Category Archives: Active Measures

Putin Plays the Philippines: Part II

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By Greg Rushford

Late last year I began researching President Vladimir Putin’s use of secret intelligence to support Russia’s foreign policy goals. A substantial percentage of what the Soviets used to call “active measures” involves influence operations aimed at supporting foreign leaders who have pro-Moscow inclinations. Most of the digging involved piecing together the available public record from numerous locations worldwide: press clips, court records, academic course materials, official government documents, historical studies that provide valuable context, and such. But it wasn’t long before an experienced Putin-watcher who knew that I pay attention to Philippine politics, rather casually tipped me off to something new.

Putin, the source said with a knowing smile, was running “influence operations” in the Philippines aimed at helping his admirer President Rodrigo Duterte learn “how to do it.” The “it” referred to information-warfare methods aimed at discrediting Duterte’s many human-rights critics, both domestic and in Europe and the United States. That was the full extent of the tip: tantalizing, but clearly not enough to publish an article that would meet acceptable journalistic standards.

Months of digging have not turned up proof of such a Russian-directed influence operation in the Philippines. But still, enough bits and pieces have surfaced on the public record that, added together, raise disturbing questions.

As I reported in Part I of this article, Martin Andanar, Duterte’s communications director, has struck cooperative arrangement with TASS, Russia’s propaganda agency that includes “media training” for the official Philippine News Agency. Andanar insists this is merely standard cooperation with a friendly government, not part of a joint disinformation effort. “The Presidential Communications Operations Office does not engage in fake news,” Andanar has declared previously when other reporters have raised similar questions. And Duterte’s national security adviser, Hermogenes Esperon, maintains that any inferences of an ongoing agent-of-influence operation are going too far beyond the facts.

This report attempts to explain bits and pieces of the available public record in a context that will better enable readers to draw their own inferences.

Mutual anti-American feelings

For openers, it is not difficult to understand why, from Vladimir Putin’s point of view, Duterte would be an obvious candidate for an agent-of-influence operation.

Before he was sworn-in as president on June 30, 2016, the rough-edged Philippine politician had been a provincial mayor in Davao, a bustling city in Mindanao, the Philippines’ southern island. Little-travelled, he did not claim to be experienced in foreign affairs, much less a player in the world of international intrigue.

 But Duterte was hardly shy about proclaiming his two core beliefs in clear, personal language. One centers on his longstanding deep dislike for Americans, an animosity that apparently had festered since an unhappy childhood experience (never fully explained) with an American priest. The other was that Duterte considered Vladimir Putin “my favorite hero” (along with China’s Xi Jinping.)

It is difficult to imagine that Putin, a former KGB officer who is running clandestine operations in many countries aimed at cultivating prominent politicians, wouldn’t have immediately spotted a ripe opportunity. After all, one of the Russian president’s top priorities is to foster distrust between America and its allies.

The game begins

In this case, the game seems to have begun in November 2016, when Putin and Duterte first met, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in Lima, Peru. The Russian strongman and his Philippine admirer clicked. Duterte told his Russian counterpart that he no longer wanted to be identified “with the Western world.” He told Putin that he considered the Philippines’ longstanding treaty ally, the United States, untrustworthy, Reuters reported. The Filipino railed against American “hypocrisy” and “bullying,” which are also two of Putin’s favorite subjects.

Three months later, Putin dispatched Nikolai Patrushev, one of his closest and most trusted advisers, to meet with Duterte in Davao. Patrushev heads Russia’s security council. After their meeting on February 15, 2017, Duterte and Patrushev announced that Russia and the Philippines had struck an intelligence-sharing relationship. As one news report put it, Patrushev had “offered the Philippines access to an intelligence database to help it fight crime and militancy, and training for the elite forces assigned to protect President Rodrigo Duterte.”

The Patrushev factor

If that were all, this story could stop here. But to seasoned Russia watchers, nothing Nikolai Patrushev is involved in is ever likely to be straightforward. Like Putin, Patrushev is a former KGB officer. And when Putin stepped down as head of the FSB — the Federal Security Service, which is the main intelligence agency that was spun off from the old Soviet KGB — Patrushev replaced him.

As Mikhail Zygar put it in his authoritative “All the Kremlin’s Men,” Patrushev “has been the nerve center of most of Putin’s special operations — the annexation of Crimea, for instance.” He’s virulently anti-American, and once told the state-owned newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta that he believed that the Soviet Union had “collapsed as a result of a plot hatched by Zbigniew Brzezinski and the CIA to weaken the Soviet economy.” The Russian spymaster also believes that Western intelligence operatives have sponsored violence in Chechnya. (We don’t know if Patrushev and Duterte talked about it, but the CIA happens to be another favorite Duterte target. If my plane ever goes down, “ask the CIA,” he has recently said — offering no reason for the fantasy.)

