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Let's put this into context, shall we? According to the Senate, evidence suggested WikiLeaks was "knowingly collaborating with Russian government officials." Stone communicated with WikiLeaks. He also communicated with the GRU via its persona Guccifer 2.0... (Cont'd)
Paul Manafort worked for years with Konstanin Kilimnik, identified by the Senate here as an active Russian intelligence officer (GRU), and someone with whom Manafort shared Trump campaign strategy and polling information.
The GRU, it is absolutely fair to conclude, reduplicated efforts. Whether or not all of its officers/agents were working in concert or separately doesn't matter. In the 30s, "parallel apparatuses" (unknown to one another, until they weren't) worked toward the same objectives.
It really is difficult to come away thinking, if you believe this Senate report, that this was all amateur hour. Or some crude hodgepodge of intelligence Hail Marys. The GRU worked multiple sources and angles. All with the same goal in mind: Help Trump, hurt Clinton.
In the 30s, for instance, it was often the case in which one apparatus or network would try to recruit an agent who had already been recruited by another. In almost all cases, no one knew which Soviet spy agency they were working for.
Whittaker Chambers writes in his memoir that he didn't know he was a Fourth Department (GRU) agent until after he defected (and was so told by other defectors).
This tradecraft appears continuous with the post-Soviet era. Deniss Metsavas, for instance, told me he didn't know he was spying for the GRU (as opposed to SVR or FSB) until Estonian CI caught him and informed him. He spied for Russia for *10 years*. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/06/estonia-russia-deniss-metsavas-spy/592417/
All of which is to say: Stone might not have known what Assange was doing and vice versa. Neither might have known who and what Kilimnik was. All, however, might have unwittingly worked in tandem.
It also works across the different services. NKVD/KGB didn’t necessarily know whom the GRU had recruited in real time. To stay with the Chambers theme for a moment: this is from Klehr and Haynes’ definitive history of VENONA. The quote is an intercepted message to Moscow:
The competition and oneupmanship endures. Closer to our own time, Cosy Bear (SVR) apparently didn’t realize Fancy Bear (GRU) was also rooting around the DNC servers, even though Cosy Bear got there first.
Bringing it back to the 2016 election, there is even evidence to bolster this proposition. E.g. Manafort didn't know what Stone was up to, or how credible his GRU-borne information was, despite Manafort's having worked with a GRU officer for years:
