The Plot to Hack America

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated… In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.⁶²

5 OPERATION LUCKY-7: THE KREMLIN PLAN TO ELECT A PRESIDENT

How to Organize an Election Theft

To help elect Donald J. Trump to President of the United States, the Russians would need to draw from their experience in the art of compromising the integrity of a selected person or political party that they wanted to influence or deter through the Russian strategy of Kompromat. If Vladimir Putin, the Russian intelligence apparatus, and its underground global hacking wings sought to destabilize the West, break up NATO, and reestablish the global order, they would need to lay out a strategic hybrid warfare plan.

Hybrid warfare is the new Russian model to harness the strength of all aspects of Russian intelligence, propaganda, cyber operations, and Kompromat to support battlefield preparations before ordering terrorism, special operations, and full-scale military warfare. In this case, the FSB would be tasked to plan a cyberspace-based strategic political warfare operation to influence the U.S. elections though the theft of emails and materials from the Democratic party and make selective releases through a third party surrogate, called a cutout, that does not know or care that the source is the FSB.

With this election, Vladimir Putin, the former director of Russia’s intelligence agency, sees the election of Donald Trump as the fastest way to destabilize the United States, damage its economy, as well as fracture both the European Union and NATO. These events, which start with the election of Trump, would allow Russia to become the strongest of the world’s three Superpowers and reorder the globe with a dominant Russia at the helm.

Operation Plan LUCKY-7 (Operatzia Paveslo Sem—Операция Повезло Семь)

For the purposes of this analysis we will refer to the Russian operation as LUCKY-7. Seven is the international calling code for Russia. To pull off such an enormous political warfare operation successfully would require at least seven phases. The number is not only a universal symbol of luck, but it is also consistent with Russian superstition and harnesses the iconography of the seven sacraments in the Russian Orthodox Church.

To conduct an operation at this level would require a level of organization far greater than any had been done before anywhere in the world. A political and cyber mission of this magnitude would require every component of the Russian cyber and intelligence arsenal. The mission would seem daunting at first, until one recognizes that it would simply resemble a Kompromat-style political warfare operation, but with far greater delicacy.