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Antony Blinken
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Antony Blinken
Obama adviser, 2009-15
Antony Blinken was Deputy Secretary of State from 2015 to 2017. Prior to that, Blinken held multiple roles in the Obama administration, including Deputy National Security Adviser, Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. From 1994 to 2001, Blinken was a member of President Bill Clinton's National Security Council staff.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk conducted on July 24, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.
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Putin's Political Rise
Let’s start with an early phase for you, which is back in ’99, [when] Putin becomes president.What was the word about him?… Were you concerned about anything, or did you think it would be more of the same?
The late 1990s were really a moment of still tremendous hope and optimism about the relationship between Russia and the United States.We had just signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act in Paris with President Clinton.It’s remarkable, when you think about it, because one of the things President Clinton said at the time in signing this was: “We’re no longer in a zero-sum world.This is a win-win, where NATO’s strength can be Russia’s gain, and Russia’s success can be NATO’s success.”
That was really the atmosphere that we had.So I think when President Putin came in, he was known to us.He had been national security advisor.In fact, I remember being in Europe at a summit with the then-National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, and coming downstairs from our hotel working area to give Sandy something, and he was at the bar.He was sitting next to this guy, Vladimir Putin, first time I saw him.He was Sandy’s counterpart, was National Security Advisor.
So we knew him in that capacity.I don’t think anyone in the 1990s, the late ’90s, anticipated that the Putin they knew then would become the Putin we know now.
So when you first laid eyes on this guy, who is he?What's his aspect?What did you think?
He seemed like he was an old spy transformed into a diplomat and then into a president.And [he was] very circumspect, but also, again, especially according to folks who were dealing directly with him, like Sandy Berger, very straightforward, good to deal with, cards on the table.Remember, he had come from St. Petersburg.He had come from the very liberal side of the Russia house.I think people anticipated that he would continue the reform effort begun by Gorbachev and then Yeltsin, and that he would continue to advance Russia’s integration with the West and with the rest of the world.That was what we anticipated.
And when did you know [or] get the strong impression that it wasn’t going to be a continuation of the democratic revival?
I think really not until Putin’s return to the presidency.He had given it away to [Dmitry] Medvedev.Medvedev was president; Putin was prime minister.It was not clear exactly what the relationship was between the two, whether Medvedev was an independent power source.And Medvedev himself, at least in the early days, had a very progressive line and seemed to want to pursue Russia’s integration, wanted to build a Russia Silicon Valley.We were deeply engaged with him at the early part of the Obama administration now.It was not clear whether Putin would remain the power behind the throne, a secondary figure, or whether Medvedev was really truly a placeholder for him, and he was on his way back.But as soon as he came back to the presidency, we saw a tougher and tougher line.
The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister
Let’s go back to the reset moment.Why is it called the “reset”?
It’s called the “reset” because, at the start of the Obama administration, we had the impression that the relationship between the United States and Russia was at a low point and could and should be better; that despite our profound differences, there were so many areas where it made sense to try to cooperate, and it was worth giving that a shot.Vice President Biden was the one who first advanced the reset.The very first foreign policy speech of the Obama administration was at the Munich Security Conference in February of 2009.That was Biden, and that [speech] had the reset in it.1
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While everyone focused on the reset language, and the headline was, “The United States wants a new relationship with Russia,” if you read the speech carefully, you can see that there was a flipside to that.Biden was crystal clear that, even as we sought a reset with Russia, we weren't going to renege on our basic principles.We weren't going to go back to a world of spheres of influence in Europe or beyond.We weren't going to accept the proposition that one country like Russia could tell other countries what they should do or shouldn’t do, with whom they should associate or not associate.
So the reset was very balanced.It looked to a better relationship, it saw possibilities, but it also was clear about our basic principles.
[Then-National Security Adviser Stephen] Hadley said at the end of the Bush administration, “I think we threw our relationship with Russia in the toilet.”From the beginning, when Bush had said, “I looked in his eyes and I saw his soul” and whatever, there seemed to be things that happened during those eight years that Putin, as he tells the story, and Russians, as they tell the story, … we didn’t listen to Putin; that we were in lots of ways demonstrating that we didn’t value that relationship as much as we should have, and that it had angered Putin in some way; that revenge seemed to be on his list of things he wanted to do.What's your reaction to that?
I think there's been a lot of talking past each other the last 25 or 30 years.The United States genuinely sought to advance Russia’s integration into the West and into international institutions.We genuinely sought to support Russia.We wanted a strong, successful Russia, not a weak and contained one.We put a lot of money into Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall, trying to support it economically, trying to support democratic institutions.We sought a partnership with NATO.Later on, we were Russia’s biggest champion for getting into the World Trade Organization.
Russia saw something very different, and certainly Vladimir Putin did.He continued to see the United States trying to hold Russia down, to contain it.The enlargement of NATO seen from Moscow’s eyes was an effort to keep Russia in its place.Iraq certainly was one chapter where, arguably, we didn’t listen to Russia’s views.Then if you fast-forward [to] Libya, other places where we engaged, that just fueled Russian suspicions.
I think part of this narrative is the fact that we weren't speaking the same language to each other.Now, I do think Russia got to a point, under Putin in particular, where even if we had been speaking clearly and directly, we were going to be at odds, because either Mr. Putin started with or developed a very zero-sum view of the relationship.That's really the defining problem today. …
Through the Arab Spring, he almost always, from the very beginning, the way we hear it, he believes that America, that people are spontaneously ever gathering, that the U.S. is in there, USAID [United States Agency for International Development] is in there, somebody is in there, fomenting these.
