Julian E. Barnes

Intelligence officials said the new post reflects the reality that influence operations by Russia, China and other countries are likely to continue indefinitely. Shelby Pierson, who worked on intelligence issues surrounding the 2018 midterm elections, was named to the post, which will cover both potential attacks on voting infrastructure and influence campaigns.

Administration critics praised the appointment but said it did not obviate the need for a director at the National Security Council to coordinate not just intelligence but also the response to foreign interference campaigns. And critics in Congress warned that President Donald Trump’s skepticism over foreign influence campaigns continues to undermine the government response.

Pierson’s appointment will help intelligence agencies direct resources to election security and “bring the strongest level of support to this critical issue,” said Dan Coats, director of national intelligence, who called it an “enduring challenge.”

Coats also said he was ordering all the intelligence agencies with a role in election security to appoint a senior official to oversee issues of foreign influence and infrastructure attacks. These officials will form an Election Executive and Leadership Board to ensure intelligence agencies are properly focused on voting security issues.

Critics of the Trump administration have long complained about a lack of coordination within the government on election issues. Responsibility for protecting elections is spread among the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, the military’s Cyber Command, state and local officials, and a variety of intelligence agencies.

Pierson’s appointment and establishment of senior officials at various agencies responsible for election security should both improve coordination and raise attention to the issue within the intelligence community, said Laura Rosenberger, a former Obama administration official who now leads the Alliance for Security Democracy, which works to counter foreign interference campaigns.

“In the past, some of these issues have fallen through the bureaucratic cracks,” Rosenberger said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. “Establishing ownership on an issue also helps with focus and prioritization.”

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been pushing for better cross-agency coordination. He praised Pierson and said he supported the appointment.

But both Warner and Rosenberger said the problem was bigger than just the intelligence agencies, and the government, particularly the National Security Council, needed to do more to help states with security and develop responses to foreign attacks.

Though the government is better positioned to detect and stop foreign inference campaigns than it was when Russia sought to sabotaged the 2016 election, Warner said he wished the new intelligence position had been established earlier.

“While all the relevant agencies recognize the challenges and have been doing a lot more in this area since 2016, the reality is that we still need to see leadership from the White House, which has failed to make this issue a priority,” Warner said.

Warner and other senators have introduced a number of bipartisan bills aimed at increasing election security, including improving cross-government coordination. While the House has approved an election security measure, Senate Republicans have not yet allowed a vote on the bills.

The intelligence community stepped up its election defense for the 2018 midterm races, work that Pierson led. Some outside analysts said that while that work was important, it had an ad hoc nature. But several agencies have moved to make their election defense teams permanent.

After the 2018 midterm elections, Coats conducted a review of election security and foreign interference efforts. He found that Russia mounted social media influence campaigns intent on spreading division and disinformation but said no election infrastructure was compromised.

A team of intelligence officials will report to Pierson, who will serve as the principal adviser to Coats on election security and threats.

The administration is still wrestling with how to handle election threats, influence attacks and attempted cyber infiltration of voting systems. Some officials feel such foreign influence efforts should be quickly disclosed to the public; others fear that automatically putting a spotlight on minor influence efforts could inadvertently amplify them.

Pierson will likely have a voice, at least within the intelligence agencies, about how to handle influence campaigns and whether information on foreign efforts should be publicized.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/us/politics/intelligence-election-security.html" id="ac3779d9-d52e-3069-aa96-9ec3ba23a1b6">The New York Times</a>.

Intelligence Chief Names New Election Security Oversight Official

ASPEN, Colo. — An experienced official will oversee election security intelligence across the government in a newly created senior position, the director of national intelligence announced Friday as part of an effort to improve coordination and speed response to attacks by foreign governments.

His death was confirmed by Jaymie Durnan, his executor.

Marshall, as director of the Office of Net Assessment, was the secretive futurist of the Pentagon, a long-range thinker who both prodded and inspired secretaries of defense and high-level policymakers. Virtually unknown among the wider public, he came to be revered inside the Defense Department as a mysterious Yoda-like figure who embodied an exceptionally long institutional memory.

In the early 2000s, at a time when the Pentagon was focused on counterinsurgency and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Marshall urged officials to focus on the challenge of China — a view that many considered outdated. But today, national security officials are increasingly adopting Marshall’s view of China as a potential strategic adversary, an idea now at the heart of national defense strategy.

