Russian government think tank drew up plans to influence US election

[Alexeht]

Fake news. What will be next topic? 9/11 was an inside job?

[Elim Garak]

Fake news. What will be next topic? 9/11 was an inside job?

By Russian agents, no less.

[Mormolyce]

Stopped reading there. As if you could trust what they say.

What, Americans?

- - - Updated - - -

The same organisation that kept on peddling the WMD narrative for Iraq?

Iraqi defector fabricated WMD intelligence: report

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-us...71F0IP20110216

Chuck Norris the only WMD in Iraq, say U.S. troops

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ir...54496320080310

Kek.

[Fargus]

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-us...71F0IP20110216

Hindsight's great isn't it? That article was in 2011, long after 2002-2003 when most of the media was pushing for an Iraq war.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ir...54496320080310

Don't pretend this is some sort of slam dunk. Again, this is several years after the fact.

[Shalcker]

I know not many people are really interested beyond scoring some partisan points, but good articles are finally starting to come up on what exactly that "think tank" is:

Where Old Spooks Are Sent to Retire: Russia’s Institute of Strategic Studies

At last, a smoking gun.

A Russian think tank known as the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies (RISI, in Russian), prepared and disseminated two reports to senior policy-making circles in Moscow as the 2016 U.S. presidential election drew to a close, Reuters reported Thursday. Those reports, which are classified, allegedly served as a playbook for Kremlin attempts to influence the U.S. election.

“Putin had that objective in mind all along,” one of the unidentified former intelligence officials was quoted as saying. “He asked [RISI] to draw him a roadmap.”

According to current and former U.S. intelligence officials cited by Reuters, the RISI documents were critical clues that lead the Obama administration to conclude the Kremlin attempted to undermine Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.

If this is how the U.S. intelligence community thinks, it explains a lot. There is another way to read these claims.

Ironically, RISI may have been more influential in Washington and Langley, Virginia than in the Kremlin. Allegations of Russian interference in the election are plausible, but claims of RISI’s role strain credibility. The idea of RISI influencing Russian policy is bunk, several foreign policy experts in Moscow – some with ties to the Foreign Ministry – told The Moscow Times.

“It is a retirement home for old intelligence officers and analysts” a source familiar with the situation at RISI said on a condition of anonymity. When a Federal Security Service (FSB) or Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) hand gets too old, they send them into “retirement” at a think tank.

“Some are sent to RISI,” the source says, “and the ones who end up there are old, have lost their grip on reality, and are sometimes crazy.”


Questionable Influence

Not everyone agrees that RISI is where old spooks go to die. “It is a sanatorium for loonies,” says Vladimir Frolov. But that is beside the point.

“No one makes policy based on what RISI writes,” he added. “They have no analytical capability for U.S. policy, and no experience in social media warfare. They just rehash open source media, and nobody reads what they write anyway.”

They operate much like any other think tank does, says Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian security services at the Institute of International Relations in Prague. They exist to write reports and propose stratagems, but they are likely not so influential, he added.

“Yes, Putin appoints its director, but it doesn’t mean RISI is close to him, or especially powerful,” Galeotti says.

The outfit’s former director, Leonid Reshetnikov admitted as much in a March 2015 interview with online news outlet Lenta.ru. Ordinary people wrongly believe RISI “can just write something up, pass it on to Putin, who then looks at it and says: Great! Let’s act on this!” he said. Instead, the think tank is just one of many streams of analysis going to the Kremlin.

In 2015, Alexander Sytin, a former senior RISI analyst, wrote a damning article titled “On the Mechanisms of Foreign Policy Decision-Making in the Kremlin.” In it, he described the intellectual downfall of the institute after it was formally detached from the SVR and transferred to the Kremlin in 2009.

Ideological Extreme

When RISI was transferred to the Kremlin, Reshetnikov took the reigns of the think tank. Sytin credits him with driving the institute into the ground: “Reshetnikov’s contribution was not soldier-like discipline, but something entirely different.”

While spending time in the Balkans, Reshetnikov became deeply religious and obsessed with militant Christian Orthodoxy and the history of Russia’s White Guard.

“This transformation, generally acceptable for an ageing and very unwell person, was almost clinical in nature,” Sytin wrote of Reshetnikov. Whether or not Sytin was correct — he was, after all, a disgruntled ex-employee — his view seems plausible: Reshetnikov indeed espoused a deeply apocalyptic and conspiratorial worldview. Russia, he has said, is the Christian world’s only moral hope.

