ALLATRA presents an interview podcast with Sean M. Wiswesser, a former CIA senior operations officer and Chief of Station with nearly thirty years of experience in intelligence, foreign service, defense, and national security.

Sean M. Wiswesser served on multiple overseas tours and many other deployments on temporary duty, including war-zone service. He was a chief of station and had multiple joint-duty assignments with intelligence community partners. Sean was a Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill with a bachelor's degree in history and Russian & Slavic linguistics. He was awarded a Master of Strategic Studies in 2023 from the Air War College and received the Russia Integrated Deterrence Award.

In this in-depth conversation, Sean Wiswesser draws on his professional experience and research to discuss Russian intelligence, its history, tradecraft, and evolving methods of influence.

The interview explores:

• What first drew Sean Wiswesser to Russian history, language, and intelligence work

• Why he decided to write a book about Russian intelligence tradecraft

• How Russian intelligence services use active measures and hybrid warfare

• Common Western misconceptions about the Russian intelligence system

• The role of disinformation, emotional manipulation, sabotage, cyberattacks, and covert influence

• How information operations target public trust and democratic institutions

• Lessons Americans can learn from Europe’s experience with hybrid threats

• Russia’s war against Ukraine and the risks of prematurely assuming that the war is nearing its end

• How young people may be recruited and coerced through Telegram and other online platforms

• What individuals, educators, and civil society can do to build resilience without creating an atmosphere of fear

This ALLATRA interview podcast offers an expert perspective on how intelligence operations extend far beyond traditional espionage and why understanding these methods is essential for protecting democratic societies.

This material is for informational and discussion purposes only. The statements, assessments, interpretations, conclusions, and hypotheses contained herein represent personal views of their authors as of the date of publication and do not constitute an official stance of the ALLATRA international organization or any other public association, organization, project, partner, or affiliated entity or person, unless expressly stated otherwise. 

Publication of this material provides an opportunity for open discussion and does not in itself imply institutional endorsement, confirmation, or scientific verification of the views expressed. The material does not constitute an official statement, expert opinion, or professional advice.

Full Podcast Transcript

Sean Wiswesser

Yeah. Russian intelligence. Let's go back to their history. What are they about? What defines them? Terror. Terror defines the Russian intelligence services.
The NKVD, the OGPU, the MGB, the KGB, all different names. Today it's the FSB. They stand for organized terror.
Democracy is the greatest threat to Vladimir Putin

Narrator

Sean Wiswesser, a former CIA senior operations officer and chief of station. Sean, is a veteran national security professional with 30 years of experience in intelligence and defense. He served multiple overseas tours, including in war zones. Sean is an international lecturer on Russian espionage and author of the book Tradecraft Tactics and Dirty Tricks.

Sean Wiswesser

So when the Russians use the narrative of fascist, they know it evokes emotion, they target emotion, and they don't fundamentally care one way or another. They just want to label. They just want to create dissension. They just want Americans fighting each other. And he's not going to stop in Ukraine unless we stopped him. Now they can do it with AI. Now they can do it in cognitive warfare. So I believe it's the greatest existential threat to democracy today is cognitive warfare. We choose half measures. We're only going to have more war because Putin's not going to stop. We have to be smarter. We can't allow ourselves to be duped.

Valeria

So, Sean, thank you so much for having this podcast with us today.

Sean Wiswesser

Well, thanks for having me. It's an honor to talk about issues I'm passionate about. Russian intelligence, the Ukraine war. So it's an honor. Thank you.

Valeria

Thank you very much. Before we will dive in the topic of the Russian intelligence, tradecraft and so on, I would like to raise the first question so that you open up for the audience. What first actually drew you to Russia? The history, the language, and eventually to the intelligence work.

Sean Wiswesser

Yeah. So at first it was a pretty, fairly simple decision. I went to a boarding school, I won a scholarship as a, was not a wealthy kid. I had a chance to go to a great college prep school in ninth grade. And we had to pick a language. We were going to do language for four years. Russian was the exception. It was the only language was kind of different. They had French, German, Spanish and Russian. And so I thought, why not do something different? Not a lot of people have studied, and I thought maybe I might want to go into a military career. And the Soviet Union was our adversary. This is in the 1980s. This a long time ago, 40 years ago, almost now.
So I thought on a kind of a whim, I said, okay, I'll take Russian. But then as I studied it for four years in high school, I really developed a real interest in the the language, the culture, the people. And so then I continued on. I eventually got a second bachelor's degree in Russian. I was a history major, but in college I got a second bachelor's in Russian. So that's how it started. My interest in Russia and Russian language. And then that fed into my later career. Of course, as a diplomat and then eventually as a CIA officer.

Valeria

Actually, after the career in the government service, many people chose not publicly write about the intelligence. But you're the one who decided to write a book and particular book about the tradecraft and how exactly intelligence, Russian intelligence work. Why did you decide, after finishing the career in the government to write this particular book?