Yeah, that’s right.He saw America’s hidden hand everywhere.Color revolutions left, right and center, he thought the United States was behind them.It’s not true, and it’s an unfortunate misreading of what people really felt, whether it was Georgia, whether it was Ukraine, later other countries.But certainly, I think that’s how Mr. Putin genuinely perceived it.That, too, created a lot of animosity in the relationship.
Did you really believe that the man who delivered the Munich speech could hand [the presidency] over to Medvedev and actually let him be the president of Russia?
On balance, we thought that Putin would remain the power behind the throne, even when Medvedev was front and center.Certainly there was the view that there was a pretty good chance he would try and come back and become president.But I've got to say, it wasn’t 100 percent.There was certainly a period when we thought it was possible that Medvedev had developed his own center of gravity and source of power and would contest Putin’s power, or Putin would let him continue to hold the reins.That was an open debate.Then it became clearer and clearer that no, Putin would remain the power one way or the other.
Were you at State or at the NSC [National Security Council]?
I was at the NSC the first six years of Obama.
So what does Obama think? …
President Obama was profoundly pragmatic in his view of most things, including a relationship with Russia.So no, there certainly wasn’t a wide-eyed view that we were going to become partners and best friends, but there was a clear view that there were grounds for cooperation; that it was in the self-interest of both countries to work together.Indeed, the first few years of the Obama administration, I think we proved that principle.We negotiated a new strategic arms control limitation treaty, a New START, that was good for the security of both countries.We cooperated with regard to Afghanistan, where Russia played a positive role, particularly in letting our forces and our equipment transit into and out of Afghanistan.Russia was a good partner in dealing with the Iran nuclear problem and played a productive role there.In these areas and others, we thought there are grounds for working together.Wherever Russia sees it in its self-interest and we see it in ours, we should.
Putin Returns to the Presidency, Sparking Protests and a Crackdown
I guess it is in 2011 that the people rise up.It was a bad election; things are messy.Obviously it’s been maneuvered, to put it mildly.What was the White House’s perspective on the gatherings in Moscow and Putin’s response?
Well, here, too, there was a profound disconnect, because we were seeing this from a distance.We had nothing to do with it.Mr. Putin thought, or at least said he believed, that we had everything to do with it.In particular, statements that then-Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton made suggesting sympathy with those protesting, I think fueled Putin’s profound suspicion, if not paranoia, that the United States was the hidden hand behind these protests.
I think he was thrown by the protests.He was taken aback by the passion of the opposition and had to look for a place to point the finger.He pointed it at us.For the United States, for the Obama administration, we saw this as what it was, which was a spontaneous uprising.That’s too strong a word, but certainly a spontaneous reaction to Putin’s overreach at home, to the fact that he was quashing democracy in Russia, that he was building what turned out to be a kleptocracy to keep himself in power.That response from the people on the streets was a profound warning sign to him.2
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When Medvedev says, “Oh, we've decided to flip,” or “We’re going to go back to the other way, and he’s going to come back; Putin’s going to come back into power,” what did the president think of that?
I think all of us thought, including the president, that it was going to be challenging, that we would have to deal with Mr. Putin as president, as the main power.He was taking an increasingly confrontational role [toward] the United States, and increasingly seeing the relationship in zero-sum terms.
That’s an evolution from the guy you watched come in when you were in the Clinton administration, and the expectation that somehow there's going to be some kind of a partnership, maybe even a NATO membership, to wherever that is in 2012.What happened?
Well, I think there were a series of events.We continued the process of NATO enlargement, and we continued to keep an open door.That sent a message to Putin that the United States, the West was trying to hold him back, contain him.There had been the confrontation that started during the Bush administration over Georgia and Russia’s invasion of Georgia.Then you saw this color revolution in Ukraine, even more significant, from Russia’s perspective, because [it's] the largest country on its borders, the one where, if democracy succeeded, if that model took hold in Ukraine, it would send a very strong message to folks back in Russia about what the alternative actually was.
All of this is happening.At the same time we have Libya, and, from Russia’s perspective, it had supported a United Nations Security Council resolution, in a sense against its own better judgment.Then, when [Muammar al-]Qaddafi ended up losing power, Russia felt betrayed, felt that we had used the Security Council resolution that it had supported to commit regime change in Libya.You take all of these things together, and it just spirals up and up and up.
And Putin, at that moment, 2012, who is he then?
Here is where we made, at least in my judgment, a misjudgment.We continued to believe until pretty late in the game that Mr. Putin’s interest and Russia’s interest was in deepening its integration with the international community, with the West.And indeed, until very late in the game, we were the main champion for Russia getting into the World Trade Organization during the Obama administration.We thought that’s where Russia wanted to go.
What we misjudged, at least in my judgment, until almost after the fact, was that Putin had gotten to the point where he had built this kleptocracy.That was the source of his power in Russia.Controlling the money, finding sources of money was absolutely essential to maintaining his hold on power, continuing to buy off elites.An integrated Russia that had to play by the rules, that had to be transparent, that had to be open, was totally antithetical to sustaining that kleptocracy.The two things couldn’t go together.
At a certain point, it became against Putin’s personal interest to actually pursue Russian integration, because he couldn’t accept the rules, the transparency, the norms that come with that.That would undermine the kleptocracy that he was building.It took us a little while, I think, to figure that out.By that time, we really were in the zero-sum world where, from Moscow’s perspective, Russia’s strength was our weakness, and our gain was their loss.
