There is a well-established literature on what intelligence scholars call “active measures,” the Soviet and later Russian practice of using publicly disclosed information, forged documents, and strategically leaked material to destabilize an adversary’s political system. The KGB refined these techniques over decades. The FSB inherited them. What is extraordinary, in the most literal sense of the word, is watching them deployed in real time against the United States with the apparent complicity of the FBI’s own director.
Last week, Kash Patel told Reuters that the FBI has spent the past 15 months quietly building what he called “new and dynamic relationships” with Russian and Chinese security agencies, including the exchange of intelligence. Patel insisted this cooperation is limited to transnational crime and that the risks are manageable. One might note that every intelligence officer who has ever been compromised by a hostile service was also certain the risks were manageable. This is rather the point of the discipline.
Federal Bureau of Investigation (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsWithin days, Moskovsky Komsomolets, a Russian outlet with a well-documented history of publishing FSB-sourced material, ran an article that should have triggered immediate congressional hearings. It quoted Vladimir Vasiliev, a senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, openly speculating that Russia possesses kompromat on Democrats and could provide it “in one form or another to the American side.” Vasiliev mused about what Moscow might receive in return, floated Patel as a “liaison officer” to Putin, and suggested that FBI-FSB contacts “most likely already exist and are ongoing” in third countries, naming Turkey, the Balkans, and Switzerland with a specificity that strains the boundaries of idle speculation.
Let us be precise about what is structurally significant here. The FSB does not need a tabloid to communicate with the FBI director. Patel has already acknowledged the channel exists. If Russia wished to pass information quietly, it could. The decision to publicly discuss kompromat on Democrats, a backchannel to Putin, and secret meetings in neutral countries is not communication. It is theater. It is the preparation of an information space, the seeding of a narrative, the kind of active measure that preceded the 2016 election when Russian intelligence stole Democratic emails and flooded the information environment with fabricated material to damage one candidate and assist another.
A decade later, the person at the center of this discussion is not a campaign aide or a peripheral figure. He is the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He previously accepted $25,000 from a company run by Igor Lopatonok, who has spent more than a decade conducting influence operations for the Kremlin in close coordination with Putin ally Viktor Medvedchuk. There is no evidence Patel knew he was participating in a Russian influence operation. There is also no evidence that anyone in Congress has bothered to ask whether the current FBI director’s judgment is sufficient for the office he holds, or whether his enthusiasm for “dynamic relationships” with the FSB serves American interests or Russian ones.
Alexander Makarov / Александр Макаров (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia CommonsPatel is reportedly planning to travel to Moscow and St. Petersburg on October 14 and 15, weeks before the midterm elections. The FBI director does not need to visit Russia. The FBI director especially does not need to visit Russia weeks before an election while a Russian state-aligned outlet is publicly discussing the transfer of kompromat on the opposition party. This is not a complicated analytical problem.
The structural irony is nearly unbearable. The agency constitutionally tasked with countering foreign intelligence operations against American democratic institutions is now being publicly courted by the foreign intelligence service it is supposed to counter. And the person running that agency is, by his own account, cultivating the relationship. Congress has the oversight authority and the constitutional obligation to investigate what information has been exchanged, what meetings have occurred in third countries, whether any FBI investigations have been opened using Russian-supplied material, and whether the director of the FBI has been compromised, in the professional sense, by a service that has spent a century perfecting exactly this kind of cultivation.
Vanessa Garcia / PexelsThat the question even needs to be asked is itself the scandal. That it has not been asked yet is the symptom of something larger.
Olga Lautman Substack: Why Is Russia Talking About Giving Kash Patel Kompromat on Democrats?
Facebook repost of full Lautman article with MK translation excerpts