Sean Wiswesser

So this fed out of my career with CIA, in particular, working Russian intelligence. You know, I would never write a memoir. I'm not interested in writing a memoir to talk about my life. I think that's all kind of boring, at least for me. What I wanted to talk about now more than ever, is our adversary, Russian intelligence.
I think that they're not well understood in the West. They're not understood well in Europe or the United States. And so I spent a good bit of my career. You know, I spent 28 years in the intelligence community, some with State Department. Most of that over two decades was CIA. And when I was with CIA, I taught a lot. I taught at other intelligence community academies FBI, DHS, CIA. Of course, at our own academy.
And I relate some of that in the book. But the book is focused on Russian intelligence and some of their tactics, their techniques. Ten chapters focused on how they do their craft, because I think it's so misunderstood in the West. And I thought with things like the 2016 election meddling, both in the United States and in Britain, Brexit, what the Russians call active measures, I thought there needs to be more awareness of this.
You know, they're attacking democracy. They're they're trying to undermine democracy worldwide. The most vivid example of that, the most stark example is, of course in your country, Ukraine. Ukrainians fighting for their very existence. You know, nowhere is the struggle for democracy more stark than Ukraine right now. So I wanted to do my part. That was the inspiration for the book — do my part to explain Russian intelligence. Fortunately, the book's gotten a good welcome and readers, I think, are finding it easy to read. I wrote it for the general public, so that was the inspiration.

Valeria

I actually read your book, and I really remember the way you described how you started to travel and lecture the intelligence services and because you basically saw this like gap, right? That needs to be filled up, if I can say like this and making sure that, you know, your knowledge is, and all your experience, basically you can spread it further. And what if we talk about the ordinary reader who is not an intelligence officer? What, maybe the most important thing you would like for people to understand how, exactly those Russian intelligence work?

Sean Wiswesser

Yeah. So I'll start with the dedication of the book. I quote Lermontov, I studied Russian literature, a great admirer of their culture, their traditions. We're not at war with the Russian people. Fundamentally. We're at war with a repressive regime, an autocracy, Vladimir Putin, his siloviki (russian security and military officials) all that empower them. The Russian military, the organi vlasti. As the Russians talk about organi vlasti (government agenci es). you know, the FSB, the SVR, the GRU and the military. They're waging this horrible, atrocious war against Ukraine.
They're waging a hybrid war for 20 years now against the West. That's the subtitle of my book, Russian Intelligence and Putin's Secret War. They've been at war with us for a long time. This predated the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, the 2008 invasion of Georgia. All the while, in the West, we sort of weren't paying attention. We allowed ourselves to believe Putin, you know We saw him, you know, as he wanted himself to be seen. He was a wolf in sheep's clothing. You know, he portrayed himself as, you know, Tony Blair was famous for saying, oh, you know, we can work with Putin, George Bush, of course, our own president, who I admire. I think he was a great president. But his famous quote, you know, “we looked into the soul of the man, got a sense for the soul. I think he's someone we can trust.” Well, we can't. We can never trust him. He always was committed to autocracy.
He said himself early in his presidency “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union.” So I believe fundamentally and in the CIA that I worked in, we always knew Putin was a threat to democracy, a threat to the West. And he's now revealed his design. He wants to rebuild the Soviet Union. He set out for it. It doesn't end with Ukraine. It continues with the Baltics.
He's a dictator with grievances. We should remember dictators with grievances. My God, how much damage, destruction, calamity in the 20th century was caused by dictators with grievances like Hitler, who said, well, I'm going to set history straight the way I see fit. Look at Putin's speech from 2021 where he lays out his case. Ukraine has no right to exist, was never even a country. That's his argument.
So we didn't do a good enough job сountering Putin. And now we're stuck, we're in a really bad spot. Now he's waging all out war, killing tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of his own people, certainly tens of thousands of Ukrainians, Ukrainian children have died by the thousands. And he's not going to stop in Ukraine unless we stop him. So that's the message of the book. You know, this has been happening a long time. This wasn't built overnight. And we need to do a better job in the West, seeing it for what it is and countering it.

Valeria

And you already mentioned actually, that some people really misunderstand the way the Russian intelligence work. And maybe, you can share some examples with us, of this kind of misunderstanding, how the way they operate.

Sean Wiswesser

Yeah. We tend to in the West, we tend to project our understanding of law-based societies – we project it on our adversaries. We just don't know any better. So you'll hear Western commentators, even learned scholars that look at Russian government, they'll say things like, “oh, well, the FSB, that's the equivalent of the FBI.” No it's not. It's got nothing to do with the FBI or the British Security Service or any functioning democratic security services.
In Russia, the FSB, as a giant, monolithic, corrupt bureaucracy dedicated to one thing that's keeping Vladimir Putin in power. And the system that sustains him and sustains their own corruption. You know, it totals nearly half a million officers in the FSB. It's a giant bureaucracy, at least 400, 000 strong, with 200,000 border troops and all the other intelligence services. They're they're running the roost. They're rolling Russia today. And so I think we don't understand this in the West.
Look at how Putin presents the members of siloviki — the strongman, men of power — just the very term siloviki. Look at how he presents them when he's holding important meetings: these are all his close KGB hardliners, they're the ones that surround him. Before he invaded Ukraine in 2022 with the full scale invasion. What did he do? Remember one week before that gathered all those key siloviki and ministers? He had them all state for the record on Russian TV. How do you feel about the four Eastern Oblast? Ukraine? You know, should they be a part of Russia? That was his way of making sure they all stated the case for war. And so remember when Sergei when Naryshkin, the head of the SVR, he didn't speak up enough. He was mumbling and he said, well, you know, I'm okay. I'm za (I am for it) . He's like, “well, Sergei, speak plainly. Откровенно, прямо скажите” [ Tell me openly and frankly.] He wanted them to say, hey, boom, I want to hear it on the record. Are you for the war or not? Because he wanted it clear for the whole world, the Russian people and the whole world. These are my guys. These are my…This is my government. We're all in this together. We're all aligned together so that no one could say, well, you know, I wasn't for the war. Я был против лично Personally I was against it. You know, nobody could say that he put them all in the air.
So it's telling us How he does business. He's an autocrat. He's been at this now 26 years. He makes it clear he's calling the shots, and he plays all of his lieutenants against each other. So I think, again, we do a poor job understanding this is a security state built to keep Putin in power. All those siloviky that are completely beholden to him for all of their wealth, all of their golden palaces. Why was Navalny killed? He was killed because he was doing documentaries. He was showing the Russian people, look at how they live. Look at these golden palaces they build in Sochi and in Moscow. And the Russians were watching it.
Democracy is the greatest threat to Vladimir Putin. Democracy is what he's after. Can't have Ukraine — a functioning democracy on his border — have to destroy that. That's too much of a threat. Can't have the Baltics — functioning democracies either — they're the next step. So again, I think we need to do a better job of understanding him and his regime for what it is.

