How America Affects Foreign Elections

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

American scientists have finally completed their long calculations. The number of Washington's interference in the election of others was analyzed, classified and subjected to strict bureaucratic accounting. It turned out that the White House interfered in other people's elections 81 times! Moscow is so far from such a result.

“Russia is not the only one who interferes in the elections. We do that too,”writes Scott Shane, a national security journalist and former Moscow correspondent for The New York Times.

Cash bags. They arrived at a Roman hotel. This is money for Italian candidates. And here are the scandalous stories from foreign newspapers: it turns out that someone "pumped" the elections in Nicaragua. And elsewhere on the planet - millions of pamphlets, posters and stickers. They were published for the sole purpose of overthrowing the current President of Serbia.

Is this Putin's long arm? No, this is just a small selection of the history of United States interference in overseas elections, Shane notes ironically.

Recently, US intelligence officials warned the Senate Intelligence Committee that it looks like the Russians are preparing to “repeat” a familiar “move” in the 2018 midterm elections, that is, to carry out an operation similar to the 2016 operation. The scouts told about "hacking, leakage, manipulation of social networks." Perhaps the Russians will go further this time.

Later, Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor, accused thirteen Russians and three companies run by a businessman with "close Kremlin ties" for the intervention. The scheme of attacks through social media on Hillary Clinton and sowing discord has been applied, it turns out, for three whole years!

Most Americans, of course, are shocked by all this: after all, this is an "unprecedented attack" on the American political system. However, veterans of intelligence and scientists who specialize in the study of covert operations have a very different view of these things. These experts shared their revelations with Mr. Shane.

“If you ask an intelligence officer if the Russians are breaking the rules, are they doing something weird, the answer is no, not at all,” says Stephen L. Hall, who retired from the CIA in 2015. He worked for the CIA for thirty years, and he worked as a head in the department of "Russian operations".

According to him, the United States is the "absolute" record holder in history for influencing other people's elections. The scout hopes that the Americans will retain their leadership in this matter.

Lock K. Johnson, an intelligence "professor" who began his career back in the 1970s, says the 2016 Russian operation was "just a cyber version of standard practice in the United States." The United States has been practicing such interventions "for decades." American officials have always been "worried about external elections."

“We've been doing this sort of thing ever since the CIA was created, that is, since 1947,” said Mr. Johnson, now an educator at the University of Georgia.

According to him, in their activities the intelligence officers used posters, brochures, mailing lists, and whatever. False "information" was also published in foreign newspapers. The clerks also used what the British call "King George's cavalry": suitcases of cash.

The United States has moved away from democratic ideals and much further, writes Shane. The CIA helped topple elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s and support violent coups in several other countries in the 1960s. CIA men plotted assassinations and supported brutal anti-communist governments in Latin America, Africa, Asia.

In recent decades, Hall and Johnson argue, Russian and American election interference "has not been morally equivalent." Experts point out a significant difference. American interventions have tended to help non-authoritarian candidates "challenge dictators" or promote democracy "in a different way." But Russia intervenes more often in order to harm democracy or promote authoritarian rule, experts say.

Speaking of comparison, Mr. Hall noted that it is like two cops: they are equal in that both have weapons, but one of them is a good guy, the other is a bad guy. In a word, the motive of action is important.

Dov Levin, a scientist at Carnegie Mellon, analyzed the historical evidence for the intervention. And he revealed that the record in both overt and covert actions to influence the outcome of the elections belongs to the United States. He found 81 interventions by the United States and only 36 by the Soviet Union or Russia between 1946 and 2000. True, he finds the "Russian total" "incomplete."

“I am in no way justifying what the Russians did in 2016,” Levin said. "It is completely unacceptable that Vladimir Putin intervened in this way."

However, the Russian methods used in the US elections were a "digital version" of the methods used by both the US and Russia for "decades." Joining party headquarters, recruiting secretaries, sending informers, publishing information or disinformation in newspapers - these are the old methods.

The scientist's findings show that the usual selective intervention by the United States, sometimes covert and sometimes quite overt, does indeed apply.

The precedent was set by the Americans in Italy, where "non-communist candidates" were promoted from the late 1940s to the 1960s. “We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians to cover their expenses,” admitted Mark Watt, a former CIA officer at the end of the last century.

