America Meddles in Elections, Too
Bags of cash delivered to a Rome hotel for favored Italian candidates. Scandalous stories leaked to foreign newspapers to swing an election in Nicaragua. Millions of pamphlets printed to defeat an incumbent in Serbia.
The long arm of Vladimir Putin? No, just a small sample of the United States’ intervention in foreign elections.
Earlier this month, American intelligence chiefs warned that Russia appears to be preparing to repeat in the 2018 midterm elections the same chicanery it unleashed in 2016: hacking, leaking, social media manipulation and possibly more. Then Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the 2016 election, announced the indictments of 13 Russians and three companies, run by a businessman with close Kremlin ties, laying out a threeyear scheme to use social media to attack Hillary Clinton, boost Donald J. Trump and sow discord.
Most Americans are shocked by what they view as an unprecedented attack on their political system. But intelligence veterans have a different view.
“If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all,” said Steven L. Hall, who retired in 2015 after 30 years at the C.I. A., where he was the chief of Russian operations. The United States “absolutely” has carried out such election influence operations historically, he said, “and I hope we keep doing it.”
Loch K. Johnson, who began his career in the 1970s as a staff member for a Senate committee that investigated the C.I. A., says Russia’s 2016 operation was simply the cyber-age version of standard United States practice for decades. “We’ve used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners — you name it. We’ve planted false information in foreign newspapers,” said Mr. Johnson, now at the University of Georgia.
The C.I. A. helped overthrow elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s and backed violent coups in other countries in the 1960s. It plotted assassinations and supported brutal anti- Communist governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
But in recent decades, both Mr. Hall and Mr. Johnson argued, American interventions have generally been aimed at helping non-authoritarian candidates challenge dictators or otherwise promoting democracy. Russia has more often intervened to disrupt democracy, they said.
Equating the two, Mr. Hall says, “is like saying cops and bad guys are the same because they both have guns — the motivation matters.”
This history of election meddling has largely been missing from the reporting on the Russian intervention. It illuminates the larger currents of history that drove American electoral interventions during the Cold War and motivate Russia today.
A Carnegie Mellon scholar, Dov H. Levin, has scoured the historical record for election influence operations. He found 81 by the United States and 36 by the Soviet Union or Russia between 1946 and 2000, though the latter count is undoubtedly incomplete.
“It was completely wrong of Vladimir Putin to intervene in this way,” he said. “That said, the methods they used in this election were the digital version of methods used both by the United States and Russia for decades: breaking into party headquarters, recruiting secretaries, placing informants in a party, giving information or disinformation to newspapers.”
Richard M. Bissell Jr., who ran the C.I. A.’s operations in the late 1950s and early 1960s, wrote in his autobiography of “exercising control over a newspaper or broadcasting station, or of securing the desired outcome in an election.”
A declassified report on the C.I. A.’s work in Chile’s 1964 election boasts of the “hard work” the agency did supplying “large sums” to its favored candidate and portraying him as a “wise, sincere and high-minded statesman” while painting his leftist opponent as a “calculating schemer.” Over time, more American influence operations have been mounted openly by the State Department and its affiliates. For the 2000 election in Serbia, the United States funded a successful effort to defeat Slobodan Milosevic. Similar efforts were undertaken in elections in wartime Iraq and Afghanistan, not always with success. At least once the United States reached into a Russian election. Fears that Boris Yeltsin would be defeated for re- election as president in 1996 by an old-fashioned Communist led to an effort to help him, urged on by President Bill Clinton. It included an American push for a $10 billion International Monetary Fund loan to Russia four months before the voting.
Thomas Carothers, a scholar at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace, recalls arguing with a State Department official who told him at the time, “Yeltsin is democracy in Russia,” to which he said he replied, “That’s not what democracy means.”
In recent decades, the most visible American presence in foreign politics has been taxpayer-funded groups, which do not support candidates but teach basic campaign skills, build democratic institutions and train election monitors. Most Americans view such efforts as benign. But Mr. Putin sees them as hostile. One such group, the National Endowment for Democracy, gave a $23,000 grant in 2006 to an organization that employed Aleksei Navalny, who years later became Mr. Putin’s main political nemesis.
Whatever the C.I. A. may have done in recent years to steer foreign elections may not be known for decades. It may be modest by comparison with the agency’s Cold War manipulation. But some old-timers aren’t so sure.
“I assume they’re doing a lot of the old stuff, because, you know, it never changes,” said William J. Daugherty, who worked for the C.I. A. from 1979 to 1996. “The technology may change, but the objectives don’t.”