Disinformation campaigns are nothing new – and we can expect more before this US election is over

The west has a long and dishonourable history of interference in the affairs of other countries in the developing world, says Kim Sengupta. It should not come as a shock that foreign states are adopting the same tactics

Using China as a threat, especially on coronavirus, is an election ploy by Trump (Getty)

Allegations of malign foreign interference in the politics of other countries have become so rife that they no longer surprise. It would now be quite unusual to be told that an election or a referendum had passed without a disinformation campaign from abroad.

The long-awaited and recently published Russia report by the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee produced no smoking guns. What was interesting was not the allegations of Russian interference in the Brexit and Scottish referendums and the last general election, but that nothing was done because of an extraordinary avoidance of responsibility for the security and intelligence services and government ministries.

The UK is not the only country which had been subjected to cyberattacks. The French, German and Italian elections, and the Catalan referendum, have all been surrounded by claims of clandestine Russian operations.

We have the US elections of 2016 and the investigations, which still continue, on whether Donald Trump was the successful Muscovian candidate for the White House. And, with the next presidential election just three months away, there are claims by US officials of supposed plots by the Russians, the Chinese and the Iranians to manipulate the outcome.

The west has a long and dishonourable history of interference in the affairs of other countries in the developing world. Reactionary forces, often religious ones, were used against progressive leaders who tried to carry out reforms deemed to be too radical and threatened western commercial interests.

Thus we had assassination plots against Gamal Abdel Nasser by the British in Egypt, in conjunction with the Muslim Brotherhood; the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran by the British and Americans, with the help of clerics including a young Ruhullah Khomeini; the removal of Ahmed Sukarno in Indonesia – also by the US and UK; the overthrow and murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by the Belgians; and the American-backed coup against the government of Salvadore Allende in Chile – one of many countries in Latin America handed over to murderous military dictatorships by successive US administrations.

It should not, therefore, come as a shock that foreign states are trying to influence events in the west.

However, the very nature of cyberwarfare and disinformation campaigns can lead to opposing claims and counterclaims about culpability and motive.

Take the use by Jeremy Corbyn during the last election campaign of leaked information on the proposed trade deal between the UK and US, which revealed a possible threat to the NHS from American big pharma. It subsequently emerged that the document had been obtained by Russian hackers. Conservative politicians and the right-wing media were quick to make much of Corbyn using material stolen by Moscow.

There is no evidence that leaks were sent by the Kremlin to the Labour Party. They had been circulated on the website Reddit, three other German language websites, and a Twitter account for a while. The documents had been taken from the email accounts of then trade secretary Liam Fox by a Russian hacking group, called Secondary Infektion.

So can the Labour Party really be blamed for using useful political ammunition when it could not have known that it had been obtained through hacking by a foreign power? The Tories themselves had sought to downplay the value of the documents when Corbyn brandished them, keen to stress that they had been available online for over two months.

Other public figures in Britain have also been under scrutiny over Russian hacking. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been repeatedly accused of being involved in disseminating material stolen by Russians from the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) computers. Made public, the information gravely damaged Clinton’s campaign and boosted that of Donald Trump.

The investigation by Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 US election led to the conviction of Roger Stone, a friend and adviser to Trump. Stone, the special counsel found, was a link between the Trump campaign and the Russians over the DNC and Clinton email hacking, as well as an online disinformation campaign against Clinton.

Stone’s sentence was commuted by Trump last month – a move which was widely condemned as abuse of power. But Assange, whose links to Stone and, allegedly, to Russia, were key aspects of Mueller’s investigation, remains in prison. He is facing extradition to the US on 17 charges of espionage and computer hacking, carrying a maximum sentence of 150 years.

Assange has not been charged in relation to the Clinton/DNC hacks. But that does not mean that charges will not follow when he gets to the US; especially if the Democrats win in the November election.

The WikiLeaks founder has denied culpability over the Clinton and DNC material. Stone, however, had spoken a number of times about contacting Assange through a number of conduits.

One name which came up was that of Nigel Farage. The Brexit Party founder had visited Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2017 after returning from a trip to the US. The news of the visit broke after a member of the public saw him go into the building. Glenn Simpson, whose Washington-based investigations firm hired former MI6 officer Christopher Steele to compile the Trump report, told a US Congressional inquiry that Farage was a more frequent visitor to Assange than was known, and that he had passed data onto Assange on “a thumb drive”.

Farage has repeatedly denied the claims, but refused to tell a number of news organisations what he had discussed with Assange. He told me: “I met Julian Assange just once. I went there in a journalistic capacity because like you I wanted to find out about the emails, no real answer was forthcoming. It is nonsense to say that I had met him secretly. Do you think one of the best known faces in the country can go into the embassy without people noticing?”

Recently released FBI documents reveal Stone sent Assange a Twitter message saying: “If the US government moves on you I will bring down the entire house of cards ... I don’t know of any crime you need to be pardoned for – best regards. R”. Assange responded: “Between CIA and DoJ they’re doing quite a lot. On the DoJ side that’s coming most strongly from those obsessed with taking down Trump trying to squeeze us into a deal.”

Assange is in the maximum security Belmarsh prison locked up 23 hours a day. He is experiencing acute physical and mental health problems, say his legal team, but attempts at getting bail, the latest one during the coronavirus pandemic, were turned down.

There are protests at the harsh punitive regime Assange has been subjected to by the British authorities. But there are also quite a few people, previously supportive, who have turned their back on him because of his alleged role in putting Trump into power.

Such are the perils of getting enmeshed in the tangled tales of Russiagate.

The focus now is on the US and November where, as we have seen, there have been claims of interference by China and Iran, as well as Russia.

But what is the veracity of these claims? Trump and his cronies have long sought to refute the findings of the Mueller investigation and US intelligence agencies that the Kremlin sought to influence the 2016 election in his favour. And there has been a steady cull of intelligence and security officials who refused to go along with the creation of the president’s “alternative facts”, as White House advisor Kelly Anne Conway once put it.

As evidence emerged that Russia was also trying to manipulate this year’s election, Trump and his team tried at first to suppress it, and then to deflect attention with allegations that states are interfering against Trump’s campaign.

China and Iran were brought into the frame by William Evanina, the Trump-appointed director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Centre. The two countries, he stated without offering any evidence, were working to defeat Trump.

It was a deliberate mixing up of a public influencing campaign carried out by China, something it does elsewhere, including the UK, and the secret intelligence campaign of the Russians. No one in the security and intelligence field seriously believes that Iran has the capability of influencing the US election.

Using China as a threat, especially on coronavirus, is an election ploy by Trump. He had tweeted 15 times over six weeks in praise of President Xi Jinping and China’s efforts over the pandemic even when it became clear that Beijing had suppressed information about the disease, which was by then spreading internationally. There is no reason to believe Trump will not reverse his anti-China stance if he wins the election and a China bogeyman is no longer needed.

The president, it has been claimed, sought Chinese help for his re-election. Former national security adviser John Bolton and senior officials have recounted how Trump urged Jinping to buy American agricultural produce, helping his support base among farmers.

This appeared to have some effect. China agreed to buy $200bn (£151.8bn) worth of additional US goods by the end of next year as part of a deal, including $36.6bn of American agricultural products this year – and this was while Beijing imposed penalties on Australian imports after Australia called for an independent international investigation into the origins of coronavirus.

Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat speaker of the House, castigated Evanina over the misinformation, and he was forced to issue a statement acknowledging that Russia “is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former vice president Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia ‘establishment’”.

But we can expect tales of subterfuge, illicit operations and hostile foreign interference to continue as the US approaches its most crucial election in recent history.