Not just Russia, the US meddles in elections, too

Bags of cash delivered to a Rome hotel for favoured Italian candidates. Scandalous stories leaked to foreign newspapers to swing an election in Nicaragua. Millions of pamphlets, posters and stickers printed to defeat an incumbent in Serbia.

The long arm of Vladimir Putin? No, just a small sample of the US's history of intervention in foreign elections.

On Tuesday, US intelligence chiefs warned the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia appears to be preparing to repeat in the 2018 midterm elections the same full-on chicanery it unleashed in 2016: hacking, leaking, social media manipulation and possibly more.

Then on Friday, Robert Mueller, the special counsel, announced the indictments of 13 Russians and three companies, run by a businessman with close Kremlin ties, laying out in astonishing detail a three-year scheme to use social media to attack Hillary Clinton, boost Donald Trump and sow discord.

Most Americans are understandably shocked by what they view as an unprecedented attack on our political system. But intelligence veterans, and scholars who have studied covert operations, have a different, and quite revealing, view.

"If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all," said Steven L Hall, who retired in 2015 after 30 years at the CIA, where he was the chief of Russian operations. The US "absolutely" has carried out such election influence operations historically, he said, "and I hope we keep doing it."

Loch K Johnson, the dean of US intelligence scholars, who began his career in the 1970s investigating the CIA as a staff member of the Senate's Church Committee, says Russia's 2016 operation was simply the cyberage version of standard US practice for decades, whenever US officials were worried about a foreign vote.

"We've been doing this kind of thing since the CIA was created in 1947," said Johnson, now at the University of Georgia. "We've used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners - you name it. We've planted false information in foreign newspapers. We've used what the British call 'King George's cavalry': suitcases of cash."

The US departure from democratic ideals sometimes went much further. The CIA helped overthrow elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s and backed violent coups in several other countries in the 1960s. It plotted assassinations and supported brutal anti-Communist governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

But in recent decades, both Hall and Johnson argued, Russian and US interferences in elections have not been morally equivalent. US interventions have generally been aimed at helping non-authoritarian candidates challenge dictators or otherwise promoting democracy. Russia has more often intervened to disrupt democracy or promote authoritarian rule, they said.

Equating the two, Hall says, "is like saying cops and bad guys are the same because they both have guns - the motivation matters."

This broader history of election meddling has largely been missing from the flood of reporting on the Russian intervention and the investigation of whether the Trump campaign was involved. It is a reminder that the Russian campaign in 2016 was fundamentally old-school espionage, even if it exploited new technologies. And it illuminates the larger currents of history that drove US electoral interventions during the Cold War and motivate Russia's actions today.

A Carnegie Mellon scholar, Dov H Levin, has scoured the historical record for both overt and covert election influence operations. He found 81 by the US and 36 by the Soviet Union or Russia between 1946 and 2000, though the Russian count is undoubtedly incomplete.

"I'm not in any way justifying what the Russians did in 2016," Levin said. "It was completely wrong of Vladimir Putin to intervene in this way. That said, the methods they used in this election were the digital version of methods used both by the United States and Russia for decades: breaking into party headquarters, recruiting secretaries, placing informants in a party, giving information or disinformation to newspapers."

His findings underscore how routine election meddling by the US - sometimes covert and sometimes quite open - has been.

The precedent was established in Italy with assistance to non-Communist candidates from the late 1940s to the 1960s. "We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians, to defray their expenses," said F Mark Wyatt, a former CIA officer, in a 1996 interview.

Covert propaganda has also been a mainstay. Richard M Bissell Jr, who ran the agency's operations in the late 1950s and early 1960s, wrote casually in his autobiography of "exercising control over a newspaper or broadcasting station, or of securing the desired outcome in an election."

A self-congratulatory declassified report on the CIA's work in Chile's 1964 election boasts of the "hard work" the agency did supplying "large sums" to its favoured candidate and portraying him as a "wise, sincere and high-minded statesman" while painting his leftist opponent as a "calculating schemer."

CIA officials told Johnson in the late 1980s that "insertions" of information into foreign news
media, mostly accurate but sometimes false, were running at 70 to 80 a day. In the 1990 election in Nicaragua, the CIA planted stories about corruption in the leftist Sandinista government, Levin said. The opposition won.

Threat of American cash

In recent decades, the most visible US presence in foreign politics has been taxpayer-funded groups like the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which do not support candidates but teach basic campaign skills, build democratic institutions and train election monitors.

Most Americans view such efforts as benign - indeed, charitable. But Putin sees them as hostile. The National Endowment for Democracy gave grants years ago to Alexei Navalny, now Putin's main political nemesis. In 2016, the endowment gave 108 grants totalling $6.8 million to organisations in Russia for such purposes as "engaging activists" and "fostering civic engagement." The endowment no longer names Russian recipients, who, under Russian laws cracking down on foreign funding, can face harassment or arrest.

It is easy to understand why Putin sees such American cash as a threat to his rule, which tolerates no real opposition. But US veterans of democracy promotion find abhorrent Putin's insinuations that their work is equivalent to what the Russian government is accused of doing in the United States today.

"It's not just apples and oranges," said Kenneth Wollack, president of the National Democratic Institute. "It's comparing someone who delivers lifesaving medicine to someone who brings deadly poison."

What the CIA may have done in recent years to steer foreign elections is still secret and may not be known for decades. It may be modest by comparison with the agency's Cold War manipulation. But some old-timers aren't so sure.

"I assume they're doing a lot of the old stuff, because, you know, it never changes," said William J Daugherty, who worked for the CIA from 1979-96 and at one time had the job of reviewing covert operations. "The technology may change, but the objectives don't."