That’s right.And he needed—it’s like he still needs, I guess, America to be the bogeyman.
He needs to be able to explain why Russia is having trouble at home, why its economy is stagnating, why it is not delivering for its own people.This is classic.Whenever you're, in one way or another, mismanaging your own country, you’ve got to point fingers somewhere else.He’s found it useful to point them at us and at the West.
But there's something more profound going on.For Putin, when Western democracy is successful, it’s the most profound indictment of the system that he’s built in Russia, a country that started to embrace democracy and capitalism after the end of the Cold War, but now it’s turned into this kleptocracy, this illiberal democracy, and, indeed, self-recognized illiberal democracy.
Putin, I think, came to the conclusion that the more he could do to undermine the Western democratic model, to foment trouble, to create tension, difficulties within the West, between the United States and Europe, within Western European countries, within the United States, the better [off] he would be.He’d be able to say to his own people: “You see, their model is no better than ours.They lie; they cheat; they steal.They fail just like we do.So stick with what we've got.There's no difference.”
Putin and Hybrid Warfare
… What was Estonia?3What was that?Were those early probes?Was that an early development of something that’s going to manifest itself in our presidential election in 2016?
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I think Mr. Putin came to a few conclusions.One, of course, was that the success of democracy, particularly on his borders, was a real threat to him and to the system that he had built up, so he had an interest in trying to throw some wrenches in the works, wherever he could.It’s also true that he wanted to protect Russian-speaking populations in these countries [and] saw himself as their guarantor and their guardian.These two things combined probably prompted him to look to see if he could take advantage of the situation, make a little trouble.That was one thing.
The other thing is, he knows that he can't challenge a NATO country frontally, militarily.That would be to invite the full wrath of NATO.That would be to invite the United States into a conflict.He has no interest in that.
Because of Article 5.
Because of Article 5.
Explain Article 5.
Article 5 of NATO says that an attack on one member of NATO is an attack on all members, and everyone vows to come to the defense in one way or another—it’s not spelled out exactly how—of any NATO member that is under attack.There's a real tripwire there, and a frontal military confrontation between Russia and a NATO country is not something that Putin or any Russian president would risk.
But where he’s very smart and very adept is using these so-called asymmetric tactics to push, to prod, to probe, to provoke without a frontal military assault.It’s everything from buying off politicians and centers of influence, misinformation campaigns, very under-the-radar limited military probes and actions, supporting separatist forces in these countries, all of that taken together turns into an asymmetric strategy that, with very few resources, and with a much weaker hand, can do tremendous damage.
He can fight above his weight.
He can fight way above his weight, and that’s what he’s been doing.I think Putin has been playing a weak hand very, very well.
Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term
He’s the center of attention in the world with the Sochi Olympics, but meanwhile, there's a bonfire burning underneath him in Ukraine and Crimea.Tell me the story from the way you guys learned about it, thought about it.We talked to Toria Nuland and others about their role.So take me there.Take me to ’14-’15 and what the United States’ perspective is.
In the fall of ’14, Ukraine and its president, [Viktor Yanukovych], have vowed to pursue membership in the European Union.The people want it; that’s the direction the country is taking.As they're moving forward in that direction, the [Ukrainian] president does a very dramatic about-face, at Moscow’s behest.That provokes this revolution, the Maidan, where people take to the streets, because their president had promised to pursue Western integration, pursue a relationship with Europe, and he pulled the rug out from under them.
At the same time there was, I think, a view among the public that corruption was just eating away at Ukraine, so it was these two things together.It was the broken promise of moving toward the West, and corruption.These things together created the Maidan, brought thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets.Then the government, in a classic fashion, overreacted.Instead of letting people express themselves, it started to use violence to hold them back, to repress them.This shocked everyone in Ukraine.It started to shock people around the world.
At that point, the Europeans, the Western Europeans got deeply engaged.Our initial reaction was to support them, but to let them try to work out some kind of arrangement to calm things down.When it became apparent that that wasn’t succeeding, we jumped in.President Obama felt very strongly that we needed to work hand in hand with the Europeans to try to prevent some kind of mass violence in Ukraine, so we engaged directly with the Russians.President Obama engaged directly with President Putin multiple times, to see if we could forge some kind of agreement, get a deal, get peace back, prevent a massacre.
And indeed we did.There was an agreement that the President Yanukovych would serve out another six months.There would be an election, and we’d let the Ukrainian people sort this out.Just as that deal was agreed to and consummated, and we thought we put this back in the bag, the [Ukrainian] president fled.From Putin’s perspective, we were somehow behind this.In the vacuum, his [Yanukovych's] own party, in effect, ceded power to more democratic, European-oriented forces.Moscow saw another color revolution that had succeeded, a second one in a sense, in Ukraine, and thought we were behind it.We had nothing to do with the president fleeing.In fact, the very day he fled, he’d had a scheduled phone conversation with Vice President Biden.Biden was trying to get him on the phone; we couldn’t find him anywhere, and indeed it turned out he had left Kiev to flee.
All of a sudden, you have exactly what Russia sought to prevent, which was the democrats taking power in Ukraine, the very people who wanted to pursue the European orientation for Ukraine that Russia thought it had derailed in the fall of 2014.So they provoked a counter-Maidan.They went into Crimea, and then they ginned up a crisis in eastern Ukraine in the Donbas, a crisis that didn’t exist before they created it, where they backed a very small number of separatist forces who seized control of a chunk of eastern Ukraine.And that’s the crisis that we’re living with today.
Of course he doesn’t acknowledge—in fact he outright lies about what they're doing, first in Crimea and then in the Donbas.
