CHAPTER 1
THE SEEDS OF FUTURE STRUGGLE
For seventy-five years, America and Russia have fought for dominion over the earth. In the twentieth century, America won the long cold war, and it seemed for a time that its triumph might endure, and freedom would flourish everywhere. The moment vanished. In the twenty-first century, Russia has fought back against America and its allies with stealth and subversion. Its stratagems have undermined American democracy, a political architecture that withstood a civil war and two world wars over the course of a quarter of a millennium. The outcome may determine if America will endure, and whether democrats or autocrats will rule the world. Great armies and navies and arsenals bristling with nuclear weapons have proved useless in this struggle. The battle depends on political warfare.
Political warfare is the way in which nations project their power and work their will against an enemy, short of launching missiles or sending in the marines. Its conduct requires the full spectrum of intelligence and diplomacy, from covert operations to coercive persuasion, and the skillful orchestration of these instruments by the president. The United States built a powerful machine for political warfare after World War II, and it sped the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the American engine sputtered at the turn of the century, and today it has all but died. The Russians have been using political warfare with skill and cunning ever since Vladimir Putin came to power twenty years ago. From 2014 onward, they have struck blows against the American political system, and in 2016 they helped elect a president in thrall to Putin, plunging democracy into danger. In 2020, they strengthened their powers of disinformation and deception and took aim at America again. We need to know how political warfare works before the next attack strikes. It is coming.
War is the state of nature in the world we have made. More than two hundred million combatants and civilians have been killed in the past century. The smoldering ruins of the First World War ignited the long fuse for the second, and out of the ashes of the second rose the toxic cloud of the cold war. Among the ideals shattered by these conflicts were the noble-minded rules codified early in the twentieth century: wars were fought between uniformed combatants, they began on one day with a formal declaration of hostilities, and they ended on another with the dignified signing of a peace treaty. Nations did not intervene in the internal conflicts of others. These proved to be empty promises for the thousands of American troops sent to Siberia to fight against the Red Army from August 1918 to June 1920, nineteen months after the Armistice; cold comfort to thirteen million Poles who woke up in September 1939 to discover that they were captives of the Russians, seized under a secret clause of the pact Stalin signed with Hitler.
Two laws of war still held in August 1945, after President Harry S. Truman dropped the bomb on Japan. One was fighting power—the will of a nation to sacrifice the lives of its soldiers. The second was firepower—the killing force of a nation’s arsenal. For the moment, though not for long, the United States had sole possession of the ultimate weapon. The destruction of cities reduced to radioactive rubble left the living to wonder what the Third World War would look like if Stalin had the secret of the weapon. In truth, he had it in hand, though no one in Washington knew it at the time. The Americans in charge of national security began to think about the unthinkable, and the advent of nuclear weapons changed the ways they thought. The wisest among them saw that if they were going to have it out with the Russians, the next war would destroy everything we wished to defend, and the living would envy the dead.
When the two sides failed to make peace between them, and set out to struggle for dominance over the nations of the world, they had to find a way to fight one another through the clandestine projection of power—spying and subversion, subterfuge and sabotage, stolen elections and subtle coups, disinformation and deception, repression and assassination. The Americans knew next to nothing of this way of war. The Russians had been at it for four centuries.
Ivan the Terrible, the sixteenth-century czar, had established a primitive secret police. Peter the Great and Catherine the Great had expanded Russian espionage, spying on foreign adversaries as well as on their own people. By the time Napoleon invaded in 1812, Czar Alexander I had strengthened Russia’s foreign intelligence and linked it with his military. The Okhrana, formed after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, spied on enemies within and without Russia in the decades when anarchists were killing kings and queens, princes and archdukes, and, in 1901, the president of the United States. But the Kremlin’s spies were crushed by the Bolshevik revolutionaries who seized Russia in 1917. In their stead, in that cold and pitiless December, Vladimir Lenin created his own secret police: the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage—the VChK, known to all as the Cheka. “We stand for organized terror,” the first leader of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, said in 1918. Stalin gave them unchecked power. In 1934, they instituted the Great Terror: one million people were murdered. By that year, Stalin’s spies were at work in the United States. By World War II, they had burrowed into the government—the State Department, the Justice Department, the Manhattan Project. In 1954, after Stalin’s death, the spy service was rechristened the Committee for State Security: the KGB. Charged with conducting espionage, subverting enemies with disinformation and political sabotage, securing the state, protecting its rulers, and crushing dissent, the KGB was a ministry of fear, combining the missions of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the cold-war CIA, and the Nazi Gestapo. It was the biggest intelligence service in the history of the world. If you, like Vladimir Putin, were born into poverty and hunger in the postwar rubble of mid-century Russia, and you aspired to power, the KGB was the place to be.
