REBOOT — ‘Reds Under the Bed’ - Russia’s War on Everybody
Rebooting RadPod’s interview with author Keir Giles about the Russian-state’s ‘mayhem for the sake of it’ and how they are heading toward World War III
***This report was originally published on January 11, 2023. Rebooting due to the urgency of ramped up assault by Russia on Ukraine. Please upgrade to a paid member to access full content.***
“The pattern unfortunately that seems to underlie a lot of the most enthusiastic Russian propagandists is that they have been dealing with severely damaged personalities and personal failure for most of their lives. In fact, the overlap between the number of Russian propagandists who also turn out to be convicted sex offenders is absolutely startling. There are some deep-seated fundamental personality flaws that actually predispose people to being available to be made use of by Russia. And if you look back at the KGB handbooks for recruiting agents of influence, agents of subversion, or indeed propagandists, then you can see very clearly that Russia understood the misfits make the good targets - the people with a grudge, the people who feel they've been treated unfairly by the world because they've been consistent failures, and therefore seek revenge. And the revenge coming through so strongly in some of the verbal attacks that you hear from the trolls, from the so-called independent journalists, the ones pushing the Russian propaganda lines, because the bile and the vitriol and the hatred that they pour out when they're talking about people who criticize Russia, it's extremely personal. And it's plainly tapping deeply into their own personality defects.”-Keir Giles on RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast, January 10, 2023
In exactly 84 seconds, author Keir Giles explains to me, Jim, and HiFi on our first episode of the new year exactly who and what we are fighting - the misfits, the sex offenders, the failures, and those seeking revenge on the world. They are agents of Russia, and they are always at war.
You may recall my recent post The Kremlin School of Bloggers where I revisit my 2019 Warfighting thread, where I parse in bite-size pieces the Handbook of Russian Information Warfare.
It was in doing that work that I became friends with Keir Giles, a brilliant Russia analyst whose latest book, Russia’s War On Everybody offers an incredible summation of our global fight.
Toying with a Trotsky line, he writes: “You may not be interested in Russia, but Russia is interested in you.”
To help others understand that we all are affected by Russia’s endless war on everybody, what follows are key and condensed transcripts of our interview with Keir, so you have ammunition for the people in your life who do not understand that they, too, are victims of Russian-state aggression. (Those who are not yet paid subscribers to my Substack, can listen to the interview here. Paid subscribers have access to all content and will be invited to our next Bette Dangerous ‘Speakeasy’ zoom salon this Sunday.)
ME: I met Keir because one of my Twitter followers said I needed to read Keir’s NATO Handbook of Russian Information Warfare written in 2016. I was riding on the Metro, and had just pulled an all-nighter threading the latest Mueller indictments. And as I started reading it, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this was already known in 2016!’ And I began threading it immediately right there on the Red Line. And then Keir and I met each other, and have been swapping information ever since. We’ve literally done dozens of threads together. Can you take us back to 2016 to what prompted that report?
KEIR: What I really wanted to do with that NATO Handbook was pull together a lot of this knowledge into one place, and make it accessible because it had been scattered throughout scientific papers and academic journals, and very specialized stuff for Russia watchers. We knew a lot of it a long time before 2016.
I wanted it accessible for people who were coming fresh to the Russian disinformation problem and make it available for everybody worldwide. And that's exactly how you picked it up. So the handbook looks at all of the different things that Russia itself had said about information as a weapon, as a means of Russia getting its way in confrontations with other countries, and lots of different levels of ambition.
One of the things that you picked up on specifically when you read it back in 2019 - that when people are thinking about the reasons why Russia carries out disinformation campaigns, information attacks against its adversaries, people often think that there has to be some purpose, some strategic goal, some actual objective that they're trying to reach by doing so. But that's not always the case. You have different levels of ambition that they're trying to achieve. There's strategic regime change, depriving a country of its sovereignty by changing its government, down through creating a permissive environment for Russia worldwide, trying to set the conditions for them to do something that we really don't want them to or escape the consequences afterwards. But then at the very bottom level, there's just causing damage and harm and mayhem for the sake of it.
