MICHAEL KIRK - Let’s start in Dresden … what's
going on for Vladimir Putin? SUSAN GLASSER - … This seems to be the formative
adult moment for Vladimir Putin, and it’s no accident to me that years later, having
become this unlikely president of Russia, Vladimir Putin says the breakup of the Soviet
Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, notwithstanding the geopolitical
catastrophes of the 20th century that included the rise of Nazi Germany, that included Stalinism
inside Russia itself. For him, he experienced that geopolitical
catastrophe in Dresden and in the former East Germany, and in his signature autobiography
First Person, which in many ways is I think probably one of the most insightful documents
we have available about Vladimir Putin, he describes this moment, and he says something
that's always stuck with me: The [Moscow] Center was silent. What should we do? There were no instructions forthcoming. The center, the all-powerful center which
controlled everything, presumably, in the Soviet Union, which told far-flung agents
of the KGB what to do, had nothing to say on this most momentous of occasions. So here they are, burning documents in this
outpost in East Germany and having no idea what they're supposed to do. That's the moment when central authority becomes
untethered for Vladimir Putin, and it's scary, and it’s uncertain, and he seems to want
to restore the authority of the center for evermore, both for himself personally and
clearly as a leader for all Russians. He's looking to restore the center. MICHAEL KIRK - You feel like it’s at that
moment he embarks on something, whether he knows exactly what it is or not. This is a core principle? SUSAN GLASSER - Well, that's right. I mean, for many people there is a defining
moment in their history when all things after that moment refer back to it in some way,
and I think it's fair to say that for Vladimir Putin, the breakup of the Soviet Union and
specifically his experience of it as the center not holding and no longer having anything
to say was the key moment in his personal history that then became written onto the
history he would inscribe on Russia. MICHAEL KIRK - Inside this man is a little
boy. Who was that little boy? What was his life story, and what were the
most important moments that you've heard about that make up the early composite of Vladimir
Putin? SUSAN GLASSER - Well, you know, look, Vladimir
Putin grew up very poor, essentially a street kid in post-World War II traumatized, devastated
Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. But at the time, he was very much a product
of the trauma of World War II. His family had lost a child during the war,
had barely survived themselves, the mother and father. There's an incredible, horrific scene of his
mother being pulled from a pile of corpses. Anyone who grows up with that kind of trauma
inside the household and the city itself, it seems to me, is a product of that in some
key way. Add on to that the poverty and the narrowness
of the life of the courtyard—that's the way it’s referred to in Russian itself,
the kind of childhood that Putin grew up in; that he was basically a child of the courtyard,
is the way that phrase goes. And, you know, he was a tough guy. He was a little kid who took up martial arts,
right, this sort of small guy with much to prove. Seems like it applies to Vladimir Putin. I remember encountering him in person for
the first time and being struck by those two coexisting qualities in Vladimir Putin. One is still that short, angry guy with a
lot to prove. He always seems very tightly wound to me. He always seems as if he would be ready to
let loose with a barrage of fists, as he did as a child, the law of the streets. Many people, I'm sure in all your interviews,
have already quoted Vladimir Putin's own observation that the weak get beaten and that he was determined
not to be weak on the streets of St. Petersburg. Then you combine that with his encounter with
the Soviet popular culture and glorification, deification of the role of the secret police
and spies in Soviet society, and you put those two things together, it seems to me, and you
have a personality profile of Vladimir Putin: A small, angry street kid with a chip on his
shoulder meets the glorification of state-sanctioned violence, of spies, of secret police, and
boom, you have a career trajectory for Vladimir Putin, and you have something that fits his
personality. MICHAEL KIRK - That show, The Shield and the
Sword, that he so talks about having animated his aspirations is a good example of that,
I suppose, and that cultural influence? SUSAN GLASSER - That's what I'm thinking of,
is The Sword and the Shield, which was this television series that basically recounted
the derring-do of Soviet spies in World War II. Of course it was a different portrait of the
secret police, not the Stalin secret police who internally carried out the repressions
of the Soviet era, but the external-facing James Bond, if you will, of the Soviet Union
version of the secret police. By the way, it's important to note, I was
just having this conversation with someone recently, with Strobe Talbott recently, and
he made the very important point that people always talk about Vladimir Putin as a former
KGB spy, but they should more properly look to the personality, training and habits of
him as a former counterintelligence officer. Those are different qualities, different professional
training, different kind of person who gravitates toward that. A counterintelligence officer is somebody
for whom conspiracy theories and enemy within are the job, and rooting those out and carrying
that kind of paranoid "Everyone might actually always be out to get us" view of a spy, rather
than the international man of intrigue, shaken and not stirred with my martini, please. MICHAEL KIRK - That's exactly right. Fabulous. Let's take him to like 800,000 KGB people
are shipwrecked, as David Hoffman likes to say, at the end of the Soviet Union. Some wash ashore in different places. He washes ashore in his hometown, St. Petersburg.
… SUSAN GLASSER - … Vladimir Putin washes
up at the end of the Soviet Union, this catastrophe in his hometown now being renamed St. Petersburg. I think something to note here that's relevant
is his knack for hooking his career to a rising star. In this case, he somehow ends up right by
the side and eventually deputy mayor to a rising young democrat, Anatoly Sobchak, who
becomes the first post-Soviet mayor of the newly renamed St. Petersburg. Putin emerges as his sort of gray right-hand
man in charge of foreign investment, first of all, for a place in complete economic crisis,
total meltdown. Here's Putin who offers to somehow find a
way to bring money into the ailing city’s coffers. It had been starved in Soviet times. It was the second city. It was disliked as the city of the czars. Moscow got all the resources, so it already
was in pretty dire straits. And then, of course, the economic catastrophe
of the early years at the end of the Soviet Union and the beginning of post-Soviet Russia,
it was just in a calamitous situation. People didn't have enough to eat; they didn't
have jobs or industries that made sense anymore. So here's Putin in this crucial role somehow
of interacting with foreigners who could bring desperately needed dollars and investment
into the city. So he has a knack not heretofore seen of hooking
up with the most powerful man in Russia's second city. That's not exactly obscurity and randomness,
right? I mean, this is a pretty important role and
a pretty important place for Russia. I think that's one thing that goes a little
bit against the conventional wisdom about Vladimir Putin, number one. Number two, though, is this sense of dislocation,
and what does he really believe. Is he a democrat or not? We don’t know because he probably doesn't
know at this time. MICHAEL KIRK - Let’s take him to Moscow. Let’s get him at the FSB. … SUSAN GLASSER - So, Putin comes to Moscow. That's still a shadowy part of the story,
it seems to me. But, he undertakes this remarkable rise, basically,
where he goes from obscure provincial official in an important provincial place, but nonetheless
having nothing to do with the center of power in Moscow to running its most important security
agency working in the Kremlin, becoming the heir apparent to the president of Russia. Becoming the prime minister, creating a political
party and then being handed the presidency of Russia on a silver platter on the very
eve of the new millennium. MICHAEL KIRK - There's a moment that happens,
the apartment bombings. … Help me understand the importance of that
moment. SUSAN GLASSER - … From the very beginning
of his political career, and I think it’s a through line all the way to the present,
by the way, with Vladimir Putin, this perceived connection between the enemies within, in
this case given the label of radical Islamic terrorism or Chechen rebels or foreign jihadists
somehow infiltrating Russia, slight variations to the name, but this enemy within has been
a consistent theme that has powered his political rise, that he has turned back to at moments
of political trouble from the beginning. It lies, I think, in this incident in 1999
with these apartment bombings and then the decision to launch the second war in Chechnya
that you really have the origins of Putin as a public figure, as a politician in his
own right. His very identity as a political figure in