Covert propaganda became the backbone of American methods. Richard M. Bissell, Jr., who led CIA operations in the late 1950s and early 1960s, accidentally revealed something in his autobiography: He pointed to control of newspapers or broadcasting stations in order to "ensure the desired election outcome."

The declassified report on the work of the CIA in the elections in Chile in 1964 also boasts some discoveries: the very "hard work" for which the CIA spent "large sums", but simply money for an American protégé. Thanks to this money, he was portrayed as a "wise and sincere" statesman, and his left-wing opponent - as a "calculating schemer."

CIA officials told Mr. Johnson in the late 1980s that messages were “inserted” into the foreign media, mostly true, but sometimes fake. Such messages were typed from 70 to 80 per day.

In the 1990 elections in Nicaragua, the CIA posted stories of corruption in the left-wing Sandinista government, Mr. Levin noted. And the opposition won!

Over time, more and more influence operations were conducted not secretly by the CIA, but openly by the State Department and the organizations it patronizes. In the 2000 elections in Serbia, the United States funded a successful attempt against Slobodan Milosevic. It took 80 tons of self-adhesive to try! The press was in Serbian.

Similar efforts were made in the elections in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they were not always successful. After Hamid Karzai was re-elected as President of Afghanistan in 2009, he complained to Robert Gates, the then Secretary of Defense, about blatant US attempts to overthrow him. And Mr. Gates himself later called these attempts "our awkward and unsuccessful putsch" in his memoirs.

Well, before that, the "hand of the United States" reached the Russian elections. In 1996, Washington feared that Boris Yeltsin would not be re-elected, and that an "old-regime communist" would come to power in Russia. This fear resulted in attempts to "help" Yeltsin. They helped him both secretly and openly: Bill Clinton himself spoke about this. First of all, there was an “American push” regarding the issuance of a loan from the International Monetary Fund to Russia (by the way, $ 10 billion). Moscow received the money four months before the vote. In addition, a group of American political consultants came to Yeltsin's aid.

This major intervention has sparked controversy even within the United States itself. Thomas Caruthers, a scientist at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace, recalls his disputes with a State Department official, who then assured: "Yeltsin is democracy in Russia." To which Mr. Caruthers replied, "This is not what democracy means."

But what does "democracy" mean? Could it include operations to secretly dethrone an authoritarian ruler and help aspirants who share democratic values? And what about funding civic organizations?

Over the past decades, the most visible American presence in foreign policy has been the organizations funded by American taxpayers: the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute. These organizations do not support any candidates, but they teach the “basic skills” of campaigning, build “democratic institutions” and “observe”. Most Americans (those very taxpayers) find such efforts something of a democratic charity.

But Mr. Putin in Russia finds these funds hostile, Shane points out. In 2016 alone, donations to organizations generated 108 grants in Russia for a total of $ 6.8 million. It was money to "attract activists" and "promote civic participation." Foundations no longer openly name recipients from Russia, as under new Russian laws, organizations and individuals receiving foreign funding may face harassment or arrest.

It is easy to see why Putin perceives this American money as a threat to his rule and does not allow real opposition in the country. At the same time, American veterans of "promoting democracy" find Putin's hints that their (intelligence) work is supposedly equivalent to what the Russian government is accused of today, disgusting.

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As you can see, American scientists and former intelligence officers (however, there are no former intelligence officers) not only brag about their interference in elections in foreign countries, but also count records in this area. Moreover, Americans defend their "democratic" right to be called good guys. While the Russians, apparently, are guys of a completely different kind. And therefore, Yeltsin, whom the Russians for some reason have stopped loving, should "help" in the elections.

Hence, the Americans also have a negative assessment of the "intervention" of 2016, which Putin allegedly undertook and for which thirteen "trolls" led by "Putin's chef" should be held accountable before American law.

In a word, Washington can do what Moscow is not allowed. The motives, you see, are different. Americans are fighting against authoritarianism and see this fight as a kind of charity - they are doing good for those peoples whom they are "democratizing". The democratized peoples themselves may think otherwise, but neither the White House nor the CIA is interested in this issue.