HARPER AND DECAMERON: CONTROLLING THE NARRATIVE

Several years back--in the pre-Trump era--a friend attended a forum at the Brookings Institution on
the subject of US-Russian relations.  During the question and answer portion of the event, she asked a question about American and European meddling in Ukraine, leading to the ouster of the Yanukovych government and the subsequent Russian re-annexation of the Crimea.  She cited the open admission by then-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, about the US having spent $5 billion to build the democracy movement in Ukraine, suggesting that the Russians may have had cause to view the Ukraine regime change events of 2013-2014 as a Western effort to drive a wedge between Moscow and Kiev, and possibly deprive Russia of its only Black Sea naval facility..

One of the speakers responded to the question by declaring that the questioner was clearly presenting a narrative that had been "written in Russia."  The panelist went on to elaborate that the real issue is "which side controls the narrative."  At no point did any of the panelists challenge any of the facts presented in the question.  Those facts, or any other facts challenging the conclusion that the entire Ukraine crisis was strictly the work of imperial adventurers in Moscow, were simply to be dismissed as "their narrative." 

Control over the narrative has more and more replaced truth seeking.  It is the old Goebbels dictum:  If you repeat the same lie over and over enough, it becomes the truth.

Recent examples abound, but the golden egg prize goes to the claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 Presidential elections to secure a victory for Donald Trump.  This narrative was presented in January 2017, after the Trump victory but before his inauguration, in an intelligence community assessment.  Go back and re-read that 25-page "narrative" today and you will be shocked.  It contains no evidence, but relies on a pseudo-psychological profile of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was presumed to have been angry at Hillary Clinton since 2011 when she made some nasty personal comments about him.  "Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton because he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012, and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him."

The assessment accused Putin of--heaven forbid--seeking a partnership with the United States to defeat the Islamic State:  "Moscow also saw the election of President-elect Trump as a way to achieve an international counter-terrorism coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)."

Originally, the document was presented as an all-intelligence community consensus document, prepared by representatives of the 17 organizations that comprise the US Intelligence Community.  Later it was acknowledged that the report was prepared by two analysts.

They cited the CIA and the FBI, headed at the time by John Brennan and James Comey, as having "high confidence" in the judgment that the Russians attempted to interfere in the 2016 election.  The NSA, the agency with the greatest technical capacity to "read Moscow's mail," gave only "moderate confidence" to the judgment of Russian interference.

In a methodological annex to the report, the authors acknowledged that they had no facts to back up their conclusions:

"Estimative language consists of two elements: judgments about the likelihood of developments or events occurring and levels of confidence in the sources and analytic reasoning supporting the judgments.  Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.  Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents..."

The authors of the assessment claimed that there was much more evidence in the classified version of the report, but that intelligence had to be withheld from the public. 

Last month, at the behest of President Trump, CIA Director Mike Pompeo met with a former NSA official, William Binney, who had conducted his own investigation of the allegations that Russian hackers had obtained Democratic National Committee emails, showing a systematic campaign by the DNC to secure Hillary Clinton the nomination over Senator Bernie Sanders.  Binney concluded that the emails had been obtained by someone working at the DNC headquarters and were "leaked, not hacked."  Now, former acting DNC Chair Donna Brazile has come out with a detailed, fact-filled book-length account, confirming that Hillary had, indeed, rigged the primary outcome to secure the nomination by buying off the DNC in 2015.

Binney's report got marginal coverage in some left-of-center and right-of-center publications, but no one in the Mainstream Media (MSM) touched the story--because it contradicted the narrative.

If someone in the USIC had a sense of humor, they would have probably named this "narrative control program" "Operation Gossamer Shield."  Gossamer is defined as:  "a fine, filmy substance, consisting of cobwebs spun by small spiders... Used to refer to something very light, thin, insubstantial or delicate." 

Comments

[Account Deleted]

The Colonel's suggestion is hard to beat, but in the context of this post I'd suggest:

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past

[Ishmael Zechariah]

Colonel,
Good call. They do behave like that. Perhaps one could substitute "the World" in place of the "State".
Ishmael Zechariah

[Babak Makkinejad]

There are dynamical effects in Special Relativity.