Russia is intertwined from the very beginning with this connection that he’s drawn between
needing to keep the state safe, needing to keep citizens safe from the enemy within,
who he has pretty consistently defined as Islamic terrorism. And by the way, that's also been in many ways
one of the shaping doctrines of his foreign policy from the beginning, is to say to the
West, to say to a series of American presidents, the enemy of radical Islam, of terrorism,
of jihadism is something we should make common cause with. At many points in time, he’s been very critical
of his American interlocutors and saying that they, unlike he, did not really understand
the nature of this threat and the brutality required to fight it. MICHAEL KIRK - From what you can tell, especially
in contrast to Boris Yeltsin, how prepared was he to be president of Russia at the time? SUSAN GLASSER - You know, when I would travel
around Russia and talk to people in the first couple years of Vladimir Putin's presidency,
invariably what I encountered were people who were very admiring of Vladimir Putin. They themselves drew a very explicit contrast
between Putin and his predecessor Boris Yeltsin. They would always tell me he is sober; he
is strong; he is normal-seeming; he’s educated; he speaks a foreign language; he seems like
a modern man; he's young. Those were the contrasts that they drew. But what was most amazing was actually, it
did come down to it, a simple word: sober. Vladimir Putin replaced a guy who was a drunk
as the president of Russia, and that was an enormous asset to Putin. MICHAEL KIRK - … So first let’s describe
the Russia-America relationship that he inherits. What's the view from his perspective of America? SUSAN GLASSER - Well, remember, America had
gone from being the main Cold War enemy of the Soviet Union and defined in opposition. Things were almost this duality, right? They were the two competing superpowers. Then the Cold War had ended very abruptly,
suddenly, and, from the point of view of Russia, with America being a not very gracious victor
in this. While President George H. W. Bush went to
some pains and some lengths to try not to dance on the grave, as it were, inevitably
there was a certain amount of chest beating. And while Americans saw themselves as magnanimous
victors and we sent aid and we did this, Russians very much viewed themselves in the 1990s as
this sort of humiliated former superpower and that it was embarrassing to be going through
the indignities of serial economic crises, and having to accept American aid in and of
itself was seen as humiliating in the 1990s, and not something that a great nation like
Russia should be forced to accept. Then later on, the geopolitics of it and the
fact that there were many people, even within Boris Yeltsin's administration, who wanted
Russia not to be subservient to an American way and believed that Russia's national interests
remained very different from America's interests in the world. Already the preconditions were there. But the bottom line was that in the Yeltsin
era, America was a partner and a friend of Russia. Although there were tensions that erupted,
they erupted in the context of an unequal power relationship and of close ties between
the Yeltsin presidency and the Yeltsin administration and the American administrations of both Bush
and Clinton. MICHAEL KIRK - When Yeltsin decides to hand
the presidency to him, does Yeltsin know what he has there, who Putin actually is? … I realize there was a deal cut, supposedly,
where Putin's going to protect Yeltsin. SUSAN GLASSER - Well, right, that's the question. It’s like, you know, was it really a very
transactional thing in which the paramount consideration was making sure that Yeltsin
and his immediate family members would not suffer prosecution? In fact, Peter [Baker] and I recently met
with someone who played a very significant role in that era, and he told us—this was
someone we had not been able to interview for our book about this period when Vladimir
Putin mysteriously ascended, but this was someone who had been very close to the Yeltsin
circle of power and said, “I racked my brain many, many times about this ascension, and
was there something that could have been done to stop Vladimir Putin? What was the real motivation? It was not my
idea.” He recounted going to a meal with Putin at
the behest of those who were sponsoring his rise in Yeltsin's inner circle and in effect,
Putin selling himself on the basis of loyalty and saying that he didn't believe in persecuting
families for the sins of their fathers and those around him, and that this was compelling
to someone who, at the time, clearly was putting his personal interests over understanding
what the long-term implications of bringing in somebody from the security services to
run Russia's civilian government would be. … MICHAEL KIRK - It’s funny, he shows up in
fancy suits and looks like a modern young leader in the world, and I guess we all buy
the optics. SUSAN GLASSER - … We were amazed at how
ideological the disputes were around interpreting Vladimir Putin and trying to understand what
was the nature of this new figure in the Kremlin, because it never seemed quite so complicated
to us. He was very consistent and always struck me
from the very beginning in terms of his views about restoring order to the state. This was rhetoric from the very beginning
that he used about the weakness that he found unacceptable in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin
and his desire also to restore Russia's standing in the world. Those were themes, along with cracking down
on this enemy within, along with attacking Islamic terrorism. These were the themes that Vladimir Putin
talked about in 2000, and they're the themes that he talks about in 2017. MICHAEL KIRK - Absolutely. And the first signs? A lot of people say when he started to take
over the television. What was the first sign for you? SUSAN GLASSER - We arrived basically when
Vladimir Putin was elected president of Russia, and early on, there were little indicators
right from the very beginning, not only in his rhetoric and presentation, but he did
things like bring back the former Soviet anthem. It was very embarrassing to Russians in the
1990s that they didn’t have an anthem to be played when the Olympics were happening. They had been at an impasse, really, over
what was the post-Soviet identity of Russia. In fact, actually Boris Yeltsin even set up
a commission whose job it was was going to be to determine what was the post-Soviet identity. What were the symbols of the new Russia? But really, they couldn’t decide. There was an impasse, a gridlock in society
about what the way forward was. Vladimir Putin came in and said: “Well,
this is unacceptable. A great nation has to have its own symbols. So OK, fine, we're going to have our anthem
back, because it recalled the glories of the Soviet state.” Remember, this was a state-sponsored athletics
program. They were getting so many medals; that was
part of their Cold War competition with America. Fine, we’ll change the words a little bit
if that's unacceptable, but we're going to bring it back. I remember this was a big debate when we arrived:
What would it mean, and was it really sinister, or was it really just fine? It seemed to me that it was, in fact, just
what it seemed, and that as a reporter, as a journalist, especially in a confusing situation
and in a different culture and a new place, that it was important to not be credulous
but to actually listen to what the president of Russia actually said. I maintain to this day that if you go back
and look at what Vladimir Putin said he was going to do in those first few years, he more
or less laid out the path that he was going to be taking, which was to reduce democracy,
to consolidate authority back into the Kremlin. He took steps, some of which were small and
symbolic, like going back to the Soviet-era anthem, and some of which were extremely meaningful,
like taking over the independent media that had arisen, like taking on the independent
power centers of wealthy oligarchs who had obtained money and power, and that he acted
actually quite systematically, and it seems to me, very consistently with what you see
in almost any other society where an authoritarian leader comes in after a period of chaos. His moves are not that different from what
President Erdogan has done in Turkey over the last decade, for example. His moves aren’t that dissimilar from what
Egypt’s leader is trying to do now in the wake of the dislocation and chaos after the
Arab Spring. MICHAEL KIRK - When George W. Bush wins, traditionally
the American president has a new idea; there's a kind of love affair sometimes for a very
brief period of time. How did Putin prepare for George W. Bush,
and how much did he understand him? What did he hope to receive? SUSAN GLASSER - We were there when George
W. Bush was inaugurated as president. It seems lost in hindsight because so much
followed it. But actually George W. Bush had campaigned
as someone who was going to be much more realistic, was the term he used, about our relationship
with Russia, and he was very critical of Bill Clinton for being overly romantic and overly
embracing Boris Yeltsin despite his flaws. And Bush came in, aided by Condoleezza Rice
and other Soviet hawk veterans of his father’s administration. Bush came in, and he said: “Well, no, we're
not going to take that approach. We're not going to personalize our relationship