That’s right.
These “little green men”—tell me that story.
Russia, again, this is a classic example of using asymmetric tactics.It didn’t frontally invade Ukraine, either Crimea or the Donbas, eastern Ukraine.It sent in small numbers of special forces who allied themselves with local separatists, gave them instruction, gave them equipment, gave them money, gave them direction, and then Putin denied their presence.It was striking, because I remember multiple conversations between President Obama and President Putin.We would be in the Oval Office, and the president would be on the phone with Putin, and Putin would be denying, and in fact flat-out lying, about Russia’s presence in Ukraine.Obama would say to him: “Vladimir, we’re not blind.We have eyes; we can see.”And Putin would just move on as if nothing had happened.
It became very, very challenging, because we were genuinely trying to find a way out, an “off ramp,” as we called it, for Russia, that restored Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, but also made clear that Russia’s own interests could be upheld.We believed strongly—and Obama told Putin, “We know Russia has a unique relationship with Ukraine—history, geography, culture, language—and there's no reason that can't be preserved."But the basic principle that we had enunciated in that famous reset speech in 2009 at the very beginning of the Obama administration, that also was sacrosanct for us: no spheres of influence; no larger countries changing the borders of smaller countries by force; no country telling the people of another country it’s their direction with whom they could associate or not associate.We had to uphold those principles.It was bigger than Ukraine, bigger even than Europe.But at the same time, it didn’t have to be a zero-sum game.Putin disagreed.
When Obama is talking to Putin on the phone, what’s everybody’s aspect?What's the vibe?
Putin is extraordinarily calm, matter-of-fact.He doesn’t get ruffled.He may say hard things, but he says them in a very calm, almost matter-of-fact way.In a strange way, Obama is not dissimilar.He also is extremely even-keeled.So here you have two very even-keeled guys talking to each other.The difference is that, unfortunately, President Putin simply speaks mistruth after mistruth and tries to misinform.But he does it as easily as he breathes.
And President Obama’s response to you guys after he hangs up?
There's a lot of shaking of the head and saying, “Look, it is challenging to deal with someone who simply doesn’t tell the truth and evades the facts.”But Obama was extraordinarily persistent, kept coming back at it, kept looking for ways forward, and you know, we would make progress.Whenever the two of them managed to talk, they’d agree on some move that would try to calm tensions and see if we could find some kind of roadmap to getting out of the crisis.That would work for a few weeks, and then Russia would revert back to its previous tactics.
It was a little bit like it had its hand on the rheostat.It wasn’t an on-off switch in Ukraine.It would turn up the heat, turn down the heat, depending on how much heat we were exerting.But Obama led this very systematic, determined effort to, in a sense, go at the problem asymmetrically ourselves.That is to say, it made no sense for us, from Obama’s perspective, to try to confront the Russians directly, militarily in Ukraine.They were there; we were not.They could amass force much more significantly than we could.Ukraine was not a NATO member.
The soft underbelly for Russia in Ukraine was not military; it was economic.Hence the sanctions; hence the effort by the United States to lead Europe in imposing very significant sanctions on Russia that made it pay a real price for its adventurism in Ukraine.
Putin Returns to the Presidency, Sparking Protests and a Crackdown
… Let’s back up just a little bit.Tell me about the [Victoria] Nuland phone call with the ambassador and why that seemed to matter at the time.4
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I think that Russia probably interpreted that call as the United States being a hand or a hidden hand behind what was happening in Ukraine, which wasn’t the case.We were defending our basic principles.We were defending our partnership with Ukraine.But we were also trying to find a way forward to resolve the crisis, to calm things down, to make sure that violence didn’t spiral out of control, and to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.That was what it was about.But I think heard from Moscow, this probably just confirmed to Putin’s ears the United States as the actual power behind the throne in Ukraine.
Everybody seemed really surprised that it was released.I mean, phone calls are gathered; wiretaps happen continuously.But for some reason, this one gets rolled out.And to some, it signals a change in the way Russia is going to act in moments like this.
I think Putin became very sophisticated in using in a public fashion misinformation, and/or even using information that it had acquired through traditional spying means, that normally wouldn’t get then disseminated in public or used.It would just be collected for informational purposes, to figure out some kind of weakness or leverage.
What changed were these so-called active measures, where not only would the information be collected, but then it would be turned around and used in some way against us or against other countries.Russia was becoming more and more sophisticated in doing this, and Putin saw this as a very cost-effective weapon.
Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term
There's also during this time a lot of fake news; there's lying; there's active measures like taking over the local newscasts and essentially passing out wrong information as well.Are we paying attention to that?Do we know that those things are going on, or are they on the margins?
We were very focused and extremely concerned about this increase in misinformation and Putin using, in a sense, our strength against us.This was where he was extremely adept.We have an open country and an open collection of countries, where information flows freely.Increasingly, information is in the hands of more and more people, the ability to use it, with technology.Putin turned that against us.He turned a strength of the United States, of the West, against us and made it a weakness by using misinformation, by using propaganda, by lying.
This was very much at the center of our discussions and debates within the administration.We saw this happening, and it became a real challenge to figure out what to do about it and how to act effectively, because what Putin was trying to do was to show that everyone’s lying, everyone’s cheating.There is no objective truth, and there is no difference between what you hear from Western media and what you hear in, say, Russia’s media.That was the line, and he became increasingly successful in blurring it for people, including in the United States and the West.
