Russian President Vladimir Putin has been “found out” again by the Sherlock Holmes clones inhabiting western investigative media. When I first read the story of how a mysterious document titled “No 32-04 \ vd” had been leaked to The Guardian by some idiot at the Kremlin, I was stupefied, I’ll admit. I even asked myself, “How could I have missed this?” But then, the larger, more nagging question began to eat at me as I scanned the page. “Has Vladimir fooled us all? Is he micromanaging the puppet strings of conquest for real?” And then I read the report on Putin installing a Donald Trump windup toy in the White House a second time.
I know most who are reading this are familiar with this story, but here’s my translation of Russia’s most recent slander of Russia’s leader. Let’s start with the title “Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House.” Whenever an author uses a weak modifying word like “appear” in a title, you know that what you are about to read his opinion. So, the “news” that 50,000 media outlets in the western world is now republishing is not news at all. The lead paragraph tries to cement opinion as fact for The Guardian’s readership.
“Vladimir Putin personally authorized a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.”
Here’s where this opinion is further weakened, when the authors project the fantasy and then back off of claiming they have evidence of anything. “According to what are assessed” means somebody at The Guardian’s legal department gave these bozos the go based on the likely impossibility of anybody proving “No 32-04 \ vd” is NOT an official document. The logical question here is, “Who made this assessment?” I wonder what their qualifications are? I think we shall never know.
Here I will go staccato to make my report as painless for readers as possible. The pertinent words are in BOLD CAPS. In short paragraph two – “The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the PAPERS SUGGEST….” Paragraph four reads, “Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree APPEARING to bear Putin’s signature.” Paragraph five reads in its entirety:
“Western intelligence agencies are UNDERSTOOD to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.”
So, it looks like we have found out who made the assessments and what their qualifications are. Did somebody at the US State Department or spook central at Langley leaked these papers? APPARENTLY, but let’s move on. Oh, wait, wait, wait, we have another slip-up slash butt-covering in the next paragraph, which reads:
“The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say they APPEAR to be genuine. Incidental details COME ACROSS AS GENUINE. The overall tone and thrust IS SAID TO BE CONSISTENT WITH KREMLIN SECURITY THINKING.”
Are you still reading, or has a laughing fit already turned your face from the screen? Just checking, because I had to stop reading at this point before continuing. The trigger that got me was the insertion of an official Kremlin photo of the media in question. It was a meeting announced and outlined with minutes on the Kremlin website of President Putin.
In response to a Guardian request, President Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov called the accusations that Russian leaders had met and agreed to support Trump in at the meeting in early 2016 was “a great pulp fiction.” Sandy Peskov was generous and diplomatic, in my opinion.
The supposedly authentic super-secret “32-04 \ vd” got one thing right, even if the document proves to be fake. Whoever drafted the texts said Trump was an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex.” Unless I miss my guess, another document, “No 32-77\ kk (for Killery Klinton) assessed Trump’s rival as “diabolical, egoist, sociopath, who is also unbalanced and PROBABLY capable of cold-blooded murder.” I made you laugh, go on.
The following two short paragraphs contain the qualifiers APPARENT CONFIRMATION, POTENTIALLY, THE DOCUMENT SAYS, “CERTAIN EVENTS,” and UNCLEAR. Then the authors turn to misdirect and confusion under the heading “The Kremlin summit” by using the fact a meeting was held and recorded to fool readers into believing that the authentic meeting was really held to install a US President. It’s clever. I’ll give them that.
The Guardian sleuths go on to garnish their bullshit with facts like the Kremlin press release announcing the strategy meeting. Even though the Russians said the discussion covered the economy and Moldova. Now you tell me. Is this something out of an asymmetrical warfare DoD manual? It reads as if the author worked for RAND Corporation to me.
Anyhow, for the sake of brevity here, allow me to assert my analysis, opinion, quasi facts, and speculation that The Guardian, by releasing this story in its current form, is acting out the US Department of Defense strategies, probably. Let me illustrate using the USNaval Institute’s March 2021 proceedings “The Reality of War Should Define Information Warfare.” Then I will let the reader determine whether or not a branch of the US defense establishment POSSIBLY leaked a fake Russian document and ALLEGEDLY validated its authenticity. Is The Guardian practicing:
Information Superiority: The operational advantage derived from the ability to collect, process, and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information while exploiting or denying an adversary’s ability to do the same.
Information Warfare: Offensive and defensive actions in physical and virtual space that enable and protect the friendly force’s ability to access, process, and communicate information that also deny, exploit, corrupt or destroy an adversary force’s ability to use information.
Information Advantage: An advantage in which a military force exploits rapid access to more detailed and comprehensive information than that of an adversary for superior awareness, decision-making, and action at the strategic, operational, or tactical levels of warfare.
COULD BE, huh? Peskov should have laughed and hung up the phone.
Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
