Contemporary Authors

The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West
Malcolm Nance. Hachette, $28 (336p) ISBN 978-0-316-48481-7

Russian president Vladimir Putin is also “the first Russian president of the United States,” bent on world domination, with President Donald Trump merely his puppet, argues this<< overwrought work of conspiracy theory>>. NBC counterterrorism analyst Nance (The Plot to Hack America) gives a knowledgeable if disjointed rehash of the Russian government’s hacking into voter databases, leaking Democratic officials’ emails, bot-flooding social media with pro-Trump fake news, and holding suspicious meetings with Trump campaign figures during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He sets the account of these activities against a history of Russian hacking, disinformation, blackmail, and assassination in America and Europe. Nance inflates these reasonably well-attested claims into a grandiose Putin scheme to convert democracies into authoritarian ethnonationalist regimes in an “Axis of Autocracy.” Trump, he writes, is a “malignant narcissist” who displays “real idiocy” and is “willingly working with Putin to pull America down” for monetary gain alongside Republicans, white nationalists, and former Breitbart News executive chairman turned presidential advisor Steve Bannon, “the American Goebbels.” Nance produces no evidence that Trump has done anything at Putin’s behest, or that Putin masterminds the global populist right, or that Russian meddling decided the election; his larger conspiracy theories rest on hand-waving insinuations. The result is <>. (June)
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Reviewed on: 05/14/2018
Release date: 06/26/2018
Compact Disc - 978-1-5491-4391-5
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The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election
Image of The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election
Author(s):
Malcolm Nance
Release Date:
October 10, 2016
Publisher/Imprint:
Skyhorse Publishing
Pages:
216
Buy on Amazon

Reviewed by:
Michael Lipkin
Malcolm Nance’s The Plot to Hack America is an essential primer for anyone wanting to be fully informed about the unprecedented events surrounding the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Published shortly before the election, the book still provides the basic framework for understanding all that came after the election, much of which corroborates Nance’s claims and speculation. Remember, many people disputed or downplayed Russian involvement at the time. Subsequent developments show that Nance, the experienced intelligence operative, was way ahead of the curve

The book begins in summer 2016 when Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks released embarrassing emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee showing, for example, that leaders had a clear preference for Hillary Clinton as their candidate. This information immediately caused discord between Clinton supporters and the Sanders people. The harmful hacks had begun in March, as the intruders stole emails, voicemails, and donor data, timing the release at the worst moments for the Democrats.

Cyber investigators noticed important things about the hacks, Nance explains. First, the complex patterns and tools pointed not to amateurs, but to state-sponsored actors, based on past history and other electronic “fingerprints.”

Second, from this evidence, the prime suspects immediately became two Russian-sponsored hacking groups, FANCY BEAR and COZY BEAR (collectively called CYBER BEARS).

And third, while most hacks collect and hoard stolen information, these hacks made the data public. Based on the evidence, the investigators thus developed a theory: Russia was trying to influence the election against Hillary Clinton and in favor of Donald Trump, who supported policies in line with Russia’s geopolitical agenda.

In this era of wild conspiracy theories, it helps to examine Malcolm Nance’s credibility before going further. Nance is a career Naval intelligence officer with expertise in counterterrorism and national security, and he has already shown his deep knowledge of similar matters in his books, The Terrorists of Iraq and Defeating Isis.

Starting his intelligence career as a Russian language interpreter, Nance studied the Soviet Union intensely, especially its espionage arm, the KGB. He also learned Arabic and spent many years tracking both Russian-connected states and terrorist groups in the Middle East. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Nance closely observed as the KGB transitioned into the FSB (Russia’s office of State Security) and created a new kind of “hybrid” intelligence—a tight mix of covert cyber, political, and psychological operations.

Nance is thus the ideal investigator to write The Plot to Hack America and to help Americans sort out “what’s known, what’s suspected, and what it all means” regarding the hacks and associated actions, as well as considering the likely danger that similar or worse attacks might occur in the future.

After the DNC hacks and information dumps, massive investigations were begun by civilian, U.S., and NATO nations. Some politicians were still telling American voters that this was no big deal and that you can never know where a hack comes from—maybe from a hostile power, maybe from a 400-pound guy in a bed in New Jersey.

But as Nance explains in great detail, you can trace the origin of a hack. There are many methods of tracking down the source, and Nance outlines the process, letting readers in on important methods of cyber and human intelligence, such as:

1. comparing the hack or other event with every similar occurrence in related history to see if it reveals patterns used by particular spies or spy agencies. Nance dissects the typical patterns of Russian hacking and other aggressive interference, its methods as well as its targets—which are always nations, entities, or individuals that oppose Russian objectives or that are direct targets of Russian aggression.

2. using common sense to consider the context of the covert intrusion, especially looking for possible hostile intentions and for coincidences, such as: Why did only Democratic information get released and why at especially crucial and damaging times?

3. and, perhaps most importantly, and least known to the average person, analyzing metadata, the wide range of electronic traces left behind by hackers and leading back to the source, both by electronic tracing and by specific formats or “fingerprints” of known actors. For example, one cyber investigative organization hired by the DNC implanted analytical software into the hacked servers and was thus able to trace the intruders’ methods of entry as well as their pathways and source.

Nance goes deeply into this topic of cyber sleuthing, giving the lay reader an education in methods of cyber hacking and detection. In the process, Nance adds numerous valuable terms (and related warnings) to readers’ vocabularies, such as typosquatters, watering holes, and timestamps.

In the case of the DNC hack, all indicators showed patterns that were recognizable to just about every intelligence officer, and it all continued to point to the Russian-sponsored CYBER BEARS.

But back to the analysis of coincidences. Was it a coincidence that all the information that was hacked and revealed damaged Hillary Clinton and was helpful to Donald Trump? To explain that “coincidence,” Nance digs deeply into the histories and personalities of Putin and Trump.

A telling phrase Nance uses to describe Putin is “Once KGB, always KGB.” One great skill Putin learned in his KGB tenure was how to turn people against their own country and into spies, witting or unwitting, for the Soviets. He learned to play on their deepest passions needs, desires. He could attack their vulnerabilities, such as by showering a vain, insecure person with flattery. One KGB defector has described these prime targets as: “Ego-centric people who lack moral principles—who are either too greedy or who suffer from exaggerated self importance.”

Putin could also blackmail his targets with a technique the Russians call Kompromat (compromising material), using embarrassing or compromising information, real or fabricated, to stifle enemies, to recruit Russian agents, or at least to turn individuals into Russian sympathizers.

Nance traces Putin’s career from junior KGB officer to the presidency of Russia. He describes a career of “dark arts,” such as blackmail, murder, gangsterism, and a resulting lucrative position in Russia’s growing wealthy oligarchy. As his political power and his wealth grew, Nance explains, Putin’s political agenda developed—a desire to increase Russia’s power and wealth against an economically crippled and isolationist United States under pro-Russian leadership.

This, according to Nance, is where Donald Trump enters the picture.

“If there were ever a candidate for recruitment by a hostile intelligence agency, then Trump would be moved to the head of the class,” or so suggests Nance. Trump had been visiting Russia since 1987 seeking business deals and favor among the nation’s wealthy elite he so admired. He proudly stated after one meeting that “almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.”

After Trump’s many well-documented bankruptcies, Nance explains, he turned to Russian sources—including criminal ones—for financing of his projects. Meanwhile he developed a great affinity for Putin and the nation of Russia.

Nance, the experienced spymaster, has little doubt that Putin saw Trump as an asset to be developed, even though the recruitment might be unrecognized by Trump himself. Nance believes that Putin and his associates would have steered Trump toward political positions sympathetic to Russia, while likely persuading Trump that these were his own ideas.

Nance goes on to discuss the powerful pro-Russian ties of many of Trump’s closest associates, including Paul Manafort, Howard Lorber, Carter Page, Richard Burt, Dimitri Simes, Michael Caputo, and perhaps most importantly, General Michael Flynn (Trump’s subsequent choice for national security advisor), who went from forced resignation as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency to being a contributor for the Kremlin-controlled television propaganda outlet Russia Today.

Of this group of Trump associates, or “the Kremlin Crew,” as he calls it, Nance puts forth a powerful and informed opinion:

“The revelations of the Kremlin Crew’s proximity to Moscow are stunning in their depth. They reveal how easily some Americans will accept money to work against their national interests. . . . Such riches would surely be issued with invisible strings, allowing the FSB to gain access to the highest-level players in a new American administration.”