Now, what was interesting was in Ukraine, we were in an information war.Putin was lying and denying that there were Russians in Ukraine.When the Malaysian airliner was shot down by separatists, using a weapon that was wheeled in from Russia and given to them, Putin denied it.He created other scenarios, other stories, tried to point the finger at Ukrainians, point the fingers at us, and muddy the waters.
We realized that we were in an information war, not a physical military confrontation, but an information war, and we spent an amazing amount of time trying to figure out how to fight it, to marshal the information, to get our Intelligence Community to release things that normally it wouldn’t want to be in public for fear of compromising some of its sources and methods.We wanted to see if we could put more into the public.
And [we were] working with our own partners and allies to demonstrate to them that what Russia was saying was not true, that things that were in the European media about Russia having nothing to do with Ukraine, its soldiers not involved, nothing to do with shooting down the plane, that these were plain and simple lies.
At the end of the day, the most effective resource that we had was President Obama’s credibility, because even when leaders and publics in Europe, say, might disagree with some of the policies that he was pursuing, they never doubted his word.When he said it, they tended to believe it.There's a famous story about the importance of the credibility of an American president, and that goes back to the Cuban missile crisis.At that point, we were implementing a quarantine of Cuba, and we needed to get our allies onboard.President Kennedy sent very senior emissaries to our major partners to convince them that Russia had indeed put nuclear weapons on Cuba.He sent former Secretary of State Dean Acheson to our most prickly partner, France, and [Charles] de Gaulle was then the president.Acheson went in to see De Gaulle, explained the situation, and said to him, “President Kennedy has authorized me to share with you our secret satellite photographs of these missiles.”De Gaulle put up his hands and said: “No, no, no.That’s not necessary.If President Kennedy says it, I believe it.”The word of an American president matters a great deal in these situations.
Were there other conversations?There must have been.And why didn’t it fly to go tit-for-tat with him, play his own game?If fake news is the way you want to play it, we can create some fake news.If cyberwar is the way you want to play it, we can get around and screw around with your economy.That must have been raised.Why didn’t it fly?
Sure, it got raised, but it got rejected, because it’s a very dangerous downward spiral.If we are suddenly doing the same thing that Russia is doing, and we are no better than Russia, then Putin wins.He’s right.The very story he’s trying to tell his public, that there is no difference, that democracy is no different than the system he’s established, this illiberal kleptocracy in Russia, then he’s won; we’ve lost.If we don’t hold on to our own values, to our own way of doing things, then he’s right.
So it was very important to us to stand against what Russia was doing, but to do it on our terms, by our values, not his.
We talked to lots of people about arming the Ukrainians, … The president decides not to do it.Can you take me into those arguments and tell me why the president landed where he landed?
It was a very tough and close call.This was something that was deliberated and debated multiple times, at all levels of the administration and National Security Council, including with the president.On the one hand, some of us believed that it did make sense to give the Ukrainians lethal defensive weapons, particularly anti-tank weapons, because at that point, one of the most dangerous things being used against the Ukrainian soldiers were tanks that the Russians were providing to the separatists, or in some cases actually using themselves, and against which the Ukrainians didn’t have an effective defense.
The argument was that if they had these anti-tank weapons in their hands, they could start to do a lot of damage, defend themselves, but also do damage and maybe create a bit of a disincentive for the Russians to continue to do this, because the Russians would start to lose forces, and they’d have to explain that back home.So that was one argument.
The other argument was that if we started to get into a tit-for-tat with Russia on military grounds, that it would start to spiral up—we would put in more weapons, they would put in more weapons; we’d try to match it, they would surmount that—and that that was going to be a losing game for us, because for Russia, this was really existential, or at least for Putin it was existential.And they were there; we weren’t.They were right on the border.It was very easy for them to get a lot of force in very quickly.We were always going to be behind in that game.
… What made the most sense was not to get into a military tit-for-tat that spiraled up but rather to go at the soft underbelly, which was Russia’s economy.At the end of the day, that’s where President Obama came out.I think Europeans, including [German] Chancellor [Angela] Merkel, thought that that was the best direction to go in, but it was an ongoing argument within the administration.
Where were you?
Well, look, I don’t want to say.I think it’s not appropriate.All I can say is my job was to give the president my best advice.That’s what I did.But when he made a decision, we carried it out.
And the argument … that he’s a schoolyard bully, somebody’s got to step up and say: “Stop this.He’s road-testing hard power and other stuff.If you do it, he’ll back down.”
Well, a few things.First, it’s not as if we weren’t doing anything on the defensive side of the ledger.To the contrary.We were providing a significant amount of equipment to the Ukrainians, defensive in nature but very important.We were providing increasing amounts of sophisticated training to them.That started to show real results over the course of a couple of years.Of course we were providing very significant economic support.That’s on one side of the ledger.
On the other side of the ledger, while Putin seemed to be having some tactical success, it was our strongly held view that he was not heading in a positive strategic direction in terms of Russia’s interests, because in a sense, everything he was trying to prevent, he was, in fact, precipitating.This intervention in Ukraine cost him a relationship with the vast bulk of the Ukrainian people far into the future.Russia is now hated in much of Ukraine.
NATO was dramatically re-energized by Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, led by the United States.Our presence, including in countries bordering Russia, is much more regular and significant than it was before the crisis.Europeans became more united when it comes to energy security, again because of this.Across the board, Russia actually strategically was getting into a weaker position.Then of course the sanctions, most important, together with the falling oil prices and Russia’s own mismanagement, was gutting the Russian economy far into the future.So tactically, yeah, Putin was doing pretty well.Strategically, a very open question.
Gives him lots of ammunition to be pretty pissed off at us.
It does.And again, I think it fueled his own worldview.It fueled the sense of a zero-sum relationship, and this, despite repeated efforts by President Obama to try to find an off ramp for Russia, to try to demonstrate that there could be a win-win, not a win-lose.But obviously, we were not successful.
Putin Returns to the Presidency, Sparking Protests and a Crackdown
… Let’s go back, just for one minute, and capture one of the other motivational things.You mentioned it, but I just want to make sure we get your thoughts on it.This idea that Hillary, by talking in 2011 on that audio tape and on the Web, encouraging people to stand up or whatever she did, at the time and as you look back on it, [was this a] strong motivation for Putin vis-à-vis a specific secretary of state?
Secretary Clinton, being such a well-known figure around the world, having, I think, not only recognition around the world but great respect around the world, when she spoke out, people listened.It made a difference.But she wasn’t egging the protesters on; she was simply standing up for the right to make their voices heard and for there to be democracy in Russia, which was what the Russians purported to want, and what we strongly supported.
Mr. Putin, I think, saw this as a real threat.He saw her and thus us as somehow instigating the protests, not simply supporting the right of the protesters to speak out.He was deeply, deeply concerned that if he didn’t put a stop to it, this could spiral out of control and begin to really threaten his rule in Russia.
Did she know how angry he was, and that he was blaming her?
We knew at the time that he was certainly not happy about it.But whether anyone thought, fast-forward, that this would become a casus belli for Putin to try to prevent Secretary Clinton from becoming president of the United States, I don’t think anyone would have imagined it in the moment.
Intervention in the U.S. Election
Let’s go to the summer of 2016, or the spring maybe.… What was the earliest time that you had a pretty good idea it was Russia?
Well, at least in my case—and at this point I was at the State Department, no longer at the White House—the summer of that year, July into August, we were seeing increasing signs and increasingly troubling signs that Russia was trying to meddle in the election.What we first thought was happening was that Russia was actually trying to get into our electoral systems and somehow affect the result.This caused us to go into overdrive, to make sure that we could defend the integrity of the elections.A massive effort was made to make sure that the election systems themselves were secure.We determined that they were.We determined that, precisely because it’s a decentralized system and these things are not connected to each other, it would be very hard for Russia or any other country to actually physically affect the outcome of an election.But that was the first concern that was raised.
Then we thought that actually what Russia was trying to do was not so much necessarily actually affect the outcome, but create doubt about the integrity of the election.Even if it couldn’t switch one vote or deny one vote, if in people’s minds there was something wrong with the election, that would do its job for it.That became our assessment of what Russia was up to.It was only later, much later, that the Intelligence Community determined that not only was Russia trying to sow doubt about the election, it was actually trying to prevent Mrs. Clinton from winning and help Mr. Trump win.
… Cozy Bear is in the State Department and the Defense Department and the White House.You're probably just getting to State then?Did you guys know about that?
I think what changed, what we saw and what we didn’t arguably understand right away, was when we saw Russia making these various efforts early on, we believed that it was traditional spy.It’s spy games, and everyone does it.We’re trying to get information about them; they're trying to get information about us.Usually that information is put away somewhere; it’s analyzed; maybe they find a way to create leverage against someone.It builds their information base.
What was new was turning it around and actually actively using it against us to affect some kind of outcome, in this case, the election.That’s what took a while to come into sharp focus.
That’s the addition of WikiLeaks, Guccifer 2.0, DC Leaks, all of that.
That’s right.
The U.S. Response to Russian Measures
You hear that, you know something else is afoot.
Yeah, this is a whole new game.And we went into overdrive, first, again, protecting—making sure we could protect the integrity of the system, but then confronting the Russians directly.And that involved John Brennan, the CIA director, putting his Russian counterpart on notice, I believe in August that year.5Then a couple of things happened.We thought that the most effective way we could push back against the Russians was to send a very strong bipartisan message of concern.So in August, Brennan and other leaders of the Intelligence Community, as well as our top counterterrorism Homeland Security person at the White House, Lisa Monaco, went to Capitol Hill to talk to the leadership about what we had learned and what we were seeing in terms of Russia’s efforts to meddle in the election.They talked to the senior eight leaders in Congress, the so-called Gang of Eight.
5
To our shock, some of these leaders refused to believe what they were hearing from the director of Central Intelligence and accused us of playing politics to help Mrs. Clinton win the election, and thus rejected the idea of some kind of bipartisan statement of concern and determination not to let this stand.That was a very, very unfortunate moment.
What did you chalk it up to?
All I can chalk it up to is the hyperpartisanship in Washington.Unfortunately, I suppose one might conclude that those who refused to believe what the director of the Central Intelligence Agency was telling them in a sense that they believed Russian Vladimir Putin more than they believed their own director of Central Intelligence.Well, I don’t know how to interpret that.I think it’s deeply, deeply unfortunate, deeply troubling, and it really set us back, because it took a month beyond that to get to the place where finally we got a bipartisan expression of concern from Congress.In between, President Obama directly confronted Mr. Putin at the G-20 Summit in China.
Did you happen to be there?
I was not there but was involved in the preparations for that summit, and [I] certainly got the account of what happened.He gave him a very clear, stark warning, that if Russia’s meddling didn’t stop, there would be significant consequences.What's interesting is, as best we could tell, after that meeting, Russia seemed to pull back.We didn’t see these efforts continue to try to get information and turn around, but the damage had already been done.A lot of the information, of course, in the DNC [Democratic National Committee], from the Clinton campaign, had already been exfiltrated.Then it passed on to cutouts like WikiLeaks and others, and it continued to trickle out, even after the encounter between President Obama and President Putin.But Russia’s own direct efforts seemed to be held in abeyance.
Were you around as part of the preparation for Hangzhou?Was there actual language worked out with the president what to say to Putin?Was there a plan for him to buttonhole him and pull him aside?
Oh, very much so.Very much so.
Help me with the preparation.
It was determined that absent getting directly to Putin, and absent it being the president of the United States doing it, we were not going to get a clear message to Moscow.In the Russian system in particular, unless you're dealing directly with Putin, you can send any messages you want; it’s not going to have the same effect.So President Obama believed that the most effective way to get the Russians to stop what they were doing was for him to confront Putin directly, and that’s exactly what he did.
So what were the options?What could he have done besides just say what he said?Was there anything else?
Sure.And of course we put together a series of possible responses, and indeed possible punishments that were in our toolkit.The main thing, though, was this.First we wanted to make sure that, as a practical matter, Russia could not, in fact, interfere in the electoral systems themselves.That’s why we worked very, very closely with all the states, did an intense analysis of the electoral systems, determined that they were in fact safe, and that their integrity could be preserved.
Second, we wanted Russia to stop what it was doing, and it seems, from the meeting between Obama and Putin, that after that, they did.Third was the question of, what is the appropriate punishment?There we thought that we have time; we can work on these different options.At the same time, because it was our belief that Russia’s primary objective was to sow doubt in the integrity of the system, even if it didn’t actually do anything to the system to change a vote or deny a vote, that the more we played this up in public, the more we would actually be playing Russia’s game.If the president of the United States got on the bully pulpit and started talking about this in the midst of the campaign, even if it was to say, "Russia is trying to do this, but don’t worry; everything is fine," actually that would probably just gin up concern and start to raise questions about the integrity of the system, exactly what Russia was trying to achieve.
We thought then that the better approach was to be very clear and very direct with the Russians in private, to make sure that the system was protected, and then in a deliberate way, maybe after the election, take the appropriate measures in terms of actually punishing Russia for what it did.In retrospect, I think if we had come to the conclusion earlier that Russia was actually trying to deny one candidate the presidency and give it to another candidate, maybe we would have spoken out more forcefully in public.But given what we thought Russia was trying to do at the time, we didn’t want to do anything that would play into its hands.
I suppose—you tell me, but I suppose if you believed that Hillary Clinton was going to win, which almost everybody, it seems like, did at the time, it would create a different strategy.
I really think that, from the perspective of President Obama, the issue was, what is the right thing to do to make sure that we are protecting the integrity of the electoral system, that we are making sure that we don’t advance what Russia is trying to do, which was to create doubt in that system, and then, in a deliberate fashion, to decide what the right response was.That was what was motivating him, not who was going to win the election [and] who wasn’t going to win the election.
It really, again, wasn’t until after the election that the Intelligence Community came to the conclusion that there was a very deliberate effort by the Russians to affect the outcome of the election, not just to sow doubt in its legitimacy.
You can see why it’s viewed by many as yet another dithering tactical mistake by President Obama.
There's one other element that’s very important.Besides this direct confrontation between President Obama and President Putin in September at the G-20, in early October, the director of national intelligence [and] the director of homeland security issued an unprecedented public statement about Russian interference in the election.6Normally, that would have been the dominant story, but of course, that very same day, the infamous <i>Access Hollywood</i> tapes were released.This unprecedented statement by two leaders of our intelligence and homeland security community was drowned out and lost.
6
Putin and Trump
And in fact, I think that WikiLeaks started to make its big dump of information, too, from the [Clinton campaign chair John] Podesta files.
That’s right, and it certainly raises questions in people’s minds.
But what are those questions?
Well, it would seem that time and again, information started to come out at particularly interesting times when juxtaposed against what was happening in the campaign.But maybe that’s all coincidence.
Well, what are you trying to say?
No, I just think that one of the things that of course the various investigations are looking at is whether there was any kind of active collusion between anyone involved in the campaign and Russia.It certainly at least raises the question, the coincidence of some of these things coming out at particularly advantageous moments for one campaign and disadvantageous moments for another campaign.That at least creates questions.So all of this will be investigated in due course.
Your thoughts about Trump’s initial response where he essentially says, “Hey, Russia, go look at Hillary Clinton’s emails.”
What was troubling about Mr. Trump’s response during the campaign itself was that his own talking points could have been taken right from the airwaves of Russia Today, RT, or Sputnik, Russia’s propaganda organs.The line they were putting out was that our election was rigged.Mr. Trump was saying exactly the same thing, unwittingly it seems, advancing the very narrative that Putin and Russia were putting forward.That was deeply unfortunate.
… So Trump wins.What did you see? When you looked at Putin’s response, Russia’s response, what did you see?
One of the things that we saw was that, on the one hand, Russia had arguably just committed the most successful misinformation and meddling campaign in an election that we’d ever seen.That raised profound questions, not just about the election that had just taken place, but about future elections, because given its success, it had every incentive to continue.That’s one of the reasons that President Obama took the steps that he did after the election, but it’s also one of the reasons why, going forward, there has to be a clear definitive line about what Russia did, and of course our Intelligence Community and the three major agencies that investigated this were unanimous in their conclusions.There has to be a very clear message to Moscow that this cannot happen again.It will not happen again with impunity.Ultimately, the president of the United States is the one who has to deliver that message.It’s a message that President Obama delivered when he was president.It’s a message that President Trump now must deliver if we’re going to stop the Russians from meddling again.
