A CIA Officer's Perspective, with Sean Wiswesser [Ep2.55]

MH370 disappeared during the opening salvos of Russia's hybrid warfare campaign against the democratic West. What was Putin hoping to achieve through "new generation warfare?"

Someone took MH370. But who, and why? In today’s episode of Finding MH370, we delve into the motivation and methodology of one potential culprit with someone who has a rare perspective on the the subject: recently retired CIA officer Sean Wiswesser, who spent decades studying and applying the lessons of espionage and spy tradecraft. He also has a new book out, Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War.

I want to be clear up front: We’re not discussing what the CIA thinks happened to MH370. That is not his bailiwick, and frankly, I don’t think the US intelligence community has any idea what happened to the plane. What we’re going to talk about is the strategic environment in which the disappearance took place. That will help us understand the number one question that people always ask me: Why was this plane taken? What was the motive?

The most widely held assumption, of course, has long been that the captain must have taken the plane. In the previous three episodes, we saw how the three pillars underlying that main theory turn out to be rickety. The implication — that the captain wasn’t the culprit — leaves us with only one plausible alternative explanation, that the hijacking was carried out by extremely ruthless and sophisticated outside actors. Namely, Russia.

But why would Russia want to do such a thing?

This is where Sean Wiswesser’s expertise comes in. He has studied their motives, and he has studied their mindset and their methodologies. Wiswesser’s main takeaway is that Putin has been waging a one-sided war against Western free-market societies for the better part to two decades, and he’s been largely able to get away with it because his main enemy has been distracted by other conflicts and threats, including the War on Terror and the more recent war in Iran.

But there is also a cultural element at play. Wiswesser makes the point in his book that the concept of conspiracy looks very different in Russia and the West. In Russia, “konspiratsiya” (конспирация) does not have the negative connotations that it does in English; it means more something like “espionage tradecraft.” It would be a compliment to say that someone has good konspiratsiya, whereas in the English-speaking world it’s considered absurd and delusional to think that conspiracies are afoot. What we have, then, is a culture that respects and admires conspiracy using it as a tool against a culture that sees acknowledging conspiracy as a sign of mental weakness and so refuses to acknowledge it.

Seems like a bad arrangement…