so much. We're just going to be much more cold-eyed
and talk about American national interests and Russian interests and where we can do
business together.” Obviously that would become something that
his successors would also struggle with. So Bush comes in, and he says we're going
to be more realistic. On the Russian side, there was an attitude
about American politics inherited from the Cold War and the American experts of the Soviet
era who believed that Republicans rather than Democrats were better for Russia. I think they had this view maybe from Henry
Kissinger and Richard Nixon and their policy of detente. That was the conventional wisdom when we came
to Moscow, was OK, this is going to be good for us. In fact, we're going to get along better with
Bush than we did with Clinton, even though Bush, meanwhile, is back here in Washington
criticizing Clinton for being too close to the Russians. We got there, and we were surprised to find
out, actually, the Russians had a different conventional wisdom, which was: “No, we're
going to do much better with the Republicans, because they're not going to lecture us about
our internal affairs, and they're not going to meddle as much as those pesky Democrats
who are always talking about democracy and human rights and things like that. They're going to be realists, and that's good,
because we know how to deal with them, and we made detente with Richard Nixon and Henry
Kissinger, so we're going to get along with this Bush just fine.” In fact, one of the first people that my husband
and I went to interview when we landed as correspondents in Moscow was Mikhail Gorbachev,
the last leader of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev at this point in time also reflected
this view. Yes, there are questions and concerns already
being raised about Vladimir Putin, but we believe that now relations are going to get
even better between the United States and Russia as a result of having this change in
administrations. MICHAEL KIRK - And it certainly looked that
way from the Slovenia. The first meetings—can you take me there,
tell me what happened? SUSAN GLASSER - Well, you know, this was an
off-script moment, and you'll hear that in your next interview with Dan Fried, who was
sitting there and told me recently that he was sitting next to Condoleezza Rice, the
president's chief Russia adviser, at the very moment in the press conference when Bush is
asked about his assessment of Vladimir Putin, and he gives this famous comment about having
gotten a sense of his soul and finding him to be a man that Russia could do business
with. Dan describes it as a gasp. I asked Rice about it recently. She claims it was not so much a gasp as an
inward-looking ugh, and that the reason that it was an ugh and not a gasp was because she
felt responsible, is what she said to me recently when we talked about this. She said that she knew this was a question
that would come up and that she felt she had failed to prepare George W. Bush adequately
to give a better answer than that. But yes, these are smart people, and they
understood this was a comment that would be wrapped around Bush's neck, as it was for
as long as he was president. MICHAEL KIRK - Still. SUSAN GLASSER - Still to this day, yeah. MICHAEL KIRK - Putin, there's the story of
the cross which Peter [Baker] told us, and a lot of people have told us. It also feels like both men had been super-prepped.
… SUSAN GLASSER - … This is an area where
I believe Putin has sort of changed a little bit and that he’s grown accustomed to wearing
this suit. But in his initial years in power, he was
insecure. Of course he was insecure about power. He had come out of nowhere, unheralded and
not in a democratic process where he was tested by the public and shown to be able to handle
the challenges thrown at him. So he was insecure. And what did he fall back on? The fact that he was going to be well briefed,
that he was going to be a professional intelligence officer. To me, that again is the through line between
Putin being so eager when he meets Bush to prove that he is well briefed, that he has
read the file, that he understands that this is a man who’s religious, that he’s going
to find a way to meet him. Same thing when he met Angela Merkel famously
and seemed to be playing off of her fear of dogs with his actions. When he first met American journalists, and
I was sitting in the room at the Kremlin, that was one of my main impressions of him
after a number of months of already covering Putin. This was the first time that we’d actually
encountered him directly in person. I came away, and I thought this is a guy who’s
spent the last few days memorizing his briefing books. I thought he must have a great memory. I thought he must be very eager to show that
he had a great memory. He was like somebody who was new to the exercise
of fielding questions like that. He gave long and extraneous answers to the
questions in part because he seemed so determined to show that he had mastered his brief. MICHAEL KIRK - Was that the press conference
that goes from 9:00 to midnight? SUSAN GLASSER - Yes, exactly. MICHAEL KIRK - Tell me about that. This is his first meeting with the press? SUSAN GLASSER - With the American press. So this is June—I believe it’s June 18,
2000. I recently went back and looked this up. It’s one week after the famous meeting with
George W. Bush at which the soul was looked into. I guess both sides felt at the time, by the
way, that it had gone very well. Rather than thinking of that as this moment
that would go down as an infamous encounter between the American president and the Russian
president, certainly the Russians felt it had been a big success, the meeting with Bush. They followed up on that success by inviting
the American correspondents in Moscow to Vladimir Putin's first-ever press conference with the
American correspondents. We were summoned on I believe it was a Friday
afternoon; you want to go back and look it up, but I believe it was a Friday afternoon
late in the day. We were told to appear in front of the Spassky
[Spasskaya] Clock on the Red Square right next to the Kremlin at a certain time; I believe
it was 5:00. Somehow it was like going—you know, Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory, right? Go stand on this gigantic—like Tiananmen
Square. It’s Red Square. Stand on this gigantic cobblestone expanse. Stand in front of the Spassky Gate, and somehow
at the magic time, the gates would open, and we would be invited within. MICHAEL KIRK - And the Oompa-Loompas would
be there. SUSAN GLASSER - Absolutely. So I went and stood there with my fellow correspondents. I was the bureau chief, along with my husband,
of The Washington Post, and there was The New York Times and Time magazine. There were more correspondents then, by the
way, than there are now as a result of the dramatic transformation in American journalism
that we've seen. So we stood there in front of the Spassky
Gate and waited for the appointed hour. We were ushered in. We went through security. We were taken to the wood-paneled Kremlin
library, a round, circular room, two stories tall, and then we waited, and we waited, and
we waited. Putin is famously behind schedule on his meetings,
kind of Bill Clintonesque in that sense. We waited for what seemed like forever, but
it was at least a couple hours until Putin showed up. But then when he sat down with us, he seemed
to have all the time in the world. We went around this circular table in the
order that we were seated at to offer questions, but Putin gave very long answers. He went around the full circle more than once—I
think it was twice—so everybody got to ask their question, and he was voluminous in his
citing of facts and figures, in his desire to show us his mastery of his briefing book. But my correspondents were—the fellow correspondents,
were a little bit—it was an intimidating setup, right, and we didn't really know very
much what to expect. I realized, as I remember it, about two-thirds
of the way around the table, and I realize with an increasing sense of anxiety that no
one had yet brought up the war in Chechnya, which had really made Putin who he was as
a political figure. No one has brought up the accusations of human
rights abuses in Chechnya or the questions about the war and what effect it was having
on Russian society. This was headline news at the time, and I
realized if none of the other correspondents bring this up, of course we Americans must
show our journalistic colleagues that we weren't just letting it slide and that somebody was
going to have to ask the president of Russia from the KGB about this. Sure enough, by the time it got to me, no
one yet had asked that question, so I felt that I needed to. MICHAEL KIRK - And you said? And you asked? SUSAN GLASSER - Well, I asked Vladimir Putin,
in effect, yes, your modernization of Russia is important, but what about this war in Chechnya? What about the accusations by the American
government and other outside observers of major human rights abuses taking place in
the war in Chechnya? Putin changed dramatically in tone and demeanor
from the previous way he had been interacting with correspondents. He became flushed; he became heated. I wouldn’t
say angry. He had that response in other settings later
on over the next couple of years to journalists. He didn’t, maybe—by the way, because I
was a woman and this is definitely a very macho, very male public culture, so there
