Rigged

May 15, 2020
Journalist Shimer turns in a thoroughgoing account of the many ways in which Russia and the U.S. have tinkered with each other's voting processes. Russia has been attempting to sway American public opinion since the days of Lenin, who knew that his government's survival hinged on being accepted in the outside world. But when Barack Obama was informed that Russia was gaming the 2016 presidential election, he looked only at the short term--and only at the question of whether Russia was directly changing ballots. "They were not focused at all on what we knew had been very effective elsewhere," said an adviser, "the influence campaign, changing public opinion." Obama retaliated with sanctions that were undone by Donald Trump. By Shimer's account, Russia has rigged plenty of elections before, including many in Eastern Europe, when brigades of Soviet agents literally stuffed the ballot boxes to promote supposedly freely elected communist candidates in Poland and East Germany. But then, so has America, if in less direct ways, as when the CIA poured millions of dollars--by Shimer's reckoning, about $107 million in today's dollars--into the promotion of the Christian Democratic over the Communist Party in the Italian elections of 1948. The CIA's interference in the Chilean elections of the 1960s proved less effective, leading to the election of the Communist Salvador Allende, who was deposed by an Ameican-backed military coup in 1973. As an aide to Henry Kissinger admitted, the U.S. attempted to sway that election by "creating false propaganda" and "overthrowing the constitution," and it worked. Shimer offers a fascinating counterfactual in the case of Willy Brandt, who, aided unwittingly by Soviet agents, urged d�tente between East and West Germany and the superpowers behind them: If the election had not been swayed in his direction, "the very arc of the Cold War...might have been transformed." A useful addition to the discussion though unlikely to change Mitch McConnell's mind on election security.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 18, 2020
Journalist Shimer debuts with a provocative and well-sourced study tracking Russian and U.S. efforts to influence foreign elections from the early 20th century to the present day. Though the history of covert electoral interference began with Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin’s efforts to spread communism in the wake of WWI, Shimer writes, both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. “targeted elections aggressively and frequently” during the Cold War. His examples include CIA efforts to keep left-wing candidates out of office in Italy and Chile, and the KGB’s role in ensuring that West German chancellor Willy Brandt survived a 1972 no-confidence vote. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, Shimer claims, America stopped its influence campaigns “in all but the most exceptional of circumstances.” Russia, however, has escalated its electoral meddling in the internet age, according to Shimer, and Vladimir Putin’s “digital warriors” waged covert campaigns in 2016 to unseat Montenegro’s pro-NATO leader, put Donald Trump in the White House, and influence the Brexit referendum. Though his prose style is more scholarly than scintillating, Shimer makes excellent use of archival research and interviews with U.S. government insiders and intelligence experts. This incisive treatise lays bare the monumental task of countering foreign interference in the 2020 election.

Starred review from July 1, 2020
Russian state intelligence services used a variety of digital means to sow discord in the U.S. during the presidential election of 2016 because Russian president Vladimir Putin wished to back a friendly candidate and weaken democracy in general. But as Shimer points out in this timely, eye-opening book, that was not the first campaign of its kind but the culmination of a century of Russian meddling in free elections and attempts to undermine the sovereignty of free countries. Shimer first examines the history of Soviet attempts to install communist regimes in countries around the world through covert electoral interference and America's attempts to thwart them. He then digs into Russia's 2016 propaganda campaign through social media networks, the Obama administration's Maginot Line-like defense of electoral infrastructure that practically ignored the digital onslaught, and the failure of the U.S. to adequately punish Russia for these efforts. Shimer combined in-depth research with extensive interviews and statements from relevant intelligence officers to produce this thoroughly engaging inquiry into covert electoral interference that puts 2016 into context, thus explaining Russian aggression and American vulnerability. Rigged is a top-notch, if not the definitive, account of Russian assaults against America's electoral process and a mighty timely call for caution.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)