And, by the way, this is not a partisan issue.This time Democrats were the victims.Next time it could be Republicans.This is an American, a nationalist issue, and a place where we have to stand united as Americans in standing up against it, doing something about it, stopping it.But that starts with the president of the United States.If he’s not speaking clearly about it, if he’s not acting deliberately about it, the message Russia gets is, we can keep doing this.
I think you wrote or said that Putin is the master of the game.What do you mean?
He has taken it to an art form to take a relatively weak hand, a country that is in a very difficult strait economically, that has a declining population, declining life expectancy, and is struggling.He’s taken that very weak hand and played it incredibly well.The art form that he’s perfected is particularly in the information space, taking our very openness, using it against us, manipulating information, lying, deceiving, and creating doubt.That doubt is a very powerful thing.It takes away our own certainty, our own conviction, our own confidence that our system and values really are better and stronger.It creates doubt in the minds of our own citizens, and it tells his own citizens in Russia that there really is no difference, and that helps him sustain his grip on power.
I've never seen anyone better at doing it than Mr. Putin.And it begs for—it demands a clear, deliberate, coordinated response, not only from the United States but from our partners across the board.We’ve seen the beginnings of that.I think the French election demonstrated that you can be very effective in pushing back and diluting these efforts by Russia to interfere in an election, but it has to start at the top.It has to start with our own president, making clear that there will be real consequences for Russia if it continues down this path. …
The U.S. Response to Russian Measures
There's the argument, of course, that Obama made, which is, I'm not going to hot something up right before a new president comes in.My job is to lay a little bit low.If he wants to turn the temperature up, let him do it.
That’s exactly right.I think President Obama felt that we needed to put all of this together, hand it off to the next president and let him or her decide what the appropriate follow-on actions would be.Indeed, he asked that our Intelligence Community come together and try to issue a definitive report about what happened.It was in that process of going back over every single piece of information in intelligence that they came to the conclusion that they hadn’t reached before the election, that Putin was actually trying to affect the outcome of the election; that is, he was trying to make sure that Mrs. Clinton didn’t get elected and trying to make sure that Mr. Trump did get elected.That was really a product of this look back at everything we had and everything we knew, putting pieces together that we hadn’t seen connected at the time.
And of course the alternative, the counterargument to Obama, to the one I just articulated, is, but wait a minute.Now you know it’s Trump.Why not go hell-bent for leather?Because you know where Trump is on this.Trump has been encouraging the Russians.
Well, you very much hope and believe that whoever is elected president of the United States is going to do the right thing and stand up for the national interest and for the nation’s security.It was our belief and conviction that President Trump should and would do that.It was our responsibility to give him the information that had been developed by the Intelligence Community—not by a Democratic president, but by the Intelligence Community—to give him our best recommendations for what should be done.But ultimately it would be his responsibility.
Now, of course the Obama administration did take action while it was still in office, including kicking out about 35 Russian so-called diplomats, who were in fact engaged in intelligence collection and spying, closing down two compounds that the Russians were also using for intelligence purposes, and the president having previously put Putin on notice, we reserved the right and hoped the administration that followed us would reserve the right to take further action if Russia continued.
But now that responsibility, that power lies with the current administration, not with the Obama administration.One can spend a lot of time revisiting what we did or didn’t do.It’s always important to look back and figure out if you could have done something differently or better.But that’s no longer the issue.The issue is, how do we make sure this never happens again?And that is the responsibility of the current administration and of President Trump. …
Intervention in the U.S. Election
… In the end, what did he achieve, and what does it say about Putin that you’ve seen evolve over the years?
Mr. Putin has been remarkably successful in fueling a crisis of confidence in the United States and in the West, particularly about our elections but even more broadly about our system.Whether that was his design from day one or whether he simply took advantage of opportunities that he helped to create, hard to say.But either way, he’s been remarkably adept.We are now consumed with what Russia did or didn’t do during the elections, what one campaign did or didn’t do in collusion with Russia.That has become the dominant story every single day in our country, to such an extent that it’s also made it difficult to move on with other things that are important.
But it’s vitally important that we get to the bottom of this if we’re going to prevent it from happening again.To the extent that Mr. Putin has played a very weak hand, to dominate our own national conversation, to create doubt, to create this crisis of confidence and to further political paralysis in terms of getting anything done, he’s been remarkably successful, playing a very weak hand.
That’s why it’s so vitally important that he understand that this cannot and will not happen again with impunity.It really is up to the president of the United States to deliver that message directly to Mr. Putin, to make sure he understands it, believes it, and acts accordingly.Otherwise, you ain’t seen nothing yet.We’ll get a repeat of this in 2018, in 2020.Things will get even worse.And Russia will emerge strengthened.We’ll emerge weakened from this.
Now, one hopes that sometime, somehow, some way, we can get back to a place where the relationship between the United States and Russia is not zero-sum, where we actually are working together in areas of mutual self-interest.But unless Mr. Putin can be made to see that acting in this fashion, looking at the world through the zero-sum prism and trying to undermine the United States, Western Europe on a regular basis, unless he can be made to see that it actually is not going to be allowed, that there are going to be real consequences for it, he’ll continue, because every signal he’s getting is that it’s working, and he’s not paying a price for it.
So this really is an urgent issue for the United States going forward.And again, the buck stops with the president of the United States.He is the single actor in our system who can make clear to Putin that this has to stop, it must stop, and if it doesn’t stop, there will be consequences.
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