Reshentikov was ousted by presidential decree last year, and replaced by Mikhail Fradkov. The new director, according to one expert who has worked with RISI, was intended to help reform the institute. And while Reshetnikov may have presided over proposals to influence the U.S. election, “he loves to claim credit for things he had nothing to do with,” Frolov says.

If RISI under Reshetnikov has any legitimate claim to fame, it is for its outrageous annual ranking of the most Russophobic foreign journalists. The 2016 report has yet to be released, but in 2015 the honor went to the likes of New York Times bureau chief Neil MacFarquhar and The Telegraph’s Moscow correspondent Roland Oliphant.

RISI has also written reports criticizing other think tanks in Moscow for being too pro-Western.

“RISI does sit in on some state-organized meetings and writes policy papers, but don’t over-estimate the influence of these reports,” says the expert who has worked with RISI. “All think tanks write these, they get circulated to the relevant government bodies, and authors sometimes get a ‘thank you, this was very useful’ letter, but it doesn’t mean a thing.”

Falling For Chaff

Unfortunately, Western discourse surrounding allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 American election has waded into deeply conspiratorial waters. Now, when anonymous sources leak information on largely insignificant reports, purporting the documents to be critical pieces of a complex puzzle, the genuine truth can get lost in the noise.

Case in point: The U.S. intelligence officials quoted by Reuters suggest a timeline of RISI’s activities that makes little sense, according to Frolov.

“They quote a paper proposing policies in June 2016,” he says, “but the hacking and social media promotion of Trump had been going on for a year already, since at least mid-2015.”

Ultimately, this may actually strengthen the position of RISI and the Kremlin. If incontrovertible evidence of Kremlin interference is ever uncovered and made public, the authorities will likely brush it off in the same way RISI head Fradkov brushed off Reuter’s claims in a statement to the news agency.

“In their conspiratorial consciousness the authors of this conceit [the U.S. intelligence community] did not weigh reality against their coveted fantasies,” he said.

Also on same topic from Leonid Bershidsky:
Another Reason to Avoid Rushing on Russia’s Election Role

In January, the U.S. intelligence community accused the Kremlin of aiding Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and refused to reveal the evidence that led to the claim -- citing, understandably, the need to protect sources and methods.

In the coming months, the numerous investigations into the affair could shed more light -- they might even produce smoking guns, resignations and indictments. But details are spilling out, and they are not bolstering the intelligence community’s conclusion. Indeed, the most recent revelation suggests they don't understand who has influence in Moscow.

On Wednesday evening, Reuters published an exclusive based on interviews with "three current and four former U.S. officials." These unnamed sources described "two confidential documents" from a Moscow think tank, the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS), as "providing the framework and rationale for what U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded was an intensive effort by Russia to interfere with the Nov. 8 election."

The first document, circulated in June, proposed a major propaganda campaign in the U.S. to promote a more Russia-friendly candidate than Barack Obama. The second one, from October, warned that Hillary Clinton was about to win the election and called for replacing pro-Trump propaganda with suggestions of voter fraud to undermine the U.S. electoral system's legitimacy.

Describing the documents as “central to the Obama administration’s conclusion” in January, the officials seem to identify the RISS as the architect of what many consider one of the most successful influence campaigns in history. But that seriously overestimates the power wielded by a group that was out of favor following some serious missteps.

RISS is not your run-of-the-mill think tank. Until 2009, it was part of the SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence service. Since that year, it's been a nominally independent structure whose directors have been named by President Vladimir V. Putin himself. At the time of the U.S. election, RISS was run by Leonid Reshetnikov, a superannuated general who had served as head of the SVR's analytical center and Balkans specialist.

Reshetnikov is a Russian nationalist, close to the milieu that provided the volunteers who helped set off, and initially run, the pro-Russian rebellion in eastern Ukraine. Ultimately, he was blamed for failing to predict the Ukrainian revolution of 2014.

Though Reshetnikov kept his job, a number of other analysts were fired. One of them, Alexander Sytin, poured out his grievances in a 2015 article. "Signals started coming in from the Kremlin that it wasn't prepared to get into a full-scale war with Ukraine," Sytin wrote. "The culpability of the institute's experts in adopting or supporting decisions that led Russia into a serious economic and international crisis became obvious." The Kremlin installed a consummate political professional Vyacheslav Surkov as eastern Ukraine’s ultimate overseer.

Reshetnikov’s track record alone makes it unlikely that the Kremlin would listen to RISS -- or, at any rate, to RISS alone -- in a matter as important as a campaign of interference in the U.S. election. And there was nothing confidential about Reshetnikov’s recommendation to “intensify its messaging about voter fraud” that needed to be uncovered by U.S. intelligence. On November 8 -- less than a week after Putin removed him as head of RISS -- he said something similar to the nationalist website Tsargrad TV:

Clinton has all the levers. The financial levers and those of the intelligence services. So we have to guess whether [Trump] will win as he should or there will be falsification. Most likely, there will be desperate falsification. They will drag the grandma in.