But how could Putin bring to power this new, pro-Russian American administration led by his potential asset, Donald Trump? Nance explains that Putin would have needed to put together a massive operation of Russia’s trademark hybrid intelligence operations, quite similar to those he used to destabilize the Baltic states—“an ever-shifting melange of media propaganda, cyber warfare, and touches of military adventurism,” a mix that Americans may see as quite familiar in retrospect, and one that many intelligence officials quickly saw through at the time.

Summing up his analysis of Putin’s history, motives, and capabilities, Nance concludes that Putin:

“sees the election of Donald Trump as the fastest way to destabilize the United States and damage its economy as well as fracture both the European Union and NATO [in order to end NATO’s obstruction of Russian aggression in Eastern Europe]. These events . . . would allow Russia to become the strongest of the world’s three superpowers and reorder the globe with a dominant Russia at the helm.”

Nance lays out numerous other objectives of Russia’s hybrid attack on the U.S. election, such as the need to discredit Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and to disseminate the damaging information in a way that hid its Russian origins. Conveniently, Russia was able to use WikiLeaks and its own fake source, Guccifer 2.0, to “launder” the public disclosures.

The results of the 2016 presidential election are now history, although its dramatic and unprecedented story continues to unfold. It can be left to the reader to develop an opinion of the extent to which the Russian operations affected the election’s outcome, as well as opinions about what the cyber-hacking campaign means to U.S.-Russian relations and how the U.S. should respond.

In his final chapter “Cyberwar to Defend Democracy,” Nance provides his own conclusions, ones that are quite dire and alarming and that he believes all Americans on both sides of the aisle must take gravely seriously.

Nance insists that the U.S. was attacked by Russian “cyber commandos” in a “serious act of political warfare,” in an attempt to remove faith in American institutions.” And, Nance fears, “they have achieved this goal.”

Nance also believes (and remember, he was writing before the election) that the Russian campaign has created a leader and a group of followers with “deep admiration” of the murderous and authoritarian Russian political system. And he believes that these individuals have been won over “to further their own financial interests at the behest of a hostile government.”

In a particularly dramatic statement, Nance states that, by their choices, actions, and statements, “Trump and Pence chose Russia’s values over America’s.”

Nance continues his dire pronouncements, predictions, and warnings, related to the Russian campaign—all of which he insists Americans must heed. For example:

“It has been said that this election would spell the rise of American fascism and the end of the two-century long run of American democratic governance. It may be worse than that . . ."

Remember, Nance is not a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, nor is he a purveyor of fake news. He is a patriot and a highly experienced and respected intelligence expert bringing to bear his own deep and extensive knowledge and conclusions in perhaps one of the most important developments in American history. He surely feels it essential for the American people to give deep, serious consideration to the information and guidance he offers.

And<< this review wholly agrees with the importance of heeding and taking deadly seriously what Nance says>> in The Plot to Hack America,<< no matter what one may believe.>>

Lastly, does Nance suspect that Trump and his followers are actually witting allies of Putin—actual Russian plants inside the U.S. government, reminiscent of the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate? Does he believe that Trump is guilty of treason? If this were a political thriller, giving away those details would be called spoilers. But this is not a fictional thriller—it is all too painfully real. To get answers to these final questions, the reader should pick up and read The Plot to Hack America.

Michael Lipkin has been a writer and editor in educational publishing for more than 35 years, specializing in history, government, economics, geography, and other subjects. He has worked on staff for two top-five publishers and has been a freelancer for just about every major educational publisher and numerous smaller independent companies.

BOOK REVIEWS: “THE DARKENING WEB: THE WAR FOR CYBERSPACE AND “THE PLOT TO HACK AMERICA”
Review of Two Books: “The Darkening Web: The War for Cyberspace and

“The Plot to Hack America”

© Hazel Henderson 2017

The Darkening Web: The War for Cyberspace by Alexander Klimburg, Penguin Press, (2017)

The Plot To Hack America by Malcolm Nance, Skyhorse Publishing (2016)

In The Darkening Web, author Alexander Klimburg, Program Director of The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies; former Fellow of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, advisor to NATO, the European Union (EU) and international policy groups introduces us to the new world of information warfare and the current fight over the governance of the Internet. He traces its early days from the US government’s ARPANET to its ICANN board of volunteer computer pioneers and its unusually cooperative, trust-based development into the still-open global platform. Today the Internet undergirds our financial systems, commerce, national defense, security, government agencies, as well as innovations of Silicon Valley’s social media giants: Facebook (FB), Twitter (TWTR), Google (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT) and the FINTECH 100. We examined some of these issues in our TV program “The Future of the Internet”.

Klimburg goes beyond the worries we explored regarding the Internet’s vulnerability and fragility, its commercial over-exploitation of this taxpayer-developed asset, and warns on the institutional frailty of today’s Internet, still US-based, which is an open, multi-stakeholder, neutrally accessible platform for sharing information. Today, we are becoming aware that Russia sees the evolution of computers, communications, cybernetics and the Internet as instruments of political control, both internally and in global conflict and information cyber warfare.

We all now learn of “network effects” in aggregating power, visible in the social media dominators mentioned above and now being examined as they outclass every other form of mainstream media worldwide. We see the evidence of Russia’s strategies of using all forms of media to serve its national purpose of weakening the USA, sowing further divisions, racial animosities, aligning with the Trump campaign slogans and how weaponizing hacked information succeeded in the 2016 election.

Klimburg examines the evolution of Russia’s goal after the humiliation of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Putin’s domestically popular project of undermining democracies globally, intervening in Georgia, the Ukraine, Crimea, Syria while weakening NATO and the EU, backing right wing insurgents in Britain, France, Germany, Austria—all to restore the global respect for his vision of Russia as a global power. Klimburg quotes a top Russian intelligence official Valery Gerasimov in a 1997 paper “Invisible Drawnout War” quoting Lenin, who inverted Clausewitz‘s maxim “War is the continuation of politics by other means” into the Leninist view: “Politics is the continuation of war by other means”. Today, Russia’s information warfare is much cheaper and more efficient than using military hardware, and is much less perceptible and demonstrably successful.

All this is becoming clearer, as US Congressional committees grill executives of Facebook, Twitter and Google and how the Russians weaponized their platforms in the 2016 election. These Silicon Valley darlings were unprepared, missed their weaknesses and vulnerabilities, inadequate algorithms, and lack of oversight of the millions of Russian accounts, (many paid in rubles!), hackers and “bots” that ran fake news and advertising that reached 126 million US viewers. Google has still to take down RT, Russia’s primary global propaganda channel, which is carried on YouTube to a large audience of gullible US viewers! Clearly, these internet-based giants will henceforth be treated as “publishers” with responsibility for the content they propagate and the truthfulness and sponsors of their advertising. There is talk of breaking up these dominant social media companies, or regulating them as public utilities. Many proposals for how they need to change their business models and not sell their “Big data” on all their users’ information to marketers, insurance companies and other firms, as I have discussed in my editorials.

In The Plot to Hack America, Malcolm Nance, US counter-intelligence expert and author of the best-seller Defeating ISIS (2016) foretold in amazingly accurate detail all today’s news unfolding on the Russian effort to discredit Hillary Clinton. He describes how Putin, who dislikes Clinton, managed with his money and oligarch friends to charm Donald Trump into their fold. Nance details Trump’s trips to Moscow since the 1980s, his efforts to build a Trump tower there, his real estate deals with Russian investors, as US bankers refused more loans after Trump’s serial bankruptcies. All this is now revealed daily by US Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and indictments.

If you had read this book as I did in November 2016 after Trump’s surprising, even to him, election, you would have known all this and all the characters now appearing who were in the Trump orbit and campaign: Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Richard Gates, Michael Flynn, as well as the names of all the Russian and US-based mobsters with whom they and Trump consorted. You would have known that Robert Mercer, head of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, was Trump’s major backer, as well as funding Cambridge Analytica, used by Jared Kushner to target US voting groups, Breitbart’s website, Steve Bannon, Steven Miller, Kellyanne Conway and no doubt, others.

Thanks to the hero of the day, Malcolm Nance, we all now see where Mueller’s investigation is going and how its widening net includes interviewing White House insiders and Trump’s family members. The end game will likely include taking sworn testimony from the current Attorney General, Jefferson Sessions, a top Trump campaign surrogate, Vice President Michael Pence and perhaps the president himself. The USA is heading for turbulent times, if not a constitutional crisis of Watergate dimensions.

