Actions and americas responss. S that is obviously an important topic, and also something that a lot of people, a lot of journalists and a lot of people in congress are talking about. So hopefully we will be able to shed some light in addition to a lot of noise which you will find elsewhere around town. This is a very distinguished group. I know that many of them if not most of you if not everybody, but i will introduce two members of the board. Chairman of the board of the center for the national interest, fourstar general, Charles Voigt who has a very distinguished experience including as deputy of navy in europe, and also in a Commission Ed panel on recommendations. They made recommendation before september 11th, and the recommendations widely advertised, but not necessarily forwarded. Well, it was not wide lly praised. And also a chairman of the board of the Agricultural Committee from kansas, and the committee on intelligence and a person with a strong Foreign PolicyNational Security background and rel are vant to our discussion today. We have two speakers. We have george beebe and paul sau saunders. Paul saunders was a state Department Adviser in the george bush administration. He has experience in the u. S. iraq are relations, and also from your tenure in the state ghept the democracy promotion. At that time i have to say it was american democracy promotion in russia, and not russia interference in the United States. But i think that it provides you with a certain important perspective. George beebe is truly in my mind one of most unsightful and serious american experts in russia. George was Foreign Service officer stationed in moscow with the c ixa and a member of the i think it is seniorle intelligence service, right . Yes, and also director of russian analysis at the cia and before that was special adviser to Vice President cheney who as many of you know was not suspected of particular integration of russia. And there was a powerful piece published several weeks ago where he was raising questions of how reliable was the evidence of russian interference, and not so much that russian interference existed, but what it was trying to ak accomplish and then what level it was approved. Most of the speakers will speak for about 10 minutes. Mr. Beebe. Thank you, dmitri, and the centers of the National Center interest for the inevitativitat today. I want to keep the reremarks brief about what we know and what we dont know and what we surmise about the russian interference many in the elections. The Russian Community published a role of russian involvement in the election. It was striking and divided. The New York Times called the report surprisingly detail and damning. People that work in the information and technology field, cyber, they have a different perspective and they use words that cannot be used in a family environment about what they called somewhat sloppy. So this is a question. Are we dealing with a report that is surprisingly detailed and damning, or weak and sloppy . Interestingly enough. This kind of the question is something thatle intelligence analysts are paid to answer. Where does truth lie a mid controversy and conflicting claims and incomplete information . This is not an easy thing to do. Why is that . Smart people are generally not good at answering questions like this. The human mind is not designed to answer this sort of thing. We are all prone to things like confirmation bias, seeing what we expect to see in sets of information, and we are not particularly good at putting ourselves in the shoes of other people and seeing things from their perspectives, particularly the per spspectives of the fore actors. Which makes it hard for us to understand their intentions a lot of times. And we have a bias towards expecting the future to look like the present. Status quo bias, if you will. So when we approach a question like this, we will have to really make conscious efforts to account for all of the tendencies. So i wanted to do that briefly with the evidence that we have got in the case of russias role in the elections. Id like to focus only on information that is in the Public Domain. I obviously dont know what classified information there might be out there, and it is certainly possible that the Intelligence Community has c conclusive diagnostic evidence about what happened and why. But with what we do have in the Public Domain, i think that it raises some red flags that we need the to consider. And i wanted to look at some of them. The first is in the area of attribution, whodunit in other words. The report said that this is an operation that was explicitly ordered by president putin with specific goals in mind. The forensic evidence that we have in the public e domain is not particularly impressive in this regard. First of all, it is a couple of things that we need to address on, this and number with swone the number of intrusions, itself, and according to the forensic data, two separate intrusions into the Democratic National committee email servers, and the first occurred in the summer of 2015 and this is around the time that now President Trump was first announcing his candidacy for the presidency. The second occurred in march 2016. There were two separate groups who infiltrated the servers. This is unusual. If you are look to maintain operation areal security, you dont want to intrade trud ine into the same target multiple time, because the more likely, you will be caught. The fact that they went after the same information raises questions about whether these things were actually centrally directed or not. Now, the proponents of the socalled kremlin ordered it thesis explained it by saying, well, this is the fruit of bureaucratic rivalry. We had one Intelligence Agency the gru that penetrated and then another, fsb that penetrated on a separate occasion. That is a plausibleb explanation, and certainly, there is a lot of bureaucratic fighting that goes on in russia as