weren't a lot of [instances of] Putin interacting with tough questions from women, that might
have been why he didn't threaten me with execution or circumcision as he later did when a French
reporter, by the way, just I think a couple years after that, asked him about Chechnya
and human rights abuses. He actually threatened him with forced circumcision,
and that became a little mini scandal. But he didn't do anything like that, but his
tone and demeanor changed pretty starkly. And if you go back and reread the transcript
of his answer to me on this, as I did recently, it was very strident. He was very tough about saying, “Hey,”
and even a bit snarky, which is kind of the trademark Putin gesture as well, “what do
you want me to do with these people, talk with them about the Bible?” He said, “They're threatening our society,”
in effect, “and what do you want me to do? I'm taking the measures that are necessary
to protect Russia.” It was by far, I thought, the most revealing
encounter that I ever had with Vladimir Putin, and it showed what he really cared about. It took him outside of the comfort zone of
being the calm, hyperrational, analytical KGB guy who’s read briefing books and can
cite facts and figures, and into the emotional realm of where he really was as a leader of
Russia, which is basically tough, violent, willing to use any means to get to the end
that he felt he had been called to accomplish. He believed that his job was the restoration
of the Russian state. He believed that his job was to squash out
and to eliminate these internal threats to the integrity of Russia itself, and he was
going to use any means necessary, and there was no one, whether it was pesky Western human
rights advocates or American journalists, who were going to question the legitimacy
of that. … MICHAEL KIRK - … One of the words that a
lot of people keep using is he wanted respect from Bush, and he wanted respect from America,
and eventually wanted respect from the world. Is that about right? SUSAN GLASSER - … There's no question that
Vladimir Putin wanted respect from the United States and from the world more generally. I think that it animated his foreign policy
thinking from the very beginning, because he understood at the time, perhaps even better
than we did, how limited his possibilities were inside Russia and how he clearly had
a sense of the Russian state as being in a very perilous situation. I imagine that he believed that the once-all-powerful
Kremlin had far fewer resources and far less power over recalcitrant provinces and institutions
of government than he thought when he came into the Kremlin as a newcomer after all. So every day, he’s looking at the reality
in his first year as president of the limits on his power and seeing the weakness of the
Russian state, seeing the weakness of the Russian government, seeing the weakness of
the Russian economy, and yet still desiring to maintain this public facade as a power,
as a superpower. MICHAEL KIRK - … He calls and reaches Condi
Rice on 9/11 offering aid, assistance, consolation, solace, whatever. Certainly by then he thinks he’s buying
goodwill and a relationship with Bush in some way and the United States? SUSAN GLASSER - There's also an element of,
I believe, I told you so. Vladimir Putin, from the very beginning of
his presidency, believed that Russia and other Western nations were under assault from within
by radical Islamic ideology and terrorism that it spawned. Remember that it was the second war in Chechnya
which really solidified his power and his political standing so that Boris Yeltsin was
able to make him president. From the very beginning, he believed that
Bush and other Western leaders were dismissive of the threats of terrorism and specifically
what he called radical Islamic terrorism and the threat that it represented to their societies. So there was this element when 9/11 happened
of: “I told you so. See, now maybe my friend George will understand
what I've been facing here inside Russia and stop criticizing me for it, first of all. But second of all, maybe we can now make common
cause.” And that is the basis on which Putin believed
there could be cooperation between Russia and the United States in the world. It was specifically against this kind of threat. So for him, it wasn’t a surprise at all,
I think, that he would seize that moment and be very proactive, right, because he, first
of all, had already had this very friendly initial encounter with George W. Bush. That's one element of it. And then the second element was “And it
proves the very point that I've been trying to make, that they weren't really listening
to me.” At the time people were like wow, that's kind
of surprising; here's Putin. But in a way, it wasn’t really a surprise,
although there was real internal debate and dissension in Russia and in Putin's inner
circle about how much of a move toward the United States he should make after Sept. 11.
… MICHAEL KIRK - Let’s go to when you observe,
when you can tell that the relationship with the United States and Putin has deteriorated. What's the moment? SUSAN GLASSER - You know, this is a great
question—what is the exact moment when the relationship between Putin and the United
States has started to deteriorate?—and one that I've asked many times. With the benefit of hindsight, where should
we properly locate it? And I'm struck by the fact today here in Washington,
we're sitting here in the Trump era, after all, and this unfolding Russiagate investigation
that most people, I think, don’t date it far enough back. Our memory doesn't extend far enough back. … I was just going back and looking at the
escalating tensions over the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the very hostile reaction of Putin
and his government. I think that was the first real rift in this
moment where it became clear that Bush and his advisers had significantly misread who
Vladimir Putin was. In our book, we quoted several U.S. officials
looking back on this and saying basically we had calculated incorrectly that Vladimir
Putin not only in the end would come around and support our invasion of Iraq, but that
Putin would help us bring along the recalcitrant French and Germans. Think about that. In the context of today, right, obviously
that's like wildly wishful thinking. But how amazing was it that at that moment
in time, serious, smart people in George W. Bush's administration believed that their
relationship and their personal tie was so close with Vladimir Putin that basically our
former adversary and the leader of Russia might be more inclined to go along with us
on this major geopolitical move than our closest allies for basically a century? MICHAEL KIRK - Why did we misread it? SUSAN GLASSER - Well, again, that's a question
that I think everybody who’s studied Russia has been asking themselves for a long time,
especially because we seem to have a habit of serially misreading Vladimir Putin. I've always felt that the Russia conversation
in Washington is often about Washington as much as it is about Russia. I believe that's true today in the sort of
Trump era version of Russiagate, but it certainly was true as well in the early years of Putin
coming to power and that those conversations were often about Washington exigencies as
much as they were about Russian realities. Did Vladimir Putin change so radically from
the guy he was in 2001 to the leader that he is today in 2017? I've never believed so. There is a Russian saying that does apply
here. There are many Russian sayings, but the one
that I often think of is "The appetite grows while eating." It’s fair to say that the Vladimir Putin
of 2001 was not the territorially expansionist, aggressive-on-the-world-stage, assertive Vladimir
Putin of 2014 or of 2017. So his appetite has grown while eating. But I think the consistency is what has always
struck me. So although three different presidents in
a row have come to power basically saying, “Well, he’s a man we can do business with,”
and then being disillusioned in various ways, I still think that the misreading had to do
a lot with American politics. American presidents come in, and usually in
their first couple of years, their foreign policy can be described as do the exact opposite
of what the other guy did. So that explains a lot. I also think that there is obviously an opacity
to the Russian system and an opaqueness that makes it hard to read at various times exactly
what the Kremlin wants to do. Then there's the element of, “Well, wait
a minute; he looked me in the eye, and he lied to me” element. I'm thinking of that in particular in a very
memorable conversation we had with two senior advisers to President Bush late in Putin's
second term in office. He was facing a term limit that was mandated
by the Russian constitution, so already there was a very robust debate and discussion about,
well, how can Vladimir Putin leave power? We don’t see him as a man who’s going
to surrender power. People really already understood that it was
likely that Vladimir Putin was going to find a way somehow to stay in power, and that was
what the whole political conversation was. Yet I was really struck by the fact that we're
quizzing these two top very senior officials of Bush's government who had direct responsibility
over Vladimir Putin and Russia and our policy toward them. “Well, no, he's not going to remain as a
leader. He’s not going to remain in power.” They insisted, and we were pressing and pressing