By reading this book, at the urging of some of my key European advisors, I was forewarned of exactly how the Internet and all our media would be used by the Kremlin hackers to exploit the gullibility of US voters, so as to create today’s confusion and further divisions in our society. We supported efforts to get the obsolete Electoral College to follow the voters’ almost 3 million votes for Hillary. We found that this group, which Hamilton though would be wise leaders who could prevent the election and a demagogue, instead were mostly insiders lined up behind Trump.

Just as Nance explained, our US standing in the world would be diminished by Trump’s withdrawal from international accords, his following of Bannon’s white supremacy promoted on Breitbart, as well as the false narrative of “nativism” in the geography of the North American continent, where the only natives are tribal peoples, some 9 million of whom populated this continent at the time of the arrival of Columbus in 1492. Unfortunately, Bannon still has Trump’s ear and calls him regularly.

China has now emerged as the world’s leading power as Trump further abdicated the USA’s former global leadership role. The Economist’s cover story “A Tsar Is Born” (Nov 3, 2017) describes what Malcolm Nance foretold in his book. The Kremlin Playbook report of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at Johns Hopkins University (2016) tells the same story: ” Vladimir Putin has a playbook that has worked for him two or three times and he will continue to use it”. Meanwhile, the struggle over who will control the Internet continues at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a United Nations agency, the venue where all the info-wars will play out in the next years. These two books will keep investors like me and aware asset allocators up to speed on these unfolding events.

*****

REVIEW: ‘The Plot to Hack America,’ the untold war on American soil
By Dook Snyder Sunday, Jul 8, 2018 Viewpoints 2
The Plot To Hack America
By Malcolm Nance
Skyhorse Publishing
New York, NY 10018
2016

Spencer Ackerman of the UK Guardian sets the stage for “The Plot To Hack America” by Malcolm Nance: “The 2016 presidential election was already surreal – a former reality TV host fueled by white backlash had completed a hostile takeover of the Republican Party — before the bears emerged.”

The “bears,” intel-speak for the Russians and their hackers, harkens back to the glory days of the Cold War when J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy and enthusiastic Republicans searched beneath the beds of progressives for evidence they might be Reds.

This is irony times a hundred for those of you watching Republicans like Jim Jordan, Trey Gowdy and Devin Nunes doing Trump and Putin’s dirty work by impugning the FBI and the Department of Justice and hoping to find sensitive sources to out to FOX News.

Ackerman acknowledges a fundamental political truth few admit: “[the] leaks showed the Democrats’ political apparatus to be petty, vindictive and determined to anoint Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee despite grassroots enthusiasm for challenger Bernie Sanders.”

I have read several of the recent Russia/2016 books but Nance, a self-described “old spy and codebreaker,” better than anyone else goes beneath the surface waters of the politics to analyze the Russian assault from the perspective of intelligence officers. Some “come from the Human Intelligence world, where they learn to read, manipulate, and distrust everyone in order to ‘social engineer’ intelligence from people who do not want to give them anything. Others are forged in the signals intelligence world, where all data is just a massive electronic puzzle to be constantly analyzed, turned over, and fused together into an exploitable product, or into a final code to be decrypted or broken. Some, like myself, come from both worlds, and are at turns analytical and skeptical of seemingly obvious information. This hybrid mindview doesn’t approach the world as streams of linear data; it attempts to analyze information like a constantly flowing game of three-dimensional chess.”

“The Plot to Hack America” was written during the campaign. Its insight into what was happening is chilling and instructive. So much sooner than the political analysts or the voters, Nance saw the Russians effectively working to destabilize our political process.

Malcolm Nance

At Naval Intelligence, Nance “spent decades watching the Russian client states of Libya, Syria, Iraq, as well as their ties to European terrorist groups Red Army Faction, Action Direct, the Irish Republican Army, and the Combatant Communist Cells. No matter what my target was, the KGB cast a shadow across every spectrum of my operations.”

The Russian connections to Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates rang familiar bells for Nance. The Russian operation to compromise the 2016 election was multifaceted, and included a complex and sophisticated digital operation coordinated by “the FSB and its sister the GRU – Russia’s national and military intelligence bureaus … [and] a conglomeration of cyber spying groups codenamed CYBER BEARS.”

All a part of Russia’s Kompromat: “political warfare by using cyber assets to personally attack and neutralize political opponents … Russia has attacked Estonia, the Ukraine, and Western nations using just these cyber warfare methods. At some point Russia apparently decided to apply these tactics against the United States and so American democracy itself was hacked.”

As for Donald Trump, Nance tells us: “Whether he knew it or not Trump was the perfect candidate for a political asset. Former KGB officer Yuri Bezmenov said the KGB targeted ‘Ego-centric people who lack moral principles – who are either too greedy or who suffer from exaggerated self-importance. These are the people the KGB wants and finds easiest to recruit.’”

“The Plot to Hack America” is a detailed breakdown of pretty much everything the Russians were doing behind the scenes to interfere with and influence our election on behalf of Donald Trump. Unlike Nixon’s Watergate burglary of the Democratic headquarters, the 2016 Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee “was the exact same operation. However, this time … the burglars would not be caught wearing latex gloves and planting microphones. They would copy the information in a matter of seconds, their digital fingerprints would emerge long after the break-in, and discovery would occur well after the damage had been done to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign …

“The hackers took all manner of electronic information, particularly emails related to the internal conversations of the individual staff members, deliberations of the senior leadership, and internal correspondence. Additionally, Excel spreadsheets with donor information, contact lists… However, the true treasure from this intrusion was a single file folder of the opposition research on the likely Republican opponent in the U.S. Presidential elections, Donald J. Trump … On June 15, the website Gawker published the entirety of … opposition files on Trump.”

Nance offers a fascinating look at the twisted path some of this purloined material took from the digital darkness into the light of day: “One of the most surprising events after the announcement of the DNC hack occurred a few weeks later in conservative media. During Fox News’ May 9, 2016 show, The Megan File, contributor Andrew Napolitano made an amazing statement to host Megan Kelly about the hacks. Napolitano claimed to have confidential information about what was going on at the highest levels of decision-making at the Kremlin, SVR (Russia’s foreign intelligence service), and Putin’s inner circle, saying ‘there’s a debate going on in the Kremlin between the Foreign Ministry and the Intelligence Services about whether they should release the twenty thousand of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that they have hacked into and received and stored. All of this is happening at once.’ Taken in the context of what we now know, it begs the question, how did Napolitano come upon this incredibly specific information?”

At top of the Russian pyramid sits Vladimir Putin. Putin spent years honing the various skills of spycraft. “From 1985–1990 Putin was assigned to … the KGB offices in Dresden … There he ran East German academics and businessmen across the Iron Curtain and helped them spy or recruit sympathetic West Germans for the KGB. Most interestingly, he used agents with the East German computer company Robotron as cover stories for agents to steal computer technology secrets from the West with the help of the East German secret police, the Stasi. Putin’s pattern of theft using advanced information systems would come up again and again in his future …”

As the Soviet Empire began to crumble, Putin left the KGB in August 1991 for politics. As deputy mayor “it was Putin’s job to liquidate Soviet assets and real estate in St. Petersburg and control the buying of foodstuffs and assets for a population that was just feeling freedom for the first time in seventy years. His position brought in billions of dollars to the mayor and his friends … Needless to say this job required the toughness and guile of a former spy, but it also showed him how to work the new class of oligarchs that would make money hand over fist.”

MOSCOW, RUSSIA: Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, chats with the first President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, left, during a State reception in the Kremlin in 2001. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Putin kept himself close to President Boris Yeltsin and it paid off: “In 1998 he became Director of the FSB, the Office of State Security, now centralizing all power both foreign and domestic. In August 1999 Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin to the office of Prime Minister and the Duma approved his appointment shortly thereafter.”

The consequences were critical and immediate: “Once he was appointed Prime Minister he would find a reason to quickly launch a second brutal war in Chechnya that would eventually kill over fifty thousand people … When Putin hit the stumps and came out as a pit bull on a Russian nationalist platform against terrorism, he rose in popularity. When Yeltsin resigned the Presidency, Putin became President in accordance with the Russian constitution.”

I wasn’t fully aware of the FSB’s penchant for U.S. real estate. According to Nance: “From the end of the Soviet Union to the rise of the oligarchs, Russian state money has been buying property and making real estate deals all over the United States. It was a flush market for Russians and a good place to hide illicit cash. Real estate was the perfect investment instrument for the FSB to also introduce its officers into the United States.”

Nance tells us the Miss Universe Pageant of 2013, facilitated by Russian oligarch Agalarov whose new facility was the perfect venue, was not the first trip Donald Trump took in search of prime real estate and expanding his brand to Russia: “Long before the pageant, in 1987 Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin convinced Trump to visit Moscow and St. Petersburg to develop a Trump Tower for Russia. Trump went on an exploratory trip but the business and construction conditions were not optimal for him to take advantage of the Soviets or make a profit. He returned home without any projects in hand …”

“I have always been interested in building in Russia,” Trump told the New York Post after returning from Miss Universe in 2013. Proud that “almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.” … “The Russian market is attracted to me,” Trump said. Upon returning to the United States, Trump gave his experience in Russia glowing reviews. “I just got back from Russia—learned lots & lots,” Trump tweeted upon his return to the U.S. “Moscow is a very interesting and amazing place! U.S. MUST BE VERY SMART AND VERY STRATEGIC.”

Nance adds new information: “When Trump met with the Agalarovs in November 2013, Alex Sapir and Rotem Rosen were also in attendance. The Russian developers helped construct the Trump Soho hotel and condominium project in Manhattan. Sapir’s father was alleged to have had close ties to ex-KGB officers … Sapir told New York’s Real Estate Weekly that Russian visitors to the Trump Soho ‘have been telling us they wish there was something modern and hip like it in Moscow … A lot of people from the oil and gas businesses have come to us asking to be partners in building a product like Trump Soho there.’

Vladimir Putin and DOnald Trump

Nance offers a portrait of a willing subject. Trump told Fox News in May 2016, “I know Russia well,” Trump said. “I had a major event in Russia two or three years ago, which was a big, big incredible event.” Trump declined to say whether he had met Putin, but added: “I got to meet a lot of people. And you know what? They want to be friendly with the United States. Wouldn’t it be nice if we actually got along with somebody?”

Wouldn’t it be nice? Positively. Absolutely. Except, as Nance reminds us: “The man Trump so enamored, whom Trump was so desperate to meet and impress was not just the ruler of Russia. He was a man steeped in the most dangerous of experiences—he was a master of espionage and an expert at manipulation and exploitation. He could do to Donald Trump what he did to the oligarchy of Russia; make him or break him with a single sentence of approval or insult. Trump, knowing he was culling favor with a powerful man—he had nuclear weapons and beautiful women—responded with obsequiousness that must have pleased such a spy king. Putin must have recognized this showman as a target who could be developed into a political asset friendly to Russia.”

I am reminded how quickly reality takes a major seat backwards to fantasy when Trump desires something. The Kim Jong Un who tortured Otto Warmbier to death because he tried to take a North Korean poster back with him to the States becomes a trusted partner, a strong ruler envied by our president because Kim’s state-owned TV flatters him with constancy, whose people sit at attention for him lest they die. Admired because, as President Trump said: “when you take over a country, tough country, with tough people, and you take it over from your father, I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have … If you can do that at 27 years old, I mean that’s one in 10,000 that could do that. So he’s a very smart guy, he’s a great negotiator. But I think we understand each other.”

But recent reports by NBC, the Washington Post and a Wall Street Journal editorial note that, despite President Trump’s pronouncements on Twitter that Americans can now sleep easy because “there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea,” in fact, “New satellite photos show that Kim Jong Un is continuing to develop his nuclear weapons program, and U.S. intelligence sources say they believe North Korea has increased its production of nuclear fuel at multiple sites. This wasn’t supposed to happen after the Donald Trump-Kim summit last month in Singapore.”

One man’s ceaseless narcissism, ego and unwillingness to study history makes him another man’s perfect target. Nance writes: “If Putin were to consult the spy-handling experts at the FSB … he would not be hard pressed to find a more suitable candidate that shared his values and could ‘Make America Great Again.’”

Nance shares Kremlin spy craft: “A defector from the KGB, Yuri Bezmenov, gave a series of lectures on KGB recruitment strategies … Bezmenov said: ‘My KGB instructors specifically made a point. Never border with leftists. Forget about these political prostitutes. Aim higher. Try to get into wide circulation, established conservative media. The rich. Filthy rich movie makers. Intellectuals. So-called academic circles. Cynical egocentric people who can look into your eyes with an angelic expression and tell you a lie … Flatter the vain, cash to the indebted gambler, adventure for the thrill junkie, sex for the hideous; it is the officer’s job to size up the potential subject and make him or her eager to work for the officer …”

Nance notes this is not all that different from the U.S. playbook: “The U.S. government uses a system called MICE. It is an acronym used by the CIA which stands for Money, Ideology, Coercion (or Compromise), and Ego or Excitement …”

Nance is convinced Trump was/is an easy mark: “At almost every turn, his ‘bromance’ with Putin would potentially stand on a foundation of his desire for their riches, and to be universally recognized as a man of substance and stature. It would cost Russia nothing to entertain his desires while furthering their own … Putin would want Trump to feel as if he is truly qualified to be President, over the opposition of his American detractors who ridicule Trump as not being remotely qualified … Putin’s strategically-placed endorsement of December 2015 is a classic example of a ‘hands-off but actually hands-on’ supporting statement to make the asset feel special. On Trump, Putin said: ‘[Trump] wants to move to another level of relations, a closer, deeper level of relations with Russia … How can we not welcome this? Of course, we welcome this … He is a bright and talented person without any doubt. He is the absolute leader of the presidential race …”

Nance moves from broad strokes to details: “One of Trump’s most troubling intelligence connections was to the Bayrock Group. Trump first aligned with them to build a hotel in Moscow in 2005. When that didn’t happen, he partnered with them to build the Trump SoHo. Bayrock was chaired by Tevfik Arif, originally a Soviet Union commerce apparatchik from Kazakhstan, who worked to introduce Trump to Russian investors. Trump saw it as a chance to open Trump Hotels and Towers in Moscow, Kiev, Warsaw, and Istanbul.

“Felix Satter also worked for Bayrock.” [While Nance spells his name “Satter” many others prefer “Sater”] “He has been implicated in ties with Russian Mafia. Satter is also known for ‘using mob-like tactics to achieve his goals,’ and was convicted of a stock fraud scheme. Satter made arrangements with Trump to develop projects in Russia and the U.S. He bragged in 2008 testimony, ‘I can build a Trump Tower, because of my relationship with Trump.’

The president who once claimed George Papadopoulos was a coffee boy and that Paul Manafort was hardly involved in the 2016 campaign seems not to have known Felix Sater, even though Sater was using business cards claiming he was a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump.”

Left to right: Paula Manafort, Roger Stone and Lee Atwater in 1985. Photo: Harry Naltchayan/Washington Post/Getty

Manafort looms large in Nance’s story: “Once Trump took on the Presidential campaign he also managed to acquire the most controversial of all the Putin-associated characters: Paul Manafort … Manafort was known as the leader of the ‘Torturer’s lobby’ while working for the law firm of Black, Manafort Stone & Kelly. They represented some of the worst dictators in the world including Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, the Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos, and the brutal Angolan warlord Jonas Savimbi. Manafort has also been an advisor to the Trump kingdom since the mid-1980s …

“In 2005, Manafort was working for mining tycoon Rinat Akhemetov along with Manafort partner Rick Gates, Konstantin Kilimnik, and the ‘International Republican Institute’ of Moscow. Manafort represented Dmytro Firtash, a gas ‘tycoon’ who is wanted by the U.S. Manafort was also named as a defendant in a civil racketeering case with Firtash … According to U.S. Ambassador William Taylor, in cables released by Wikileaks, Firtash admitted having ties to Seymon Mogilevich, an organized crime boss in Russia.”

Notably “on August 17, 2016, the London Times released a bombshell report from Ukrainian prosecutors that Manafort had been paid by pro-Russian parties in the Ukraine to organize anti-NATO protests in Crimea, leading to the withdrawal of forces for a planned NATO exercise.”

We’ve learned since “The Plot to Hack America” from an exclusive AP report of July 2, 2018, that Manafort and Kilimnik might have been acting to advance Russia’s interests much earlier than imagined: “internal memos and other business records obtained by the AP … include a rare 2006 photograph of Kilimnik, a Ukrainian native, in an office setting with Manafort and other key players in Manafort’s consulting firm at the time … More than a decade before Russia was accused of surreptitiously trying to tilt the presidential election toward Trump, Manafort and Kilimnik pondered the risks to Russia if the country did not hone its efforts to influence global politics, the records show.

