Malcolm Nance - The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West

O ne of the greatest dreams of the old Soviet Union was to put a highly suggestible American ideologue into power who would do the bidding of the Kremlin. For nearly a century, Russia wanted to change American policy in such a way that its economy and alliances with NATO would be so damaged that the Soviet Union would become the preeminent superpower in the world. The idea of a Kremlin-controlled President would live on after the death of the Soviet Union.

In 2012, the plan to subject the 2016 United States election to a massive cyber influence operation, possibly in coordination with the Trump campaign, was launched. It ostensibly started with the hacking of the Democratic National Committees servers in order to steal critical information to knock Hillary Clinton out of the running for President of the United States. The plan would eventually work to the benefit of Russias chosen candidate, Donald Trump.

On November 8, 2016, the American presidential election culminated into what could arguably be called the greatest intelligence operation in the history of the world. In the Russian attack on the American election, a strategic adversary influenced enough voters through manipulation of the internet to get their preferred candidate chosenand convinced more than 40% of the American population that they had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

I was determined to track down other information to illustrate where Russian intelligence used cyber warfare to influence elections, referenda, and political opinion to their advantage. My investigation showed that Russian intelligence had been using these advanced malware suites to attack other nations for almost a decade. The 2016 election hacking was just window dressing on a larger goal. I found there were many activities where the Russian CYBER BEARSa collective name for their national, criminal, and intelligence hackerswere involved in shifting the goalposts. The 2016 hacking was the start of a global campaign to imagine a New World Order and make it a Russian World Order. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) code named the Russian operation against the United States GRIZZLY STEPPE. In my last book, The Plot to Hack America, I referred to it as Operation LUCKY-7, considering the amount of luck the Russian spies would need.

The next phase of their campaignthe plot to destroy democracywould be better described as GLOBAL GRIZZLY. The best plan would be to resort back to a goal from the Soviet era, discredit and destroy Western-style democracy all together. This time Americans would be curried through their hatred of Muslims (and their first African-American President, Barack Obama) to align themselves through cultural similarities, as opposed to Cold War politics. In the GLOBAL GRIZZLY plan, tribal commonalities among white ethno-nationalists would be cemented through a political order based on authoritarianism, anti-liberalism, and anti-globalism, and lever the success of the super-rich.

By 2016, Operation GLOBAL GRIZZLY was occurring right before our eyes. It was the full-scale implementation of a new form of asymmetric warfare. Although Russia was a military superpower, it remained an economic dinosaur, with the exception of fossil fuel production. In order to defeat a superior economic entity like the United States, Russia embraced a new battlefront that could cripple a democratic adversary. It would exacerbate the domination of the information battle space.

In The Plot to Destroy Democracy, I will reveal the strategy the Russian Federation put into effect to defeat the worlds biggest democracies and challenge principal governance structures of the Western world. The singular beauty of this plan, which has roots far back into Stalins Soviet Union, is that the Russian political chess players have harnessed the Wests own technology and liberty as the dagger to be plunged into the heart of democratic governance. Russia saw opportunity to co-opt American and European political parties to destroy democracy itself.

At its heart, The Plot to Destroy Democracy is a fast-paced cross between a spy thriller and a National Intelligence estimate that provides a deep dive assessment of the dangers that surround the nation where the enemies are both foreign and domestic. However, the game remains in motion. All the pieces are still visible, and a bulldog of an investigator, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, is on the hunt. Make no mistake, democracy in the era of Trump and Putin is in retreat and has been targeted for extinction. With the right amount of public awareness, determination, and dedication to the principles we hold dear and love, it can be stopped.