While such opinions suggest that objective intelligence analysis is not Patrushev’s strong suit, he’s considered more talented in so-called “wet” operations. A British official inquiry fingered both Putin and Patrushev as the most probable suspects in the 2006 murder-by-poison of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko. Earlier this year, Patrushev was one of 24 Russians close to Putin who were subjected to sanctions by the United States for a variety of “malign” deeds.

At least for a man who has always been a civil servant, Patrushev seems to have the resources to ride out such sanctions, if reports that he owns a mansion outside Moscow worth upwards of $17 million are to be believed. Like Putin, Patrushev has also managed to avoid prosecution for suspected economic crimes, including the smuggling of rare Russian birch trees.

While the Patrushev-Duterte February 2017 meeting in Davao raised eyebrows, the “active measures” trail pretty much went cold again.  

An admission of a foreign intelligence operation

But a year later, Duterte — whose famously loose lips have often landed him in controversies — seemed to blow the whistle on himself.

On February 12, 2018, Duterte made headlines in Manila by boasting that “another country” had given him a transcript of a telephone conversation involving Loida Nicolas Lewis. Lewis is a well-regarded (and wealthy) Philippine-American lawyer and businesswoman who lives in New York City.  And she sure has gotten under Duterte’s skin.

First, Lewis supported the ultimately unsuccessful candidacy of Manual “Mar” Roxas, the Philippine politician who was beaten by Duterte in the 2016 presidential race. Since then, Lewis has become a prominent critic of Duterte’s controversial human-rights record. There is no evidence that Lewis — who is also on the board of the respected U.S.-Philippines Society, which promotes closer ties between the two traditional allies — has done anything beyond exercising her rights to engage in normal political discourse. She is also widely known for her charitable work.

That hasn’t prevented Duterte from fuming that Lewis has been part of a conspiracy to destabilize his government.

A few days before Duterte announced that he had been listening into Lewis’s telephone conversations, the International Criminal Court had announced it would open a preliminary inquiry into thousands of extra-judicial killings on his watch. Human rights advocates have estimated that some 12,000 Filipinos who somehow got caught up in Duterte’s war against illegal narcotics have been killed. The ICC, which is headquartered in The Hague, is charged with prosecuting crimes against humanity.

In his February 12 remarks, Duterte said that he had not been surprised by the announcement from The Hague, because he had been listening in on Lewis’s calls. “I knew in advance,” the Philippine president said. “I was already listening to the tapes of their conversation.” He added: “It was provided by me by another country but the conversation was somewhere between Philippines and New York.”

Presidential spokesman Harry Roque told reporters in February that he could not “annotate” Duterte’s remarks, adding: “Let’s take the President’s statement on its face value.” When I inquired again late last month, Duterte’s national security adviser, Hermogenes Esperon, informed me that he had “no comment on telephone transcript.” The secretary added: “But we all know Lewis supported another presidential candidate. She is one who wants the democratic way of electing presidents — if her candidate wins.”

Lewis says that she has no idea what Duterte was talking about, and that she is not in the business of plotting coups. She says that she only learned about the ICC’s inquiry when it was officially announced. “They can watch me as much as they want,” she told me. “Truth is the best defense.”

Clearly, the Russians aren’t the only ones who eavesdrop. The Philippines has its own telephone surveillance equipment (some of which has been purchased in the United Kingdom on Duterte’s watch, according to news reports). The Chinese, of course, have sophisticated surveillance capabilities — and Lewis has also upset Beijing with her public stance calling upon Duterte to take action against Chinese illegal seizures of reefs in the South China Sea that international law reserves exclusively for the Philippines.

Still, to anyone familiar with Russian spycraft, the wiretapping of an American citizen in the Big Apple has a distinctly familiar smell. But once again, there is no concrete proof — other than the “if it talks like a duck, walks like a duck…” version.

Russian propaganda hits the Philippines

In recent months, the Philippine press has been full of numerous reports of so-called “fake news” and various online disinformation campaigns that have targeted several of Duterte’s political opponents and human-rights critics: in the Philippine senate, the Supreme Court, and the ICC in The Hague. Proving where these campaigns originated, though, has been elusive.

The closest any journalist has come to documenting the suspicions of a Russian influence operation directed at the Philippines was published on February 26 in the Manila-based Rappler, an online publication that has earned a worldwide reputation for its quality investigative journalism.

The report, by Natashya Gutierrez, noted that a Spanish-based Russian Twitter account, @Ivan226622, had been exposed by authorities in Madrid as part of a Russian trolling operation. Ivan and other denizens of the bot-twitter universe had aimed at destabilizing Spain by supporting independence in Spain’s Catalonia region. “But it seems that” the Russian propaganda account “has since changed gears: it is now tweeting exclusively about the Philippines,” Gutierrez wrote.