and pressing. Why? Fundamentally in the end, the answer
that I heard them give to me was, “Well, because he looked me in the eye, and he said
he wasn't going to.” … Of course, Vladimir Putin a few months
later resolved the question, and he did find a way to stay in power by switching places
with Dmitry Medvedev and installing him effectively as a placeholder president, a symbolic president,
while Putin assumed the prime ministership temporarily. MICHAEL KIRK - He lied. SUSAN GLASSER - Yes, he looked us in the eye,
and he lied. MICHAEL KIRK - Help me understand what the
Munich speech was. SUSAN GLASSER - Well, I wasn’t there. Others will probably describe the scene more
vividly to you. But, basically having consolidated power,
having returned to the presidency, Vladimir Putin uses this as his coming out to say Russia
is back on the world stage. We are a superpower again. You're not going to push us around anymore,
and we're going to do what we want. And it was exactly, really, the prelude, you
could say, to the takeover of Crimea, which later occurred, and the military incursions
into Syria, into eastern Ukraine, and into the current very standoffish state of relations
between Russia and the West that we see today. It was around this period that I interviewed
Sergey Lavrov, who is Russia's longest serving foreign minister of the post-Soviet era, and
he had very interesting remarks along this theme of the Munich speech as well, which
at the time, of course, I didn't understand to be as significant as they later were, because
this is right before the invasion of Crimea. I went to see Sergey Lavrov in his office
in Moscow on the seventh floor of this aging Stalin-era skyscraper built to house the Foreign
Ministry, built to mirror, by the way, American institutions. His office was on the seventh floor because
that's where the American secretary of state’s office is, and Sergey Lavrov and Vladimir
Putin are absolute believers in what they call the law of proportionality in international
relations. If America does something like sanction us
or throw out our diplomats, you can be darn sure we're going to do something to respond
to that. So I went to see Lavrov right after—in fact,
they had been furious over what they saw as the American intervention in the Russian elections. This is one of the origins, I think, of Vladimir
Putin's particular disdain and even hatred of Hillary Clinton. He publicly accused her of intervening to
topple him from power. Many people believe that this, Clinton, as
secretary of state, and her criticism of Russian elections and whatever support for democracy
activists that America had given, that Putin's response to Hillary Clinton then was part
of why he seemed determined to make sure that she was not going to become president just
a few years later. So it was in this context. The Russians had just decided to ban all American
adoption of Russian babies, which had been a very prominent thing, and, by the way, classic
Russian move to retaliate for some geopolitical measure by arguably punishing Russian orphans
and making sure that they could not come to awful, decadent American homes. That was part of their view of international
relations. But Lavrov sketched out this view of the world,
and he said: “Russia's back. We're not lying down anymore, and we're going
to see ourselves present in parts of the world where we haven’t been able to be present
in a long time, since the end of the Cold War, because Vladimir Putin has done such
a good job of making Russia great again. The result is that our internal strength means
we're now going to be strong on the world stage.” He said those words to me. It was only a few months later that Russia
surprised the world—and maybe it shouldn’t have—by invading Crimea, taking back over
what it believed to be rightfully its own, and by pursuing an extremely aggressive and
revisionist foreign policy ever since. MICHAEL KIRK - Let’s deal a little bit with
the so-called reset. … SUSAN GLASSER - I always felt from the very
beginning that most ordinary Russians have been able to see much more clearly sometimes
than we here in Washington the nature of the Putin government and power and who’s really
in charge. I don't think that they were under many illusions
that Dmitry Medvedev was going to become this very powerful successor to Vladimir Putin. I think they understood that Putin remained
the power behind the throne. But you could argue that that moment in September
of 2011, there was this United Russia Party conference at which basically Putin and Medvedev
shocked everybody by abruptly announcing this return to power of Putin, that he was going
to take back the presidency and Medvedev was out. It’s a classic example of what I would say
is something both shocking but not surprising. The manner in which they chose to do so seemed
to genuinely shock, upset and offend Russians, or at least the Russian burgeoning middle
class in places like Moscow and St. Petersburg that thought things were going to be going
a little bit differently in modern Russia. They were truly offended, and, of course,
that is what triggered these protests in the street. That is what triggered, really, the most serious
threat to Putin's tenure since he took power 17 years ago. I wouldn't want to dismiss that, because I
do think that that was a real phenomenon and that Russians, while they understood on some
deep level that Putin had retained control of things during the Medvedev years, it still
did have the power to shock and to affect events, the manner in which he chose to re-assume
power. MICHAEL KIRK - Let’s go back a little bit
before the street protests in Moscow and talk about Arab Spring and what he, Putin, draws
from seeing these popular uprisings. Take us to Libya and the Libya policy and
Medvedev's actions in concert with the president? SUSAN GLASSER - Already we saw in Putin's
tenure as president that he was very wary of American interventions in other countries. He was deeply suspicious of this, of course,
because Russia itself, he felt, had been lectured to and patronized and intervened with in the
1990s when it didn't have the ability to fend off this American influence, and he always
was very skeptical of this in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. It was something he spoke out against and
he felt violated a basic principle, in part because regime survival, in this case his
own regime survival, has always been the principal goal of Putin's, as it is the goal of all
authoritarians. That is their number one political priority
at all times. So it stands to reason that he would be offended
by those who take a different view of their role in the world and in the affairs of other
countries. That, I think, was the precursor to and setting
the stage for this incredible disruption of the Arab Spring, which took everybody by surprise. Barack Obama's decision certainly took Russia
by surprise, as it took many people here in Washington that he would so abruptly withdraw
support for Hosni Mubarak in Egypt after decades of him being an American client, and a quite
faithful one, too, at least when it came to the external matters. And boom, Barack Obama basically told him
unceremoniously after a relatively short period of protest in Tahrir Square: “Your time
is up, man. Get off the stage.” That was shocking even to many of Obama's
own advisers. People like Hillary Clinton were surprised
by the manner in which he chose to do that. Of course if Hillary Clinton was surprised
by that moment, Vladimir Putin was surprised by that moment. Then more events continued to unfold. The high-water mark of this Obama administration’s
investment into Dmitry Medvedev arguably came with the Western decision to intervene in
Libya and to take the [United Nations] Security Council vote that would allow basically Western
airpower to support the rebels on the ground. They believed they were doing so on humanitarian
grounds, and the Russians ever since have claimed that they were hoodwinked. We have never received a convincing account,
it seems to me, as to whether there was dissension inside the Russian government at the highest
levels, whether there was a dispute between Medvedev and Putin, whether Medvedev acted
on his own. That remains a very important chapter for
history to uncover. MICHAEL KIRK - We have people tell us stories
about Putin watching the killing and the murder of Qaddafi over and over again. Apparently, it's a very personal moment for
him for obvious reasons. SUSAN GLASSER - Well, especially because this
has always been Vladimir Putin's trigger, if you will, which is the deposing of authoritarian
leaders in other countries. This has always been his red line, if you
will, and his worry and fear that this is how change happens in nondemocratic societies. That is the old saw, especially about Russian
history, is that change happens violently and very rapidly and without prediction. That is the history of the Russian Revolution,
and it is something that all subsequent Russian leaders have been afraid of, is the same fate
that befell the czars. MICHAEL KIRK - After he makes the decision
to become president again and the people hit the streets, as you say, there's a recording
of Hillary talking about unfair elections, and he internalizes all this in some way that
really feels motivational. To those of who look back at what happens
in 2016, he may have already not liked her, but now he has something he makes into a real
