Vladimir Putin will aim his interference machine at the November midterms, former CIA station chief Sean Wiswesser warned on Narativ Live Wednesday — exactly 90 days before the vote, with the operation already running at a scale no troll farm ever reached. Election interference “is a primary tactic of the Russian intelligence services,” Wiswesser said. “It has been for 100 years.” He ran CIA stations against that machine across 28 years, five joint-duty assignments and a war zone, and his book — Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War, back at number one on Amazon’s Russia list — is a manual of the other side’s methods. For an hour, on the Narativ special report T Minus 90, he opened it.
Wiswesser brought the case file to match. A flash mob formed in a small Midwestern town, two crowds screaming across a street — one swearing nobody would take its guns, the other swearing nobody would hand guns to schoolchildren. Police pushed in and asked each side for its leader. Neither had one. The FBI pulled the thread and found the summons hadn’t come from either side — or from anywhere in America. “It was our adversaries playing us for suckers,” Wiswesser said.
The method has a name: active measures — the Kremlin now prefers “measures of support.” Wiswesser reached for defector Vasili Mitrokhin’s KGB archive to define it: intelligence as politics by other means. The SVR runs an entire directorate for it — thousands of officers, he said, whose sole job is meddling in the United States and its allies. The FSB, Putin’s alma mater, fields roughly 400,000 people and a hacking unit, Center 16, that worked the 2016 and 2020 elections. The GRU’s Fancy Bear cracked the DNC’s servers — while the FSB, hacking the same building, nearly tripped over them. “They don’t coordinate,” Wiswesser said. “They’re all after the United States.” The services conscript criminal hackers to fill the gaps: hack for us or go to the Gulag.
What changed since 2016 is the engine. “What happened 10 years ago that was done by human actors, now cognitive AI can do,” Wiswesser said. “The amplification is 10,000 or even 100,000-fold.” Prigozhin’s troll farm needed people; the 2026 version is machine-enabled, and it feeds on the same fuel — the rawest wound in any democracy, amplified until neighbors hate each other. The Venezuelan voting-machine story, the one Attorney General Bill Barr called “bullshit” — his word — is the template: find a thread of grievance, spin it, repeat it until Americans stop trusting their own elections.
Zev pushed where the guest could not go. Wiswesser, who still contracts for the Defense Department, held the professional line — the SSCI report Marco Rubio signed found Moscow meddled against democracy itself, and any benefit to a candidate “is incidental to the larger goal.” Zev answered with his own read: one American party trends toward autocracy, the other toward democracy, and a power whose stated target is democracy knows exactly which outcome serves it. The guest didn’t take the bait, and didn’t need to. Hungary made his point for him: Moscow ran more intelligence officers in Budapest under Viktor Orbán than ever before. “They didn’t trust Orbán either,” Wiswesser said. “They don’t have any allies.”
Zev has met the secret war himself, and told the story on air: a woman, plainly Russian and plainly out of place, cornered him at a Tony Awards after-party, claimed Oliver Stone wanted to work with him, and offered to fund his journalism. Somebody had tracked a reporter to a closed room full of people who sing for a living.
Wiswesser’s prescription for the drones now probing Romania and the cables cut on the Baltic seabed is the one Kennedy used on Khrushchev: a deterrent with consequences. “Shoot down those drones,” he said. “Right now we have an empty deterrent.” The night before he spoke, a Russian strike killed 17 people around Kyiv — while American interceptors sat undelivered. Ukraine, which he rates among the world’s top five intelligence services, keeps teaching the lesson anyway: Operation Spiderweb’s drones crawled out of trailers and burned Russia’s strategic bombers where they parked. Britain handed America radar in 1940, he noted. Kyiv is offering the drone.
Ninety days out, the target is not a candidate. It is the thing on the ballot underneath every name. Wiswesser spent a career meeting Russians who risked their lives for the CIA because they believed America was the city on the hill. The people trying to burn the city down are counting on Americans to strike the match themselves.
Thank you Robin Payes, Skutt Hope, Farmers AGAINST trump., Jami, Kim G, and many others for tuning into my live video with Sean Wiswesser! Join me for my next live video in the app.