An immense statue of Dzerzhinsky stood in front of the Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters in Moscow, from 1958 until 1991, when it was toppled by protesters aiming to take down the crumbling architecture of the Soviet Union. The statue wasn’t recast and remounted, but Putin rehabilitated Dzerzhinsky as he revived the Soviet intelligence state. Chekist Day is now celebrated every December 20 in the Kremlin. And Putin is a Chekist to the marrow of his bones. What that means is what it always has meant: the preservation of the leader’s power, at all costs; the imprisonment and assassination of his domestic opponents; and the conduct of political warfare to mystify, mislead, and surprise his enemies, to trick them into acting against their own best interests, and to weaken their position in the world.
The United States never had a peacetime spy service until Congress created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947. Though we Americans have learned a great deal about the craft of intelligence in the ensuing years, often through embittering experience, at the outset we were amateurs in almost every aspect, particularly at political warfare, and especially in the dark arts of deception and disinformation. In its first days the CIA was only two hundred officers strong. Its mission was to fight the cold war and prevent the next Pearl Harbor. Its forces grew a hundredfold in five years, controlling covert armies around the world, running paramilitary missions from Russia to China, mounting coups, seeking to crack the Iron Curtain.
The White House and the Kremlin ordered their spies and diplomats to manipulate at least 117 national elections all over the world during the twentieth century. They fought to control nations across Africa and Asia and Latin America and the Middle East, buying allegiances with guns and money but never coming directly to blows. Each side shored up strongmen and despots, and subverted the other’s favorite regimes, covertly backing guerrilla armies and underground movements and pliant political leaders. The United States fought the war on communism in the jungles of Vietnam, and the Russians smuggled arms and ammunition to America’s enemies in Southeast Asia. The Russians seized Afghanistan, and the CIA shipped billions of dollars in weapons to the Islamic holy warriors who fought them. Americans beamed news and propaganda over the Iron Curtain via Radio Free Europe. The Russians fought back with torrents of disinformation disseminated by the KGB.
And in the end, after trillions of dollars spent on armaments in Washington and Moscow, and millions of lives lost in the nations where the great powers had contended, the Soviet Union collapsed under the dead weight of its self-deceptions. The Kremlin could not sustain its founding falsehood, the big lie that Soviet communism was more noble an experiment than American democracy. “Imagine a country that flies into space, launches Sputniks, creates such a defense system, and it can’t resolve the problem of women’s pantyhose,” Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, lamented after the hammer and sickle was furled for the last time. “There’s no toothpaste, no soap powder, not the basic necessities of life. It was incredible and humiliating to work in such a government.”
The dream of the Americans who fought the cold war had been realized: the map of the world had been remade by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The tide of liberal democracy had risen, and the nations of Eastern Europe had been freed from the suffocating grip in which Stalin and his successors had held them. And another war had been fought and won, when the United States crushed the Iraqi army in 1991. The Gulf War was a shockwave in which the Pentagon wielded new weapons of strategic deception, perception management, and information warfare. They proved as devastating as smart bombs and cruise missiles.
The United States bestrode the earth like a colossus in those days, as it had after World War II, and the prevailing wisdom in the high councils of Washington was that the world was going our way. “There weren’t any foreign policy problems” when George H. W. Bush left office in January 1993, said his secretary of state, James A. Baker III. “Everybody wanted to be friends with the United States.… Everybody wanted to embrace free markets. Everybody wanted to embrace democracy, with the sole exceptions of North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, and Libya. Everybody was ours.” Everybody loved America—including the Russians. Or so we wanted to believe.