And that's a point that I think often a lot of people actually miss - the fact that in this zero sum view of security that Russia has, anything that they do to harm adversaries, damage to their societies, or the political systems or faith in institutions, or all of those things that Russia attacks, any of those things, by weakening the adversary, by comparison, make Russia stronger. And that's why you have these campaigns that seemingly have no purpose other than pure malice.
And a classic example, of course, is funding and coordinating anti-vaccination movements worldwide before we were hit by a global pandemic, because it suited Russia for other countries to be having public health crises. And then, of course, in the Coronavirus pandemic - just stepping up those efforts and pushing more and more anti-vaccination propaganda. This indicates the malicious intent behind this and also the purposeless of it, other than just to cause harm.
ME: Your gift is in relaying things in a smart but not academic way. You have an ability to cut right to the point, and that is why I believe your work is so valuable.
KEIR: I do try to keep it simple. I'm not an academic. And sometimes the way of getting a point across in a way that's understandable is just bringing it down to my own moronic level so it’s clear. Some of the problems that we are confronted with coming from Russia are at their root, very, very simple and straightforward. And sometimes when you try to overcomplicate these things, it makes it more difficult to understand.
And you just need to come back to that basic root of the problem that the people who are running the show in Moscow don't like us, they don't want to be like us, and they want to harm us, whether or not it actually has a purpose. And as soon as you view all of these actions through that basic prism, everything becomes a great deal more straightforward.
The current book that's out is a follow up to my 2019 book, Moscow Rules, about what drives Russia to confront the West. The question that kept being asked was, ‘Why exactly is Russia so hostile to the West? Why do they want to attack us, not just in the present day, but going back through centuries. What makes them hate us so much?’ So it was a look back through Russian history to look at all these consistent patterns that make Russia behave like this, and the ways in which they actually carry out that behavior.
This new book that's coming out in the U.S. at the end of January is about the ‘how of it’, Russia's War On Everybody. And it looks at all of the different ways in which Russia prosecutes these campaigns to damage the West, all of the ones except what we see in Ukraine at the moment, because Ukraine with this open military conflict is the one thing that Russia is trying to avoid when it deals with the West as a whole. It knows that if it is in open warfare, the result is a foregone conclusion that it will be disastrous for Russia.
But in every single other possible domain of waging war, Russia has already been convinced for a long time that it is in a state of conflict with the West, and it's behaving accordingly. So all of the different levers of power that it can use to attack us, it has been using. That's the part which I think has not been sufficiently recognized even after this war on Ukraine started, whether its economic or cyber or disinformation warfare, or some of those campaigns of subversion, and punishing public health that we talked about just a few minutes ago. It's all been ongoing. And the point of this latest book is it affects everybody. It's not just the politicians and the diplomats and the generals that need to be concerned about this, because it's ordinary people around the world that feel the effects.
ME: You were the first person who taught me that in this type of active measures, information warfare, there are no rear areas. It's cheap to target people, we get targeted by subversion operations. I showed in the Ionov indictment how Russia pays American groups on the left and the right to cause chaos.
KEIR: That phrase that you just used ‘no rear areas’ that actually comes from a quote that I pulled from Russia's Chief of General Staff, Valery Gerasimov.
He was talking about the way in which there's no front line and there's no rear areas, about the effects that Russia can now deliver, being able to reach across the whole of an adversary’s territory.
And that means that the United States is not insulated by distance from how Russia can reach out and do it harm. What we really need is key leader engagement in far more countries than we've seen so far,
As soon as the leadership of a country admits publicly that they are under attack by Russia, that triggers a whole load of other processes, which make defending against Russia a great deal easier, because it gets over that initial mindset of denial of ‘it's not happening here,’ and government and media and institutions and businesses and ordinary people actually take those essential steps to protect themselves and to build up that societal resilience, which is the biggest tool in protecting yourself against Russia. So the first step anywhere is just admitting and recognizing the problem.
HIFI: So you say that media needs to admit that we are under attack. However, it seems to me that the forces of Russia have infiltrated our media. How do we counteract that?
KEIR: In the United States, it’s a very, very specific problem, where some of the prime time broadcasters are actually pushing the Russian messages. Other countries around the world are better equipped societally and constitutionally to deal with that kind of challenge, because they can recognize the threat from hostile foreign influence, and can take steps to mitigate the damage.