with many governments, but i think that this particular case, we ought to consider an alternative hypothesis which is that perhaps these were not centrally directed intrusions. To combat the tendency of confirmation bias, it is behooving us to consider alternative hypotheses such as could these have been hacktivists that were at work here. Could this have been a false flag operation . The evidence that we have here is consistent with all of these hypothes hypotheses. Second red flag is the sloppiness of the operations themselves. In the cyber world, the chinese have a reputation for being quite brash and sloppy in their intrusions. The analogy might be one of an intruder into home that breaks your window, and marches around your house in muddy boots and leaves fingerprints everywhere, almost as if they dont care if we are able to figure out that ch china was behind the operations. The russians on the other hand have typically been more likely the intruder that, you know, you dont know they entered the home and two years after the fact you figure out that, boy, something is missing, and how did that happen. They are quite stealthy. In this particular case however, the operations were almost amateuri amateurish, and they left all ind kay er or thes indicator to point towards the russians and the compiling of the information they took happened in moscow business hour, and it is an easy thing to fix. Even the entry level hackers can figure out how to program the compiling so that it wont leave that clue. Some of the emails leaked included metadata put in using cyrillic keyboards and one of the users behind the leaks had a code name of felix admonovich which is a clear ref are rens to t clear reference to the founder of the soviet chekhov. So you think, gee, was ut really th them . A false flag or did they want to be found which is another possibility that we ought to consider which gets to intent. The last thing is the level of sophistication of these intrusions, and not very high. The cyber experts looked at the malware code that was used, and essentially said, look, this was off of the shelf now where widely available internationally, anybody basically could have done this. And we are not dealing with the custom crafted code that was something that you would automatically say, you need a sophisticated intelligence level operation to undertake this. So all of these things are not to say, e gee, it show has the russian government was not behind it, and not at all. Because it is a plausible hypothesis, but, it does behoove us to explain alternative explanation explanations, because when you do that, you can get into trouble, and affects your confidence in the judgment, and big implications behind the judgments that we are talking about here, and before we go down to the road of saying, you know, we are certain about certain things, you think that we really owe it to ourselves to think hard about whether the facts that we have in front of us can be explained in other ways. We got into trouble in this regard with the famous iraq wmd example. I would hope that we can learn some of the lessons that led to failure in that case, and apply them here so that we dont repeat the mistakes. So that is attribution. The other part of this is intent. Not just whodunit, but why . What was motivating them. Intent is a harder nut to crack than attribution, and attribution in the cyber world is slippery thing. It is rare that you get def definitive intelligence to allow you the understand clearly what the motives are driving the conduct that you are seeing. And it is, it struck me in the ic report on this, that it is quite categorical about the intent that it was ascribing to russia, and the ambitions that it aare tributes to russia were quite striking, and nothing less than undermininging the u. S. Led democratic order. When we are look agent what actually occurred, my question would be, gee, are there other ways of attributing intent here, even assuming that the russian government was behind it . There are. There are other explanations that are quite plausible, and i want to address a couple of them. One is sCyber Espionage. The penetration of the dnc servers can be easily explained first of all as the simple attempt at espionage information gathering, and it is reasonable for us to pause it that the russian servers have a standing collection of priorities which include plans and intentions of foreign government, the Technical Specifications of wep systems, and what is likely to occur in elections and change of governmen governments. A logical thing for russia to are try to gather in this area. Now, you might ask, okay, that is great. So they stumble upon information here that appears to have relevance in the context of the u. S. Election, and it is one thing to gather the information and another thing to actually disseminate it publicly to make it available, and once you have done that, you have crossed a line between espionage, and active interference, and illegitimate interference in the election, and it is a fair point. However, to cross that line, you dont necessarily have, have to have a goal of the u. S. Led International Order or destroying the faith in our electoral system. One fairly simple explanation in that area of it might be titfortat. The russians believe rightly or wrongly the United States habitually interferes with countries abroad and not just in the states of the soviet union, but elsewhere abroad. So it is a fairly easy thing for me to imagine that they looked at the information and said, boy, with give them a dose of their own medicine here. And the goals may have been simple retribution or, boy, once they see that we can do it, too, maybe they dont have as big of an appetite to do it in the future or use it as perhaps an impetus to reach some agreement on the cyber treaties and the things that they have talked about wanting to do in the past. I am not sure necessarily that you have to go all of