Through his many hires and generous Pentagon grants, estimated to total more than $400 million over four decades, Marshall trained a coterie of experts and strategists in Washington and beyond. One veteran of the office, Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, is now the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Another, Robert O. Work, was the deputy secretary of defense from 2014 to 2017.

The exact nature of Marshall’s office was poorly understood. But he cultivated thinking that looked beyond the nation’s immediate problems and sought to press military leaders to approach long-term challenges differently.

“His gift was the framing of the question, the discovery of the critical question,” said Michael Pillsbury, a China expert who advised and worked with Marshall throughout his career. “He would always pick the least studied and most strategically significant subjects.”

Marshall’s career as a strategic thinker began in 1949 at the RAND Corp., where his theory of competitive strategies took root. Borrowing from business school theories of how corporations compete against each other, Marshall argued that nations are also in strategic competition with one another.

“His favorite example was if you can pit your strengths against someone else’s weakness and get them to respond in a way that makes them weaker and weaker, you can put them out of business without ever fighting,” said Henry Sokolski, a strategist who worked with Marshall.

Recruited by Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Marshall joined the National Security Council as an analyst in 1972. He formed the Office of Net Assessment the next year, and began studying Soviet military strength.

He and the strategists he brought into the office came to believe that the Central Intelligence Agency had erred in its estimates of military spending by the Soviet Union and of the strength of the Soviet economy. He believed that Moscow was devoting a far greater percentage of economic output to the military than the CIA had thought, and that therefore it would be unable to keep pace with the U.S. economy. The Soviet collapse in 1991 proved him right.

“He had early insight into the economic troubles the Soviet Union was having, and helped develop strategies to exacerbate those problems and help bring about the demise of the Soviet Union,” said Andrew May, a strategist at the office and a collaborator with Marshall for decades.

Andrew Walter Marshall was born Aug. 13, 1921, in Detroit to John and Katherine Marshall. He enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit but left during World War II. Medically disqualified from serving in the military during the war, he instead went to work in an aircraft factory in Detroit. After the war he attended the University of Chicago, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics. He abandoned his Ph.D. studies to work at RAND.

Marshall married Mary Katherine Speer, a fellow RAND employee, in 1953. She died in 2004. He later married Ann Wheeler Smith, who died in 2017. No immediate family members survive.

Not all policymakers were enamored with the long-range focus of Marshall’s Office of Net Assessment. Critics said it had missed big trends like cyberwarfare and had wrongly ignored the kind of terrorism threats that the United States faced early in the 21st century.

Marshall’s defenders point out that the pathbreaking work he and his disciples did on military modernization had formed the pathway for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s program to transform the military during George W. Bush’s administration, emphasizing lighter and nimbler forces that would form the backbone of U.S. military power during the Obama administration.

At the heart of Marshall’s work were highly classified reports called net assessments, about 24 of which were created from 1973 to 2015, when he retired several years into his 90s.

Marshall kept the distribution of his assessments extremely limited. Few people have read more than one or two of them. Even secretaries of defense were not allowed to keep copies.

The best of the assessments, according to people who have read them, compared Russian and Chinese strategies against U.S. war plans, finding the weaknesses of the Pentagon’s approach and pushing for improvements. He urged the Pentagon to develop not single war plans but ones that would cover myriad scenarios.

Marshall began focusing on China in the mid-1990s. He was the first Pentagon official to talk about an emerging great power competition with Beijing, an idea now embraced by Pentagon leadership.

“His view was that because of the sheer size and potential economic weight” of China, it “could become a competitor over time,” Selva said. “That proved to be a good question to ask, and that has started to play out.”

In 2009, Robert M. Gates, the defense secretary at the time, asked Marshall to write a classified strategy on China with Gen. Jim Mattis, the future defense secretary.

Marshall believed that U.S. military planners had little understanding of what Chinese regional or global ambitions were. Deterring conflict in the future would be impossible if strategists were blind to the competition, he maintained.

The study by Marshall and Mattis helped speed the development of new undersea technologies, pushed Gates to make the B-21 bomber a priority and changed how the Pentagon conducted strategic war games, according to former officials.

“He understood that becoming competitive again would take some hard work and unpopular moves,” May said. “But we needed to get back in that mindset.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="5ee78067-6011-4d45-abc4-66c58f597d78" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/us/politics/andrew-marshall-dead.html">The New York Times</a>.