[Richardstevenhack]

The problem with the VIPS analysis is that they forget that neither Adam Carter nor The Forensicator ever said that the emails analyzed were from the original leak that provided Wikileaks with their documents.

Both Carter and Forensicator have said that the analysis applies ONLY to the emails released by Guccifer 2.0 - NOT to the documents released by Wikileaks. The point of that analysis was to demonstrate good circumstantial evidence that Guccifer 2.0 had nothing to do with the actual leak. Further, Carter provides evidence that Guccifer 2.0 was merely introduced into the situation to try to establish that Russians were involved in the leak.

The point of the analysis is to prove that the official narrative of the government - that Guccifer 2.0 was part of a team of Russians who hacked into the DNC over the Internet from someplace in Europe or Russian is entirely false.

Unfortunately VIPS doesn't make that distinction. Binney is focused on the fact that the NSA has no data to back up the official narrative whereas the NSA should be able to prove definitely whether a hack occurred and by whom.

As I've said before, anyone - Russians or not - could have hacked the DNC without being detected by the NSA if they used one of three methods:

1) Physical penetration;
2) Wireless penetration;
3) Standard tradecraft: bribery or blackmail.

Binney ignores these options. However, to the degree that he is focused on refuting the official story, he is correct to do so.

Guccifer 2.0 is a false flag entity introduced by someone - either the DNC, the Clinton campaign, CrowdStrike or some Ukrainians or all of the above - most likely the latter - to strengthen the pathetically poor attribution done by CrowdStrike.

Further investigation would make that apparent and lead to the demise of the entire "hack" story.

[Richardstevenhack]

We keep telling you it's the Deep State and the Military-Industrial Complex, but you don't believe THOSE "puppet masters" exist.

Kinda leaves the rest of us who do out in the cold for explanations.

[Keith Harbaugh]

This is the VIPS memo you are referring to, right?
"Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence"
By VIPS
Consortium News, 2017-07-24
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/

And this is the The Nation article, right?
"A Leak or a Hack? A Forum on the VIPS Memo"
A letter from dissenting members of VIPS, a reply from VIPS, and the results of our independent review.
By Various Contributors
The Nation, 2017-09-01
https://www.thenation.com/article/a-leak-or-a-hack-a-forum-on-the-vips-memo/

Just want to be clear on what you are talking about :-)

[Bill Herschel]

I think Trump won this one on his own, just as he is currently driving a wooden stake through the heart of the Republican Party on his own. His "ideas" before the election were a lot different than his "ideas" today. As I think pl has pointed out, today he nothing but another Saudi Prince singing the tune he is told to sing.

I am convinced there was absolutely no Russian influence whatsoever. But if you happen to run into a Martian in the grocery store, I assure you that he or she will tell you that Vladimir Putin is a bad man, a dictator, a corrupt murderer of journalists, etc. The propaganda campaign is of that magnitude.

[Bill Herschel]

The religious connotations of "evil" are too strong for me. On the other hand, can children be evil. I do not believe they can. And children remain children certainly through adolescence. Clinton is not an adolescent. She must be held responsible for her actions. What she is describing in the case of Gaddafi is murder. She is laughing at murder. Condoning it. Making light of it. With any luck she will leave the public stage forever.

On the other hand, I believe she is capable of all the things she and her team accuse Vladimir Putin of. She has her own definition of evil.

[different clue]

The Twisted Genius,

That several-million popular vote lead for Clinton was almost all from California. I suspect more fine-grained study would show it to be from Coastal California from Greater Los Angeles north to the Oregon border.

It would be interesting to know how many of those votes for Clinton were actually FOR Clinton as against being "for" Clinton as the only way to be aGAINST Trump. ( In an upside-down version of my vote "for" Trump being the only way I could vote aGAINST Clinton.)

[Christian Chuba]

IMO inertia.

During the Cold War we had the superior resources and were delivering a boot stomping when we won in the 90's. The apparatus that we built just just couldn't let it go and has been dying to unload against the Russkies. Just a variation of 'to a hammer, all problems look like a nail'.