If there's disinformation being pumped into people's living rooms through propaganda channels, then they have the power to actually step in and shut that down. (UK/Australia readers can listen to more on this here in the full interview.)
JIM: Vladimir Putin came from the KGB, and the KGB has been conducting these subversion activities going way back into the 20th century. Putin appears to be trying to reinstitute the Soviet Union through his Eurasian activities. I just wanted to get your thoughts on what seems to be going back to the USSR - the ideology and the behavior of the Soviet Union.
KEIR: The intent in Moscow has always been there. It's the capabilities that have varied. So we shouldn't overlook the fact that everything that Russia is doing has deep roots in Russian tradition going back, not just to the Soviet Union, but even into Tsarist times.
What Putin is saying and why he's launched this war on Ukraine - he doesn't want to recreate the USSR. He says the USSR was actually to blame for some of the anomalous situations that he says are around Russia's periphery at the moment - to blame for setting up these national republics based on ethnicities, like Ukraine, like the Baltic states, which he says is the root of the problem between Russia and the peoples that should be under Russian domination like Ukraine.
So to put it another way, he wants to reverse the mistakes of the creation of the Soviet Union and revert to the Russian empire where there is no such thing as Ukraine, and it is directly governed from Moscow.
JIM: He's trying to normalize the idea of the Soviet Union so that he can go back before that time.
KEIR: That's absolutely right. He can pick and choose from history the bits which actually suit the narrative that he's putting together. So you see Russia tapping into the Soviet mythology of the Second World War, for example, to legitimize what they're doing now, while suppressing all of the inconvenient bits - like being in league with Nazi Germany to carve up Europe in 1940.
HIFI: So with regards to that, I almost think it behooves the world to remind Putin that in 1259 - the Mongolian empire - there was no Russia. He is causing a showdown globally. (HiFi, Jim, and Keir have a fascinating discussion on Russian woo and Dugin here).
ME: It also was very interesting when I was reading Robert Massie's book on Nicholas and Alexandra and looking at Rasputin's impacts on Alexandra, and her desire for magical thinking, because she was so worried about her child. We know how that ended.
KEIR: Russia is not the only society promising magical solutions to everyone’s problems when they’re desperate and also having somebody to blame. It’s exactly the same principle that QAnon is founded on.
ME: There's a quote in your book from a longterm observer of Russia that Russia's national strategy under Putin has been to behave so badly that others don't seem to know how to react. To me, that is our problem. The bad behavior, the poisonings, the defenestrations, which you mentioned are so 600 years ago, all of it, we do not know how to react. I love how you say that Russia missed the enlightenment.
KEIR: It is a fundamental problem that has hamstrung Western policy towards Russia. The idea that it can't possibly be true that this is a country that behaves as a rogue state. There is not that suspension of disbelief that has always been absolutely essential to deal with Russia as it is, as opposed to continually being optimistic and thinking, ‘Well, they can't be that bad really.’
ME: We do not have the same ambitions as Russia - we are engaged in a challenge over the way the world works.
KEIR: Exactly right. And until that is recognized, there is never going to be a functional relationship with Russia, because it is always going to be based on a fiction.
JIM: The influence that Russia has over people is complex. You use the MICE acronym in the book, and I just wanted to briefly hear your thoughts on how these different ways of influencing people come out in the world, and why that makes it very complicated to distinguish between authentic voices and inauthentic.
KEIR: It is complicated. And we have all of these different gradations of why somebody is working against their own country on behalf of Russia, or any other foreign power, based on a lot of different motivations. And one of the biggest dividers is whether they are consciously furthering Russian interests, whether it's paid or unpaid, by attacking their own society, or whether they think that they are doing it out of their own convictions. They've reached their own conclusions about how the world works, and think that their own society is wrong. But even within those two categories, you've got so many different facets and so many different reasons why people seek to harm the society that they grew up in by furthering Russian interests.