Valeria

What do you think? What does the Russian intelligence understand about the human weaknesses. Maybe something that democratic societies often underestimate.

Sean Wiswesser

Yeah. Russian intelligence. Let's go back to their history. What are they about? What defines them? Terror. Terror defines the Russian intelligence services. Dzerzhinsky said it himself. The founder of the of the Cheka, the first Committee for the defense of the Revolution. Felix Dzerzhinsky, the famous Iron Felix. He stated on the public record, we stand for organized terror. Okay.
Everything that they've been about for 100 years, you've seen this. Okay, so the follow on successors, the NKVD, the OGPU, the MGB, the KGB, all different names. Today it's the FSB. They stand for organized terror. It's about terrorizing the Russian people. It's keeping a chokehold on them. Absolutely no freedoms whatsoever. Can't have freedom of the press. Can't even have a suggestion that they're fighting a real war, right? For four years now, it's been against the law for Russians to even say, are we at war? Even though now some of their even their spokesman, Peskov, he made the mistake recently, but he won't be put on trial. But how many simple, ordinary Russians? They can't even say they're at war. They're dying. By the by, the hundreds of thousands. They have 1.5 million in casualties.
So terror defines a state. And then they export terror. They export coercion as a form of foreign policy. Let's look at examples. The Russian state has murdered people. And when they have carried out those murders, it's clear that Putin sanctions them. Let me give you an example. The FSB officer, Vadim Krasikov, he's an assassin. He was a personal bodyguard to Putin. This is what …we mean when we talk about the Thugocracy that is Russia Today. In 2019 Krasikov the story is within the services he volunteered, said, let me do this for you.
You know, they call Putin the boss in Russian. They call him chef. I dealt with debrief Russian intelligence officers within their systems. He's chef. Ну как так говорят Шеф, That's what they say, Chief. He's the boss. In a similar way, Stalin used to be called Хозяин The Master in his time. He's the boss man. He's running the whole show like the Хозяин колхоза Collective farm boss. Of course, you know.
So the boss wanted somebody killed. He wanted a Chechen descent killed in Germany. Krasikov, a personal bodyguard, apparently volunteered to do this. He was caught immediately. Broad daylight. He killed the the Chechen dissident and was arrested. And he spent five years in prison until Putin insisted any trade with the West. This hostages innocent civilians like Brittney Griner or Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter. So Putin said, I want Krasikov. He told. It was clear in the negotiations, I want my guy out. And the Russians had denied he was an FSB officer, even though it was clear he was an intelligence officer. So what happened? Putin got his way. There was no trade without Krasikov, and he met him on the airport, and he gave him half a bear hug and a firm handshake on the red carpet. He wanted the he wanted his guys to see his terrorists that are his intelligence officers. When you kill for me, when you kill under my orders. I will take care of you. I will get you out. And he did. He got Krasikov out. And then within days, Peskov, the spokesperson, admitted, yes, he's an FSB officer and we decorated him for what he did.
This is a state that carries out murder by order of the president, and he greets the murderer on the tarmac of the airport. So I think it's, again, hard for us in the West to understand, to comprehend a president who personally orders murders and whose regime carries out murders. They killed Politkovskaya. They killed Nemtsov. They killed Navalny. We have conclusive proof of this. This is a murderous regime that kills on orders for the president and then carries out wars by his order to. And that killed tens of thousands of civilians in your country, Ukraine. It's only with the collective resolve in the West, when we wake up to the threat, we recognize him for who he is. We recognize this regime for what it is, a murderous regime that carries out hits for a boss, much like a mafia state. Only then can we really counter it.

Valeria

Thank you so much for again bringing this example. And I think the West really did not understand that this is a regime of murder, that's for sure.

Sean Wiswesser

Yeah. And there's those that I'll just add, there's those that still don't see it. You know, we just had a government in Hungary that thankfully was finally replaced. Thankfully for the Hungarian people — chose a new leader, you know. And I try to stay out of politics. I try to stay apolitical. But in the case of a foreign minister in Hungary who's caught on the record… It’s telling, by the way, that tapes were leaked. Who knows who leaked them? Maybe even Russian intelligence themselves. What should the Hungarians know and focus on? Look at what's been revealed. There were more Russian intelligence officers working in the embassy under Orban, under his government that was friendly to Russia. They had more Russian intelligence officers working at that embassy than at any point ever. It shows there are no friends for Russia. You're not going to win over Putin and his government. There are no friends. It's a zero sum game. It's them against the West, against all democracies. And so Europe needs to recognize that we're in this together NATO, the United States, Europe, we're in this together, and we should do more to support Ukraine as well.

Valeria

Now, if we talk about the term of hybrid warfare now, it's used very, very often. But when people hear about hybrid warfare, they usually think about fake news or something like that. But your work actually includes, sabotage, cyber attacks, proxies, assassinations, criminal hackers and covert influence. So can you explain how this all, all of those pieces comes together?