[turcopolier]

richardstevenhack

That is because these things do not exist but like a fool you pursue what does not exist. Why do you do that? It is because you have been programmed to believe they exist. pl

[LondonBob]

I agree with some of that but I don't think fears regarding the Soviet Union and Communism were overstated in the interwar period. The Bolshevik revolution was almost unprecedented in European history with the wholesale liquidation of perceived enemies and the explicit ideology of spreading the revolution. Germany, Hungary, Spain etc. were all wracked by communist activity. Perhaps uniquely most countries also harboured substantial fifth columns that actively supported the revolution, bringing a new dimension to the conflict. Indeed in my opinion internal subversion was the only area where Soviet capabilities were underestimated rather than overestimated.

From the 1930s perspective it is understandable why many hoped Hitler would limit his ambitions to Ein Reich, Ein Volk, rather than the tradition Imperial German policy of an empire in the East, or lebensraum as Hitler preferred to term it. Similarly Hitler's genocidal proclivities could not be determined yet. Chamberlain had few choices given the international situation with the US absent from upholding the Versailles settlement, the Soviet Union had actively assisted Wiemar Germany in undermining it, France was traumatised by her losses in WWI and Mussolini ruled Italy. Who knows if an army coup would have worked in 38, they didn't during the war, although I would have liked to have seen more done here, FDR's policy of unconditional surrender was stupid and evil.

I do agree though that far too many in the West were unable to see the steady transition from the revolutionary state to something resembling more traditional Russian modes, not unlike the shift from revolutionary France to Napoleonic France. Post Stalin the Soviet leadership were all people we could do business with, perhaps something that JFK, Nixon et al. sensed, even if others did not.

Ironically I believe that the various internal subversions have had the most impact, but I think post Cold War history has shown those don't need to have a Soviet sponsor to survive and thrive.

[LondonBob]

Bureaucratic inertia and self interest. The most powerful special interests and lobbies have a deep stake in an activist foreign policy which requires the US to go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

[confusedponderer]

CC,
re: "Just a variation of 'to a hammer, all problems look like a nail'."

Well, for folks used to think that their ideas are brilliant and good for everybody else and for whom dissent on that is intolerable ... well, for such folks a government that they don't like or that doesn't obey needs "help", lately often called 'regime change' - to a new group that isn't an obstacle to benefits and wisdom of these folks.

As Madeline Albright once said so clearly to Colin Powell: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Apparently, that lady is a person for whom anything looks like a nail that really needs a hammer.

And I see that sort of view as a basis at work in the script of that notable US military exercise "Millennium Challenge 2002", playing a conflict of the US vs Iran.

The exercise was started with an utterly benign and diplomatic US invitation directed at Iran to (a) immediately surrender and (b) show cooperation by (c) committing suicide, or (d) they'd be bombed to see wisdom.

Well, they didn't agree to that, and so it speaks, in its own way, for itself that the retired US marine general Van Riper playing the 'reds' - Iran - cleverly and thinkingly, and inflicted so severe losses on the US that the exercise was rescripted so the blue folks would win. Oopsie.

And that sort of view is rather persistent in the US. Just lately, Trump said that Tillerson, his foreign secretary, is "wasting time" by doing diplomacy with NoKo. And I always foolishly thought that diplomacy is part of the job of a foreign secretary ...

But when your way is the only way and negotiating is a waste of time, then you get nonsense approaches like that as an embarassing exercise and as an embarassing practice.

Just see the great successes (a lot of chaos and a lot of killing) so achieved in Libya and Syria. Or look at the unholy mess - siege and the epidemic of chloera - in Yemen, anpother country that was found to need 'help', err, regime change.

All these stunts didn't really work, but, the way it looks, the failure didn't make the folks less regime change happy. And why call it failure anyway? You can redefine it as a ... hmmm ... ah yes! - a brilliant success!

[J]

Good points made. The complete narrative needs to be addressed, not just lopsidedness.

A good case in point you may have overlooked is the regular demonstrations in NYC by anti-Zionist Jews against the State of Israel. Also if an American Jew dares to utter anything derogatory against Zionism or the State of Israel and its dehumanizing Palestinian Arabs, they're immediately silenced or the subject is changed.

[jpb]

Life is the puppet master and evolution is the mechanism.