While most of Ivan’s tweets were retweets of Philippine newspaper articles, the troll also circulated a “YouTube video on how trust in the press has dropped over time,” another staple of Russian propaganda. Shortly after the Rappler report, Twitter suspended Ivan’s account.

The headline to Gutierrez’ article asked the right question: “Has Russian propaganda infiltrated the Philippines?”

So far, there are more such questions than conclusive answers. Stay tuned.

Putin Plays the Philippines

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Kremlin spymasters have their eyes on Rodrigo Duterte. To understand why, first consider the long list of other foreign leaders the Russians have targeted.

(Part One of a Two-Part Series)

 By Greg Rushford

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been wooing Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, in what appears to be a Kremlin-directed agent-of-influence operation. It is a matter of public record that Russia and the Philippines have established an intelligence-sharing arrangement. The publicly announced deal appears to be the standard fare: sharing intelligence on the threat the Philippines faces from Islamic terrorists in Southeast Asia, a gift of 5,000 Kalashnikov rifles and ammo, training of Duterte’s presidential guards. But whenever the Russians are involved, there are always, well, curiosities.

Curiosity number one: Duterte has boasted that a “foreign” power has given him telephone transcripts of one of the critics of his human-rights record, an American citizen of Philippine origin who lives in New York City. To anyone familiar with the tradecraft, that sounds straight out of the Putin playbook.

Curiosity number two: Duterte’s presidential communications office has sought “media training” for the official Philippine News Agency (PNA) from TASS, Moscow’s mouthpiece.  Why would the Philippines, a democracy with a free press, seek any journalistic assistance from one of the world’s most disreputable propaganda operations?

Curiosity number three: In February, a solidly-researched article by Natashya Gutierrez, a leading Philippine investigative reporter, revealed that “a Russian-linked Twitter account used to interfere in polls in Spain is now tweeting exclusively about the Philippines.” Gutierrez’s article, published in the online investigative news outlet, Rappler, also disclosed that this was “one of several disturbing developments that may suggest Kremlin influence.”

Add up the curiosities, and it appears that Putin and Duterte have been hiding in the open, which often comes with the territory in Moscow’s influence operations. But Philippine officials deny that, even as they acknowledge it is a matter of public record that their country has struck an intelligence-sharing relationship with Putin’s Russia.

Manila’s side of the story

Duterte’s national security adviser, Sec. Hermogenes Esperon, says he has “no comment on [the] telephone transcript.” And he brushed off a query about the Russian propaganda directed from Spain. But to insinuate that an agent-of-influence operation is going on “is really insinuating too much,” Esperon added. It’s in “our national interest” to deal with Russia, as well as neighboring China, the secretary noted. “It is always good to have friendly relations or, at the least, open lines of communications with neighboring Asian countries.”

Esperon also stressed that “retaining standing alliances is also beneficial,” referring to the close security ties the Philippines has enjoyed since the 1950s with the United States.

Martin Andanar, the head of the Philippines’s presidential communications operations office, insists there is nothing untoward about the Philippine News Agency’s relationship with Russia’s TASS. The PNA also has “a standing partnership with Kyodo News of Japan and Press Trust of India,” and other “media/information counterparts in South Korea, Japan, and Cambodia,” he adds.

Tradecraft can strengthen a weak hand

Before taking a closer look at the emerging Moscow-Manila intelligence ties, some essential background history illustrates the nuances of how Russia has long used secret intelligence in its dealings with many other foreign leaders.

Putin’s main goal in cultivating the Philippines’ Duterte is a familiar one: to exploit Duterte’s well-known visceral dislike of Americans, looking for opportunities to weaken the Philippines deep-rooted security ties with Uncle Sam. No wonder: Beyond their expertise in influence operations, the Russians don’t have much else to offer foreign leaders.

The anemic Russian economy (GDP of $1.3 trillion, and going nowhere fast) is puny compared to big players like China ($12 trillion GDP) and America ($19.3 trillion). In their dealings with foreign leaders anywhere in the world, the Russians — who were humiliated by the collapse of the Soviet Union — look to leverage their foreign policy aspirations to be taken seriously.  So they reach into their historically proven bag of dirty tricks to buy influence, and respect.

Vladimir Putin is only the latest Russian leader to play this game.

Indeed, there is a rich historical context associated with how the Kremlin’s spymasters have long practiced the art of cultivating the secret affections of foreign leaders.