Sean Wiswesser

Yeah. So my research on hybrid war really started just prior to the Ukraine war starting. I was getting my master's at US air war college as part of our great war college program. I was still in government. But then the Ukraine war kicked off and unfortunately, your country was invaded. And I wanted to look at sort of why, how they planned this, how this came about. Why did the Russians think they could win?
So I was publishing a couple of books. One was with Army War College called “A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force”. And I was publishing another one called “The Air War in Ukraine” by Cambridge Publishing House and Justin Bronk as an editor, a very well-known airpower expert. I focused on air power, the Russian air power failure, in both those books and in my thesis, which was published in the UK. But I looked at it from a hybrid war standpoint, and I've written in my current book as well. Chapter ten is about how the Russians applied their hybrid war doctrine. Russians don't call it Гибридная война Hybryd warfare. That's a cognate from the English language. Russians call it Война нового поколения. So warfare of the next generation, they also call it Бесконтактная война Non-contact warfare. And so they've been looking at this for a long time, focused on this for over 20 years. It's worth a really quick mention because this is their history.

Sean Wiswesser

This is what they were planning and coming up with 20 years ago — some Russian general staff figures like Mahmud Gareyev, another guy named Valeriy Slipchenko. These were generals writing about how is Russia going to successfully potentially wage war against NATO. They knew technologically they could never meet the resources of the United States and our NATO allies. They knew they couldn't match us in the air power for air power. They weren't fools. So what they started to believe, and what they wrote in this book called О будущих войнах On Future Wars in 2004. In 2004! That's 22 years ago(!) the Russians are writing about a new generation of warfare, and the West were not even paying attention, right? We're not paying attention at all.
These are well-known generals. And one of them, Slipchenko, wrote in the book, if we can't understand and practice non-contact warfare, Russia won't survive. So what did they what did they talk about? Using information war as a continual second front against their adversaries, an idea later picked up by Valery Gerasimov, the current chief of the General Staff, who in 2013 wrote a famous paper about this and then gave a speech and wrote a paper for a magazine called Courier in Russian. And so this became known in the West. People called it the Gerasimov Doctrine.****Well, he didn't come up with it. It wasn't his idea. He was just continuing the idea.
So the Russians have been looking at this for 20 years. And this can currently happen at a time when you had a former intelligence officer, a former FSB director, become president. So the Russian intelligence service is naturally corrupt bureaucrats that they were they said, yeah, we can do this. We volunteer, we'll do information warfare against the West, sabotage, We'll carry out what they call активные мероприятия information operations.
And they had testing and proving grounds for it. Georgia was one of them, in 2008. Syria was another proving ground. Try to incapacitate the ability of the democracies in the West to react. I happen to know something about Georgia. I served in that region. CIA doesn't want me to exactly state where. I was in the region when the Russians invaded. The news was filled with a lot of confusing propaganda. “Oh, the Russian army has to save the poor people of Ossetia and Abkhazia.” Don't tell that to the Abkhazians in South Ossetia, because Russia didn't do anything for them. They didn't rebuild those those provinces formerly of Georgia, they just invaded and took them over.
Same thing in 2014, right? “We have to rescue the poor people, the Donbas, that are suffering.” What did they do, by the way, between 2014 and 2022? As we all know, Russia did nothing to invest in the Donbas. They did no reconstruction. They didn't do anything in the territories they occupied from 2014. So it's all a narrative to confuse, not necessarily to convince, but their information warfare is designed to confuse the West.
Now add on a new level of escalation that they've always planned, but they've been carrying out since 2022. Cable cuts in the Baltic Sea, more cuts of important infrastructure, critical lines in the Baltic Sea than in any other waterway in the world. And the Balts, they know it the Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, they're not naive about it. Across the Baltic Sea, I'm not so sure. There was a Finnish court that arrested a captain. I was in Helsinki giving a talk. In October, they released the captain of the crew, who drug his anchor for 65km and cut two cable lines. This is Russian hybrid warfare — pay the captain off from the GRU or FSB, cut these cable lines, carry out arson in Poland (a giant shopping centre), take down a cargo plane in Lithuania, arson in the UK, assassination attempt against a German CEO. This is война новго поколения this is warfare of the next generation. But the Russians planned it and they've been out a long time. So I just think it's again, not very well understood in the West.

Valeria

And also, you write in your article that Europe is already under attack, as you already mentioned, through these hybrid methods. And maybe for an American audience, Europe can sometimes look like a distant theatre, let us say, but it may actually be like a preview. And in your view, what should Americans learn from Europe's experience with Russian hybrid operations, and what types of activity in Europe should be understood as warnings for the United States?