[The Twisted Genius]

different clue,

California and New York voted 2 to 1 for HRC as did a few few other states. Here's the vote totals for just those two states.
California Trump 4,483,810 Clinton 8,753,788 Clinton +4,269,978
New York Trump 2,790,073 Clinton 4,491,191 Clinton +1,701,118
A number of states voted for Trump in the same ratio including the Dakotas, Wyoming, West Virginia, Alabama and Oklahoma. All that is moot since it's the Electoral college vote that counts. I was just surprised she did as well as she did given her self-inflicted faults.

[The Twisted Genius]

David Habakkuk,

Reflexive control as a field of study did not appear until the 60s with the theories of V. A. Lefebvre in the Soviet Union. It's influence can be seen in the practice of human persuasion and influence operations and in the Soviet/Russian applications of radio electronic combat. Tim Thomas, a Russian Area Specialist Officer at Fort Leavenworth's Foreign Military Studies Office, has written quite a bit about this.

I'm nostalgic for the time when there were military contacts between Russians and Americans. In 2012 the 10th SFG(A) and the 45th Guards Spetsnaz Regiment conducted exchange training missions. In the 80s, the Austrian Army Mountain Guide School took great pains to keep our units on separate Alpine ridges during training. We only got to wave our ski poles at each other from a distance. I see no reason we can't work together again, even militarily. Look what we do in space.

[The Twisted Genius]

Keith Harbaugh,

Those are the articles, especially the one from "The Nation." The other one I linked to was Scott Ritter's article at "Truthdig."

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/time-to-reassess-the-roles-played-by-guccifer-2-0-and-russia-in-the-dnc-hack/

[Babak Makkinejad]

By "Deep State" I imagine you mean the Protestant Churches in US? A.K.A. the Puritans?

[David Habakkuk]

TTG,

I looked up ‘reflexive control.’ From a piece in the ‘Georgetown Security Studies Review’ in February entitled ‘Disinformation and Reflexive Control: The New Cold War’ by Annie Kowalewski (note name):

‘Reflexive control is a “uniquely Russian” concept based on maskirovka, an old Soviet notion in which one “conveys to an opponent specifically prepared information to incline him/her to voluntarily make the predetermined decision desired by the initiator of the action”.’

(See http://georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/2017/02/01/disinformation-and-reflexive-control-the-new-cold-war/ )

Whether the term originated with the theories of V.A. Lefebvre in the ‘Sixties is, I submit, not really very relevant. This is what people have been doing since time immemorial.

Actually, I happen to know a good deal about two occasions when the Soviets did ‘reflexive control’ very effectively. One was when the ‘MSM’ – in particular the ‘New York Times’ – dismissed and sneered at the reporting of the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones on what is now called the ‘Holodomor’. As the family were friends of my grandparents, my father knew who to believe.

Another occasion was the Katyn massacre, when the only reliable reporting in Britain came from someone who was a genuine ‘Holocaust denier.’ I can vouch for this – I met him, years later.

Unfortunately, on other occasions ‘Russophobes’ – sometimes our home-grown British variety, but often erstwhile victims of the Russian and Soviet states, or their descendants – have convinced themselves that what was at issue was ‘reflexive control’, when in fact this turned out to be simply wrong. One knows these traumas run deep, but often the policy consequences are unfortunate.

This was precisely what happened when people like Postan and my father were trying to persuade people like Chamberlain that it might be a good idea to not take for granted that Litvinov’s overtures were a ‘baited hook.’ It was also what happened when, following guidance from people like MccGwire and Garthoff, who actually had developed methodologies to distinguish ‘reflexive control’ from accurate statements, I attempted to persuade people to take the Gorbachev-era ‘new thinking’ seriously.

We were right, the mainstream ‘intelligence communities’ on both sides of the Atlantic utterly wrong.

As it happens, the British used to be rather good at ‘reflexive control.’ A key basis, in the Second World War, was the cracking of the Abwehr Enigma at Bletchley Park – Dilwyn Knox’s team, in which a key player was a 19-year-old girl called Mavis Lever, made possible the ‘specially prepared information’ of ‘Operation Mincemeat’ and ‘Operation Fortitude.’

