Table Of ContentSTRIKING BACK
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STRIKING BACK
The End of Peace in Cyberspace
– And How to Restore It
Lucas Kello
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
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Copyright © 2022 Lucas Kello
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CONTENTS
I ntroduction: The Evolving Menace of 1
Technological Aggression
1 Technological Revolution in Historical 21
Perspective: Lessons for Our Times
2 Cyber Legalism: The Limits of Law and Norms 45
3 Challenger States: Revisionism in the 63
International System
4 Russia and New Technological Threats to 75
Democracy
5 China and Cyberspace: The Rising Technological 104
Hegemon
6 The Dimensions of Current Strategy: To Deter 124
or Not to Deter?
7 Punctuated Deterrence: How to Strike Back 141
8 What Kind of NATO? Punctuated Deterrence 160
in Practice
9 Data Embassies and State Continuity: The Return 174
of Denial?
10 Conclusion: A Partial Restoration of Peace 203
Notes 211
Bibliography 248
Index 266
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INTRODUCTION
The Evolving Menace of Technological Aggression
1972: PRELUDE TO OUR TIMES
Markus Wolf, the Stasi’s chief of foreign activities, needed one thing to execute
his plot: a viable target for bribery and blackmail among West Germany’s poli-
ticians. It was the spring of 1972, a turning point in Cold War relations. Willy
Brandt’s election as chancellor three years earlier had produced a relaxation of
tensions in Europe under the mantle of Ostpolitik. Brandt’s signature foreign
policy delivered notable spoils to the Communist bloc: a non-aggression treaty
fixing the location of contested borders in Eastern Europe, formal recognition
of Poland, commercial ties that could fuel economic growth, and a cross-
border transit agreement. A calmer and stabler continent on which to pursue
greater integration and arms reduction was in the offing. Gone were the
decades of intense standoff, not least over the troubled status of West Berlin.1
Wolf and his political masters worried, however. Spoilers in the Bundestag
threatened to ruin the mood of conciliation and deny Communists their prizes.
Chief among them was Bundestag opposition leader Rainer Barzel of the Christian
Democratic Union. Sensing an opportunity to replace Brandt as chancellor,
Barzel prompted a parliamentary vote of no confidence in the government. He
opposed Brandt’s economic opening and diplomatic rapprochement with the
East. Communists throughout Europe looked on with concern. The cherished
Ostpolitik was in peril of parliamentary derailment.
And so began “Protect Brandt Week,” an information campaign headed by
Wolf under Moscow’s instructions. The aim of the operation was to infiltrate the
political firmament in Bonn and save Brandt – or rather, his policy – by disrupting
the confidence vote. The very future of East–West relations was at stake.
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STRIKING BACK
Wolf found his target in Leo Wagner. The Bavarian Bundestag member from
the Christian Social Union hardly fit the code name “Lion” that was given by
his Stasi handlers. Wagner’s recruitment by the Stasi played out over several
years. Operatives of Department X of the Main Directorate for Reconnaissance
(HVA), which was responsible for information campaigns, had long monitored
him. His intelligence profile noted: “Catholic, married, two children” – a picture
of moral probity that did not accord with the secret reality of his nocturnal
excursions. Among Stasi spies, he had the reputation of an unreliable debtor
and an alcoholic scoundrel. Rumors had it that in a single night he spent thou-
sands of deutschmarks on women and drinks. And yet he enjoyed high esteem
among party officials. Fellow lawmakers did not foresee his path to personal and
financial ruin. East German intelligence officials were more perceptive. “We
tried to recruit Leo Wagner because he was so open to attack, especially for
financial reasons,” recalled former Stasi agent Horst Kopp.2 This tale of political
drama features no protagonists, only antagonists.
The hook was ready to be dangled. Wagner had made first contact with the
Stasi in the mid-1960s when he met Georg Fleissman, a Bavarian journalist
and recruiter on Wolf’s team. Fleissman now showered the libertine Lion with
money to fund his extravagances. “He just wanted to receive the money and
maintain his lifestyle,” explained Kopp.3 Finding himself in a position where
refusal to cooperate seemed impossible because it would expose his depravities
to the public, Wagner almost immediately acceded to Fleissman’s request to
abstain in the Bundestag vote.4
The vote that decided Brandt’s political fate on April 27, 1972, was tight.