Sean Wiswesser

Yeah, it's a great question. Listen, I believe fundamentally… I write a column for The Cipher Brief, and I wrote six months ago a piece called, I entitled it “echoes of 1940”. Listen, it's really important that the United States remember and know that NATO is our strength. This alliance that stood for 80 years. We stood together against Soviet potential aggression. What made the 20th century the American century wasn’t American dominance. It was the fact that after World War II, when we defeated our adversaries, we rebuilt Europe. We rebuilt Japan, the Marshall Plan, the United States invested, you know, countless billions of dollars to rebuild Europe. And the Europeans remembered that. And they loved the United States for that. And so NATO, it's all it's all a legacy together. What we should remember of the alliance and what we accomplished in defeating Nazi aggression and Japan's attack against the United States.
But let's remember where we were before that, because there's a lot of analogies to the United States right now. Listen, Americans are war-weary. We had 20 years of war. My generation of CIA officers, we deployed into war zones. I served in Afghanistan. I served twice in war zones. One CIA doesn't want me to talk about, but I served in Afghanistan. Many others served many, many times. We have millions of servicemen and women served. Americans don't want to talk about war. They don't want to even think about it.
And there's an analogy. After the Great War, World War One, Americans were also stuck in this isolationism. Europeans as well. Britain and France didn't want to think about war. And you had a dictator with grievances. You had Hitler saying, well, I gotta have my grievances satisfied. I used this quote, I was lecturing in the UK last month. It's so important to remember the quote from Churchill. Churchill was the only voice, one of the only voices in the 30s, screaming for Europe to stand united against German aggression. And nobody was listening to him. “Oh, Winnie, he's just a fool. Don't listen to him. He's the fool that led to the Gallipoli campaign”, Churchill said in 1938, when the British signed and the French signed appeasement of Hitler at Munich, Churchill said the choice was between dishonour and war. “You chose dishonour, and you'll have war.” And nobody listened to him. And he was exactly right.
In a similar way, the United States and Europe both have chosen half, half course. Or whether you call it dishonour or not, we've taken half measures with Ukraine. Well, maybe we can give Ukraine just enough to defend its territory, but we don't want them to really strike back against Russia. We've done half measures, we've done half prognostications, half measures to try to convince Russia in this war. It's not going to work. We live in a time of consequence, much like the 1930s, a time when decisions have consequences. And so we should remember again, if we choose dishonour, if we choose half measures, we're only going to have more war because Putin's not going to stop. He uses he views it as weakness when we don't counter them.
“Give the Ukrainians the tools they need to finish the job.” – another quote from the 1930s and early 40s. Give the Ukrainians the tools, give them long-range strike weapons like Ukraine is producing right now (those flamingos and others attacking the energy sector). That will end this war. That's what matters to Putin. It's what matters to the Russian economy.
And so I think it's so critical that as much as we don't want to think about war, we're confronted by war. War is upon us for Americans too. It didn't protect us in 1941, it won't protect us again. We have to stand with our allies. Ukraine is one of them. We have to stand by our allies at war and do more to help.

Valeria

Now, if we talk about the labeling and Ukraine. In the recent OSCE Supplementary Human Dimension meeting in Vienna, our research center – an ALLATRA Global Research Center expert – examined how repeated labeling can evolve from just words into stigmatization, isolation, and repression. And if we talk about Ukraine and the labeling. So Russian state propaganda has repeatedly portrayed Ukraine and Ukrainians as fascists, using this label – a false characterization aimed at discrediting a sovereign democratic nation defending its freedom. From an intelligence tradecraft perspective, how is such a historically charged label weaponized?

Sean Wiswesser

Yeah, it's really… Thank you, Valeria. It's important to talk about Russian information warfare – what they call активные мероприятия. So the Russians have always had it for 100 years. They've been really good in information warfare. For the Russians, let's paint our adversary as we want the world to see them. In chapter nine of my book, I talk about the very definition of KGB активные мероприятия and information warfare designed to weaken one's adversary by any means possible. You can pay off a journalist, recruit a journalist, put a fake story out in the news. One example I cite: the KGB fostered all sorts of assassination theories about JFK. Any time they saw a new theory that could help with dissension within the United States population, they helped foster it. They paid for authors to write books, and I give examples of that. 

In a similar vein today, Russia wants to label any adversaries to the Russian Federation as they see it. Well, they're the aggressors; they're the ones not allowing peace. So as crazy as it is to anyone objectively looking at it, we need to see also the strength of the Russian narrative. When they blame NATO or they try to call Ukraine fascists, it does resonate with Russian-speaking populations. Why? Великая Отечественная война – The Great Patriotic War – was a horrible calamity for the Russian and Soviet peoples. My own wife is Lithuanian; on her Lithuanian side – her mother's side – her grandfather fought with the Lithuanian division of the Red Army. On her other side, her grandfather is Ukrainian from the middle of Ukraine, Кировоградская область. Her mother was a сибирячка from Siberia. They met at the front. She was a battlefield nurse. They experienced horrible suffering. My wife's grandfather – her Ukrainian grandfather – his village was wiped out in the war. There was no one left. His only surviving brother settled in the Baltics. That's how he ended up in the Baltics. That's just an example from my wife's family. You all know it, your grandfathers and grandmothers: Ukrainians – Ukraine suffered more than any other of the former Soviet republics, save maybe for Belarus. So when the Russians used the narrative of фа шисты – fascists – they know it evokes emotion. They target emotion. 

Why is this important? In 2016, in the active measures the Russians used social meddling, how do they train on it? What I talk about in my research, my book: the Russians targeted the most emotional issues in the United States in a similar way to the way they target Ukrainians and trying to label them as fascists. In the United States, they targeted the abortion issue, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ issues. They target the issues that are emotional for Americans, and they don't fundamentally care one way or another. They just want a label. They just want to create dissension. They just want Americans fighting each other. And so, unfortunately, they're very good at it. They train on it. I call it SVR politology. Their foreign intelligence service has thousands of officers in what they call Directorate MS for their Управление мероприятий содействия – the Directorate for Measures of Support. That's their current term for it. They train on this. They've been doing this forever. They're very good at it. So labeling does matter. Unfortunately, it does influence some populations. 

