’ Masters … and Mr. MacDonald Would Lend Russia Our Money!”¹⁷

When covert interference is uncovered, the beneficiary is put on the defensive, regardless of whether he solicited the help. Because Zinoviev favored Labour, the right swiftly labeled MacDonald an instrument of Moscow and linked his party with foreign influence. MacDonald was left to fight for his political life. “All I say is this: So far as I know, the letter might have originated anywhere,” he said two days before the election. “How can I, a simple-minded, honest person who puts two and two together, avoid the suspicion—I will not say the conclusion—that the whole thing is a political plot?”¹⁸

MacDonald was right: Historians now consider the Zinoviev letter a forgery. To this day, it is a mystery who wrote it. But none of this was clear in 1924, so when the Conservative Party won the election, Labour attributed its defeat to the Comintern’s apparent interference in British politics (although scholars like A. J. P. Taylor are certain that Labour would have lost anyway).¹⁹ Regardless of whether the letter swung the election, it certainly divided voters. MacDonald’s opponents had cast Labour as sympathetic to Moscow, and the party’s supporters felt unfairly attacked as such. The mere appearance of covert interference had polarized a nation. Almost a century later, the legacy of the letter lingers. “This document—which may never have existed in the form of an original letter and was almost certainly not written by Zinoviev—has haunted politics, especially Labour politics, in the United Kingdom ever since,” writes Gill Bennett, the former chief historian of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.²⁰

Foreign democracies assumed the Comintern had powers that it did not. By overtly calling for world revolution, the organization had developed an outsized reputation. The Comintern could not catapult Communists into power globally, but it could sow discord within democracies. A single letter had thrown British politics into upheaval. The Comintern’s perceived influence, though, came at a cost: It isolated Moscow on the international stage. Elected leaders distrusted the Comintern and, therefore, Stalin.

As Hitler strengthened Germany, Moscow needed allies. The Comintern, however, had alienated democracies like the United Kingdom and the United States. Lenin’s creation had become Stalin’s liability. “It would therefore be in the interest of Russia itself to dissolve the Comintern and to prove, by scrupulous abstention from interference abroad, that it can be treated on an equal footing with those democratic powers whose ideals it professes to share,” urged Franz Borkenau, an Austrian political theorist, in 1939.²¹

Stalin chose a different path. That August, he entered into a nonaggression pact with Germany. The German Wehrmacht and the Soviet Red Army then invaded, divided, and annexed Poland. The United Kingdom and France responded by declaring war on Germany. World War II had begun, but the treaty that kicked it off did not last. In June 1941, Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. Fascism once again became the enemy of Communism. Stalin, now allied with democracies, provided the Comintern with fewer and fewer resources “for rendering assistance to foreign parties.”²²

Stalin finally abolished the Comintern in 1943, as a gesture of goodwill toward Washington. “The dissolution of the Communist International is proper,” Stalin told Reuters, “because … it exposes the lie of the Hitlerites to the effect that Moscow allegedly intends to intervene in the life of other nations.”²³ There was, of course, no lie to expose. The Soviet Union had interfered in foreign elections and would continue to do so. The Comintern’s fatal flaw was not its covert activities but its public mission, which had disturbed Moscow’s wartime allies and made its existence untenable.

The outcome of World War II left Stalin with means of which Lenin had only dreamed. During the interwar period, the Soviet Union had controlled its own territory, and the Comintern had funded foreign Communist Parties, but those parties were, for the most part, unpopular, illegal, or both. Moscow’s ability to shape other countries was limited. The results of the war changed what was possible. Four great powers—Nazi Germany, the Empire of Japan, the United Kingdom, and France—were either destroyed or severely weakened, creating a power vacuum for the Soviet Union and the United States to fill.

As the Red Army marched toward Berlin, its forces occupied the countries of Eastern Europe, which became a testing ground for electoral interference. After the war, most of these states held elections, but Moscow manipulated them so intensively that they hardly qualified as competitive. Whereas the power of the Comintern was its reputation, the power of these postwar operations was their scope, scale, and ambition. In East Germany, the Soviets directed the campaign of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), a coalition of Communists and Social Democrats. “All of the SED’s decisions,” a Soviet official said at the time, “must be agreed upon by the leadership of the Soviet Military Administration.” Moscow bolstered the SED’s electoral prospects through a variety of tactics, such as enabling its leaders to print more than a million leaflets and posters. But in October 1946, the SED still underperformed relative to Moscow’s expectations, so more aggressive forms of interference—arrests, intimidation, and threats—followed. In December 1947, the Soviets forced the resignation of Jakob Kaiser, the head of the rival Christian Democrats. He then went into exile in West Berlin.²⁴

A similar story unfolded elsewhere as a mix of covert and overt tactics determined the outcomes of supposedly free elections. In Poland, ahead of the January 1947 election, opposition leaders were arrested, Communist officials falsely alleged that a rival candidate had died, and soldiers monitored polling places as voting unfolded. The Soviet-supported “democratic bloc” achieved an overwhelming victory, in part because ballots were falsified in its favor.²⁵ Meanwhile, in Hungary, Mátyás Rákosi, the Communist leader, used so-called salami tactics to slice off his opposition. In February 1947, Soviet soldiers arrested Béla Kovács, the secretary general of the popular Smallholders Party, whose colleagues then went into exile. For the election that summer, hundreds of thousands of voters were purged from the rolls; many thousands more were too intimidated to turn out. On Election Day, special brigades traveled from district to district, some riding in Soviet vehicles, visibly stuffing ballot boxes. The Communist Party triumphed and, as in Poland and East Germany, consolidated control.²⁶ More than four decades would pass until these countries again held contested elections.

The brazenness of these electoral operations was extraordinary. The Red Army’s physical presence enabled their most aggressive components, such as Béla Kovács’s arrest. But other tactics, like manipulating voter rolls, altering vote counts, and disseminating propaganda, have since remained central to Moscow’s approach to covert electoral interference.

American policy...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Praise
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Democracy Under Siege
• Part One: The Hidden History
• Part Two: 2016
• Conclusion: Breaking the Siege
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• About the Publisher