Andrew Marshall, Pentagon's threat expert, dies at 97

Andrew Marshall, a Pentagon strategist who helped shape U.S. military thinking on the Soviet Union, China and other global competitors for more than four decades, died Tuesday in Alexandria, Virginia. He was 97.

The assessment by Dan Coats, director of national intelligence, was the result of a request by the White House before the November vote that he examine election meddling by Russia and other powers. The agency did not release that report, but Coats released a statement on the document.

“Russia, and other foreign countries, including China and Iran, conducted influence activities and messaging campaigns targeted at the United States to promote their strategic interests,” Coats said in the statement.

The statement contained little detail, but U.S. officials said the intelligence report found that Russia continued to use social media, fake personas and Moscow-controlled media to influence positions on opposite ideological sides with an aim of further polarizing the United States.

The report will be sent to the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Under the executive order issued in September, automatic sanctions could be imposed when the government review is complete on anyone found to have tried to manipulate the vote.

Coats said in his statement that the report did not include an assessment of the effectiveness of the Russian information campaign. The public report also did not include an assessment on whether Russian attempts at election meddling were tilted toward a particular party or candidate. Current and former U.S. officials have said that Russian propaganda efforts in the midterm elections were less than expected.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the report shows that the Russians did not stop attempts at election meddling after 2016.

“Now that the Russian playbook is out in the open,” Warner said, “we’re going to see more and more adversaries trying to take advantage of the openness of our society to sow division and attempt to manipulate Americans.”

Some officials attributed the diminished Russian activity at least in part to efforts by the government and technology companies.

In the months before the election, the military’s Cyber Command began a campaign to deter the Russians behind the 2016 influence campaign. They sent messages to Russian operatives saying they had been identified and warned them to cease their efforts.

Cyber Command, the National Security Agency and the FBI also tried to identify fake accounts and Russia-backed trolls who were spreading Moscow’s propaganda, passing that information along to technology companies so the accounts could be removed.

The New York Times first reported those Cyber Command operations in October. This month, The Daily Beast published an interview with Yevgeny Zubarev, director of Russia’s Federal News Agency, in which he said he had been targeted by Cyber Command. “The United States Cyber Command writes to me to say that what I am doing is wrong, that their job is to fight trolls,” Zubarev told The Daily Beast.

The results of those efforts, and much broader public understanding of Russian techniques, helped contribute to a less-effective campaign, according to Defense Department and other U.S. officials.

Government officials said they had hoped U.S. resilience and resistance to the Russian techniques might be growing. A pair of reports commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee and released this week provided new information about how Russians sought to inflame U.S. opinion and exacerbate existing divisions in the country.

One report released Monday outlined how the Russian campaign aimed to drive down African-American participation in the 2016 election.

Participation in the midterms was up with both parties, and it was not clear if the Russians tried to drive down participation with particular groups of people or if they abandoned that effort during this vote.

Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which monitors election interference, said as long as politicians continue to try to polarize U.S. voters, the public will be vulnerable to Russian interference efforts.

“Our polarization is a national security vulnerability,” she said. “The deeper wedges in American society, the more opportunity there is for Russia to stoke divisions.”

U.S. officials said the efforts by Cyber Command and the National Security Agency were continuing even after the 2018 election. Some outside experts have predicted an intensified information campaign by Russia around President Donald Trump’s election campaign. Only a persistent campaign by the government intelligence agencies will be able to blunt that, officials said.

Rosenberger said one effective Russian technique, the hacking and release of documents, was not seen in the 2018 vote. But U.S. electoral politics remain vulnerable to such efforts.

Before the election, a joint statement by the director of national intelligence, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security said state and local governments have reported attempts to access their networks. But in the statement Friday, Coats said that no efforts had been successful.

“At this time, the IC does not have intelligence reporting that indicates any compromise of our nation’s election infrastructure that would have prevented voting, changed vote counts, or disrupted the ability to tally votes,” Coats said, using initials for the intelligence community.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/us/politics/russia-midterm-election-influence-coates.html" id="867ee77e-80c0-34ba-a7e8-0228e0e26749">The New York Times</a>.

U.S. Report Finds Russians Meddled, but Could Not Crack Voting Systems

WASHINGTON — Russian operations meant to polarize U.S. voters continued during the midterm elections, but did not compromise the voting systems used, according to a study by the intelligence community.

The statement contained little detail, but U.S. officials said the intelligence report found Russia continued to use social media, fake personas and Moscow-controlled media to influence positions on opposite ideological sides with an aim of further polarizing the United States.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the report shows the Russians did not stop attempts at election meddling after 2016.