I'll share one quick anecdote on that point. I traveled to Mongolia, was there a couple years ago meeting with think tanks, talking with academics. Very smart people, lovely, lovely people, Mongolians. I like them, but they were parroting and echoing the Russian narrative on the Ukraine war: "Well, we can't have Russia destroyed as a state. Remember, they're just trying to counter NATO's aggression." These are smart, intelligent people, but they're buried in the propaganda of watching Russian news. And why do they watch the Russian news channels? They have good movies, they have good videos, they have good music. They always have for decades, right? So in the former Soviet Union – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Mongolia – they watch Russian news. And so it does matter. 

At the same time, in the West, what are we doing? We took away resources from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Voice of America. This is foolhardy. This is crazy. At a time when we should be proud that the United States government doesn't control editorial content for Voice of America – we never did for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – we should be bolstering that. We shouldn't be taking away resources. So Russia is strengthening their information warfare, their information operations, and in democracies, we don't know how to counter it. We take away the very resources we should be using to fight that. So it's a tough issue. It's not an easy, simple answer, but it's one I've tried to build awareness with in my book and also all my public speaking. Yeah.

Valeria

In your article, Kremlin Files column, "Rumor and Reality," you warn against the notion that Ukraine is already winning and that the war is nearing its end. So why can this narrative harm the public's understanding of the situation and weaken the willingness to continue supporting Ukraine?

Sean Wiswesser

Yeah, this is really important. Right now, I've been speaking a lot about this in the past month. I had an article in Foreign Policy magazine, "Don't believe the rumors of Putin's Weakness". I have The Cipher Brief article, "The Myth of Russia's Imminent Collapse." And I would just point out Ambassador Zaluzhnyi said himself just a week ago, this is dangerous for Ukraine. This idea, this constant talk in the West and press and supposed analysts and experts who I don't know what they're studying, but they keep talking about, "Oh, Russia's going to collapse now Any day. it's over for Putin; he's going down." 

Listen, we all hope for that. We all wish for that. But hope, wishful thinking, is not going to save the tens of thousands of Ukrainians that are dying every year of this war. Russia is not just going to give up. Unfortunately, this is a layered security state: 400,000 strong in the FSB; 300,000 strong in Rosgvardia, which Putin restructured in 2016 to make them personally loyal to him – he took key divisions out of the Ministry of Interior, like the Dzerzhinsky Division named after that terrorist Felix Dzerzhinsky, named after him, made them personally loyal to him; 3,000 strong in the Federal Protective Service, the FSO. They're not just going to give up. 

Where are the mass protests in Russia, by the way? There haven't been any for 14 years. The last ones were in 2012. So I think it's a lot of wishful thinking. I think it's some intelligence services, too, that feed these targeted leaks to the press. It's been talked about in Europe, in a number of countries: "Oh, our intelligence service from Country X in Europe is saying that Putin is now weaker than ever." Based on what? Based fundamentally on what? He's not going to be weaker until we again, in the West, helping the Ukrainians, make him weak and force the energy sector to collapse. It hasn't collapsed yet. There's long petrol lines in Crimea. Thankfully, there's a lot of disruption, there's weakness, but there's not fundamentally a collapse. We're not there yet. 

So yeah, I believe this is a really dangerous narrative. I've been criticized in some quarters for it. People say, "Oh, that's defeatist. You shouldn't be saying that." No, it's realist. It's a realist view to say: here's where we are. 

I've spoken out every occasion I get a chance, just like today. I'm a strong believer in Ukraine. They deserve more. We should be doing more to help Ukraine. There's no greater defenders of democracy today in the world than the Ukrainian people. I compare in my own book. When you read chapter ten of my book, I compare the young generation – Ukrainians fighting and dying for freedom are like the Founding Fathers of the United States. I can't make any stronger argument to show where I stand and what I believe in.
But we're not doing enough. And if we act like the war is over, it's not over. Ukrainians are still dying. So yeah, it's a dangerous narrative. It's not a true narrative. It's not going to be that easy, unfortunately. It's going to take more of what Churchill called blood, toil, sweat, and tears. Unfortunately, most of the sweat and tears are on the poor Ukrainian people right now. I'm doing my part to try to advocate very strongly. Europe and the United States need to do more.

Valeria

Thank you so much for pointing this out. And also, when I read that article, I remember that you explained why it's dangerous, because hearing that Ukraine is doing very well, which is Ukraine is doing very well, it's true – but hearing that, some of the countries might say, "Oh, maybe we don't need to support it so much now that they're doing very well," right?

Sean Wiswesser

And it's happening.

Valeria

That's how it's dangerous.

Sean Wiswesser

The German defense minister, you know, Pistorius, said 2 or 3 weeks ago – he was asked, "Hey, how about those Taurus long-range missiles? Now, will Germany finally give them to Ukraine?" Because the energy sector is, of course, the key sector. We've all known it for a long time, and Ukraine is valiantly fighting on and finding resources through their own innovation, like Flamingo. There's been talk about US should give them Tomahawks. I believe in it; I'm for it. We should give Ukraine Tomahawks. There are some problems there: Tomahawk might not be the right missile because it's usually sea-launched.
But the German defense minister was asked, "What about the Taurus missiles?" And what did he say? "Well, maybe Ukraine doesn't need them. They're doing so well, after all." No, that's nonsense! He's buying into this narrative. There is no stronger and better narrative for the Russians right now than for people in the West to believe, "Oh, hey, this war is done, right? The Ukrainians have won," when there is no victory, there is no there is no just peace, there are no security guarantees for Ukraine.
And fundamentally, just for our American audience, I try to explain this a lot. You know this. You're living it. Ukrainians are breathing it and Ukrainians are dying for it. There's no fundamental peace for Ukraine unless you can take your young men and women off the front lines and let them rebuild your country. 40% of your infrastructure has been destroyed – your utilities, apartments in the East especially that need to be rebuilt. So as your president – your heroic president – has wisely pointed out, Ukraine has no future if you can't bring these troops back from the front lines. So if we don't have a secure peace for Ukraine, you can't rebuild your country; you can't bring the people, the young men and women, off the front lines. I don't think that's understood in the West enough, and that's not understood in the United States. So I try to explain that, too. That's why they need some type of security guarantees for Ukraine to finally end this war.