The pattern unfortunately that seems to underlie a lot of the most enthusiastic Russian propagandists is that they have been dealing with severely damaged personalities and personal failure for most of their lives. In fact, the overlap between the number of Russian propagandists who also turn out to be convicted sex offenders is absolutely startling. There are some deep-seated fundamental personality flaws that actually predispose people to being available to be made use of by Russia. And if you look back at the KGB handbooks for recruiting agents of influence, agents of subversion, or indeed propagandists, then you can see very clearly that Russia understood ‘the misfits’ make the good targets - the people with a grudge, the people who feel they've been treated unfairly by the world because they've been consistent failures, and therefore seek revenge. And the revenge coming through so strongly in some of the verbal attacks that you hear from the trolls, from the so-called independent journalists, the ones pushing the Russian propaganda lines, because the bile and the vitriol and the hatred that they pour out when they're talking about people who criticize Russia, it's extremely personal, and it's plainly tapping deeply into their own personality defects.
(Listen to the full interview to hear a chilling discussion between HiFi and Keir on how Russia has not used their best weaponry in Ukraine, and the ‘seething cesspool of corruption that is the Russian military’.)
HIFI: You just said, the Big War. Russia is planning for World War III, aren't they?
KEIR: Of course. They have been for a very long time. In fact, they've been under the impression that they've been at war with the West for over a decade. They know they can't go to war overtly. And that's where all of these covert, sub-threshhold, grey zone, so-called hybrid attacks that I'm talking about in the book come in. Because that is how Russia has been reaching out to harm us, short of actually going to military conflict.
ME: HiFi has taught me that information warfare is ‘war’. How do we fight it?
KEIR: It comes down to national responses and each country around the world has its own particular handicaps in dealing with that specific problem with information warfare. In the United States, it's that deeply embedded view that the constitutional amendments safeguarding freedom of speech mean that you can allow a hostile power to exploit it in order to damage your society. That is the biggest problem that the United States is facing.
Short of recognition at the very senior level that there is a problem and admitting what the problem is, and pointing to those ways in which Russia is delivering this hostile information into US society and the consequences of it, nothing is ever actually going to change.
The problem in a way is not a media issue, it's a counterintelligence issue, because the only thing that is going to make a difference is establishing those connections that actually lead these major voices in the US media to parrot Russian disinformation.
And that is not something which is going to be possible to establish from open sources unless they are very careless, or somebody is very lucky.
The problem is, it needs the political will to actually recognize this as a challenge, and start digging in places where members of the public like you and me cannot. And that's not just the United States, it's across the world, where people are working on behalf of Russia - whether it's in the media, whether it's hacking corporations, whether it's the agents of influence, who do their work covertly and dripping the Russian messages into the ears of decision makers directly in closed meetings. All of those things are beyond our powers to investigate. All of them require an actual counterintelligence investigation looking at sources which are not open to the public. But that in turn requires the will to actually stop that process.
HIFI: So President Biden, if you're listening?
ME: We just got our marching orders… Can you give our viewers one example from your book that is not well known that really embodies what our battle is?
KEIR: The ransomware problem, which is well known in the United States, of course, just like it is in the UK. And the way in which it actually dips into everybody's pocket and funnels the cash to Moscow is the costs of these campaigns are borne by ordinary citizens - whether it's spread out through cyber insurance, whether it comes out of your tax dollars, and it all goes straight to Russia and straight to criminal gangs that share a headquarters with the Ministry of Digital Communications in Moscow. So this is why I say nobody's too unimportant to be a target. And it's Russia's war on everybody, because everybody is affected by these Russian campaigns.
(He and Jim discuss how difficult it is to fight the “Russia, Russia, Russia” propaganda, which was a ‘highly successful propaganda campaign by not just Trump, but also building on traditions that went back a long way’.)
KEIR: For so long, Russia was not recognized as the problem and people like me were saying, ‘Well actually, we do have a problem. And it will bite us very hard in the tender parts before long.’ We were called the cranks, we were called the conspiracy theorists, who saw reds under the bed where they were none. That presents a very deep-seated attitude, against which you have to push back. But that's the reason why the book is dedicated to Vladimir Putin, because he's done more for us than anybody has in proving that actually, yes, the world really does have a Russia problem.
ME: What is it about your background and your passion that makes you want to do this work? This is not easy work. It's not comfortable. We know we're dealing with a mafia state. Why do you do it?
KEIR: Because I dislike what they do. And I would rather they stopped.
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To hear the full fascinating interview with Keir Giles, and Keir discussing Russia’s ‘messianism as a coping mechanism for Russians who realize the deep insoluable misery of their own existence’, please do check out RadPod’s Ep55.
Originally published on January 11, 2023
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