“The West is just a little more skillful at playing the modern game, where perception by the world public opinion and the spin is more important than what is actually going on,” Kilimnik wrote to Manafort in a December 2004 memo analyzing Russia’s bungled efforts to manipulate political events in former Soviet states. “Russia is ultimately going to lose if they do not learn how to play this game.” (Emphasis added.)

There’s Michael Caputo who “lived in Russia in the post Soviet 1990s. Caputo worked for Gazprom Media, and has done work under contract to improve Vladimir Putin’s image. He took on the role of Trump’s adviser for the New York primary in 2016.”

And, of course, there’s Gen. Michael Flynn. Nance concludes: “The revelations of the Kremlin Crew’s proximity to Putin and Moscow are stunning in their depth. They reveal how easily some Americans will accept money to work against their own national interest whether in business, government, or propaganda … Such riches would surely be issued with invisible strings, allowing the FSB to gain access to the highest level players in a new American administration.

“These pro-Russian players apparently were so close to Trump that they … would also be able to advance Russia’s objectives, desires, and activities—fully in-line with their own personal fortunes—above America’s interests, with the full force of the Oval Office.”

So how would Putin do this? Nance explains: “He would need to create an operational organization that would manage the U.S. elections … Hybrid war is an ever-shifting mélange of media propaganda, cyberwarfare, and touches of military adventurism that could help elect Trump and lead to the break-up of the European Union and NATO. Putin’s vision would be to use the sycophant Trump as President to subordinate America to the role of junior partner to a rising Russia.” (Emphasis added.)

With Kompromat, “blackmail can be applied, embarrassment can stifle activism, and words or images can defame those in power and limit their ability to respond to threats or even warfare … This can include both real and fabricated information, but it is always applied judiciously and maliciously … the FSB would be tasked to plan a cyberspace-based strategic political warfare operation to influence the U.S. elections though the theft of emails and materials from the Democratic party and make selective releases through a third party surrogate, called a cutout, that does not know or care that the source is the FSB.”

Nance notes: “A political and cyber mission of this magnitude would require every component of the Russian cyber and intelligence arsenal … Trump would need to first feel at home with Russia. The runway for this approach would require the first word of the MICE recruitment strategy be dangled before his eyes, and to which he was particularly susceptible: Money. The FSB could easily arrange for a billionaire wanting to earn money in Russia to meet the Kremlin’s own multi-billionaires …”

Nance tells us because there was “no greater threat” to Putin’s political agenda than Hillary Clinton, “the objectives of LUCKY-7 would be to focus all efforts of the Russian cyberwarfare information operations directorates to damage her election by stealing as much internal information as possible and smacking her with a full scale Kompromat operation.”

Nance offers examples of how the U.S.-Russia relationship would improve with Trump. Regarding the Russian seizure of Crimea: “Trump was having none of it. As far as he was concerned, if the policy affected Russia, and was implemented by President Obama—or any President since 1947 for that matter—then he wanted to be rid of it. Trump gave the New York Times a wide-ranging interview in which he remarked that he saw a major change for the seventy-year old NATO alliance. He said that if Russia attacked any NATO nation, he would first consult and determine if they had ‘fulfilled their obligations to us’ before coming to their aid. Trump set forth a policy of extortion never before heard or seen in American politics: ‘… if we are not going to be reasonably reimbursed for the tremendous cost of protecting these massive nations with tremendous wealth . . .Then yes, I would be absolutely prepared to tell those countries, “Congratulations, you will be defending yourself …”

Nance outlines the phases of the Lucky-7 campaign and quickly suggests, “The right man was running for President, he was managed by a close ally, and his foreign policy/intelligence chief was literally on the Kremlin Payroll of Russia Today.”

PHASE 1: Make Contact, Befriend, and Encourage the Asset
PHASE 2: Make Asset Feel Indebted to Russia
PHASE 3: Conduct Covert Cyber-Intelligence Preparation of the Battle Space
PHASE 4: Prepare the Political Battle Space
PHASE 5: Develop and Sustain Supporting Political/Propaganda
PHASE 6: Fund and Manipulate a Cut-Out Asset to Disperse Kompromat information.
PHASE 7: Execute Kompromat Operations

So Nance tells us: “Phases 1 through 4 had already been put in place. Phase 5 would be the easiest. By using Russia Today TV to blast Hillary Clinton on an international scale and tacitly express support for Trump, Putin has been able to get Donald to tout his connections to Russia as a positive for America. To his followers, Trump has successfully spun the line that ‘Putin respects me and would work with me, he won’t work with Hilary,’ and they love it.”

What was next? Nance writes: “The FSB CYBER BEARS strategy was to steal critical political intelligence data from all wings of the U.S. Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Hillary Clinton Campaign, and donors and supporters … Winning battles in Cyberspace are a matter of influencing the global perception thought output of “opinions” and “voices” to “trend” a perception that the producer wishes. Whether it’s the number of hits on the latest trending kitty playing with yarn video or the location of a Pokémon GO character, if an organization with a large enough computing system and secret operatives so wishes they can steal, smear, influence and quite possibly select a U.S. President with little pushback from the media. This is apparently the terminal mission objective of Operation Lucky-7: Direct the CYBER BEARS to collect enough damaging information on Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Democratic Party to damage them in the mind of the American public.”

Remember Donald Trump’s deflection, “It could have been Russia or maybe China … or someone sitting on their bed weighing 400 pounds.” Nance explains: “Russian intelligence … needed its own “legend” – espionage terminology for a false backstory to protect the identities of the case officers. The Cyberspies decided to create their own legend and to honor a hacker that was already well known: Guccifer.”

Nance takes us into technical territory with his detailed description of Putin’s bevy of Cyber Bears: Fancy Bear, Cozy Bear, Venomous Bear, Criminal Bear and Militia Bears and their hacking efforts called Advanced Persistent Threats. Those of you knowledgeable, fascinated by the black hat/white hat world of cyber intrusion, of spearfishing and malware and eraser programs will appreciate a paragraph like this: “Like the nation-state actors, the Carbanak method of stealing financial data exploits malware with a backdoor that replicates itself as “svhost.exe” before it connects to a command-and-control server to download more files and begin probing for more vulnerabilities. The APT can then download additional tools to take control over the infected computer, including keylogging, as well as capturing data from screen captures, microphones, and video cameras. Carbanak has even documented their operations in video form to evaluate the process and train others. The data that this group seeks to exfiltrate may go beyond financial information alone, but the primary goal has been to steal funds via fraudulent transactions.”

Over my head but the rest of you might be fascinated by this more accessible history: “In the height of the cold war, Russia learned to make the leap from manual intercept of printed media to the computer age well before the internet existed. Between 1978–1984 the KGB carried out an audacious electronic intelligence operation that preceded the CYBER BEARS antics. A select group of special technicians had intercepted a shipment of American IBM Selectric II and Selectric III electrical typewriters en route to the American embassy in Moscow and the US Consulate in St Petersburg. The KGB inserted devices called the Selectric Bug into sixteen of the typewriters. The special electrical device was embedded in a hollow aluminum bar that would capture the impact of the rotating print ball as it struck the paper. As a typist struck the keys, the bug would transmit each keystroke to a nearby listening post via a short-distance radio signal. The NSA countered this by deploying a special team to Moscow and inspected all of the Embassy’s computers, encoding machines and typewriters. Code named GUNMAN, the NSA team eventually found the bugs and replaced the typewriters with secure ones in secret. Still, the KGB’s early awareness of the advance in print technology led them to implement one of the very first keystroke detection systems before computers became commonplace. With this corporate knowledge in hand, the KGB was well ahead of the curve in intercept technology, an aptitude they would soon come to command in the computer age.”

Vladimir Putin

Remember how Special Counsel Mueller indicted 13 Russians connected with Putin’s Internet Research Agency? Nance connects some dots: “Several internet hoaxes spread on social media and caused panic in around the country in the fall and winter of 2014. The first came after an explosion at a Louisiana chemical plant in September, then later an Ebola outbreak, and a police shooting of an unarmed black woman in Atlanta in December. None of these events, however, actually happened … During the chemical plant hoax, for example, posts inundated social media, residents received frantic text messages, fake CNN screenshots went viral, and clone news sites appeared. In each instance, reporter Adrian Chen discovered, a Russian group known as The Internet Research Agency concocted the elaborate hoaxes … He wrote that the agency had become known for ‘employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters.’” (Emphasis added.)

