I have led intelligence agencies — the us and uk must do better on russia | thearticle

What strikes someone looking from across the pond at the release of the Intelligence and Security Committee report into Russian interventions in British politics is how long it took to come

out, what it doesn’t cover, how brazen the Russians were, and how successful they apparently were in using money to insinuate their way into British society. The release, substantially

redacted, came 18 months after the inquiry was completed, and seven months after Boris Johnston led the Conservative Party to a large majority in Parliament. As someone who has led US

intelligence agencies, I understand both the complications of bureaucracy and the awkward politics of releasing intelligence documents. That must be all the more so in Britain, given that

the Committee is something of a step-child in the parliamentary system. But, unlike in the US, no one on either side of the aisle seems to have been pushing for the release. The delay feeds

directly into the most obvious omission — the scant discussion of possible Russian influence in the June 2016 Brexit referendum. As chair of the US National Intelligence Council, I oversaw

preparation of the report, delivered in January 2017 to both the incoming Trump and outgoing Obama administrations, about Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. The three prongs of

that intervention — hacking and releasing emails, using social media as a cheap amplifier of propaganda, and trying to break into election machinery — would have provided the Committee a

starting point for looking at Brexit. And it was not for want of trying, apparently, for the report says the Committee inquired but the government showed little interest in investigating the

referendum. In response to a request for written evidence, “MI5 initially provided just six lines of text,” the report says. When the government said there is no evidence of interference,

the Committee responded that no one was looking for it. Much of the Russian playbook as portrayed in the Report is pretty familiar: using both traditional media, like the tv channel RT, and

trolls and bots on social media for propaganda purposes dated back, the report says, to the Scottish referendum in 2014. What is striking is the brazen history of Russian interference in

Britain, running back to the 2006 poisoning on the streets of London of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent and critic of the Kremlin, and underscored by the poison attack in 2018 in

Salisbury on Sergei Skripal, another former Russian spy, and his daughter. The report is strongest where US investigations have been weaker, detailing the role of Russian money in British

politics. I have tended toward the view that Russia, in many respects a failing state, relies on cyber and social media tools because they are cheap, but the report details Russian oligarchs

laundering money in London, welcomed by British politicians and enabled by a web of lawyers, accountants and the like, who, in the words of the report, “played a role, wittingly or

unwittingly, in the extension of Russian influence which is often linked to promoting the nefarious interests of the Russian state.” The report urged an investigation of members of the House

of Lords — whose names were redacted — who had business interests linked to Russia or who worked for companies with ties to Russia. Getting to the bottom of the money trail remains a

failing in American investigations, not least because President Trump has stonewalled over his finances. Yet if there is any reason for his willingness to kowtow to Putin, it is hard to

believe that money doesn’t have something to do with it. Those of us on this side of the Atlantic should draw two lessons from the UK’s report. The first is the importance of following the

money. The second is the need to improve public awareness of what the Russians are up to. The 2016 hacking episode caught us Americans by surprise — but it should not have. The US has been

slower at coming to grips with these “hybrid” Russian threat than countries in Europe, especially those in Russia’s immediate neighbourhood. The Swedish civil contingencies agencies asked me

in 2017 to do a study of the Russian interventions in the 2016 US elections, as they prepared (admirably) for their own 2018 elections. The report portrays a Britain in which public

awareness was also slow in coming. Both Britain and America need to do better.