reason, I guess. SUSAN GLASSER - Well, that's right. And by the way, I think the mutual dislike
between Vladimir Putin—or I should say I think the dislike between Vladimir Putin and
Hillary Clinton was entirely mutual. I hope you get to interview her for this,
because I think it would be very interesting if you could get her really talking about
her one-on-one experiences with Vladimir Putin. She, like Barack Obama, who also would be
very interesting on this subject, found him to be a very disdainful character, very disrespectful
of them. I've seen her do an interesting imitation
of Vladimir Putin and his sort of mansplaining-meets-manspreading ways of talking, although I think he probably
did the same thing with Barack Obama, too. … MICHAEL KIRK - After he gets elected in 2012,
a lot of people say this is the moment where it’s really now utterly manifest. He’s who he is. He’s autocratic; he’s everything. We started out wondering whether he was going
to become that. He has become that, is that right? SUSAN GLASSER - Well, I think, again, you
asked about moments, like moments when things really took a turn for the worse in terms
of the relationship with the West. But I think you're right to hone in on 2012
and Putin's election, re-election to power for second term as president as a really key
moment. First of all, go back and look at the tape
of that inauguration, and it’s very different than the inauguration they staged for him
after his first election. First of all, his speech is different. He never mentions the word “democracy”
in his second inaugural address. He did in the first. He paid basically at least lip service to
aspects of a democratic system that by four years later he didn't even need to pay lip
service to. He walks in by himself into this gilded hall
in the Kremlin, down this endless red carpet in a way that suggests the crowning of the
old kings and that no one else can put the crown on their head. You had the sense that no one else could inaugurate
Vladimir Putin except he himself. So I think that was his imperial presidency
moment. For me, that was nowhere more clear than in
the first week of September of 2004, and what happened that week was the Beslan massacre
on Sept. 1. That's the first day of school in Russia every
year, and it’s a very big moment. Russian children start school a little bit
later than American children, so they're a little older when they do, but it’s a really
big deal, and their parents take them to school, and they dress up, and they bring things for
the teachers. In this small town in the Caucuses right near
Chechnya, Sept. 1 comes around, and what happens is this school is taken over by these militants,
these Chechen militants, and it’s a horrible scene that reflects the [Dubrovka] Theater
siege in Moscow of the previous year, when 900 people were taken hostage. But now it’s children, and it’s little
children, too. It’s their families and their moms and dads
and their older brothers. The school that's normally meant to only hold
a few hundred people is holding, I think, hundreds and hundreds of people, because they
were all there for the ceremony. It turns into this debacle, and literally
the Russians storm it. There's a firefight; there's bombs go off. The end result is corpses of little children
stacked like firewood in the morgue, which was a horrible incident in and of itself. But the point about Putin that I found always
to be the most resonant is not only did he once again respond with this enormous force
to this horrific incident as he had previously done, because he doesn't feel accountable
to saving lives; he feels accountable to defeating the enemy using whatever means necessary. He flies down. He says nothing during the days that the siege
is unfolding. In fact, even at least initially, Russian
state TV, which he’s now taken over as part of his consolidation of power [and] initially
is basically completely Soviet, shows a movie and doesn’t cut into this horrible incident,
which is obviously a dramatic international piece of news. He flies down in the middle of the night once
the siege is over and the people are in the hospital. He visits somebody—literally I think it
was like 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning; he goes and makes rounds at the hospital, visits people. Then boom, the next morning he announces as
a result of this horrible terrorist act, which they were then claiming at the time had been
done by outside jihadists, but in fact turned out to be people from Chechnya and inside
of Russia, as a result of this horrible terrorist attack, I'm canceling elections for governor
all across Russia. His pretext was to roll out a long-planned,
long-discussed move of canceling democratic elections for governor thousands of miles
away in Siberia because there had been a terrorist attack here in the Caucuses. To me, it was deeply cynical and deeply revealing
about who is Vladimir Putin, now that he feels confident and he feels that he’s consolidated
power enough to take the moves that he didn't make in his first term. … MICHAEL KIRK - He's not a surprise, though,
is he? You can almost predict what he’s going to
do in the moment of a crisis, and maybe he wants you to be able to do that. SUSAN GLASSER - Well, that's exactly right. I don't think that he is a surprise. I don't think that he’s unpredictable. I don't think that he is an emotional—some
people will say, well, he was a surprise if you look at the invasion of Crimea, for example,
and that he did seem to go off on hair trigger because of essentially what he viewed as the
illegitimate revolution in Ukraine. But in general, I think that I've always found
Putin to be pretty clear and consistent in what he wants to do. He can't always accomplish it at the exact
moment, but he made it very clear, he would tolerate no independent centers of power,
and that's what he moved to do over his first few years in power. He made it very clear then in his later tenure
that he wanted to restore Russia's standing in the world, that he was unsatisfied with
basically the post-Soviet boundaries and sphere of influence and that he wished to restore
not necessarily the full Soviet legal empire, but at least the political sphere of influence
that Russia had previously had. He’s been very consistent about that. Again, the tactics at any given moment might
surprise or shock, but the overall strategy I think has been quite consistent. MICHAEL KIRK - … He’s got this strategy,
this so-called Gerasimov strategy. It’s got info war; it’s got cyber; it's
got all kinds of other hard power. Were you witnessing, were you noticing, was
it obvious that this was going on as a result of the mini-color revolutions and then the
other color revolutions, the Estonia, etc.? SUSAN GLASSER - Putin, from the beginning,
his history is intertwined with his desire to restore Russian power in the world. To him, certainly he’s defined it as military
power, but he’s also always been very realistic about the asymmetrical nature of that and
understanding from the beginning that his goal was to make Russia's economy as big as
Portugal’s when he was in his first term in office. He’s not given to wishful thinking or delusions
about what Russian power was. He understood that they had to restore Russian
military power in order to restore Russian greatness and Russia superpower status in
the world. But he also understood the economic realities
at least enough to understand that he couldn’t just spend his way back into parity with the
United States. So I do think that they had a view of asymmetrical
warfare from the very beginning and an opportunistic view of how they would reshape Russian strategy. But, you know, they were very conscious, too. This is Russia's Vietnam generation, in effect,
that has governed alongside Putin, and his age cohort experienced the defeat of the war
in Afghanistan in very similar ways to the ways that the American establishment experienced
Vietnam. We're going to talk about that a lot. But the fact is that the Afghan war was obviously
almost a decade-long trauma for the Soviet Union that arguably contributed to its defeat. Vladimir Putin was a young man just entering
his professional life as a KGB agent during this period, and many of them saw that as
a signal, not only a defeat of the Soviet Union, but a harbinger of the indignities
to come. I think for them, you have to look upon this
refashioning of a Putin-era military in the context of this being Russia's Vietnam generation,
Russia's Afghan generation; the fact then that America was in Afghanistan and was another
superpower going in there after Sept. 11, not heeding, according to the Russians, their
own advice and their own effort to tell them this is a potential quagmire in the making. I was in Moscow in the first couple weeks
after Sept. 11, and I went around, and I talked with Soviet-era generals who I could find
who had been in Afghanistan, including Boris Gromov, who at the time was the governor of
the Moscow region but had been the Soviet commanding general at the time that Gorbachev
pulled the troops out of Afghanistan. There's a very famous picture of Gromov walking
across the Friendship Bridge, it was called, from Afghanistan back into Uzbekistan with
his son, who I believe was an enlisted man in the military. He decided to personally lead the retreat
out of Afghanistan, so he’s walking across the bridge. It's a very famous moment. I went to see him—it must have been Sept.
