Audio: A Long Screwdriver and Nuclear Willy Waving — A Q&A with Keir Giles in a Northamptonshire Pub
Keir is not optimistic about the November election in the US, because he sees no evidence that Americans have not lost our gaddam minds
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As my readers know, I am all about the power of “in real life” meetings, which is why I have been doing everything I can to travel in recent months, solidifying bonds between those who do the brave work of pro-democracy activism. I have been adding dozens more contacts to my virtual rolodex, which leads to dozens more national and international reports.
I have been working with author Keir Giles for five years, ever since I discovered his NATO Handbook of Russian Information Warfare, published in 2016.
Among some of the key reports I have done with Keir — author of Russia’s War On Everybody — is this one, where I transcribe one of his visits to RadPod:
I will always be indebted to him for being among my sharpest sources with such a keen understanding of how and why Russia wages hybrid warfare, also detailed in his book Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West.
So you can imagine my joy when I met him in real life Monday, over lunch at a lovely pub in Northamptonshire. I just wanted to hang out with my longtime friend and ally, but because of the recent UK and France elections, and because of his profound understanding of the stakes of the US elections, I asked him if we could duck out into the garden while our food was being prepared so I could record his observations.
***Content Warning: We are in terrible danger. He is not hopeful that Americans will get our shit together by November. It is my hope this interview lights a fire under your arse.***
Here are his words:
A Long Screwdriver and Nuclear Willy Waving — A Q&A with Keir Giles in a Northamptonshire Pub
Heidi: So happy to see you! Yeah, let's just chat. There has been some elections going on. And my framing is always, ‘How does this affect Putin?’ Anything that's happening, anything that becomes a big story — my first question is always, ‘Does this benefit Putin or not?’ And are you seeing anything interesting on the global stage that's worth noting that may have an impact on Russia and or the war in Ukraine or whatever you want to talk about?
Keir: That's a very different balance of interests between the different countries, especially for instance, between the US and the UK, because now in the UK, you've had a choice between two main parties, where there was very little difference between them in terms of how they were going to approach the Russia problem — support for Ukraine and so forth — as this is not like the Labour Party of a little while ago, when Jeremy Corbyn was in charge — he will definitely have been a Putin favorite because of his emphasis on disarmament, surrender, appeasement, and general lack of interest in defending the country, which would’ve been right up Putin’s street. Labour government, the one that has just come in as of today, shows instead that it has a very clear understanding of what's necessary to defend this country. And that defense starts in Ukraine. We've seen that with the the very first international engagements from the key figures in this Labour government.
The Foreign Secretary has gone east, the defense secretary has gone further East and is now in Kyiv already reaffirming that Labour Party support for Ukraine. And there have been a series of really quite high profile moves in the first 48 hours of this new government confirming that the UK is still on track. And despite this, being a left-wing government hasn't actually derailed the process of international engagement altogether, which is a huge relief for those people who thought it might. And it's only those who are alarmed at what a left-wing government will do to the country domestically that is still concerned, after all, this is something that people haven't been used to over the last 15 years and the protest vote against the last 14 years of Conservative government may not quite have realized what they've got themselves into.
A Very Different Picture
In the US, of course, it's a very, very different picture where there's a clear favorite between Biden and Trump, if you have one of the two candidates that many people have already forgotten was actively working for Russia in his first term, then obviously, there's going to be a a clear incentive for greater attempts at influencing the result in the US then then there was in the UK.
Here in the UK, there was expectation of some very evident and visible Russian interference attempts, and they have not so far been reported on widely. That may be because there wasn't really that much to choose between the two parties. Although, of course, Russia has always shown that it has no problem at all stirring up trouble by just backing two sides against each other. It may also be because the situation domestically has changed since the last high profile attempts at influencing domestic British politics.
The Brexit Referendum and Electoral Integrity
For example, the Brexit referendum, in that there is now a much greater interest taken in protecting electoral integrity, protecting democracy and democratic processes from foreign interference. There is, for example, now a National Security Act in the UK, which fills the gap in legislation, which previously meant it was perfectly legal to act as the agent of a hostile power against its country. Now it isn't. And there have been prosecutions of people working for Russia.