The general added that the U.S. electoral system had always been rigged to make sure "Trumps don't get through." The lines were perfectly synchronized with Kremlin propaganda: On October 30, much of state TV's main news show, Vesti Nedeli, hosted by Dmitry Kiselyov, was devoted to the ease of falsifying U.S. election results.

Was the Kremlin was directing the propaganda on Reshetnikov's advice -- or was Reshetnikov following the Kremlin? I suspect it's the latter, especially considering the RISS’s chilly assessment of Trump after he was elected.

On November 21, the institute's Igor Pshenichnikov penned a column for the state-owned RIA Novosti agency predicting Trump would probably act like a "normal" Republican president, one that would presumably clash with Russia as others have:

It's impossible to rule out that, once he comes into his own at the White House, Trump will make two or three ritual bows to his backers from the American heartland and then take a more balanced stand from the point of view of the American establishment.

That wasn't a popular view at the time even in the U.S., and Russian state propaganda was jubilant about Trump's victory and full of praise for his warm approach to Putin. Why would the RISS design a plan to elect Trump only to warn against him afterwards?

If indeed U.S. intelligence is basing its understanding of Russia's role in last year's election on RISS documents, it should reconsider. Under Reshetnikov, the institute became allied with far right forces in Moscow who have little influence over Kremlin policy. Putin might agree with them on some points, and he might use them unofficially to advance certain political goals, but they are far from the only voice he hears. Indeed, after their miscalculations in Ukraine, Putin seemed to distance himself from them.

RISS is now run by a man cut from a different cloth -- Mikhail Fradkov, the former prime minister and SVR chief who is more worldly and whose background is in foreign trade rather than the military. Putin has kept him in important jobs throughout his rule, and Fradkov may actually turn RISS into more of a Kremlin brain trust. But last year's "confidential documents" from the institute can only be a footnote to the as yet untold story of what the Kremlin actually did and didn't do in the U.S.

[Orbitus]

You can't guarantee shit.

You're just as clueless as everyone else here, including myself.

Oh, but I can guarantee it. Unless you are getting your information from NPR or AP, you are getting shit news. And from our previous speaking, you aren't that educated and read shit stuff compared to Reuters, NPR or the AP.

[Mormolyce]

Hindsight's great isn't it? That article was in 2011, long after 2002-2003 when most of the media was pushing for an Iraq war.


Don't pretend this is some sort of slam dunk. Again, this is several years after the fact.

I was expecting you to furnish me with articles from closer to the date in response.

Colour me disappointed.

[Deleted]

I was expecting you to furnish me with articles from closer to the date in response.

Colour me disappointed.

Not easy to find. I tried. He's right though, you posting a 2011 article doesn't do much.

[Blur4stuff]

At this point, denying Russian involvement and collusion with Trump's people is on the level of denying climate change and promoting faith healing.

[Elim Garak]

At this point, believing in Russian involvement and collusion with Trump's people is on the same level as "I'm not saying it's Russians, but it's Russians. I want to believe."

[Mormolyce]

Not easy to find. I tried. He's right though, you posting a 2011 article doesn't do much.

So I have two articles and he has zero.

[Deleted]

So I have two articles and he has zero.

No you both have zero.

[Deleted]

A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters’ faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters.

Heres your problem.

Any names?

Ofc not... thats because its FAKE NEWS.

[Fargus]

Oh, but I can guarantee it. Unless you are getting your information from NPR or AP, you are getting shit news. And from our previous speaking, you aren't that educated and read shit stuff compared to Reuters, NPR or the AP.

There are no guarantees in life, so no, you can't.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

I read the article and I'm trying to figure out what specifically points out the big "A HA" moment. A lot of "Former us Officials." While normally to me that would be enough but on something like Russia. Well I dunno if I'm convinced.

[Lenonis]

It's obvious and frankly quite logical at this point that Russia put significant effort into influencing the election. It's blatantly obvious and there is more than enough proof.

What isn't obvious is if they did any hacking beyond the DNC/RNC and if they colluded with Trump directly.

The only people at this point who think Russia had zero involvement, ironically enough, are the same people who believe every conspiracy from the right, but point to this and say "you gullible fools believing the conspiracy nonsense." The irony is thick. As is their skulls. :P

[Theodarzna]

And? How many American plans and actually executed policies existed to overthrow 10+ countries governments?