The assessment by Dan Coats, director of national intelligence, was the result of a request by the White House before the November vote that he examine election meddling by Russia and other powers. The agency did not release that report, but the agency was expected to release a statement on the document.

“Russia used social media, false flag personas, sympathetic spokesmen, Russian-controlled or influenced media, and other means of influence to inflame positions on opposite ends of controversial issues, promote conspiracy theories, and further polarize the American population,” Coats was expected to say in the statement, according to officials.

The report will be sent to the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security. Under the executive order issued in September, automatic sanctions could be imposed when the government review is complete on anyone found to have tried to manipulate the vote.

Officials said the statement would include no assessment of the effectiveness of the Russian information campaign — nor would offer more details. The public report will not include an assessment on whether Russian attempts at election meddling were tilted toward a particular party or candidate. Current and former U.S. officials have said that Russian propaganda efforts in the midterm elections were less than expected.

Cyber Command, the National Security Agency and the FBI also tried to identify fake accounts and Russian-backed trolls who were spreading Moscow’s propaganda, passing that information along to technology companies.

Participation in the midterms was up with both parties, and it is not clear if the Russians attempted to try and drive down participation with particular groups of people or if they abandoned that effort during this vote.

U.S. officials said the efforts by Cyber Command and the NSA were continuing even after the 2018 election.

Russians Tried, but Were Unable to Compromise Midterm Elections, U.S. Says

Cyber Command, the National Security Agency and the FBI also tried to identify fake accounts and Russian-backed trolls who were spreading Moscow’s propaganda, passing that information along to technology companies so the accounts could be removed.

The New York Times first reported those Cyber Command operations in October. This month, The Daily Beast published an interview with Yevgeny Zubarev, director of Russia’s Federal News Agency, in which he said he had been targeted by Cyber Command. “The United States Cyber Command writes to me to say that what I am doing is wrong, that their job is to fight trolls,” Zubarev told The Daily Beast

U.S. officials said the efforts by Cyber Command and the NSA were continuing even after the 2018 election. Some outside experts have predicted an intensified information campaign by Russia around Trump’s election campaign. Only a persistent campaign by the government intelligence agencies will be able to blunt that, officials said.

Before the election, a joint statement by the directors of National Intelligence, FBI and Department of Homeland Security said state and local governments have reported attempts to access their networks. But in the statement Friday, Coats was expected to say that no efforts had been successful.

“At this time, the IC does not have intelligence reporting that indicates any compromise of our nation’s election infrastructure that would have prevented voting, changed vote counts, or disrupted the ability to tally votes,” Coats was expected to say, using initials for the intelligence community.

His assessment was the result of a request by the White House before the November vote that he examine election meddling by Russia and other powers. The agency did not release that report, but Coats released a statement.

“Russia used social media, false flag personas, sympathetic spokesmen, Russian-controlled or influenced media, and other means of influence to inflame positions on opposite ends of controversial issues, promote conspiracy theories, and further polarize the American population,” Coats said in the statement.

The Coats statement included no assessment of the effectiveness of the Russian information campaign — nor offered any more details. But current and former U.S. officials have said that Russian propaganda efforts in the midterm elections were less than expected.

Before the election, a joint statement by the directors of National Intelligence, FBI and Department of Homeland Security said state and local governments have reported attempts to access their networks. But in the statement Friday, Coats said that no efforts had been successful.

WASHINGTON — Russian operations meant to polarize U.S. voters continued during the midterm elections, but did not compromise the voting systems used, Dan Coats, director of national intelligence, announced Friday.

The Coats statement included no assessment of the effectiveness of the Russian information campaign — nor offered any more details. But current and former U.S. officials have said Russian propaganda efforts in the midterm elections were less than expected.

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Julian E. Barnes

Articles written by the author

Intelligence Chief Names New Election Security Oversight Official

Andrew Marshall, Pentagon's threat expert, dies at 97

U.S. Report Finds Russians Meddled, but Could Not Crack Voting Systems

U.S. Report Finds Russians Meddled, but Could Not Crack Voting Systems

Russians Tried, but Were Unable to Compromise Midterm Elections, U.S. Says

Russians Tried, but Were Unable to Compromise Midterm Elections, U.S. Says

Russians Tried, but Were Unable to Compromise Midterm Elections, U.S. Says

Russians Tried, but Were Unable to Compromise Midterm Elections, U.S. Says