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.