I am now watching, with horrified incredulity, an attempt at ‘reflexive control’. This involves:

1. the investigation of the DNC servers being entrusted by Alperovitch and ‘CrowdStrike’, who are already clearly involved in such operations, rather than either the FBI’s own experts or any contractor with any remote claim to impartiality, who point the finger at the GRU. You have attempted to justify this, but it is clearly unjustifiable;

2. documents being immediately produced by ‘Guccifer 2.0’, in which the former GCHQ employee Matt Tait immediately identifies the name of the founder of the Cheka. The ‘patter’ is familiar from incompetent operations: ‘I did not believe “CrowdStrike”, but then I found this evidence showing they were right after all’;

3. a view days later, Christopher Steele, who rigged the Litvinenko Inquiry – I have plenty of evidence to prove this – producing the first installment of a ‘dossier’ which claims that somehow, when nobody expected Trump would have any kind of serious role in American politics, had already decided he was the ‘coming man.’

This is, quite patently, a very crude attempt at ‘reflexive control’ by elements of the American and British intelligence services, acting in conjunction.

At the moment, a critical question is whether or not General Valery Gerasimov, who as you know is Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, is or is not an appropriate collaborator in combating jihadist terrorism.

You, on what appear to me to be very flimsy grounds, are giving aid and comfort to those who are seeking to rule the possibility of collaboration out by portraying his organisation as having played a central role in attempting to subvert American institutions.

So doing both makes effective resolution of current crises in a whole range of places more difficult – and also contributes to what has become a non-negligible risk of nuclear war.

If you think you can ‘work together again’ effectively with the Russian military – at anything more than the most basic level – while behaving like this, or indeed calling Putin ‘mudak’ (English equivalents, I understand, including ‘ass, asshole, blockhead, motherfucker, shitass, simpleton, turd, ass hole, mother fucker, bugger, arse’), I think you are, if I may say so, something of a ‘simpleton.’

[different clue]

The Twisted Genius,

I did not know that New York was also two-to-one Clinton. This makes me wonder if the Democratic Party structures of California and New York are most strongly controlled by the Jonestown Clintists and will be the last State Democratic Parties and Electorates to be reformed and declintaminated . . . if they even can be.

[John Merryman]

Control, like lots of things, can be a double edged sword. Too rigid and it is brittle. Too much force and it can spin out of control. Basically most people are riding a wave. Some bigger, but they have to go the direction the wave is going, or else.

[The Twisted Genius]

David Habakkuk,

I recommend some of Tim Thomas' works on reflexive control. I noticed Annie Kowalewski used him as a source. I disagree that this concept was based on maskirovka although I've heard that before. It's more like maskirovka can be described as an implementation of reflexive control. I've had several conversations with Tim Thomas about reflexive control. We spoke about the juxtaposition of reflexive control and the Russian use of cybernetics. I see a strong relation between the two concepts and the Russian implementation of information-based warfare.

https://www.rit.edu/~w-cmmc/literature/Thomas_2004.pdf

I think you are far too fixated on Alperovich as a reason to discount the idea of a Russian hack of the DNC servers. The FBI was the first to notify the DNC that the Russian hackers that they were battling in several government systems for more than a year. This first notification was made in Sep 2015 and was based on NSA intercepts of the hackers activity on the DNC system. Both the FBI special agent and the DNC IT guy screwed the pooch and no action was taken against the hackers until CrowdStrike was called. Fortunately the team leader (Robert Johnston) that first examined the DNC system recently left the military after working to kick the same hackers out of the JCS systems. He recognized the hack for what it was. The important point of this story, other than Alperovitch was only tangentially involved, is that the NSA captured the hacker traffic itself, something way more valuable than after-the-fact forensics of the hacked servers. Unfortunately for us, that info has not been released publicly and probably never will.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jasonleopold/he-solved-the-dnc-hack-now-hes-telling-his-story-for-the?utm_term=.qiJKmnA5NK#.juOxMJR9ex

Concerning my use of the term mudak, which you translated quite correctly, that is a term that I and several old school Russian hackers often exchanged on FIDONet and IRC. We used it as a term of endearment and mutual respect, much like we called each other such things on my SF team and SMU team. I hope that explains things... you old bastard. ;)

[Babak Makkinejad]

I believe that has been the whole purpose of the Intelligence Arts, to cause one's opponent to perform a certain task or take a certain course of action - by his own volition - that would advance one's interests.
There is nothing specifically Russian in any of this; Did not the English create "The man who never was"?