German
Intel Clears Russia on Interference
Mainstream U.S. media only wants stories of
Russian perfidy, so when German intelligence
cleared Moscow of suspected subversion of German
democracy, the silence was deafening, says
ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
By Ray McGovern
February
16, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Consortium
News"
- After a multi-month, politically charged
investigation, German intelligence agencies
could find no good evidence
of Moscow-directed cyber-attacks or a
disinformation campaign aimed at subverting the
democratic process in Germany. Undaunted,
Chancellor Angela Merkel has commissioned a new
investigation.
Last
year, Berlin’s two main intelligence agencies,
the BND and BfV (counterparts of the CIA and
FBI) launched a joint investigation to
substantiate allegations that Russia was
meddling in German political affairs and
attempting to shape the outcome of Germany’s
elections next September.
Like
the vast majority of Americans malnourished on
“mainstream media,” most Germans have been led
to believe that, by hacking and “propaganda,”
the Kremlin interfered in the recent U.S.
election and helped Donald Trump become
president.
German
intelligence agencies rarely bite the hand that
feeds them and realize that the most bountiful
part of the trough is at the CIA station in
Berlin with ultimate guidance coming from CIA
headquarters in Langley, Virginia. But this
time, in an unusual departure from past
practice, analysts at the BND and BfV decided to
act like responsible adults.
Whereas
former CIA Director John Brennan prevailed on
his analysts to resort to anemic, evidence-light
reasoning “assessing” that Russia tried to tip
the U.S. election to Donald Trump, Berlin’s
intelligence agencies found the evidence lacking
and have now completed their investigation.
Better
still, the conclusions have been reported in a
mainstream German newspaper, Sueddeutsche
Zeitung, apparently because a patriotic
insider thought the German people should also
know.
Lemmings
No Longer?
If BND
President Bruno Kahl thought that his own
analysts could be depended upon to follow their
American counterparts lemming-like and find
evidence – Curveball-style – to support the U.S.
allegations, he now has had a rude awakening.
When
the joint investigation was under way with his
analysts doing their best to come up with
reliable evidence of Russian perfidy, Kahl had
behaved like his BND predecessors, parroting the
charges made by his CIA counterpart, that the
Russians were fomenting uncertainty and
instability in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
In
a rare interview
with the mainstream newspaper, Sueddeutsche
Zeitung, on Nov. 28, 2016, Kahl went out on
what he probably thought was a safe limb,
denouncing subversive “interference” by the
Russians (“as they did in the U.S.”). He was
just a few months into his job and may have been
naïve enough to consider what John Brennan said
as gospel truth. (If he really is that gullible,
Kahl is in the wrong profession.)
In the
interview, Kahl played the puppet-doll Charlie
McCarthy with Brennan in the role of Charlie’s
ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. Kahl told the
Sueddeutsche that he agreed with the U.S.
intelligence “assessment” that the Kremlin was
behind the cyber attacks aimed at influencing
the U.S. election.
He
added: “We know that cyber attacks are taking
place and that they have no purpose other than
to produce political instability. … Not only
that. The perpetrators are interested in
delegitimizing the democratic process itself. …
I have the impression that the outcome of the
American election has evoked no sadness in
Russia so far. …
“Europe
is [now] the focus of these disruption
experiments, and Germany especially. … The
pressure on the public discourse and on
democracy is unacceptable.” Sound familiar?
Still,
one might excuse the novice BND president for
assuming his analysts would remember which side
their bread is buttered on and follow past
precedent in coming up with conclusions known to
be desired by their masters in Berlin and the
CIA.
So it
must have come as an unwelcome surprise to Kahl
when he found out that, this time, BND analysts
would stand on principle and refuse to be as
malleable as their Washington counterparts. His
analysts could find no proof that the Kremlin
was working hard to undermine the democratic
process in Germany, and said so.
Worse
still from the U.S. point of view, the two
German intelligence agencies resisted the usual
pressure from some senior leaders in Berlin
(perhaps including Kahl himself) to jam whatever
innocuous information they could find into the
anti-Russian mosaic that Washington was
constructing, a kind of Cubist version of
distorted reality.
And So, a
Do-Over
So,
what do powerful officials do when the
bureaucracy comes up with “incorrect”
conclusions? They send the analysts and
investigators back to work until they come up
with “correct” answers. This turned out to be no
exception. Absent evidence of hacking directed
by the Kremlin, the Germans now have opted for
an approach by which information can be fudged
more easily.
Not For Profit - For Global
Justice
|
According to the Sueddeutsche,
“Chancellor Merkel’s office has now ordered a
new inquiry. Notably, a ‘psychological
operations group’ jointly run by the BND and BfV
will specifically look at Russian news agencies’
coverage in Germany.” We can expect that any
articles that don’t portray Vladimir Putin in a
devil’s costume will be judged “Russian
propaganda.”
For
guidance, Merkel may well give the new
“investigators” a copy of the evidence-free
CIA/FBI/NSA “Assessment: Russia’s Influence
Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential
Election.” Released on Jan. 6, the report was an
eyesore and embarrassment to serious
intelligence professionals. The lame “evidence”
presented, together with all the “assessing”
indulged in by U.S. analysts, was unable to fill
five pages; filler was needed – preferably
filler that could be made to look like analysis.
And so,
seven more pages were tacked onto the CIA/FBI/NSA
Assessment, even though the information
presented in them had nothing to do with the
cause celebre of Russian hacking. No
problem: The additional seven pages bore the
ominous title: “Annex A: Russia – Kremlin’s TV
Seeks To Influence Politics, Fuel Discontent in
US.”
The
extra pages, in turn, were then used to support
the following indictment: “Russia’s state-run
propaganda machine contributed to the influence
campaign by serving as a platform for Kremlin
messaging to Russian and international
audiences.”
Did an
Insider Leak?
It is
not clear how the German daily Sueddeutsche
acquired the conclusions of the joint
investigation or even whether it has the full
50-page copy of the final report. The newspaper
did make it clear, though, that it now realizes
it was played by Kahl with his unsupported
accusations last November.
From
what the newspaper was told, the analysts seemed
willing to give the boss what he had already
declared to be his desired conclusion, but the
evidence simply wasn’t there. The article quotes
one security expert saying, “We would have been
happy to give Russia a yellow card,” a soccer
metaphor referring to improper conduct. A
cabinet source lamented, “We found no smoking
gun.”
Initially, the BND and BfV planned to release
excerpts of their still classified inquiry, the
Sueddeutsche reported, but it’s now not clear
when, if ever, the full report will be released.
The day
after the Sueddeutsche story appeared, some
other media outlets reported on it – briefly.
Newsweek and Politico gave the scoop all of
three sentences each. Not fitting with the
preferred “Russia-is-guilty-of-everything”
narrative, it then died a quick death. I have
been unable to find the story mentioned at all
in major U.S. “mainstream media” outlets.
If
Americans became aware of the story, it was
probably via RT – the bête noire of the
abovementioned CIA/FBI/NSA report condemning
Russian “propaganda.” Can it become any clearer
why RT America and RT International are despised
by the U.S. government and the “mainstream
media?” Many Americans are slowly realizing they
cannot count on American network and cable TV
for accurate news and are tuning in to RT at
least for the other side of these important
stories.
It was
from a early morning call from RT International
that I first learned of the Feb. 7
Sueddeutsche Zeitung report on Germany’s
failed hunt for evidence of Russian electoral
interference.
Ray
McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing
arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in
inner-city Washington. An intelligence analyst
for 30 years, McGovern was CIA’s senior
representative to the Analysis Department of the
BND during the late 1970s.