For Russia, Trump Was a Vehicle, Not a Target
By Clint Watts at the NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/opinion/trump-russia-mueller-election.html
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In my view, as a former F.B.I. special agent who has watched the Kremlin’s infiltration of America since 2014, the answer may be neither. A standard Russian approach would have been to influence Mr. Trump through surrogates like Mr. Gates and Paul Manafort rather than through direct command through an individual — in this case, the candidate and then president.
Russian intelligence develops options and pathways over many years; as objectives arise — like the election of Mr. Trump — they focus and engage all available touch points.
Former Trump campaign official Rick Gates leaving Federal court in December.CreditBrendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The revelation last week about Mr. Gates’s connection is another piece of evidence to support that view. Russia’s efforts to influence, known by the Kremlin moniker Active Measures, did not seek a single pathway into the Trump team. Instead, they targeted a wide spectrum of influential Americans to subtly nudge their preferred policy into the mainstream and sideline foreign opponents. Russian intelligence services establish campaign objectives and compromise foreign targets through espionage, but their principal focus is to recruit agents of influence.
Typically, the Kremlin deploys layers of surrogates and proxies offering business inducements, information or threatened reprisals that can individually be explained away by coincidence while masking the strings and guiding hands of the Kremlin’s puppet masters and their objectives. When called upon by the Kremlin, oligarchs, contractors, criminals and spies (current or former) all provide levers for advancing President Vladimir Putin’s assault on democracies.
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