Mark Galeotti: The ‘Trump Dossier,’ or How Russia Helped America Break Itself
From Mark Galeotti at Tablet Magazine: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news...r-russia-putin
Selected Excerpts:
Quote:
In many ways, one can blame the so-called Trump Dossier, a collection of often dubious and dramatic allegations about the then-candidate collected by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.
In general terms, the dossier may well accurately characterize the U.S. president’s character. The problem is that the details given of Trump’s alleged Russian links were so often questionable and, indeed, open to being disproved. Steele, an agent-runner who had not been back to Russia since the late 1990s, somehow was citing multiple sources with extraordinary access, including senior figures in the Kremlin.
The trouble with the Trump Dossier is that it’s a recognizable product of a specific milieu: If you spend an evening or two in the bars where Moscow’s chattering classes hang out, you’ll hear an equal complement of political tall tales about Putin and his presidential administration.
The kind of gossip that fills the Trump Dossier is common currency in Moscow, even if very little of it has any authority behind it aside from the speaker’s own imagination.
The author of the Trump Dossier, though, appears enthusiastically to have transcribed every bit of tittle-tattle that fit the overarching narrative of a grand Kremlin scheme to elevate Donald Trump to the presidency.
In doing so, the dossier not only fatally overestimated the Kremlin—it also fatally underestimated it. Stock clichés about Russians notwithstanding, Putin is not a chess player. He does not have carefully calculated long-term schemes planned out a dozen moves ahead. He and his people are improvisers and opportunists. They try to create multiple potential points of leverage, never knowing which may prove useful and which not. They take advantage of the fact that they can operate covertly, break the rules, act without worrying about legislative oversight or constitutional niceties.
The suggestion of a cunning conspiracy years in the making is a questionable one: Person after person in Russia’s foreign-policy, national-security, and expert community last year told me there was no chance of Trump being elected. In a telling example of the way members of the Russian establishment mirror-image, assuming that Western democracy is like Russian pseudo-democracy, one airily assured me that “the American establishment would not allow this to happen.”
At the same time, the Kremlin is also realizing it should have been more careful in what it wished for...They now faced a U.S. president who could and would change state policy in unpredictable ways literally overnight, felt no need to telegraph his moves or sound out responses in advance, and had a relatively low threshold for the use of force.
Putin has long capitalized on American restraint and predictability. In carefully crafting for himself a persona as an unpredictable risk-taker, he has relied on Washington to be the responsible adult in the relationship. However, the Russian diplomat I spoke with feared those days were over, with an American president who no longer felt constrained by working institutions or was even willing to believe his own government, and no longer felt the need or saw the possibility of creating any kind of bipartisan policy consensus.
To Outlaw 09 RE: Russian Intelligence Operations
Quote:
Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
BUT here is the simple counter...while I like the work done by this author...he failed to take notice that it was a raw HUMINT report and right now minus the sex tape…80% of the dossier has been largely confirmed either by leaked social media articles and then reenforced [sic[ by actual MSM articles confirming then the social media leaked reports...
BTW...he actually confirms the Steel Dossier was in fact raw HUMINT bar/taxi/plain conversation talk…that is exactly what HUMINT delivers...as the stated quality for such reports is a F6...source unknown--cannot be confirmed...THEN it is up to the the other ints' [sic] to either confirm or deny...
Only after the raw HUMINT is analzyed [sic] and put together with other information does the quality of the original HUMINT information climb.
Secondly, while the author has a vast Russian contact base I have noticed he has not done much research on the internal competition between SVR, GRU and the good old FSB...which if one thoroughly understands the recent Russian state sponsored hacking you inherently see all three RISs hard at work trying to "trump" each other...
BUT what the author does not indicate is that HUMINT gets one through the front door....and potentially to the last door....meaning it tells you something that say SIGINT or ELINT or MASINT has never even indicated...because these int's [sic] cannot tell you what goes on inside the human head...or what the key codes are for a particular security door...
BLUF...
The Steele Dossier did exactly what it was designed for…it woke up people...pointed the direction and stated there are a number of serious issues here...now confirm my information...using simple straight forward raw HUMINT...exactly the way it is suppose to work....
Go back and reread why the Steel released it...he had felt it was not being properly paid attention to...and the issues he reported were in fact if true...massive....
Russian influence operations not only targeted Trump and the election it also targeted Sanders campaign.....
Little known fact...
Bernie's senior advisor Tad Devine worked as a senior advisor for Yanukoych? Bernie hired him knowing that.
BTW the bank accounts that Manafort used while doing consulting for Yanukoych located in both Cyprus and Cayman are still open....
People do not even have to trust Russia’s propaganda outlets for its saturation strategy to work
There is a very old saying ion the learning of a foreign language...repeat the word seven times...why seven times as it then locks it into deep memory and allows for recall....
Propaganda, disinformation and fakes news does the exact same thing...repeat it SEVEN times and then the targeted individual or society believes it to be the "truth" and does not even question it...
Outlaw,
You actually agree with nearly all of Galeotti’s analysis and conclusions, but just as the alleged sex tape is at the core of the Steele Dossier, the story that Trump is a Russian agent is at the core of your perspective on the election and its outcome. To Trump, we must add Sanders and Stein - according to you - to which you will probably add other also-rans such as “What is Aleppo?” Johnson. You seem more interested in ascribing Clinton’s election loss to Russia than in delving into Russian intelligence operations targeting the United States, which “active measures” fall under. If her loss can be completely attributed to Russia, then what of the vitriol against the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that has been undermining Clinton since Arkansas? Or of Comey being a secret Republican operative.
You may have decades of intelligence experience, but you have followed every twist and turn in Clinton’s story, much as a novice investor follows the newspapers and analysts up and down and sideways on various stock picks. Either your judgment is clouded by your bitterness at not having Hillary at the helm of state, or you are cynically parroting every excuse her and the Democrats can fling at the wall. Which is it? Much of the smears against Comey are sliding down that wall and smell quite foul.
Saturday Night Live understood the meaning of the Dossier better than you, and capitalized on its one “new” allegation: the “pee pee tape”.
Galeotti has discussed inter-agency rivalries in Russia before, but Putin has also broken down the “power” ministries and agencies as bureaucratic institutions in order to consolidate his personal rule. From a high-level perspective, it is a chaotic nebula of individuals and groups competing for favor and resources, not unlike Hitler’s mafia state.
Yet your reference to inter-service rivalries and Russia backing any and all candidates who were assumed to be “less hawkish” than Clinton, only speaks to the multiple brushfires and piranhas that Galeotti speaks of. If Trump was truly a “Siberian Candidate” then one would assume that Putin would have been far more careful.
Trump’s recent disclosure indicates exactly what I thought: Trump wanted to keep secret that his net worth was well below “$10 billion”, not that he had borrowed from Russia (). I suppose that all of those German, Swiss and American banks are merely intermediaries between Trump and the Kremlin? But feel free to regale us about Chinese and Russian investors buying condos. I suppose that the entire business and political class of the UK has been turned by Russia because of Russian investments in London, no?
As for the howling and wounded Beast of Chappaqua, it is doubtful whether she would have been more aggressive with Assad than the Entertainer-in-Chief. If you think that the Republicans and “anti-imperialist” piranhas would not have kept her too busy to do much, and suspicious of any “wag the dog” homages to her husband, I have got a ten-lane bridge over the Strait of Kerch to sell you.
Lastly, I have my own contacts, and my Serbian acquaintance called it years ago: Putin indicates his preferences, and his minions scurry about to carry it out, including at each other’s expense.
I am glad that you refer to “fake news” as propaganda. We don’t need new words for old things.