The most effective intelligence operation in modern history

Finally finished reading Rachel Maddow’s book Blowout, a deep-dive into the politics of the modern oil and gas industry, with a special focus on how Russia’s oil politics have led to our present state of affairs, as well as how the fracking boom has disrupted both the energy sector and geopolitics over the last twenty years. I’d recommend it to anyone hungry to learn more about the ins and outs of these topics — the scope of the work is really ambitious, but well done, I thought. Also, this is the first Maddow book I’ve read, and she is a very engaging and funny writer, so these heavy topics are often punctuated with levity and verve.

Maddow dedicates a few chapters to the hacking of the DNC and subversion of the 2016 presidential election. They are presented as tactics necessary to secure Russia’s future economic and geopolitical aims, which are entirely dependent on Putin controlling a lucrative oil and gas empire and using it as leverage in Europe and central Asia to further Russia’s power. She argues that increasingly tightening Obama-era sanctions straitjacketed Russia’s prospects for developing new oil and gas fields, and that the elimination of those sanctions was the overriding priority of Russian foreign, and ultimately, military policy. She also shows throughout the book how ExxonMobil, its CEO Rex Tillerson, and various American guns-for-hire (e.g. JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Skadden) walked alongside Putin and the oligarchs he empowered, seeking to maximize profit for their shareholders without regard to either the foreign policy aims of the US government or respect for human rights. (The most shocking part of the book for me was the extensive documentation of corruption, theft, repression, and torture in Equatorial Guinea by the ruling Obiang family, enabled by ExxonMobil and various multinational entities.)

There was one passage that stood out to me, among the many richly detailed and brilliant chapters —because it just hit so close to home. Laying out the rationale for Putin’s 2016 information warfare operation, in which Russian intelligence officers conducted a massive operation to attack the fault-lines of American society via social media, she writes:

[W]hat is undeniably true is that Putin succeeded, probably beyond his wildest imaginings, in his highest real aim. The “goal seems not to be domination but chaos,”, longtime Moscow correspondent Susan B. Glasser succinctly explained in an essay in Politico a year after the 2016 election. “The objective is not to destroy us, but to weaken and confuse us.”

Putin and his techno-warriors figured out what differences and disagreements and prejudices were corroding the health and cohesion of American society. They found the most ragged faults and fissures in our democracy: immigration, race, religion, economic injustice, mass shootings. Then they poured infectious waste into them. They used traditional media, social media, and disinformation to try to make citizens of differing experiences and viewpoints hate and distrust each other as much as possible; made public discourse and discussion as evil and mean-spirited and alienating as possible; created miserable expectations for coarseness and cruelty and blatant dishonesty in politics and civic life.

The Russian operation pushed American politicians and political parties to more and more extreme positions; it celebrated all manner of fringe, splinter, and radical politics and demonized centrists, moderates, and anybody on any point of the ideological spectrum who actually believed the levers of government could be harnessed for anything useful at all… At basically zero cost, Putin succeeded in his biggest aim: he corrupted and polluted our most treasured possession, our democracy.

This is not revelatory information — we’ve known since 2017, and even before, that this was happening. But what do we do about it, this act of information warfare in a virtual space, this phantom nudge of our lesser angels against our neighbors, our family members, our fellow citizens? Suggestions welcome.