Wiser minds, though not many, were wary about the spirit of strutting triumphalism ruling the day. The warrior-statesman Colin L. Powell, by turns chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state, quoted the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz: “Beware the vividness of transient impressions.” Few looked beyond the fleeting events; fewer still envisioned how the conflicts of the cold war could be rekindled in the twenty-first century. “What we did not realize was that the seeds of future struggle were already sprouting. There were early stirrings of future great power rivalry,” wrote Bob Gates, then a former director of Central Intelligence and a future secretary of defense, who served presidents from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama. “In Russia, resentment and bitterness were taking root as a result of the economic chaos and corruption that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union”—along with the American push to expand the NATO military alliance eastward to Russia’s border—and “no Russian was more angered by this turn of events than Vladimir Putin.” The Russian leader had been a KGB lieutenant colonel watching from his post in East Germany as his nation’s empire crumbled. He knew something about the practice of political warfare.
When he rose to power at the turn of the twenty-first century, he took the shattered components of the old KGB and reconstructed a new version of the Soviet state in which he controlled not only soldiers and spies but manipulated television and the internet to invent perceptions of reality. After he won his third term as president in 2012, Putin focused the full spectrum of his powers, readied his forces, and took aim at America. In the words of Mike Morell, a former acting director of the CIA, he “turned significantly back towards what was essentially Russian behavior during the cold war, which is to challenge the United States everywhere you can in the world, and do whatever you can to undermine what they’re trying to accomplish. Do whatever you can to weaken them.”
Americans tend to see war and peace as night and day. Russians see a never-ending battle. They may be right, for while the circumstances of combat change, the nature of war is immutable. For twenty years, Putin has used the power of his military and intelligence services to create new strategies and tactics for political warfare against the United States. Their counterattack slowly came into force, a blitzkrieg unseen until after it had struck at the heart of the American body politic.
Not long ago, on a winter’s night in Moscow, a senior adviser to Vladimir Putin named Andrey Krutskikh, an expert in political warfare who now serves as an ambassador at large of the Russian Federation, delivered a stark threat at a public forum. “You think we are living in 2016,” he said. “No, we are living in 1948. And do you know why? Because in 1949, the Soviet Union had its first atomic bomb test. And if, until that moment, the Soviet Union was trying to reach agreement with Truman to ban nuclear weapons, and the Americans were not taking us seriously, in 1949 everything changed and they started talking to us on an equal footing.
“I’m warning you,” he continued. “We are at the verge of having ‘something’ in the information arena, which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals.”
Now we know what that weapon was. We have to understand its origins and its history, and we have to understand that it threatens permanent damage to American democracy, and the potential for its downfall. We are reliving a moment that began a lifetime ago, when the great powers began to clash by night, and the fate of the world was at stake. One great difference stands between then and now. America is bereft of a strategic vision to replace what it had in the cold war. And where there is no vision, as the Book of Proverbs says, the people perish.
But in 1948, America had a strategy to fight fire with fire. It was the work of a single solitary figure who made his voice heard around the world. It guided ten presidents, it governed the decisions and the stratagems of diplomats and spies, and it spurred the destruction of the Soviet Union.
CHAPTER 2
THE PERPETUAL RHYTHM
The strategy that shaped the cold war was the brainchild of George F. Kennan, second in command at the American embassy in Moscow during and after World War II. He had spent most of his adult life studying the calculations and the cruelties of Generalissimo Joseph Stalin, the absolute ruler of the Soviet Union since 1924; the penetrating gaze of Kennan’s brilliantly blue eyes had been fixed on the enormity of the Soviet empire for nearly twenty years. He saw Stalin as “a man of incredible criminality, of a criminality effectively without limits; a man apparently foreign to the very experience of love, without pity or mercy … most dangerous of all to those who were his closest collaborators in crime, because he liked to be the sole custodian of his own secrets, and disliked to share his memories with others who, being still alive, had tongues and consciences.”
