Thomas Rid, a professor at King’s College London, said in an interview that in a private chat on Twitter on Saturday, he communicated with the entity that claimed to have released the email cache to WikiLeaks.
The party, which calls itself Guccifer2, last month claimed responsibility for the DNC hack. Several independent analysts have concluded that Guccifer2, who claimed to be Romanian, is likely linked to Russia.
“We’ve been looking at this very closely from both the technical and non-technical spheres,” said Richard Barger, chief information officer for ThreatConnect, a cyber-intelligence software firm. “Based on our analysis, we strongly feel Guccifer2 is linked to a Russian information operations campaign and is not the independent Romanian hacker that he claims to be.”
The apparent link to Russian intelligence raises troubling implications for U.S. foreign relations and national security. Russia has not to date tried to interfere in U.S. elections, analysts say. But if this is a deliberate effort by the Kremlin to meddle, it is worrisome, they say.
Michael G. Vickers, who served as undersecretary of defense for intelligence from 2011 to 2015, said an effort by the Russians to release intelligence in advance of a U.S. election is likely unprecedented.
“What is really new here is the attempt to influence the politics of the United States. That is the problem,” he said.
Vickers said that the Russians have attempted to influence elections in states closer to their border but that seeking to do so in the United States would represent a historic and significant change, even in an era when Russian intelligence gathering has become more aggressive.
Because he is no longer in government service, Vickers said he had no direct knowledge of the forensic evidence in the DNC email case. However, he said that “people who have looked at it have said it looks like groups that have been tied to Russian intelligence.”
Fiona Hill, a former Russia expert on the National Intelligence Council, said putting the emails out on WikiLeaks for the world to see is consistent with her view of the modus operandi of Putin and Russian intelligence.
“They’re doing what they do best,” said Hill, now a Brookings Institution senior fellow. “They would not be doing their jobs as intelligence officers if they were not trying to outsmart their main opponent and to have influence on their politics.”
But, Rid pointed out, “what we don’t know is whether this is a top-down order or not.”
Russian Embassy officials did not respond to a request for comment Sunday. In the past, Russian officials denied any involvement with the hack.
“I completely rule out a possibility that the [Russian] government or the government bodies have been involved in this,” *Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told the Reuters news agency in Moscow.
Eugene Rumer, a former analyst on the National Intelligence Council who left in 2014, said that, if the accusation is true, “the implication is troublesome, no question about it.”
One possibility is the Russians are trying in some way to influence the election outcome and perhaps promote Trump by embarrassing Clinton. If that is the case, Rumer said, “it suggests the kind of misunderstanding of American domestic politics. To think that they can affect the outcome in a country of over 300 million people, with billions spent on electoral campaigns, in a country where there is free media”
Another possibility is that this is part of an information warfare campaign that involves the release of compromising materials, or what in Russian is called
kompromat. “You release dirt on me. I release dirt on you,” Rumer said.
The Russians have made clear that they believe the United States is behind the release of the Panama Papers, which include material embarrassing to Putin. They are upset about the Olympics doping scandal, which they also believe was fomented by Western intelligence agencies.
“Whoever is behind this may feel, well, you people try to tarnish our leader, we’re going to dump this and show that your politics is no better than ours,” Rumer said.
One U.S. official, who like others interviewed for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the email dump “would be the worst possible way to influence an election. It just seems a little clumsy. It just seems a very odd way of going about it.”
WikiLeaks is nonetheless an ideal venue for gaining exposure, other analysts say. The site, cofounded in 2006 by Julian *Assange, promotes itself as an anti-secrecy organization and promises leakers’ anonymity.
“If you’re the Russians and you want to leak information for maximal effect, WikiLeaks is a great platform for that,” said one analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his work involves studying Russian intelligence and he did not want to draw attention to himself.
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