When the Bear 'assassinated' the US president
Analysis: The Russians did not kill Clinton, but they ended her political life and gained a grateful president in the White House. In different times, such an act would have been considered nothing less than a declaration of war.
The Kremlin’s intelligence services assassinated the first female president of the United States. This is not the beginning of a thriller, but the actual meaning of the CIA’s announcement
over the weekend.
The American intelligence agency determined that Russia helped Donald Trump get elected and that the operation that entailed hacking databases of political elements and spreading the information through WikiLeaks was meant not only to undermine the American public’s trust in democracy, as some of the commentators believed at first, but also to ensure that a different candidate would be elected and not the woman candidate. It was further discovered, the CIA claims, that the Republican Party’s servers were hacked as well, but that none of that material was handed over to Julian Assange.
In the 21st century, the person that Russian President Vladimir Putin hates the most, who is about to be elected US president, can be assassinated in completely different ways than with a poison-tipped umbrella
Clearly, this is not a physical murder. As it turns out, that is no longer needed. In the 21st century, the person that Russian President Vladimir Putin hates the most, the person who is about to be elected US president, can be assassinated in completely different ways than with a poison-tipped umbrella, like the one the KGB used to kill a Bulgarian dissident back in 1978. The Russians did not kill Clinton, but they ended her political life and gained a grateful president in the White House. In different times, and with another president-elect, such an act would have been considered nothing less than a declaration of war.
Trump says that the allegations are false and that these are the same intelligence officials who claimed that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It’s true that the history of intelligence is filled with errors, some disastrous—and the CIA excels in this field as well. But it is precisely the trauma of Iraq that had made the CIA extremely cautious and it has been suffering from underestimations ever since. For example, the September 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran does not have a military nuclear project, which was retracted later on.
More importantly, a number of well-known private cyber companies—that are free of political considerations—have published their own investigations showing that Russia is the source of the hackings. So did a number of espionage agencies, including Israeli intelligence experts who identified the group called “Fancy Bear” that hacked the Democratic Party (DNC) as the FSB—the Russian Federal Security Service—and the group of hackers called “Cozy Bear” as the GRU—the Russian Main Intelligence Agency. (The Israeli conclusion as to which “bear” belongs to which Russian spy agency is the opposite of the one published in the US, which concluded that Fancy Bear is actually GRU and Cozy Bear is FSB).
The facts that WikiLeaks—which is known as being in contact with elements related to Putin—distributed the information, and that the Kremlin and Trump’s staff knew in advance what WikiLeaks was about to publish, are just further evidence framing Russia for the assassination.
Behind all this is the state of mind and the way of thinking that Putin and his close assistants have maintained from their days in the KGB. The series of investigative reports published in Yedioth Ahronoth and Ynetnews about the KGB's Middle East Files exposed the depth and breadth of the KGB’s efforts in its war on Israel and the Jews.
But beyond the details of these activities, some of which are shocking, they reveal the organization heads’ mindset that history can be shaped through clandestine means or "Active Measures," as they were referred to in the Soviet Intelligence back then. They believed that the technological, economic, cultural and social gap of the Warsaw Pact vis-à-vis the West could be settled through assassinations, terror attacks, technology theft, deceit and by spreading disinformation, all "aimed at exerting useful influence on aspects of interest in the political life of a target country, including its foreign policy; the solution of international problems; misleading the adversary; undermining and weakening the adversary's positions," as phrased by KGB protocol. This notion was not exclusive to the KGB. The CIA (and sometimes even the Israeli intelligence) also believed that the future could be changed through assassinations and psychological warfare. They all nearly always failed.
Today’s Russia is even weaker vis-à-vis the West than the Soviet Union was, but its leaders apparently believe that the gap can be narrowed and that the global occurrence of events can be shaped. They have simply changed the tools of the past with a new basket – hacking computers, operating Avatars (virtual spies), spreading false rumors at huge scopes, and more.
Unlike in the past, this time they are actually succeeding.