Stalin, like his true heir, Vladimir Putin, aimed not only to penetrate the American government with espionage and to get inside the minds of its leaders, but to seize control of nations within his reach, to defeat leaders he detested, to pick supplicants or useful idiots he could manipulate, and to make Russia a great global power, feared by allies and enemies alike, and to achieve all this in the wake of a devastating struggle. Alone among Americans in the months after the war ended, Kennan grasped all this, and he tried with increasing force to make American leaders understand it too. He had deep insight into what went on inside the Kremlin; he had nearly seven years’ experience inside Stalin’s Russia, and he knew it better than he knew America. “He was terribly absorbed—personally involved, somehow—in the terrible nature of the regime,” wrote the Russian-born Oxford don Isaiah Berlin, then serving at the British embassy in Moscow. The Russians were a nation of stage managers, Kennan wrote at the end of the war, and their deepest conviction was that things are not what they are, but only what they seemed to be.
Kennan saw that the sun would soon set on Russia’s wartime alliance with America and that the shadow of Soviet power would lengthen westward, falling on one hundred million souls in Europe and beyond. “No one in Moscow believes that the western world, once confronted with the life-size wolf of Soviet displeasure standing at the door and threatening to blow the house in, would be able to stand firm. And it is on this disbelief that Soviet global policy is based,” Kennan had written in a May 1945 cable from Moscow to Washington, a warning unread at the White House, newly occupied by President Harry Truman. But he believed that America could contain the hungry wolf. If it stood steadfast against the ambitions of the Kremlin and confronted them with confidence, “Moscow would have played its last real card.” Though no one heeded his words at the time, they would become the core principle of American foreign policy for the rest of the twentieth century.
Harry Truman thought he could find a way to get along with the man he called Uncle Joe. They were set to meet for the first time at Potsdam, on the outskirts of Berlin, on the afternoon of July 16, 1945. But Stalin stood him up.
Truman was a pure product of America, born into the Missouri of the outlaw Jesse James to parents who traded in mules and horses and farmed the fertile earth. He was straightforward and plainspoken. He never went to college. A veteran of World War I, a failed haberdasher, a county judge by the grace of the Kansas City political machine, somewhat miraculously elected to the United States Senate in 1934, and ten years after that, a startling last-minute choice as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third vice president, Truman served for eighty-two days under FDR. The president was a ghostly figure to him, rarely seen, wraithlike in the flesh. When Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, Truman said, “I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”
Stalin was the dictator of 180 million people; his rule reached five thousand miles from Berlin to the Pacific Ocean, and from the cold Baltic Sea south to the balmy shores of the Adriatic. Born to an alcoholic shoemaker and a laundress, his face scarred by childhood smallpox, he had been expelled from a seminary and set out to be a revolutionary. He had edited the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, run extortion rackets to raise money for the party, survived four years of exile to Siberia during World War I, and risen to power through ruthless cunning.
He was a master of conspiracy and a mass murderer. Truman was an innocent. He had no notion of foreign policy or statecraft. He was unprepared for power, and he knew it. For eight years, these two men would hold the fate of the earth in their hands.
When Stalin failed to show up at Potsdam that afternoon, Truman took a motorcade through what remained of Berlin, once the world’s fourth-biggest city, now a hellscape of death and destruction, stinking of rotting flesh. The rubble of the Reich was piled ten yards high along the boulevards. “I thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis,” Truman wrote in his diary that night. “I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll be no reason for any of it.” As Truman toured the ruined city, it was dawn in the high desert of New Mexico. At 5:29 a.m., the scientists and soldiers of the Manhattan Project witnessed a blinding light brighter than the sun and watched the rising mushroom cloud of the world’s first nuclear explosion. Truman got the news that night.
