LONDON – Russia has mounted a long and sophisticated campaign to intrude on Britain’s democracy, according to a report delayed by a British parliamentary committee, but it is unclear whether its tactics influenced one of the most consistent votes in modern Brits. history: leaving the European Union.
Saying that they could not make that judgment, the report’s authors directed some of their harshest criticism not at Russia, but at successive British governments, which they said had ignored years of warning signs of Russian misconduct. Even after questions about the 2016 Brexit referendum, according to the report, intelligence agencies did not properly investigate whether Russia’s actions altered the outcome.
It raised a troubling question: Who is protecting British democracy?
“No one is,” was the response given by the authors.
“The outrage is not if there is interference,” said Kevan Jones, a member of the Labor Party parliament who was part of the intelligence committee that published the report. “The outrage is that nobody wanted to know if there was interference.”
The report also fell into the heat of a U.S. presidential election, overshadowed by questions about ties between President Trump and Russia, as well as fears of new foreign manipulation, not only from Russia, but also from China and Iran.
The committee’s account characterized Russia as a reckless country bent on regaining its “great power” status, mainly destabilizing Westerners. “The security threat posed by Russia is difficult to handle for the West since, in our opinion and that of many others, it appears fundamentally nihilistic,” the authors said.
Experts said the report showed parallels between Britain and the United States in failing to detect warning signs, but also significant differences. They said that the FBI and other US agencies had investigated electoral interference more aggressively than their British counterparts, while the British were ahead of the United States in examining how Russian money had corrupted politics.
“This is one of the pieces that is not really well understood in the United States,” said Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance to Secure Democracy, which tracks Russian disinformation efforts in the United States. “If there is dirty Russian money that has entered our political system.”
The report described how British politicians had welcomed the oligarchs to London, allowing them to launder their illicit money through what it called London’s “laundry”. A growing industry of “facilitators” (lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, and public relations consultants) emerged to meet your needs.
These people, according to the report, “played a role, knowingly or unknowingly, in spreading Russian influence, which is often linked to promoting the nefarious interests of the Russian state.”
According to the report, several members of the House of Lords had business interests linked to Russia or worked for companies with ties to Russia. He urged an investigation of them, although he did not mention any names. That information, as well as the names of the politicians who received donations, were removed from the public report, along with other confidential information.
“Most disturbing is the recognition that the Russian government has escaped, under our eyes,” said William F. Browder, a United States-born British financier who has worked extensively in Russia and provided evidence to the committee. “The government, and the police in particular, has had no teeth.”
The report painted a picture of years of Russian interference through misinformation spread by traditional media, such as the cable TV channel RT, and through the use of internet bots and trolls. This activity dates back to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, but was never confronted by the country’s political establishment or by an intelligence community with other priorities.
Focused more on clandestine operations, spy agencies were eager to stay away from political campaigns, regarding them as a “hot potato,” according to the report. It was also unclear who in government was in charge of countering the Russian threat to destabilize Britain’s political process. “It has been surprisingly difficult to establish who has responsibility for what,” the report said.
Despite pressing questions, the report said the government had shown little interest in investigating whether the Brexit referendum was Russia’s goal. The government replied that “it had not seen evidence of successful interference in the EU referendum” and ruled out the need for further investigation.
But the committee suggested that the reason no evidence had been discovered was because no one had sought it.
“In response to our request for written evidence at the start of the investigation, MI5 initially provided only six lines of text,” the committee said. If intelligence agencies had conducted a threat assessment before the vote, he added, it was “inconceivable” that they would not have concluded that there was a Russian threat.
Among the report’s most politically salient conclusions could be the campaign of Russian influence during the Scottish independence referendum. Nationalist sentiment is re-emerging in Scotland, in part because Scottish authorities have been considered by the Scottish authorities to have handled the coronavirus pandemic better than the government of England. Based on its past behavior, some experts said, Russia would again attempt to encourage fracturing the UK.
“That obviously has implications for next year’s Scottish elections and referendum polls,” said Bronwen Maddox, director of the Government Institute, a research institute in London. “This is all very, very relevant.”
Concerns about Russian meddling and aggression date back more than a decade to the 2006 death of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former KGB officer and Kremlin critic, who was killed in London using a radioactive poison, Polonium 210. , which is believed to have been administered in a cup of tea. An investigation concluded that his murder “was probably approved” by President Vladimir V. Putin.
In 2018, another former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, and his 33-year-old daughter, Yulia, were found seriously ill at a bank in Salisbury, after a poisoning attack that left them hospitalized for weeks. Britain accused two Russians of using a rare nerve agent to try to kill Mr. Skripal, and expelled 23 Russian diplomats in retaliation.
Although the report was approved by Downing Street in 2019, its publication was delayed before the election that gave Johnson his decisive parliamentary majority. Critics said he had been pledged by donations to his party of wealthy Russians living in Britain and argued that the report was unnecessarily delayed.
After the elections, there was a second delay as Downing Street agreed to the membership of a new Intelligence and Security Committee.
While the publicly available portion of the report uncovered little new material, one expert said he stressed the need to broaden the focus and improve coordination of Britain’s intelligence apparatus.
“We knew most of this,” said Martin Innes, director of Cardiff University’s Crime and Security Investigation Institute, “but people did not join in on the points and saw that a rather dire situation was unfolding.”
“What Russia wants is to be able to play a very powerful policy,” said Professor Innes. “And one of the ways to do this is by destabilizing the UK and some of its close allies to create that room for maneuver.”
