Why is johnson so scared of confronting russian interference? | thearticle

Yesterday saw a sudden flurry of clearly coordinated revelations about Russian meddling in Western democracies. Dominic Raab issued a statement saying that “Russian actors” sought to

interfere in the 2019 UK election through leaking illicitly acquired documents. Raab’s announcement was followed by a joint advisory statement by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre,

corroborated by the US National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security. The report detailed attempts by the cyber espionage group APT29, a Russian intelligence proxy, to steal

Covid-19 vaccine details from the UK, US and Canada. Although these are serious examples of Russian interference, the disclosures do not really divulge much in the way of genuinely new

information. We already knew that Jeremy Corbyn’s use of leaked trade documents during the 2019 Election came from a Russian hacking operation that leaked the information to the website

Reddit. Dominic Raab’s statement confirmed that the leak was “almost certainly” orchestrated by the Russian state. But this was hardly a shocking revelation as disinformation researchers had

presented enough circumstantial evidence to suggest as much in June 2019. Equally, revelations about the attempts to steal Covid-19 vaccine details are not new. There has been fairly

consistent reporting on attempts at cyber vaccine theft by both Russia and China. The most interesting part of yesterday’s announcements was their timing. The announcements were seemingly

triggered by the Government losing control of the narrative in the wake of a botched reversal of policy on Huawei and a coup which saw them lose control of the Intelligence and Security

Committee (ISC). It comes at just the moment that the Committee confirms that it intends to publish its long delayed report, entitled simply “Russia”. Many expect the report will roam far

beyond online influence operations and will raise questions about Russian involvement in the Brexit referendum, and the Conservative party’s links to Russian donors, not least Boris

Johnson’s link to Evgeny Lebedev, son of the _Evening Standard_’s proprietor and former KGB officer, Alexander Lebedev. Johnson started to lose control of the security agenda earlier in the

week. Now it looks like his communications team are launching a desperate smokescreen before the release of the full ISC report. A careful parsing of the concurrent releases raise

significant questions about the prioritising of politics over national security. What the Government knew and when they chose to respond, matters a great deal. No amount of obfuscation can

hide that. What Raab failed to mention yesterday was that the Russian disinformation operation of which the 2019 election interference was part, had been running for at least six years and

was still running at the start of 2020. Furthermore the government has known about “Secondary Infektion” (as the US network analysis firm “Graphika” named the operation) for a considerable

length of time. Although the ISC report has not been published, another report from February 2019 into Disinformation and “fake news” was published in February 2019 by the Digital, Culture,

Media and Sport (DCMS) Parliamentary Committee. Even though the full extent of “Secondary Infektion” was not revealed until earlier this year, the DCMS report had already picked up on the

most important aspects that had been perpetrated by the time of publication. The committee found that Russia had intervened in the 2016 EU referendum. They estimated that the Russian state

controlled channels, “RT” and “Sputnik”, had published a pro-leave website which managed to gain 134 million potential impressions. To put that in context it is nearly five times the reach

of the two domestic UK pro-Brexit campaigns combined (Vote Leave had 33 million impressions and Leave.EU had 11 million). The DCMS report also noted Theresa May’s accusation of Russian

“meddling in elections and planting disinformation, in an attempt to ‘weaponise information’ and sow discord in the West.” Equally May’s government suggested that in the wake of the nerve

agent poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury that “the Russian state promulgated at least 38 false disinformation narratives”. Despite this, May was careful to avoid the suggestion of direct

Russian interference in the UK’s political process. She used an extremely precise formulation of words that the government had seen no evidence of “successful interference” in UK elections.

A similar formulation was adopted by Boris Johnson, then Foreign Secretary, who confronted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with the suggestion “I think it’s very important that you

should recognise that Russian attempts to interfere in our elections, our referendum, whatever they may have been, have not been successful… had it been successful, that would be an entirely

different matter.” Certainly by mid-March this year, just as Covid-19 hit, that formulation of words had been dropped and it was revealed that UK Ministers were no longer allowed to claim

that there had been “no successful examples” of Russian interference affecting UK elections. What then did the government know between the finalisation of the ISC report in March 2019 and

the alleged first instance of Russian electoral interference in December of that year? Furthermore, could the timely release of the ISC report have prevented Russian interference in the

general election? It is impossible to know what the ISC report will reveal but clearly the Government is going to considerable lengths to divert attention from it. Some clues come from a

book by the _Guardian_ journalist Luke Harding. _Shadow State _was published at the end of June. Harding makes a number of detailed accusations, and gives considerable detail about the

manner in which Russia was involved in supporting the “Leave” campaigns during the Brexit referendum that far exceeds the disinformation campaign documented by the DCMS committee. The book

also released testimony by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele to the ISC. Steele’s account suggests that the UK intelligence services ignored information he presented to them, at the

behest of Theresa May and Boris Johnson, in order to avoid prejudicing a free trade deal with the US or the steady progress of Brexit. Harding also obliquely suggests that the Kremlin’s

direct and indirect involvement in Brexit exceeds the disinformation campaign documented by the DCMS committee. It appears that successive UK governments have only been interested in

selectively raising the issue of Russian political interference when it suits their political purposes. Perhaps this rectitude is explained by fear of revealing the full extent of Russian

intervention in UK politics. But selective engagement with Russian disinformation is an own-goal. Withholding embarrassing information limits the government’s freedom of action in tackling

Russia. Russian influence operations are sophisticated, working on multiple levels. The first order direct attempts to influence voters are bad enough. The second order effects are

potentially far worse. Government complicity by choosing to delay or selectively expose the dirty work of the Kremlin is exactly the type of outcome Russia aims to achieve, undermining trust

in government and weakening democracy itself. As Steele put it “[The] gradual and more subtle erosion of our norms and politics including our political parties, poses a significant threat.”

In this adventure the government has become an unwitting accomplice. This week’s political farce is exactly the type of result Russia hopes to achieve. First the botched exertion of control

of the ISC by attempting to appoint a government stooge. Quickly followed by a stage-managed, late and only partial release of hacking stories. Taken together the government looks both

incompetent and dishonest. During the Cold War this strategy was known as “Reflexive Control”, whereby an adversary is manipulated into voluntarily choosing self-defeating actions. We need

much firmer evidence that the government takes the very powerful threat from Russian election interference and disinformation seriously enough to comprehensively tackle it. So far there are

few encouraging signs since the DCMS committee made a number of urgent recommendations in 2019. The last word should go to Steele himself. His description of the May Government was damning —

the concern is that his testimony appears equally applicable to Johnson’s administration. “My understanding, arising partly from personal experience with the ‘Trump-Russia dossier’, is that

this government perhaps more than its predecessors is reluctant to see (or act upon) intelligence on Russian activities when this presents difficult wider political implications.”