The Potsdam conference, intended to settle some of the most pressing problems of postwar Europe, foundered from the start. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who would be voted out of office the next week, was an exhausted volcano, his words great gusts of wind. Stalin was war-weary but wily, cautious but calculating. Churchill talked without coming to a point, Truman wrote; Stalin just grunted, but you knew what he meant. The one moment of great consequence came on July 24. The day’s talks at the Cecilienhof Palace, a mock Tudor mansion built during World War I, had been fruitless. After conferring with Churchill and their respective military chiefs, Truman decided to share his secret with Stalin that afternoon. He walked around the table as the late afternoon light slanted into the dark-beamed room and spoke quietly to the generalissimo and his interpreter. He said in a casual tone that he possessed a new weapon of great force with which to end the war against Japan. He came away thinking that Stalin didn’t understand what he saying. Stalin knew exactly what he meant.
Truman came home believing he could do business with Uncle Joe. Months passed before he knew he’d been naive. Through the summer and into the fall, the glow of victory began to fade and the chill of a darkening twilight descended on Washington. No one knew where to steer the American ship of state. Truman had no firm policy toward the Soviet Union and little basis on which to build one. What did Stalin want? How far west would he project his power? What should the United States do? In late January 1946, an urgent appeal for enlightenment on these questions arrived at Kennan’s desk at the American embassy in Moscow, in the depths of the Russian winter. His title was minister-counselor, but he was running the show. Ambassador Averell Harriman had left Moscow, and three months would pass before the arrival of his replacement, General Walter Bedell Smith, who had been chief of staff to the supreme allied commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and who went on to lead the CIA during the Korean War. Bedell Smith was desperate to understand Stalin’s thinking. So were the president and the secretary of state and the secretary of war. The State Department had turned to Kennan for wisdom after ignoring his cables for months. He was sick in bed, as he often was, suffering from the flu and a throbbing headache; his mood by turns highly strung and deeply melancholy. But he was roused by Washington’s plea for an understanding of the Kremlin. “They have asked for it,” he thought to himself. “Now, by God, they will have it.” He unleashed an eight-thousand-word dispatch, the “Long Telegram,” the longest in the history of American diplomacy and by far the most widely read. It circulated all over Washington and through American embassies and military outposts around the world. Every member of the newly emerging national-security establishment absorbed it, and Stalin, thanks to his spies, read it, too.
Kennan set out to address questions “so strange to our form of thought” that they required intricate answers. He wanted his superiors to understand that the truth in Russia was whatever Stalin said it was: “The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth—indeed, their disbelief in its existence—leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another.” The Russians conducted their affairs on two levels: the official realm of public policy and diplomacy, in which lip service would be paid to international relations with its allies, and the subterranean one, carried out by secret intelligence and security agencies, through espionage and subversion.
“There is good reason to suspect that this Government is actually a conspiracy within a conspiracy,” Kennan wrote. Stalin had dissolved the Communist International, or Comintern, in its aboveground role as a world congress in 1943, as a gesture to his wartime allies, the United States and Great Britain. But the international network under his direction and control was “a concealed Comintern … an underground operating directorate of world communism.” Although J. Edgar Hoover didn’t know it yet, Soviet spies in America had stolen the secrets of the atomic bomb, burrowing into the Manhattan Project from the first. They had a long start on the FBI and the CIA. They had more than two hundred agents and sources inside the United States government, the military-industrial complex, and the media. Soviet intelligence was “an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility,” Kennan wrote, “managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history.”
The Kremlin was “a political force committed fanatically to the belief … that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted,” Kennan wrote, in a passage foreshadowing the political warfare waged by Putin against American democracy. The Kremlin would seek through covert means “to disrupt national self-confidence, to hamstring measures of national defense, to increase social and industrial unrest, to stimulate all forms of disunity.… Poor will be set against rich, black against white, young against old, newcomers against established residents”—all of which presaged the Russian attack that lay seventy years ahead.
Fighting back against this new enemy would constitute the greatest task that American diplomacy had ever faced, he warned. He proposed that the United States had to harness its strengths in a way that had little to do with armies and air forces but everything to do with the projection of political power. Stalin and the Soviet Union might be “impervious to the logic of reason,” Kennan concluded, but they were “highly sensitive to the logic of force”—not tanks and troops, but American political resistance designed to thwart the Kremlin’s dreams of glory. He was writing himself into history by imagining that America could fight Russia without weapons.
Copyright © 2020 by Tim Weiner