Valeria

And also, one of the questions I think would be great to raise that, you know, that Russian intelligence services view the conflict with the West as continuous and use not only espionage, but also hybrid methods, as we discussed, right, from disinformation to sabotage. So how can civil society and educational initiatives build resilience to such influence without creating an atmosphere of fear, of distrust towards all information?

Sean Wiswesser

Yeah, I talk about there's a couple of things we can do as societies understanding the threat from Russian intelligence and not only them, also our Chinese intelligence adversaries, you know, upwards Experts point out somewhere between 20 to 40%, maybe more, of all the content on the internet right now is AI-generated. So constantly I see it in my own commentary. I've been fortunate to have a lot of media appearances the past three months. I get a steady stream – a huge stream – of Russian trolling. Some of it I can tell is not human; others, it's not as easy to tell. 

And so I imagine Americans are struggling with the same thing: what's real and what's not. But what we need to know is, again, go back to the fundamental roots of Russian information warfare. What do they target? They target emotions. So I talked to a lot of youth groups, you know, high schools, college kids that I talked to – and I tell them, don't react to the emotion. When you see a post that really upsets you, don't react immediately on emotion with the temptation to repost with vitriol, saying, "Damn it, I'm not going to allow this to happen." 

Let me give an example. This is a true story. What happened about a year ago, there was a protest in a Midwestern US state. It was later looked at by the FBI, and there was a rally set up, a sort of flash mob. And I don't remember the exact issue – I think it was gun rights. And so this flash mob in this small Midwestern town, they just started up, and one group said, "Hey, we heard they're trying to take away our guns. We're not going to let them take away our guns." And the other group was told to show up because some group is trying to put guns in schools: "We're not going to allow them to put guns in schools with kids. That's just crazy." And they started shouting at each other and fighting and throwing each other. 

The police show up, and what do the police want to do? They're trying to de-escalate a potential flash mob fighting violence. "What's going on here? Who's the leader over here?" "We don't know. We were told to show up because they want guns in schools." "All right, who's the leader over here? We need to put this to an end. What's going on?" "I don't know, we were told they're going to try to take away guns. I'm not letting them take away my guns." What they found out later was there were no leaders on either side. This was entirely generated by our adversaries online. It can't be that simple for Americans to be turned against each other; we have to be smarter. We can't allow ourselves to be duped. 

Europe is no different. The election meddling that happened in the United States in 2016 and again in 2020 – this has proven fact. This is the DNI. The entire intelligence community agreed on it. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the 2016 election – Marco Rubio was chair of that committee. He agreed with the findings: not for or against any one candidate, but against American democracy. The same thing happened in Brexit. The same thing happened in Hungary with the recent elections there. The Russians are going to meddle against democracy. They're going to pick those issues that we're most emotional about. We can't be so gullible as a population. And it's not only them; it's the Chinese. 

And one final point, Valeria – this is really important – what the Russians did in 2016 and Brexit or here in the United States, they did Russian intelligence officers typing on computers, like Prigozhin's Internet Research Agency that he famously founded to help the intelligence services in Saint Petersburg. They used proxies. They used organized crime groups as hackers. Now they can do it with AI. Now they can do it in cognitive warfare. And the impact has grown 10,000-fold, if not more. They can push out so much more content because they, of course, have AI just writing the programs for them. So I believe the greatest existential threat to democracy today is cognitive warfare by our Russian and Chinese intelligence adversaries against the United States and all of our allies.

Valeria

And I also emphasized one of the things regarding what you mentioned as an example in the 2016 elections: that the target is democracy itself. And I liked how you described that, so people understand that there is no, they don't care who would win those elections in 2016. The goal was particularly to undermine trust in the election itself in the United States.

Sean Wiswesser

Yeah. And to a degree, to a degree, they succeeded. Unfortunately, to a degree they succeeded. We're still talking about whether there was – and let's remember how Russians function. I lay out the template in my research. I talk about it from my work debriefing Russian intelligence officers. They pick emotional topics. They pick the method: Can we bribe a journalist? Can we place a fake story? Can we do social media meddling? They're really fans of that because it worked. 

And then there's the final piece that's really important, right? Maskirovka – denial and deception, what the Russians call maskirovka. And they've been good at it for 100 years. This is where you see the narrative about Venezuelan voting machines rigged by those darn Venezuelans. It's bullshit. That's the words of our Attorney General Barr. He said it's nonsense; his words: "It's bullshit. We looked into that. There's nothing to it." But it's still talked about. That's Russian intelligence providing a narrative, or in the case of a narrative presented by some other irresponsible party, they amplify it. And you still have Americans talking about, "We can't trust those Venezuelan voting machines." Where exactly are those Venezuelan voting machines? There's no fact to it. 

This is what they do: they plant an emotional issue and they amplify it. And even when the Attorney General of the United States, appointed by President Trump in his first administration, even when he says the Department of Justice looked at that, we didn't find anything, it's nonsense. I believe that, yes, the Russians and Chinese are trying to undermine our very trust in democracy and the fundamental belief that Americans or Ukrainians or Brits or Germans. We can go to the polls and we can freely and fairly elect our leaders. Isn't that the greatest threat to Vladimir Putin and to Xi Jinping? 