Nance adds: “For Putin’s LUCKY-7 Operation to be successful, the CYBER BEARS teams would need a dissemination platform … This third party is known in intelligence parlance as a cutout … The FSB chose Julian Assange, a British citizen who is a vocal and vehement enemy of Hillary Clinton, and the founder of the online organization WikiLeaks.

“When WikiLeaks held off publication of the DNC emails until just before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks came under renewed criticism for having an agenda, for not being objective, and for straying from its original purpose … but tangible evidence of a real connection … were drawn in much starker relief when his relationship with the Russians grew closer. Powerful Russian financial backing has given RT the legitimacy of many international news agencies. They use it to pay American contrarians to appear on their RT America channel and offer an air of debate, frequently on Kremlin-directed themes. Not surprisingly, Assange hosted his own twelve-episode television show called The World Tomorrow, or simply, The Julian Assange Show. It ran from April to June 2012, airing from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

“But journalist Jochen Bittner observed in a New York Times op-ed: [I]t’s curious that one of the world’s most secretive governments has gotten a pass from WikiLeaks. Why, in all its time online, has WikiLeaks never revealed any Russian intelligence scandal? Because there is none? Or because Mr. Assange doesn’t want to embarrass Mr. Putin? …

“On July 22, 2016, a few days before the opening of the DNC, WikiLeaks published 19,252 emails alleged to be from the DNC hack. Operation LUCKY-7 was now fully underway … The emails revealed that DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman-Shultz … had been strongly favoring Hillary Clinton throughout the primary process … There was an email thread started on May 5, 2016, with the title ‘No shit’ in which Brad Marshall, the CFO for the DNC, allegedly suggests to get someone to ask Sanders what his beliefs are in order to portray him as an atheist. It read ‘My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.’”

Nance continues: “Julian Assange said that WikiLeaks actually timed the release of the leak to coincide with the start of the convention. ‘That’s when we knew there would be maximum interest by readers, but also, we have a responsibility to’ …The Assange friendly media joined in on the disinformation campaign against Clinton too. News articles abounded such as the Guardian’s headline ‘WikiLeaks Proves Primary Was Rigged: DNC Undermined Democracy.’

“Speaking to the American press conference when asked about the subject of hacking Trump brought up the private Hillary Clinton emails deleted from her server. Trump blurted out, ‘Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing . . . I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.’ Almost immediately a media storm shook the campaign and people wondered aloud if Trump was actually in league with the Kremlin. It made some wonder if the comments made by Fox News’s Andrew Napolitano in May – stating that Russia was engaged in an inter-Kremlin argument about whether to release Clinton’s hacked email – was tied to Trump’s call to release them. Did Team trump have advance knowledge of what the Kremlin was doing?

“This is the first time that a presidential candidate had openly asked a foreign power to meddle in the democratic process to his benefit. More than that, Mr. Trump seemed to be suggesting that Russia should violate United States espionage laws on his behalf. To members of the U.S. intelligence community, the indications that nefarious practitioners were playing in the most dangerous of games was now confirmed. The first question that popped into the minds of many practitioners was, “What does Trump know that we do not?” The implication would naturally cause counterintelligence and cyberwarfare operatives to ask themselves if there is there a link between Trump or his supporters and the Russians in the DNC hacks?

“The next day, after Trump’s begging Russia to hack America, the CYBER BEARS complied. On July 28, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced it was attacked by the CYBER BEARS … Overall, the CYBER BEARS, working in the guise of Guccifer 2.0, publically gave Trump and Clinton detractors illegally-obtained opposition research, without it being connected directly to Trump. As former FBI agent and security specialist Ali Soufan noted on Twitter, ‘The nature of breaches appears to be changing from covert info collection to the overt and weaponized use of that info.’

Nance concludes: “The 2016 cyber attack was … a direct attempt to hijack and derail the traditional processes and norms that held the United States together for more than 240 years … Until 2016 it was unthinkable that Americans could be assembled in mutual endeavor to manipulate the goodwill of the American people in order to further their own personal financial interest at the behest of a hostile government. But it appears to have not only happened, but even managed to completely usurp the stridently anti-Communist Republican party and replace it with a presidential nominee that openly lavishes praise on Russia’s leader, disparages NATO, and promises to dismantle America’s superiority in order to allow Russia to take the role of world’s superpower. The fact that Russia can smile, deny, and at the same time conduct cyber and propaganda operations and still have Donald Trump beg them for cyber espionage assistance to hurt another American is unbelievable … (Emphasis added.)

“On September 8, 2016, Trump gushed with admiration and at the same time insulted America’s President. He was quickly seconded by Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence who agreed, ‘I think it’s inarguable that Vladimir Putin has been a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country. . .’

Nance makes it absolutely clear how serious the stakes are for us: “By publically choosing a known, dangerous, and proven autocratic adversary who has murdered opponents, killed his own citizens, conducted acts of terrorism and has invaded and seized other nations in violation of global norms, Trump and Pence chose Russia’s values over America’s. It has been said that this election would spell the rise of fascism and end the two century long run of American democratic governance. It may be worse than that. The deliberate subornation of America’s interests over that of a hostile adversary has never before been suggested aloud in polite company in the history of this nation.”

We are used to the images of war: bombs and bullets and blood. But Nance knows what many Americans are unwilling to recognize. We are at war and this war is being fought on our land: “So complete is Russia’s control over its vast and profitable cybercrime and cyber propaganda campaigns that virtually no collateral damage ever lands within the Russians’ own border. This effect is amusingly referred to as the “Russian Cyber Force Field,” everything from making their malware exploit kits geo and language aware to manipulating malicious advertising campaigns, the Russians go to great lengths to keep their hands clean.

“The key to unraveling the objectives of LUCKY-7 is to accept that Russia is not an ally but is strategic opponent who views America’s standing as an obstacle to its own greatness. Should the chicanery of the 2016 election go without response, America would become target number one for Kompromat at even the lowest level elections. Future hacking and political releases would directly affect U.S. policy and could disable the processes that keep us safe.(Emphasis added.)

“The Russian use of cyber weapons to perform criminal acts and damage our electoral process was intended to remove faith in America itself … Due to their meddling, activities which were considered routine politics in America are now suspect. Politics itself is under fire, due to the combination of hacking and demagoguery.

“Though we have yet to see an actual disruption that matters in the lives of the average American citizen, one can be sure that it will come at a time where, once recognized, the only alternative to the attack may be a real war.”

These words were written before Trump’s attack on our traditional allies like Canada, his unnecessary and belligerent introduction of tariffs, his increasing attack on NATO partners, and his planned meeting with Putin.

Thanks to Malcolm Nance’s important “The Plot to Hack America,” we have been schooled and we have been warned.

________________________________________________________________

Additional sources:
“Trump says he wants ‘my people’ to sit at attention for him like people do for Kim Jong Un”
Kathryn Watson, CBS News, June 15, 2018
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-says-he-wants-my-people-to-sit-at-attention-for-him-like-people-do-for-kim-jong-un/

“North Korea working to conceal key aspects of its nuclear program, U.S. officials say”
Ellen Nakashima and Joby Warrick, June 30, 2018, Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/north-korea-working-to-conceal-key-aspects-of-its-nuclear-program-us-officials-say/2018/06/30/deba64fa-7c82-11e8-93cc-6d3beccdd7a3_story.html?

“Russian charged with Trump’s ex-campaign chief is key figure”
Jeff Horwitz, Maria Danilova, July 2, 2018, AP
https://apnews.com/f498ec3fec8c4100b5751beb3bf9b2d0/Russian-charged-with-Trump’s-ex-campaign-chief-is-key-figure

MORE BY DOOK SNYDER »

Book Review, Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities

Terrorist Recognition Handbook 344
Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday May 07, 2008 @02:36PM from the get-em-up-against-the-wall dept.
Ben Rothke writes
"There are two types of writers about terrorism, experts such as Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson who write from a distance and others that write graphic tales of first-hand from the trenches war stories. Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities, is unique in that author Malcolm Nance is a 20-year veteran of the U.S. intelligence community and writes from a first hand-perspective, but with the organization and methodology of writers such as Pipes and Emerson. Those combined traits make the book extraordinarily valuable and perhaps the definitive text on terrorist recognition."
Read below for the rest of Ben's review
Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities, Second Edition
author Malcolm Nance
pages 480
publisher CRC
rating 10
reviewer Ben Rothke
ISBN 978-1420071832
summary Perhaps the definitive text on terrorist recognition.
The main theme of the book, as detailed in chapter 1 is critical awareness. The book notes that criminal investigators spend years studying criminal behavior to better understand and counter crime. Nance writes that the field of terrorism is no different as it is a specialized subject that requires serious study and requires that those in the front line of defense be as knowledge as possible.