Active Measures, Past…

Aktivnyye meropryiyatiya— Russian for active measures —isanold Soviet KGB term for an array of clandestine intelligence operations aimed at furthering the Kremlin’s foreign policy goals. The covert-operations toolkit includes a variety of dirty tricks. Classic subversion. Kompromat, Russian for blackmail operations. Under-the-table cash. An array of deceptions including propaganda, mis- and disinformation campaigns. Plus, thinly-disguised “little green men” like those who showed up in plain green uniforms to destabilize eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014.

Intelligence experts generally agree that a high percentage of the Kremlin’s active measures have traditionally involved information warfare and covert assistance aimed at supporting sympathetic foreign politicians who will toe the Moscow line.

The best-documented illustration of how Soviets operate stems from the Kremlin’s manipulations in India during the Cold War.

A now-declassified secret 1985 CIA assessment noted that “the Soviets enjoy nearly unfettered access to the pages of Indian newspapers,” planting more than 160,000 articles in the Indian press.” The American intelligence report added that “access to the Press Trust of India, New Delhi’s largest English language news agency, “has become so automatic that some Soviet officials have come to call it Press TASS of India.”

And renowned Cambridge University intelligence historian Christopher Andrew has written of the “suitcases” of cash that were routinely delivered to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who dominated Indian politics from 1967 until her assassination in 1984. Seems that Mrs. Gandhi even kept the suitcases.

Due to the inherent secrecy associated with clandestine operations, it took decades for such facts from Cold War intelligence battlegrounds to dribble out.

…and Present

But in recent years, Russian active measures have become the stuff of daily headlines. With varying degrees of success, Vladimir Putin has directed influence operations aimed at an array of politicians of both left and right.

The politicians who have been targeted share one thing in common: their anti-American, or anti-European Union, proclivities. True, the details of how these operations have played out will likely remain the stuff of history that will take years to be fully documented. But meanwhile, thanks to various press reports, academic studies, and official announcements, it doesn’t require access to secret intelligence information to perceive what the Russians have been up to.

On the left, those targeted have included British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (election help); South Africa’s former President Jacob Zuma (whispers of those proverbial suitcases of cash); and Latin American strongmen like Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela (too many dirty tricks to summarize briefly).

And of course the Castro brothers, going way back. Just this week, a headline in Cuba’s communist mouthpiece, Prensa Latina, demonstrated that old-fashioned Russian propaganda is very much alive in the region: “Russia Condemns U.S. Interference in Latin American Affairs.”

In 2012, then-Ecuadorian President Rafel Correa gave Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder whose name always seems to come up when the subject is Russian influence operations, refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London. And two other anti-American populists, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega have paid their Moscow benefactors back shamelessly, expressing support for Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea, to cite just one example.  (As we will see in the second part of this series, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, an unashamed Putin admirer, is not known to have gone so far.)

Former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, another leftie who has termed American global influence as “monstrous,” while calling Putin a “flawless democrat,” went on the Russian payroll shortly after he left office in 2005. Schröder had championed the still-controversial Nord Stream natural gas pipeline that connects Germany to Russia. Today he chairs the board of the government-controlled Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil company, which has close personal ties to Putin.

And on the right…

Putin works hard-right foreign leaders also. There’s the pro-Moscow Czech president, Milos Zeman. France’s National Front leader Marine Le Pen (who has enjoyed Russian bank loans). Hungary’s anti-immigrant Viktor Orban. Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Several other right-wing parties from Italy and Germany to Scandinavia have also received Moscow’s support.

Of course, the world of secret intelligence being, umm, secret, the Kremlin’s successes in each of these individual cases remain speculative. Authoritarian-minded rightists like Erdogan and Orban, while their Eurosceptism would be pleasing to Moscow, also come from countries that are traditionally sensitive to any hints of untoward Russian influence. Plus, wily leaders like Erdogan and Orban have their own agendas. So it’s sometimes difficult for outside observers to determine exactly who is playing whom.

Putin’s most famous current success story is well-known to anyone who follows developing headlines. The U.S. intelligence community has identified the main goal of Putin’s several influence operations during America’s 2016 presidential elections: helping Donald Trump defeat rival Hillary Clinton. Clearly, the Russians had a hand in Trump’s victory (although there were other reasons for Clinton’s defeat, arguably the most important of which was her unattractiveness as a candidate).

But Putin didn’t fare so well last year during the United Kingdom’s general election, when his operatives energetically worked various social media outlets to promote the fortunes of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Labor lost the 2017 election.  As has America’s Trump, Corbyn has a history of denigrating British intelligence reports on the Kremlin’s political influence operations directed his way. And to complicate matters further, a lot of murky Russian money is also believed to have been directed towards supporting various British Conservative Party politicians.

Given such a history of active measures aimed at so many prominent world leaders, as we turn to Southeast Asia it is not surprising that Putin has also had his eyes on Rodrigo Duterte.

To be continued in Part Two…