A Chilling Effect
And that's bound to have had a chilling effect on some of the most active peddlers of disinformation. And in particular, the groups that would perform the dump part of the hack forge dump attacks to try to discredit political figures and and lean in to influence electoral results that we saw being deployed so effectively in previous years. That was expected in the days running up to the election. It hasn't as far as we know actually happened on a suspect the fact that it is now there without clear consequences for doing it, which they weren't previously may have contributed to that.
Heidi: I will say that Jim Stewartson has a theory that maybe the Russian psyops are actually starting to wear off a little bit in the UK. Do you have any sense about that? Can people begin to self-inoculate when there's enough time that's passed after something like Brexit? Or do you think that it was just you know, the party prior has done such a shit job that people were just like. ‘We're not going to do that anymore.’
Keir: Well, Jim, in spite of everything, still displays flares of optimism. I think this might be one of those. And sadly, I don't see that more widespread understanding of the extent to which Russia can reach into the domestic information space and influence things beyond those people who are already aware of it in the first place. And certainly, it didn't become a high-profile issue as far as I could tell. During the election debate, there were throwbacks, there were reminiscences of how previously the Labour Party and the Kremlin had been hand in hand with Jeremy Corbyn, for example, brandishing, hacked and dumped materials in order to boost his on election chances. And Labour MPs appearing on RT to try to take part, for example, in the campaign against the integrity initiative, the counter disinformation operation that was run from the Institute of Statecraft and backed by the FCO. We haven't seen so much of that this time.
Heidi: Interesting. I was saying to you that I think that there needs to be a national apology or acknowledgement that maybe it wasn't such a great idea to go into business with Russia in the ‘90s, particularly when Putin came to power. And you had a good line about that. What was your response?
Keir: Well, first of all, there will be people that will learn from this, and there will be people that will never learn there is the moral and the business side of it. And both of those argue strongly against investing in Russia at the moment. And yet, still, you have companies that have not pulled out of their operations, they haven't shut down, they are waiting, in fact, for it to be expropriated by the Russian government, which is the inevitable result. And we've seen that happen to a number of different corporations. So whether or not it is accepted that it was a mistake to go into business with Russia? The answer you get tends to depend on whether the person in the company you're talking to has actually lost money at it yet or not yet. And that's still ahead.
Heidi: Thank you. So in America, we have an election coming up, and I am seeing all the same operatives who were doing ‘but her emails’ now doing the ‘step aside’ Joe Biden op. Are there any echoes that you can hear of potential active measures going on? Or do you just think there's this organic crises in America?
A Long Screwdriver to Turn Up the Volume
Keir: The two shouldn't necessarily be disentangled fully, because active measures lean on organic crises and augment, as opposed to inventing in the first place, just the same as when people see a Putin trace behind, for example, the Reform Party in the UK and the right of center parties in France — that's not necessarily rhetoric that is inspiring this, these are genuine grievances that people are responding to by voting in this way. And the question is more to what extent can we see the Kremlin reaching in with a long screwdriver to turn up the volume.
A Permanent Problem
And with that, in that respect, often you can only tell a long time after the fact when on the tail when the investigation has concluded as to whether people are as active as they are as a result of their own genuine grievances, or if in fact, they aren't being stimulated to do so. But that's a classic problem. It's a permanent problem. How do you tell the agents of influence who are doing this consciously from the useful idiots who think they're doing it of their own accord? And the sad truth is often you cannot tell from open sources, because it's a counterintelligence problem. Because you need to have that information. You cannot derive it from open sources, like ‘what's in their email accounts, what's in their bank accounts? Who are they talking to? How are they being incentivized?’ And to find that out requires the political will and prioritization to devote resources to actually finding it out through the security and intelligence services of given country.
A Thousand Years of Darkness
Heidi: And you have spoken with me to say that Western leaders who have the most success at battling active measures are the ones who acknowledge it — who acknowledge that it's even happening and then there’s the cascade effect of the different things that you're able to do to combat. And we still have not acknowledged it in America in a way that's meaningful. So my question to you is, I believe what we're facing is a future of a Putin led world or democratic governance continuing in the post-World War Two spirit of things. And if you look into your crystal ball, do you see a 1000 years of darkness for us or do you see Putin's inevitable demise or what do you see? Or how can you help us frame the urgency in America?
No Amount of Botox
Keir: Well, there's no doubt that Putin’s demise is inevitable because no amount of Botox is actually going to save him from being carried out of the Kremlin feet first, eventually, but that may not necessarily help. Because yes, in this global confrontation between the retreating forces of democracy and those authoritarian powers that think it's a return to the normal and natural order for them to be in the ascendant, is certainly not going away.
Retreating Forces of Democracy
And the nightmare scenario, of course, for Europe is that in the not too distant future, with the return of a Trump presidency, and Trump enacting all of the things that he and his coterie have said they want to do, Europe is actually going to be even more beleaguered because they will be confronted, not with two main authoritarian hostile powers, Russia and China, but three because the United States will actually join them going down that track and following the same principles that drive Beijing and Moscow.
Heidi: Just incredible. Okay, so last word. I believe that so much of this is that the oligarchs know that global warming is real, and they're trying to turn us back to like some feudalistic state where we're the peasants, and they're the feudal lords, and they can hang out in their bunkers, where we deal with whatever is left for us, and how do we kind of scare America to get it’s shit together in time for November?
Collective Amnesia
Keir: I think it's too late. I think the collective amnesia that has gripped the United States is partly wishing the problem away. But pretending that it can't possibly be that bad, because if you don't pretend that what you have to deal with — the reality — that means either taking a stand against it or knuckling under and going with the new regime.
It's been a source of mild surprise to much of the rest of the world that those very few criteria for who can stand to be President of the United States doesn't, for example, include you shouldn't be a convicted fraudster. And the extent to which the the constitutional integrity of the United States relies completely on people respecting the Constitution, as opposed to people in power respecting the Constitution rather than trying to circumvent it has been shown to be a massive vulnerability because if you have somebody elected to the presidency with not only a criminal past, but also criminal intent, and they have the blessing of a subverted Supreme Court to go ahead, there's really very little to stop them taking the whole country down the track that they want to go, unlike the previous term where democratic checks and balances were still strong.
Heidi: Alright, thank you. That's grim but important. Any optimism in there at all?
Keir: No.
Ya, so he’s not optimistic, because of our collective amnesia and our subverted Supreme Court and Trump’s vast criminality and that fact that he was clearly working for Russia in his first term.
Over lunch, I asked him about whether or not there was anything we could do for Vladimir Kara-Murza, the important resistance figure currently languishing in a Putin Dungeon after just winning a Pulitzer Prize.
Keir said no, because only Kara-Murza could have saved himself by not going back to Russia.
I asked him if the Russian people are ever going to do anything about their fascist mafia leader, and Keir said unlikely until things get bad enough.
Lastly, I asked him where the hell he got the long screwdriver metaphor, of Russia reaching into our business with a long screwdriver and turning up the volume — and he said that is actually a military term, which then prompted him to tell me that so is “nuclear willy waving.”
Nuclear Willy Waving
In a report Keir wrote for Chatham House on Russian Nuclear Intimidation, he references the technical term “nuclear willy waving,” which we’ve been seeing for decades. The excuse often given in response to why the West doesn’t stand up to Moscow is nuclear blackmail, when in fact, the oligarchs launder all their money in the West and would not only be annihilating their villas, yachts, Cessnas, and mistresses, but they’d also face potential annihilation themselves.
Keir sees age-old patterns, the kind of patterns clear to those who study Russia in depth. Like the peace movement being an old KGB ruse, where they encourage other nations to disarm while they keep building their military state.
The way I see it, we have two options: we get our shit together and prove him wrong, that America does remember how bad it was under Trump, and we get out of this fugue state where Dems are bashing Biden, which benefits Putin, who can’t have a good and decent and honorable man stand between him and his gluttony to rule the planet for personal avarice and power.
We’ve been warned and challenged.
Keir says he knows he’s done his job when after a lecture, the audience is uncomfortable.
Let’s put our discomfort to work and save democratic governance in America.
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Audio interview of this report here…
Sometimes it’s cleansing to hear the unvarnished truth. Thank you both for your work. It keeps me sane just to be able to understand what is happening even if the truth is terrifying. ❤️
Excellent info and interview. Thank you. I have some questions—what’s the best way to ask you? I’ve been reading Jim Stewartons work too. Mind blown. Any overview that’s been put together to help people get up to speed on WTF we are dealing with? Love your work… I’m in Ruth Ben Ghiats Zoom group.