the way to that very stark judgment of attempting to undermine the liberaldemocratic order internationally, although it is a plausible explanation of intent. One final thing on this question of intentions. This is something that i think that is oftentimes at the root of policy disputes, differing perceptions of the intentions of foreign actors. I think it is very much at the heart of current controversies about russia are right now. What i would argue here is that this is something that we really need a Genuine National discussion about. Arguing about this by proxy, by talking about the russian Cyber Operations in the e llection is not getting at the heart of the matter. As we consider where we are going to go in dealings with russia, we really need to be talking very candidly about what is driving the russian ambition, and are they in fact as stark as undermining the u. S. Democracy and the liberal democratic order, and somewhat less than that, because this is something that we need to get right. It has enormous implications for our policies towards russia. And i think that it is really needs to be addressed directly and candidly. George, thank you very much. I have a question before we move further. Some very curious things happen happened in russia during last several weeks related to this whole discussion. At first, the fsb and the post kgb have arrested a number two person in the division of the cyber security. Then a couple of days ago, they have arrested number one in the division. Then they have arrested somebody in the socalled left which deals outside of the government with this kind of the methods, but considered post kgb, fsb contractor, and the russians did not make any public announcements, but the inf information in the media including the follows is that the death officials is being investigated for no less than treason. Treason, and that it is somehow connected to the whole scandal. Do you know anything about it . I am aware of the commerant publication. Obviously, it is tempting to look at this and connect the dots. The u. S. Intelligence community accuses russia of the cyber malfeasance, and russia realizes this, and starts to investigate. Arrests officials that are in this specific area, a ha there you go. Maybe it is true. And this may be connected. However, a couple of things about the press report stood out to me that caused me to question that conclusion. Consparski said that the ar vest based on the actives they the konsparski official had prior to joining the labs. He had joined the operation in 2012. So if we accept that as true, what they said was this is for something that occurred almost five years prior to this, well before donald trump had even announced his candidacy. So, it made me won ede deder n wonder. When that individual russian government. When that individual worked for the russian government. So i suspect that what we are talk talking about is related to corruption and not to interference in the u. S. Election, but we will have to see. Thank you very much. Paul. Okay. Im going to talk a little bit about our policy responses for a few minutes, and then maybe say a word or two about the Political Climate here in washington. You know, as we think about policy responses on the issue like this or indeed on any issue, we have to ask yourselves three questions. What is it that we are responding to . What is it that we are trying to accomplish through this . And we have come to a fair conclusion that russian was interfering in our election, but in my view, we dont yet have a full understanding, and here i agree with george, of russias inte intent. We dont have a full understanding of the actions that russia took. Certainly, relatively little of this has made it into the Public Domain. So to my mind, step one is in v invest gating this whole issue thoroughly and trying to develop a much better understanding of what happened including both what russia did and also what we think that they were hoping to achieve. As we are doing that though, we also need to place our thinking of this incident into the con context of the u. S. russia relationship which is a 25yearold relationship. The u. S. russia relationship did not start with russian efforts to hack into our election compu computers or to get into dnc or to do all of these other things that we are talking about. It started 25 years ago, and it has gone through a long and complex and mutually frustrating history and we arrived at a particular point last year when many of these things took place, and i think that we need to think a little bit about what led to that. Second question. You know, what is our objective in responding to russia. And now sh, there is one set of objectives which is that we want to punish russia or we want to discourage russia or deter russia from encouraging, sorry, from conducting this kind of activity in the future. From that point of view, i think that what the obama adm administration did in december is a little bit puzzling. The Obama Administration ejected 35 Russian Diplomats which they described more as a response to Russian Diplomats in moscow than a response directly to this matter. They sing shunned officials at the russian intelligence agencies, and by sanctioned by putting them on a list of people who cant get american visas and are subject to having their assets in the United States seized. I guess that i wonder how many gru or the fsb officials have significant Russian Military intelligence or federal Security Service that the successor kgb pe personnel have significant assets in the United States. Then they shut down two of the re recreational facilities as they were described, one in new york, and one in maryland where where Russian Diplomats go to get away from d. C. Or new york or whatever. Maybe they had some intelligence gathering capabilities there, but i expect that the action was of limited impact on russias intelligence services, and probably its greatest impact was