Currently buried beneath excited headlines from the American, British, and French elections is the recent admission, under oath, of former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell that he illegally misused the resources of his service to help Biden prevail in the last election by concocting a narrative of Russian involvement in the public appearance of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. While still under CIA contract, Morell, at the instigation of Antony Blinken, drew up figurative language with the assistance of operations officer Marc Polymeropoulus according to, “two intents. One intent was to share our concern with the American people that the Russians were playing on this issue; and two, it was to help Vice President Biden” (21). This is potentially the most severe breakdown in CIA discipline since the Vietnam-era Phoenix Program and is detailed in the Second Interim Joint Staff Report (25 June 2024) of the alarmed House of Representatives investigative committees.
A “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails” appeared on in Politico on 19 October 2020. Signed by former Directors of the Central Intelligence Agency Mike Hayden, Leon Panetta, and John Brennan, and by Acting Directors John McLaughlin and John Morell, and by forty-six other senior members of American civilian intelligence—the absence of military intelligence officers is notable—its main contention is that the “emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter…has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Although no such attributes are specified, a disruptive “laptop op” nonetheless appears probable; and the intelligence chiefs conclude by citing “media reports” of pending FBI inquiries into the matter in support of their very public intervention.
To begin with, this final observation is the most ridiculous, given that the National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA compels the FBI, without qualification, to reply in full to any written request from the Director on any subject (102.d.3); and therefore the CIA’s personnel need never have been reduced to depend on the newspapers for such information. It is also extremely difficult to accept that all these experienced analysts soberly concluded that, “with Trump down in the polls, there is incentive for Moscow to pull…a ‘laptop op’,” given that such elaborate framing would obviously require a much more sustained longitudinal interval than allowed by any such fluctuation in public opinion. But the most serious criticisms of the October, 2020 public statement consist in what may now officially be described as a willful misrepresentation of the subtle, familial, but relentless character of Russian counter-intelligence.
The seeds of what George Kennan, in his historic “Sources of Soviet Conduct” cable of 1946, described as “the very disrespect of Russians for objective truth—indeed, their disbelief in its existence” lie in the superstitious piety of the fathomless Eurasian peasantry, wherein a single spurious report of a miracle cure, audible icon, or angelic visitation may send her otherwise quiescent serfs into the most violent transports of ecstasy or terror. Moving toward the acute 1905 political crisis, the late-tsarist special police gainfully employed many an agent provocateur to divide and to misinform the roiling array of violent revolutionary group, whilst simultaneously redirecting popular anxiety with hoax narratives of which The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) remains the most recognizable. But the most influential description of the process of specifically Soviet revision, framing, misinformation, or disinformation is The Stalin School of Falsification (2004 [1937]), by Leon Trotsky.
From Mexican exile, the former People’s Commissar of Military and Naval (1918-25) and for Foreign Affairs (1917-18) who had not led, but who had salvaged the 1917 Communist Revolution was relentlessly confronting the ideology, apparatus, and wickedness of Stalin through his many books and articles; and in Falsification (1937), he explains how Stalin from 1924 began to exploit his patronage networks in the party and bureaucracy to doctor photographs, to rewrite speeches and memoranda, and to suppress embarrassing material beginning with Lenin’s extremely critical testament.
“The Soviet bureaucracy,” explains Trotsky, “after raising itself above the revolutionary class, could not help experiencing the need, in proportion as it entrenched its independent positions, for…an ideology as would justify its exceptional position and insure it against dissatisfaction from below.” He continues, “It is for this reason that such colossal sweep has been attained by the alteration, perversion, and outright counterfeiting of the revolutionary past” (21).
Despite Stalin’s ultimately limitless power, his disinformation operations tended to actually be rather subtle, consisting of ubiquitous minor adjustments to existing written, photographic, or cinematic record, intending not so much to convince all as to confound, deter, or benumb enough, steadfastly relying upon the crucial insight that lack of clarity forestalls lack of confidence.
Russian securitate forgery of the Hunter Biden laptop material, therefore, appears extremely improbable because it could never hope to withstand expert examination, especially once deposited in the United States and thus no longer under the control of the alleged forgers. The case of Trotsky—murdered by the NKVD in 1940—also illustrates the familial character of Russian framing, with the targets almost always Russian citizens like himself, Soviet subjects like Archbishop Mindszenty of Hungary, or Eurasian dissidents, defectors, emigres, and exiles, who must exercise caution even if successfully resettled in the West.
Russian, or for that matter Chinese, Iranian, or North Korean counter-intelligence is furthermore never known to have targeted the child of a presidential candidate, and the 2020 signatories fail to at all explain why a new threshold should have been crossed with Hunter Biden. Stalinist falsification as further developed by Beria, Andropov, and Putin is finally relentless in its general avoidance of big lies, elaborate hoaxes, and spectacular interventions in favor of the almost hourly production of almost imperceptible historical revision, the central methodological intent being to preclude what is for Trotsky “the most elementary of scientific demands—correctly to establish facts and to verify rumors by document” (431).
The infamous Hunter Biden laptop, now authenticated, would thus have seriously deviated from the broad outlines of a century of Russian counter-intelligence practice, contrary to the specious reasoning of the leadership of the American intelligence community. Such intervention by (Stalinist) bureaucracy in domestic politics erodes public confidence in institutions, damages the non-partisan work of national security, promotes extremism, and perpetuates ideological reprisal. Although the facts of this particular episode do not support any characterization of the 2020 election as stolen, they do conclusively demonstrate that it was indeed tampered with by a cadre of senior intelligence officials illegally colluding with the Biden campaign to defeat Trump.