20, 2001—and it was fascinating. He basically said to me the Americans are
going to go in, and they're going to make these mistakes, and they're never going to
be able to get out. And here we are in 2017, and America has not
gotten out. I often think about that. MICHAEL KIRK - … We find ourselves heading
into Sochi. What was the meaning of Sochi to Vladimir
Putin? SUSAN GLASSER - Sochi was a huge moment for
Vladimir Putin, and it was meant to be his validation and crowning moment of acceptance
on the world stage as sort of the new Russian czar. Literally billions and billions of dollars
were spent on this. Sochi itself is very personally resonant for
Putin. It’s one of his favored destinations, and
Putin was personally identified with those Sochi Winter Olympics. MICHAEL KIRK - And in the midst—it’s just
wonderful. In the midst of this show, inviting everybody,
this other really fundamental, almost existential thing is starting to break out in Ukraine. How does he handle it? SUSAN GLASSER - Well, you know, this revolution
in the Maidan [Independence Square], as they called it in Ukraine, it had been brewing
for some time. Basically really started a couple of months
earlier, before the Olympics, and started to come to a head December and in January
as popular protests grew, and it was clear that Viktor Yanukovych, the Kremlin-leaning
president of Ukraine, did not have a free hand, as it turned out, to take the Kremlin’s
offer over the course of European integration. You had this popular uprising and thousands
and thousands of people taking to public squares. Already, that is probably awakening a sort
of post-traumatic moment for Putin, who has seen this story before, in fact, seen this
very same story before in Ukraine itself several years earlier in the Orange Revolution. They clearly understood that it was a threat,
and it was particularly a challenge to Putin at this moment that he’s the new czar and
that he had decided we've consolidated power at home; now we're going to consolidate and
be more active in the world again. Putin has already said this publicly; Sergey
Lavrov has said this to me, that our intention now is to be much more present in the rest
of the world as a result of our success at making Russia great again internally. One of the things that they were going to
do was to create this new sort of Eurasia Union that somehow would compete with the
European Union and that Putin would be at the head of this and saw this as a way—I
don't know how much sovereignty he saw as being part of that, but saw it as a way of
basically reintegrating Ukraine and potentially Belarus and Russia into this powerful unit
that he believed had been wrongly broken up by the end of the Cold War. This was a direct threat to that. And then, when it also became about toppling
another leader, well, you know, those two things together were obviously designed to
make Putin maximally furious. MICHAEL KIRK - The world reaction—I gather
you can clean this up for us—is a surprise to him. Did he know that taking Crimea and then “little
green men” and all of that was going to be viewed as a no-no? SUSAN GLASSER - You know, that's an interesting
question. I don't know, obviously, what's in Putin's
head. There would be better people to answer that. My own take, for what it’s worth, is that
sure he knew; he didn't care. This is a fundamental issue for Vladimir Putin,
and he’s never let world reaction stop him before. If anything, he may have thought that this
would be akin to what happened in 2008, when he did send troops into Georgia and Westerners
complained. They intervened with him and frantically negotiated
in order to get him to stop and not to go ahead and take Tbilisi, which he certainly
was capable of doing militarily. But in the end, he didn't see it as having
a lasting effect on his ability to project power, so he may have seen this as being a
temporary outrage on the part of the West that would not necessarily interfere with
his long-term goals. But in my view, of course he understood that
people were going to be furious. I think he just thought, well, are they going
to be furious, but can I get away with it and keep doing what I want to do? MICHAEL KIRK - And he did. SUSAN GLASSER - And he did, yeah. MICHAEL KIRK - There are people we've talked
to who argue strongly, Americans in the State Department and the Defense Department who
argued strongly that we should have armed Ukrainians, that we should have protected
them. If not that, we should have done something;
we should have attacked his banks or something, let him know America is not going to put up
with the invasion of a sovereign country by you, sir. SUSAN GLASSER - Look, second-guessing is an
expert sport here in Washington, and it’s hard to know, and it’s easy to be a journalist. We get to criticize on the outside; we don’t
have to decide what to do. But I will say that I remember very vividly
the debates here in Washington around that moment of time, and the phrase that I remember
that I found very frustrating then, and obviously it was wishful thinking, was "off-ramps." We've got to give Putin some off-ramps. Our policy is about giving him off-ramps,
OK, de-escalating the crisis by giving him a way out of it that's face-saving. Vladimir Putin, in my view, was never interested
in Barack Obama's off-ramps, and he was never going to take a face-saving way out of this
crisis, because, in fact, he viewed it as accomplishing something he very much wanted
to accomplish, which was to take back over Crimea, which he viewed, and many Russians
viewed, as part of the territory that had been wrongly given away. Now, the fact that it was illegal, the fact
that Russia had guaranteed Ukraine's borders, was immaterial to the calculation from Putin's
point of view. But I always felt that regardless of what
else could have been done by the United States that there was a strong element of wishful
thinking in this formulation that I kept hearing from policymakers in the Obama administration,
including at very senior levels, that their policy was designed to create off-ramps. To me, they were off-ramps that Putin was
not interested in driving down. MICHAEL KIRK - Let’s talk a little about
the spring of 2016 and the summer of 2016 and the hacking of the American political
process. It's happening in ’15, and we kind of know
that Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear are getting into the system. The FBI tries to call the DNC, to no avail. They can't get through or whatever it is. All that happens. And in the process, many of us who first hear
about it then say: “Why is Russia here doing this? Of all the things they could do, might
do and that we need to fear, why this? Why then?” SUSAN GLASSER - I think by then we already
saw it as part of the playbook of the Kremlin. Those who paid attention to Russia had noticed,
of course, that Russia was already doing this with its neighbors in Europe and was running
these plays of intervention with varying degrees of success in many of the still-fragile emerging
democracies of Eastern and Central Europe. I've always felt that that was right out of
the playbook that the Soviet Union used in the immediate aftermath of World War II. If you go and read Anne Applebaum’s book
The Iron Curtain about that period of time after World War II, when it wasn't yet clear
exactly what system of government there would be in Poland or in Czechoslovakia or in Hungary,
that you basically saw the Kremlin doing a lot of the things that it has then been doing
in the last few years. Now, of course, the means are more sophisticated,
and we have technologies that arguably make it easier to intervene in other countries
like that. But installing puppet governments, manipulating
what seem to be open elections in order to achieve their ends, using the system and taking
it over before people were even aware of what was going on—so the fact that there was
this hacking by Russia, we had already come to accept that. How many stories did you read and tune out
about not just Russia hacking but Chinese hacking of this, that and the other thing? North Korean hacking. This had now become—I think people had wrongly
started to view this as some sort of a nuisance of this magical new Internet era rather than
understanding it as a very significant tool of state actors, and potentially malevolent
state actors. MICHAEL KIRK - Was it your assumption last
summer that, well, maybe if they weaponize it, chaos, disruption, but really not designed
to get Trump elected, just designed to inflict a little chaos and disruption, maybe nick
Hillary a little bit? Does that seem about right in terms of where
you were before all the announcements had been made of what it was in September and
October? SUSAN GLASSER - I was the editor of Politico
during this period of time, but also had this Russia background, which is not really the
standard mix of interests in Washington up until then. Now there's this convergence between Russia
and politics, but mostly people would be in one lane or the other. So that was unusual. For me, I was focused probably earlier than
other people in American politics around Donald Trump and his bizarre affinity for Putin and
his repeated comments that struck really odd notes during the primary campaign about Russia. That was always something that seemed very
odd to me. I remember I went to Donald Trump's now famous,
or infamous, April 2016 foreign policy speech here at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. It was the first time I went to see him in
person, but I particularly wanted to see him in person talking about foreign policy. So I went to that. That was held by the [Center for the] National
Interest. I was struck at the time noticing Ambassador
[Sergey] Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, sitting in the front row. He’s someone I had known back in Moscow. He was the deputy foreign minister when Peter
[Baker] and I were in Moscow as correspondents, his portfolio as deputy foreign minister at
the time was overseeing kind of the United States and the Western alliance. So, in fact, we were familiar with him. He was not seen at that time, by the way,
as a particular hardliner of any sort. So when he came here to Washington as the
ambassador, we met him, and right away—and in fact we met him at a dinner, a welcome
dinner that I remember vividly, at the home of Dimitri Simes, who is the head of the Center
for [the] National Interest and was the host for Donald Trump's foreign policy speech. I was very aware in a way that probably a
lot of the other people weren't just because of our background in Russia. That always seemed really weird to me, and
then that was reinforced by seeing Kislyak sitting there. That's not the normal kind of event, by the
way, where you would have a lot of foreign dignitaries attending. I think there was one or two other ambassadors
who did come to that event. But to me, I saw that as part of this interesting
nexus that I already knew was forming between Donald Trump and his campaign and the Russian
ambassador and the Center for [the] National Interest, whose head, Dimitri Simes, was long
perceived to be very close to the Russians. MICHAEL KIRK - Why does Trump like Putin?