In a later chapter, Nance gives the Iraq war as an example of a group of leaders that were not as knowledge as possible and ignored the advice of those that were as knowledge as possible. Had the Bush administration consulted Nance, a trillion dollars and thousands of lives could have been saved in the Iraq debacle.

The book is divided into 5 sections comprising 21 heavily-detailed chapters. Each chapter is a progression in detailing, understanding and identifying terrorists. In chapter after chapter, the book details every aspect of terrorism and indentifies all of the various elements. The various aspects of different guns, explosives, and other elements are described and categorized in detail.

In the section on suicide bombers, an important point the book makes is that contrary to popular belief, suicide bombers are rarely insane. They are most often intelligent, rational individuals with beliefs that those in the West finds difficult to comprehend. Nance does not for a second rationalize the actions of such groups and individuals. But notes that it is critical to understand why they do it in order to prevent future attacks.

Chapter 8 is quite valuable in that it provides a comprehensive overview of how terrorist cells operate and are organized. While the cell is the fundamental unit of a terrorist group; cell operations and their members are the least understood part of terrorism. Their operations are always secret and never seen, until they attack. The chapter details the many types of terrorist cells, operative membership pools, and how cells and leadership communicate.

Chapter 19 is a fascinating primer on al-Qaeda and the global extremist insurgency. The chapter details how al-Qaeda divides its enemies into two categories: Far Enemies and Near Enemies. The terms are taken from the Islamic concept of the community and those who oppose it. While the far enemies of al-Qaeda are the USA, Australia, UK, Europe and Israel, the near enemies are those Moslem's or nations that al-Qaeda sees as corrupted governments or apostate rules. These include the governments of over 20 countries including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bangladesh, India and many more comprising billions of people.

While the post-9/11 attacks from coalition forces have indeed hurt al-Qaeda and killed many of its top leaders, Nance notes that al-Qaeda now acts a terror strategy consultancy. This transformation of al-Qaeda is in response to the loss of its base of operations in Afghanistan and the displacement of its leadership to the Pakistani border. The most significant changes were a shift of operational responsibility from the regional terror commanders, who executed a long awaited plan for jihad operations, to a more radical and difficult to detect posture: jihadist who were self-starting and worked independently from al-Qaeda.

The most significant changes al-Qaeda's structure occurred when it was able to co-opt the Jordanian Salafist group Tawhed Wal Jihad and organize the foreign fighters into Iraq into al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). AQI changed the structure of the military committee's roles dramatically and Iraq would become the cornerstone of al-Qaeda's global operations. Much of the invasion of Iraq was premised on a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. There was never such a link, but the war turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as al-Qaeda is now a mainstay in Iraq.

The book writes that it is important to note that contrary to popular belief, al-Qaeda is not a single terrorist group, rather a collection of like-minded organizations that cooperate and receive funds, advice and orders from Osama bin Laden and his supporters. al-Qaeda has transformed itself from a physical chain of terrorist training camps to a virtual network that uses the Internet to create a network centric information and advisory body. Nance therefore notes that al-Qaeda has transformed itself from a global terrorism operation into a terrorism management consultancy. The 6 main aspects of this consultancy are that al-Qaeda: provides inspiration, contributes finances, shares collective knowledge, provides weapons resource and contacts, accepts responsibility and releases video propaganda.

Besides a few minor historical errors, some grammatical and punctuation mistakes, and not a lot of details about cyber-based terrorism, Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities is a most important book in that it avoids all of the hype, politics and bias that come along with such titles, and simply focuses on its task at hand, to be a field guide for anti-terrorist and counter-terrorist professionals to use to prevent attacks.

Such a title<< is sorely needed by groups such as the>> TSA,<< who still think that anti-terrorism means having people remove their shoes at airports>>. The book notes that the European approach of guarded vigilance via a sustained level of anti-terrorism readiness and awareness is a much better concept than the US approach of spiking to heightened alert levels.

The Terrorist Recognition Handbook is a must-read for anyone tasked with or interested in anti-terrorism activities. One would hope that every TSA and Homeland Security manager and employee get a copy of this monumental reference. It would change the face of TSA and the Department of Homeland Security, and might perhaps really enable them to identify terrorists, and not simply require the elderly to take off their support shoes at airport checkpoints.

Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.

You can purchase Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities, Second Edition from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Hacking ISIS: How to Destroy the Cyber Jihad
Image of Hacking ISIS: How to Destroy the Cyber Jihad
Author(s):
Malcolm Nance
Release Date:
April 24, 2017
Publisher/Imprint:
Skyhorse Publishing
Pages:
296
Buy on Amazon

Reviewed by:
Michael Lipkin
Americans should pay close attention to Malcolm Nance. A former naval counterterrorism officer, Nance understands both human and cyber intelligence; and he applies both to explain with great clarity the threats from two major adversaries—ISIS and Russia.

Nance has already provided invaluable lessons about ISIS in his 2016 Defeating ISIS. And he has given fascinating background about Russia’s 2016 election hacking and possible recruitment of American espionage resources in The Plot to Hack America (2016).

Hacking ISIS: How to Destroy the Cyber Jihad is Nance’s latest book, co-authored with cyber-terrorism expert Chris Sampson. The foreword, by ex-FBI agent Ali Soufan, lays out the book’s purpose and intended audience. The authors “have produced a brilliant resource to educate cyber security specialists, politicians, and the general public about the future risks of how ISIS’s ideology may spread further in the cyber world.” Soufan concludes that “this book will help our cyber warriors and decision-makers defeat them once and for all.”

Partly because of this purpose and varied audience (and likely by the choice of the authors) this book makes readers work and it makes them think. The authors do not serve answers on a platter.

Parts of the book, those aimed at the “general public” audience, read smoothly—an enthralling tale of espionage. Other parts, mainly the inner chapters, often read more as technical guides or spy-training manuals, providing long lists of ISIS apps and websites, communication methods, leaders, tactics, and more. These chapters often provide more unfiltered detail than the general reader may be able to absorb. In fact, it might be a good idea for the reader to identify a place in the book where skimming would be the best strategy—until the final three chapters, which tie many things together in a compelling narrative.

The first chapter is instructive as well as telling a gripping tale. It describes a May 2015 raid by U.S. Special Ops Delta troopers on a remote Syrian ISIS outpost, the hidden base of ISIS treasurer, Abu Sayyaf. The raiding troopers collected multiple terabytes of data revealing ISIS financial networks as well as personal information of every person under ISIS control—cell phone numbers, Twitter names, Facebook accounts, and other social media connections. This “treasure trove of spy gold” allowed U.S. cyber experts to home in on precise locations of ISIS members.

The captured intelligence allowed U.S. forces to begin Operation Vaporize, a massive assassination campaign targeting ISIS leaders and murderers. A reader might need a strong stomach to follow the resulting attacks, as well as suspension of belief that terrorists might deserve due process before being assassinated. For example:

“Senior ISIS military commander . . . Omar al Shishani (a.k.a. “Omar the Chechen”) was literally “vaporized”—blown into human pink mist by the 2,000-pound JDAM bombs or Hellfire missiles. ISIS senior military commander in Northern Syria, Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli (a.k.a. “Hajji Imam”)—vaporized.”

In fact, the authors suggest that the 2015 raid and data capture may have been the beginning of the end for the physical manifestation of ISIS, which they have no doubt will be destroyed, and the beginnings of a new ISIS as a covert online “Ghost Caliphate.”

The second chapter, keeping the pace of a thriller, reveals intriguing ways of “hacking ISIS.” The authors explain how ISIS cyber warriors (usually not extremely skilled or sophisticated) can be located on the Internet and then either shut down, pushed into smaller and observable portions of the Internet, or be allowed to continue operating under the watchful eyes of Western intelligence.

In explaining how to locate these ISIS sites, the authors describe the three parts of the Internet (with an excellent diagram) that most readers likely do not know about—the Surface Web, used by billions of people; the Deep Web, requiring logins and passwords; and finally, the Dark Web, entered or monitored only with specialized software. The authors explain how ISIS uses all three levels and how U.S. intelligence locates, manipulates, and takes them down at each level.

