The Plot to Hack America

Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, drew a connection between Russia and the DNC hack in a July 24 interview with CNN. “What’s disturbing to us is that experts are telling us that Russian State actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump,” Mook said. “I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention here, and I think that’s disturbing.”⁴²

Assange affirmed that WikiLeaks did time the release to come before the start of the DNC. “That’s when we knew there would be maximum interest by readers, but also, we have a responsibility to,” Assange told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “If we published after, you can just imagine how outraged the Democratic voting population would have been. It had to have been before.”⁴³

As for the allegations that Russia was involved in the leak, Assange told CNN, “I think this raises a very serious question, which is that the natural instincts of Hillary Clinton and the people around her, that when confronted with a serious domestic political scandal, that she tries to blame the Russians, blame the Chinese, et cetera, because if she does that when she’s in government, that’s a political, managerial style that can lead to conflict.”⁴⁴

He said, “What we have right now is the Hillary Clinton campaign using a speculative allegation about hacks that have occurred in the past to try and divert attention from our emails, another separate issue that WikiLeaks has published.”⁴⁵ Assange held that the organization liked to “create maximum ambiguity” about the identities of its sources, saying, “Obviously, to exclude certain actors is to make it easier to find out who our sources are. So we never do it.”⁴⁶

A month and a half before the publication of the DNC emails, Assange teased the release during an interview with Britain’s ITV. “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton, which is great.”⁴⁷

With that said, Operation LUCKY-7 had its cut-out. The FSB’s Information Warfare Management Cell (IWMC) would create a false flag source to feed Assange the data taken from the DNC and any subsequent hacks through Guccifer 2.0. Assange was desperate to be relevant and the IWMC was going to create a new era where his own hatreds and agenda could be skillfully manipulated by the FSB’s active measures officers, while the cyber teams would keep him well fed. Assange was primed to do LUCKY-7’s bidding and now only needed the data they had stolen. WikiLeaks was now a wholly owned subsidiary of the FSB and essentially the cyber equivalent of a Laundromat, a Russian laundry—ready to clean and give a white appearance to the dirt.

8 WHEN CYBER BEARS ATTACK

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

—Ian Fleming

Cyber Bears! Attack!

At some point early in fall of 2015 the National Security Agency and the FBI cyber division had indications of unusual activity related to Democratic National Committee servers. The signature of the attempts was familiar, since this had not been the first time that foreign entities had attempted to penetrate related to the US political parties’ networks, high profile persons, or U.S. government agencies. Individual hackers would attempt these penetrations for personal notoriety and bragging rights among the tight and secretive hacking community, but this practice had long since expanded into a global business worth billions in stolen data. Some hacking thieves stole Social Security numbers, credit cards, and identity theft information belonging to ordinary people, in sophisticated exploits that skimmed cash at the blink of an eye. Other groups specialized in stealing large-volume banking data or attempting large-scale fraud.

It has long been a dictum of warfare that forewarned is forearmed. In business and politics as well, the strengths of an opponent can be exploited, their weaknesses taken advantage of and manipulated. To this end a small, elite network of individual hackers or hacker gangs specialize in stealing corporate secrets to sell or use for blackmail. A hacker of this ilk will sell the stolen data to business rivals. Whether it be the size of the bid on a contract or the nude photos of an opposing CEO’s mistress, such data that could never have been previously available without physically breaking and entering a file or safe could now safely be extracted from a third party that often does it for a reasonable fee. Throughout the 1990s hacking groups performing these services had formed in Eastern Europe, then to West Africa, China, and South Asia. Foreign intelligence agencies often subcontracted their services to see what they could find on targets in America as well.