What does he see? SUSAN GLASSER - You know, I asked Bob Corker
that, who’s the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after he was interviewed
by Trump for secretary of state, a job he did not get, by the way, because he told me
he disagreed with Donald Trump about every single issue in the world except for one. He wouldn’t tell me what the one issue was. But he came away from those interactions with
Trump believing that no matter how much they denied it, it really was an affinity for strongmen
and an admiration for that. I think that is as good of an explanation
as I've gotten from people who directly talked with Donald Trump about Vladimir Putin. MICHAEL KIRK - Trump, when the Russia connection
is first articulated, he says something pretty outrageous about it, do you remember, about
he wishes the FBI or somebody, the investigating agencies, would investigate or get the Russians
to—? SUSAN GLASSER - No, because he’s asked about
Putin before that, and that’s when he says that he was a better leader than Barack Obama,
which, by the way, putting aside this investigation stuff, let's stop for a minute and remember
it's a pretty shocking thing when a Republican presidential candidate who then becomes the
front-running presidential candidate says the authoritarian leader of Russia is a better
leader than Barack Obama, the two-term president of the United States. That was already head-popping. Now we're in the realm of conspiracies and
investigations and things like that now, so I think some of the shock of that as a substantive
point of view to be expressed in American politics, regardless of hacking or any nefarious
plot, is a pretty shocking thing to say. And of course that's one of the things about
the Trump era, right, is that it’s devalued the shock property of things that otherwise
should be shocking in American politics. He had already said, I believe, that Vladimir
Putin was a better leader than Barack Obama, and then he does this amazing thing, and he
basically seems to invite Putin and his people to intervene some more in the American election:
“Hey, this DNC hack has occurred. Can you get me some more emails, please?” MICHAEL KIRK - It raises a question, August,
September, why the Obama administration didn’t at least tell us more—I understand the intelligence
agencies were also being a little coy about what they knew and what they didn't know,
apparently—and why we didn't counterattack in some way, whether we knew about it or not
as the American people? What do you hear when you talk to people about
this? SUSAN GLASSER - Well, I'm glad you're honing
in on that question. I also have felt for a while that this is
a really significant—and we don't know the facts yet; it seems to me that they’ve only
given us a personal explanation. What I think we can say is that in that period
of the summer of 2016, July, August, September, there was a robust internal debate in the
Obama administration at the highest levels over what had happened, what was done by the
Russians, what the motivation of it was, how serious of a threat it was, and a real genuine
fight and genuine disagreement over both how aggressively to respond to the Russians in
private and then in public, whether they should go public with a more detailed accounting
of the hacking. The record is clear that they were fighting
over this. It wasn't just like everybody agreed with
the policy that they came up with, which was basically to kind of try to minimize it until
forced to acknowledge it publicly and attribute it on Oct. 7. They were clearly fighting over it, and Clinton's
backers were strongly pushing them both inside the administration and out. But so were Russia policy people, and I believe
Victoria Nuland and [then-Special Assistant to the President for Russia and Central Asia]
Celeste Wallander were advocating for a stronger response and felt that this was a major move
on the part of the Russians, and that the Obama administration, for what seemed to be
political reasons, was not inclined to do more. It seems like Susan Rice, the national security
adviser, was on the opposite side and on the side of people who did not want to more aggressively
and publicly do something about it. Now, there are very real political calculations
toward that decision as well, and ultimately, the Obama administration could have really
backfired had they spoken out more publicly about this hacking. I don’t mean to minimize that, but just
to characterize what we didn't understand at the time, which there was clearly a major
internal debate in the Obama White House over how to respond to this. … MICHAEL KIRK - When Trump wins, right away,
as we know, based on investigations and other things we're about to know, I hope, lot of
back channels are trying to be set up, lot of phone calls, lot of interactions. [Gen. Michael] Flynn, of course, is in the
middle of it. [Jared] Kushner is in the middle of it. Others, [then-Sen. Jeff] Sessions may be in
the middle of it. We’ll know more and more. Is that unusual, that that kind of—in your
political experience—that that kind of action takes place right after a presidential election,
especially with Russia? SUSAN GLASSER - I think it’s extremely unusual
that there would have been this level of contacts and discussion and back-and-forth between
the new president and the new members of his team and a foreign government, especially
one that's just been accused by all of our intelligence agencies of intervening in our
election. That is unprecedented. … MICHAEL KIRK - You were there at the very
beginning of Putin, and you were there at the very beginning of Trump. Can you compare the two? SUSAN GLASSER - You know, on the surface Vladimir
Putin and Donald Trump are very different characters. Putin is controlled; he’s disciplined; he’s
well-briefed. He is a man of facts and figures. And again, he’s tightly wound, and he’s
very disciplined. Donald Trump, take one look at him. He's not disciplined. He’s the man who tweets at 3:00 in the morning. He goes on gut and on instinct. He doesn't read anything, according to those
who are most familiar with him, and he certainly is not given to spouting precisely accurate
facts and figures. But despite those surface dissimilarities,
you know, they have certain instincts that seem to me to be in common with each other,
and one of those is a desire to put the power of the individual over the power of institutions. Neither one is what you would call a small
“d” democrat by nature and inclination. Both are authoritarian-minded in a sense that
they wish to have policies and power identified with them personally. I think that that seems to be what Donald
Trump admires about other societies that have authoritarian leaders, is their strength and
their power and their control. He obviously is now at the helm of a very
different system than the system that existed in Russia when Putin came to power. I was there in Moscow in those first few years
when he [Putin] was consolidating authority back in the Kremlin. He had the ability to take over the independent
media, to challenge independent actors like wealthy businessmen who had grown used to
being free from political interference. He had the ability to cancel elections for
governor all across Russia's 89 provinces. Donald Trump can't sit in the White House
and wave a magic wand and do those things that Vladimir Putin did. But some of his instincts, some of his desires
to confront institutions that challenge him and to push back against it I think are very
similar, and they to me suggest that there is a commonality in inclination and mindset
even if the ability to act on it is very different in our system. MICHAEL KIRK - Think Putin is at war with
America? SUSAN GLASSER - I think Putin's goal remains
what it has been from the very beginning, which is to enhance the greatness and power
of the Russian state however he can, and that has often—not just in Putin's time—been
defined in opposition to the United States. But it’s not so much about conflict I think
to me as his definition of winning. You know, what's your opponent view as winning? I think Vladimir Putin views as winning winning
for Russia and winning as in the Russian state not disintegrating; winning as in his regime
and his Kremlin authority surviving; winning as in restoring as much of the power, prestige
and authority that Russia used to have when it was the Soviet Union as he can. Does that come at America's expense? Potentially. Does it mean war with America? No, because that might mean the blowing up
of all that Putin has accomplished. And I think in the end, he wants to be the
guy who accomplished those things, not the guy who potentially destroyed the world with
America. Let’s hope.