Chapter 3 continues the tale as it lays out the development of cyber warfare by al Qaeda and its spawn ISIS through the spread of terror (with gruesome videos such as beheadings), recruitment of new members (interestingly, often by way of pornography sites), and the spurring of lone wolf attacks committed by those not able to come to the caliphate.

Moving for a moment to the dust jacket on the hardcover edition, of the five review blurbs there, four use variations of the word detail, and such detail is exactly what the next several chapters lay out, at times, arguably, with precision more useful to cyber spies than to the general reader. Numerous details, in fact, seem raw and unfiltered, with the reader left to figure out their ultimate significance. At certain points, an overview with brief examples and a reference to an appendix might have been more helpful.

Topics in these “detail” chapters include different levels of the ISIS cyber hierarchy as well as the multitude of websites, apps, and other software tools used by ISIS, such as Telegram, What’s App, Signal, Wikr, True Crypt, and Tor. Other topics include the different Jihadi cyber groups, individual hackers, and the numerous media production groups and their products (ranging from glossy magazines to horrifying videos).

One should not downplay such detailed information, though, as it would certainly be essential to the “cyber security specialist” portion of the book’s audience.

After numerous chapters of exhaustive detail, the authors return to their overall theme of hacking ISIS in Chapters 12 to 14, titled The Anti-ISIS Cyber Army, Tracking ISIS in Cyberspace, and The Ghost Caliphate.

Beginning with the question “Who is standing up to ISIS online?” the authors describe efforts of governments, private companies, hacker groups, and individuals to engage ISIS in cyber battle. While they describe many effective strategies and operations, the authors avoid creating a false sense of security.

For example, they admit that the terrorists “sometimes stay a step ahead.” U.S. Congressional efforts, they insist, are limited by constant gridlock. One anti-ISIS act passed in May 2015 is already “outdated.” Many government anti-ISIS programs have met with little success and may likely have failed to reach their target audiences.

Regarding large social media companies, the authors complain that such companies, like Twitter and Facebook, often resist government intervention, justifying such behavior with their own “aggressive takedowns” of ISIS sites and materials.

The most successful anti-ISIS efforts, it seems, result from human intelligence such as tips from concerned citizens and operations such as the May 2015 Delta trooper raid in Syria, which helped U.S. forces locate and “vaporize” key ISIS members.

Descriptions of the war on ISIS waged by the hacking group “Anonymous” are interesting and entertaining, but the authors remind readers that critics find these attacks a combination of mischievous, undiscerning, unserious, and simply causes of greater resolve for ISIS. The authors intriguingly contrast Anonymous with a seemingly more focused and effective vigilante hacker known as the “Jester.”

There is much more in the outlining of the West’s cyber battles against ISIS, but in describing the many online weapons and strategies—such as counterhacking and spearphishing, following digital “thumbprints,” and searching the cyber tools and sites most current for ISIS—the authors continue to remind readers how vulnerable we remain and how much more work must be done.

The physical caliphate will fall; of that, Nance and Sampson express absolutely no doubt. But ISIS will devolve into a “Ghost Caliphate” of covert “Cyber Corsairs” who, while not yet an advanced cyber threat, will only become more skilled and dangerous over time, perhaps even learning the methods of the Russians and Chinese to commit acts like taking down the power grid or Internet of an adversary—actions that would be devastating.

As these final chapters end on an abrupt and less-then-hopeful note, the reader might ask: “So what do we do now?” “Where do we go from here?” That’s where the book makes readers think back and work hard as they try to understand which methods have been most successful in which situations and hope that anti-ISIS forces can perfect and marshal these methods against an imposing and terrifying foe.

Michael Lipkin has been a writer and editor in educational publishing for more than 35 years, specializing in history, government, economics, geography, and other subjects. He has worked on staff for two top-five publishers and has been a freelancer for just about every major educational publisher and numerous smaller independent companies.

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By Joshua Sinai - - Monday, October 2, 2017
ANALYSIS/OPINION:

HACKING ISIS: HOW TO DESTROY THE CYBER JIHAD

By Malcolm Nance and Chris Sampson

Skyhorse Publishing, $27.99, 320 pages

Terrorists and their extremist adherents are adept at utilizing the internet, particularly social media platforms, which have become widely accessible globally, and in multiple languages. These cyberspace platforms are used to spread their extremist ideologies, raise funding, communicate with one another, penetrate across borders into foreign countries that would not permit them to enter physically at their border crossings, and gain new recruits whose only initial contact with them may be via their personal computers.

For counterterrorism agencies, while the primary activity remains to militarily defeat terrorist groups and their operatives in “physical space,” these online terrorist-related social media platforms are an important secondary arena to use cyberwarfare tools to counter the terrorist organizations and their activist supporters who manage and operate such sites, including countering the extremist propaganda they propagate.

The veteran al Qaeda (and its regional affiliates) terrorist group and the relative newcomer Islamic State (known as ISIS) — which has become the latest “superstar” of Salafi jihadi terrorism (although it is also nowadays in sharp retreat as a result of the American-led military coalition campaign against it in Iraq and Syria) are the leading exploiters and beneficiaries of the Internet’s dissemination capabilities.

Since it is fairly straightforward to employ military forces — and specially trained counterterrorism forces — to defeat such terrorist groups, what are effective countermeasures against them in cyberspace, where specialized cyberwarfare tools must be used against them? In answering this question, Malcolm Nance and Chris Sampson’s “Hacking ISIS: How to Destroy the Cyber Jihad” is an important, well-researched and detailed reference resource about how al Qaeda, and now, more prominently, ISIS, operate in cyberspace and the measures required to counter and defeat what the authors term as “cyber jihad.”

The book’s chapters cover pertinent cyberwarfare topics such as the history of the cyber jihad to how it operates in the current period (with the current period characterized by the way ISIS manages its cyberoperations from its bases in Iraq and Syria); ISIS’ cyber caliphate’s “spy chain of command” (such as its media council managing the operations run by its media propaganda teams); the extent of ISIS’ cyber battlespace (e.g., ranging from the open source surface web to the difficult-to-penetrate deep web and dark web) and the specific, popular social media websites they exploit such as Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and others.

The book also identifies the software they use to communicate with one another, such as end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, WhatsApp, and others; their official and “wannabe” cyberwarrior units, such as online jihadi groups (with many of them operated by their Western activists), and what is known as the Islamic State Hacking Division.

Further, it details jihadi groups’ video media structure and the themes they propagate in their videos and online magazines, such as Dabiq; the involvement of female activists in the cyber jihad in radicalizing potential female supporters; and the appeal of the cyber jihad to susceptible Muslim individuals, especially in Western countries, who become self-radicalized while sitting at their home computers and become lone wolf terrorists (such as Omar Mateen, the Orlando nightclub mass murderer, and others).

The final chapters discuss the counter-ISIS cyberwarfare campaigns being waged by the U.S. government and its allies, which have mobilized many of the social media corporations, such as Facebook and Twitter, to control the exploitation of their freely available websites by terrorist groups and their sympathizers. The authors also discuss a counter-ISIS campaign by the Anonymous hacker community, which is strongly anti-ISIS — although its online countermeasures to take down ISIS websites have been meager, at best.

Also covered are the intelligence cybertools that are used to counter the appeal and operation of ISIS’ websites, such as formulating counternarratives to expose their hypocrisy and distortion of reality, as well as infecting terrorist websites with various malware viruses.

In the concluding chapter, the authors insightfully point out that “the destruction of ISIS will be a historic achievement, but the by-product will be a less centralized terror group that will rely much more on inspiring terror attacks rather than planning them and deploying cells.” With ISIS’ primary organization in Iraq and Syria being gradually dismantled by the U.S.-led military coalition in those countries (and elsewhere), the authors foresee a rise in attacks by ISIS-inspired lone wolves in Western countries, “who dream up a plan and then execute it without saying a word or leaving a deep digital footprint, [which is] extremely difficult to detect.”

It is such insights and an encyclopedic listing of entries on ISIS’ terrorist-related operations in cyberspace that make this book an indispensable reference resource for analyzing the latest trends in cyber Salafi jihad and how to counter them at the governmental and private-sector levels. Both authors are veteran terrorism and counterterrorism experts and executive leaders of the research institute TAPSTRI — Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics, and Radical Ideologies — in the New York City region.

• Joshua Sinai is a senior analyst at Kiernan Group Holdings in Alexandria, Virginia.

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