Merely two abstentions, Wagner’s and Julius Steiner’s, among Brandt’s political
opponents, ensured his and his foreign policy’s survival (Stasi agents, it later
emerged, had also bribed Steiner, another lost soul). The voting outcome was
celebrated not only in the Chancellery but also in the Stasi headquarters on
Ruschestrasse and in the Kremlin.
CYBERSPACE AND THREATS TO DEMOCRATIC INTEGRITY
Nothing in the Wagner episode stands out in the context of the current cyber
revolution. Its main elements are familiar to us today: intense geopolitical
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INTRODUCTION
rivalry between the Kremlin and the West; a fractured political scene within
democracies; some Western politicians hewing a closer line towards the adver-
sary without grasping its opportunistic maneuvers; and naïve party figures
assuming rather than questioning the integrity of their personal communica-
tions and the secrecy of their private lives. The Wagner episode seems like a
rehearsal for our own times. And like foreign electoral interference today, the
Communist bloc’s intervention in West German domestic politics had more
global than domestic implications.
In short, the principles and objectives of Russian information warfare
remain largely the same today as in the Cold War. But its scope and methods
have changed dramatically. In relation to contemporary threats against demo-
cratic systems, the episode of 1972 is as much an analogy as it is a disanalogy;
we can derive relevant insights from it while also identifying differences.
In Wagner’s time, before the era of the “social” Internet, foreign interfer-
ence in Western domestic politics played out in a limited arena. The list of
viable targets was small. Relevant information with which to ensnare them was
difficult and costly to acquire. A successful intrusion required as sordid and
feeble a character as Wagner operating at the heart of the democratic polity.
Aided by misinformation traveling the radio waves and, more laboriously, the
print media, Communist agents could achieve greater public effect than if
their activities remained strictly private, as a form of blackmail. But still their
information campaigns were typically circumscribed within a small locality or
region. True, Department X often supplemented its campaigns with publicly
diffused disinformation – for instance, the joint KGB–Stasi Operation
INFEKTION that ran between 1983 and 1987 and which falsely attributed
the origins of the HIV virus to a bioweapons research lab in Maryland.5 But
generally, the private information space was a more potent operational realm
than the public information space.
The explosive expansion of cyberspace and especially the Internet during
the last two decades has radically altered this situation. Today, an aspiring
intruder into democratic politics has at his disposal nearly the entire political
class among which to select possible targets of compromise. For who is the politi -
cian who has never shared imprudences in an email or snapped indecencies on
a mobile phone which are then accessible by sophisticated foreign hackers?
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Hacking is only the latter stage of the problem; its essential precondition is the
digitization of vast aspects of both public and private life that were never before
captured in electronic form.
The hacking activities of Russian military agents during the 2016 U.S.
presidential election reveal the magnitude of the contemporary problem. In
July 2016, two candidates faced each other in the race to represent the
Democratic Party against Republican Party nominee Donald Trump in the
presidential vote in November of that year. Bernie Sanders, the senator and
former congressman representing Vermont who had until recently eschewed
party affiliations, was the maverick option. He had disdained, often publicly,
much of the Democratic Party’s established figures and policies. His opponent
for the nomination was Hillary Clinton. As the former secretary of state under
President Barack Obama and the wife of ex-President Bill Clinton, she was the
conventional candidate. Sanders was a figure of revolutionary disruption
within the party; Clinton was one of continuity. The former secretly worried
many Democratic Party stalwarts for his promise to remake the party’s image;
the latter represented a force of stability who promised invigoration through
constancy.
Therein lay the problem: although the party chiefs were meant to exercise
strict neutrality in the candidate’s selection, many Sanders supporters suspected
that the leadership secretly favored Clinton. WikiLeaks’ release of private email
messages obtained by hackers from the GRU – the intelligence unit of the
Russian military’s general staff – three days before the Democratic Convention,
a time designed to cause maximum political discord within the party, gave
proof to the lie of impartiality. The leaks revealed that party chairwoman
Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other senior party figures in fact did favor
Clinton. Public confirmation of the prejudice against Sanders instigated a
crisis of legitimacy within the party among his voters. When Clinton was
nominated, a fierce insurrection erupted within the party that may have cost
Clinton enough Democratic votes in crucial swing states to deny her victory
against Trump in November – a plausible if unprovable scenario.6
The GRU’s hack was remarkable for its brazenness and sophistication.
Although innovative, the operation was neither new nor isolated. It fit a larger
program of activity of using computer information as a tool to influence
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