PHASE 4: Prepare the Political Battle Space
PHASE 5: Develop and Sustain Supporting Political/Propaganda
PHASE 6: Fund and Manipulate a Cut-Out Asset to Disperse Kompromat information.
PHASE 7: Execute Kompromat Operations
Phases 1 through 4 had already been put in place. Phase 5 would be the easiest. By using Russia Today TV to blast Hilary Clinton on an international scale and tacitly express support for Trump, Putin has been able to get Donald to tout his connections to Russia as a positive for America.
Trump and his surrogates have helped the Kremlin as well by making exclamations that Putin doesn’t respect Obama, and that Russia doesn’t like “crooked” Hilary because she helped spark political protests in Russia in 2011 and 2013, and by convincing formerly anti-Russian Americans that Putin is an ally to be assisted in the war against ISIS. It was a master stroke that would require considerable planning and precision to execute if it had been done by spies. However, it was executed by a carnival barker. To his followers, Trump has successfully spun the line that “Putin respects me and would work with me, he won’t work with Hilary,” and they love it.
Launching the CYBER BEARS
The FSB CYBER BEARS strategy was to steal critical political intelligence data from all wings of the U.S. Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Hillary Clinton Campaign, and donors and supporters. Republican Party enemies of Russian defense policy would also need to be hacked in case they became too opposed to the operation. A little side activity to guarantee the silence of the risk-adverse politicians would generally be found in the hidden corners of a laptop or nude photos that were deleted from the hard drive but still recoverable by one or more of the CYBER BEARS.
For old-school officers trained under the KGB, conducting a political and cyberwarfare operation would be a lifelong dream. It would create the space and environment to realign Russia as the preeminent power in the world. Even though most Russians who know Putin believe that this would be a very long shot, the fortunate emergence of a self-absorbed and servile Donald Trump coupled with Putin’s long hatred of Hillary Clinton meddling in his Eastern European plans would make this a tempting opportunity to severely damage the United States. Winning battles in Cyberspace are a matter of influencing the global perception thought output of “opinions” and “voices” to “trend” a perception that the producer wishes. Whether it’s the number of hits on the latest trending kitty playing with yarn video or the location of a Pokémon GO character, if an organization with a large enough computing system and secret operatives so wishes they can steal, smear, influence and quite possibly select a U.S. President with little pushback from the media. This is apparently the terminal mission objective of Operation Lucky-7: Direct the CYBER BEARS to collect enough damaging information on Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Democratic Party to damage them in the mind of the American public.
Russian intelligence would spare no effort to elect Donald J. Trump President of the United States. However, the IWMC needed to disseminate the information publically. A cut-out could be found, but the group needed its own “legend”—espionage terminology for a false backstory to protect the identities of the case officers. The Cyberspies decided to create their own legend and to honor a hacker that was already well known: Guccifer.
The original and only Guccifer was the Romanian eccentric Marcel Lehel Lazar who was arrested and extradited from Romania to the U.S. after breaking into dozens of emails that belonged to officials like both George Bush Sr. , George W. Bush, Colin Powell, and Sidney Blumenthal, long time friend of Hillary Clinton. He used the name Guccifer as his handle for his attacks. He had claimed that he successfully hacked a private server belonging to Hillary Clinton, but during the House hearing on the FBI decision not to prosecute Clinton for use of private server or other crimes, Representative Blake Farenthold asked FBI Director James Comey if there was any truth to the claims made by Guccifer that he breached the server. Comey stated unequivocally that Guccifer lied about the breach and there was no indication that any such breach ever occurred, even if the concerns or threat may have existed.
What better way to cause mayhem, confusion and mischief than to release the stolen emails under the same name? Google searches would only add to the confusion as the original Guccifer would always come up first. Since this was a new entity, a second generation, it was only fitting that he be version 2.0. Hence, Guccifer 2.0 was born.
6
BATTLES OF THE CYBER BEARS
Putin’s CYBER BEARS