As I put it in the closing of my book, if Putin had free and fair elections, he wouldn't exist as president in Russia for 26 years. Navalny would have succeeded, Nemtsov, Politkovskaya – others that heroically died trying to share the truth. So democracy is the threat to Putin, and not just Putin, to Xi Jinping as well. They can't have people freely electing their leaders. That's too great of a threat to them. So I think if we recognize that threat too, it helps unite us as Americans, as Europeans, and Americans as a NATO alliance. We realize that we're all under attack.

Valeria

And I would like to ask one final question, I think, which is very important for people to understand. You're the one who described how the FSB uses also like Telegram to offer young people a small amount of money for seemingly simple tasks. And then after they complete those tasks and get that money, they use fear of the police as leverage, threatening to report what they have done if they refuse to continue to do those tasks. So how can someone recognize those points at which a one-time side job becomes a coercive scheme?

Sean Wiswesser

Yeah, this is a dangerous form of escalation the Russians are carrying out, I believe I've touched on it in my Cipher Brief columns; I've talked about, you know, the Kremlin kill list, their assassinations, the escalation of sabotage. It's a thugocracy, really. It's a mafia-like state. And what you have is Russian intelligence continually trying to impress the boss, right? Remember they call Putin "shef" – shef in Russian, the boss. And I believe what's happening is there's a culture in the Russian intelligence services of got to do what they need to do to make the boss happy, and they get ahead by that. 

So that's how you see them coming up with increasingly more and more reckless schemes. And one of them was the plot – not reported enough – with those packages put on airliners to the United States and to other countries in Europe that led to that crash and explosion of the plane in Lithuania. And then another aspect is this recruiting of teenagers, misfits of society. They're recruiting via Telegram and other apps. 

Now we need to understand what's happening here and what's not happening. What's happening is they're taking advantage of weaknesses in our societies. Every society has malcontents, disaffected teenagers, drug addicts, others that are struggling, including some refugees from the Ukraine war, including Lithuanians, Estonians, Poles, French – every society is being targeted. And so, yeah, the Russians entrapped a lot of these young people. They offer them a couple thousand dollars: "We just want you to take a picture of a rail line." They don't tell the teenager they're Russian intelligence. A lot of times they're pretending to be organized crime. "We want you to take a picture of this factory because we're targeting it for, you know, we're trying to steal something from there. Just go take some pictures." After these kids do it. Then the next step is, "Hey, we're going to give you a package we want you to put down." "I'm not putting any package down. I mean, I don't want to go to jail." "No, you'll do it because you may not know it, but you were working for us, and now we're Russian intelligence." Well, they're in a trap. Or they're told, "You're working for organized crime. You want to go to jail for life?" 

So it is coercion, and it's what they. It's how they practice kompromat – compromising material operations, as Russian intelligence calls it. They've been doing it for 100 years. So with this new escalation, they have no accountability. They're more reckless than ever. And I believe fundamentally, though, it goes back to that culture of trying to impress Putin. I think Putin's told them – the boss is sitting at conference tables, not unlike this one, where he sat back, probably with his leaders, the siloviki, and he said, “ну что, ну как хотите”, "Whatever you want to do, whatever it takes to counter Ukraine and their allies in NATO, you know, do it. Be creative, find solutions." And that's why we're going to end up with more and more recklessness. 

I'll just end with this final point: it doesn't stop until we present, from the United States and NATO, a more credible deterrent. I can't imagine President Reagan standing by if packages were put on planes as test explosions. Those packages of the GRU – The New York Times reported on this, but nobody was really paying attention. Most of the American people saw: What? Packages on planes? Doesn't that sound like al-Qaeda? Doesn't that sound like terrorists? 

For the past 20 years… We, you know, 20 years we had war against global war on terror. The GRU was putting packages on planes. One of them blew up in Lithuania; others were meant to test whether they could get explosives on planes to the United States. I think President Reagan would be fired up. There'd be missiles flying. There'd be some proxy of Russia chosen. During the Cold War, we used proxies to prevent all-out nuclear war. 

When people say things like, "Oh, we're risking World War Three, we're risking World War Three," no, we're risking World War Three by not countering aggression. We're risking more escalation. We're risking Russia saying, "You know what? Let's blow up a couple of airliners over the Atlantic. That's what I'm going to do to get promoted within my service at GRU. I know that if I do that, the boss will be really impressed this time because we haven't done anything to counter it." 

So I believe it's a false narrative that we in the West can prevent further war by giving in to Russia's escalation. Escalation stops when we counter it, when we say, "No, we're not going to tolerate this. We're going to punch back." A bully like Putin understands aggression. He's a schoolyard bully. When he's punched in the face and punched back in the nose, then he'll stop.

Valeria

Sean, thank you very much for your expertise. Thank you for bringing us such extensive topics and sharing your knowledge. I think it's incredibly important for society of all the countries. And thank you for being with us today.

Sean Wiswesser

Well, thank you. I appreciate the chance. You're one of the first Ukrainian, you know, journalists and somebody from your country that you're doing this to try to raise awareness. I admire you all in ALLATRA for doing that. I'm a strong believer in Ukraine. I traveled a lot in your country. It really it pains me. It pains me to know that your countrymen are dying by the thousands for freedom. So I believe we can do more. We should do more. I blame Russian intelligence for this war. I blame Putin, I blame the broken kleptocracy of the Russian state, and we need to hold them accountable. So thanks for letting me talk about issues I'm passionate about. Slava Ukraini.

Valeria

Heroyam Slava.