WASHINGTON — In February 2014, the Obama administration was embarrassed when a secretly recorded phone conversation between the U.S. ambassador in Ukraine and Victoria Nuland, a senior State Department official, was posted on YouTube.
The two officials could be heard privately picking who should be in the new government in Kiev, and at one point, Nuland used a four-letter word to dismiss slow-moving diplomats at the European Union.
The intercepted call, which U.S. officials traced to Russian intelligence, created friction between U.S. and EU envoys. But its real significance is only now clear — Russia was publicly willing to use the fruits of espionage to upend U.S. foreign policy.
“Instead of using their capability to write secret memos, they decided, ‘Well, let’s see what happens if we release it,'” said Stewart Baker, former general counsel to the National Security Agency.
Russia’s government, he added, has “decided that getting fingered isn’t all that bad.”
That analysis helps explain Russia’s apparent efforts to influence the U.S. presidential campaign: under Vladimir Putin, a former Soviet-era KGB officer, spying once done in secret is increasingly public.
U.S. intelligence officials don’t believe Russian hackers can swing Tuesday’s election by covertly changing returns or meddling with the counting. The country’s 9,000 voting districts are highly decentralized and have backup counting procedures.
But they don’t rule out Russian-sponsored service denials or other disruptions that could undermine confidence in the official tallies, especially given Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the election system is rigged.
Russia’s attempts to interfere with Hillary Clinton’s campaign are not in doubt, according to U.S. officials. They appear to be driven in part by a personal animus against the former secretary of State, officials say, as well as an effort to raise doubts about the validity of U.S. democracy and leadership around the globe.
On Oct. 7, the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Intelligence Community said they were confident that Russia’s government was responsible for stealing and leaking tens of thousands of emails from accounts used by Democratic National Committee staff and from the private account of John Podesta, chairman of Clinton’s campaign.
“These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process,” the joint statement declared. It didn’t name Putin, but added, “We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
