© REUTERS/Erin Scott
Former National Security Council Fiona Hill said Russia likely didn't have blackmail info on former President Donald Trump.
Fiona Hill's "Russian-expert" testimony Thursday and her
deposition on Oct. 14 to the impeachment inquiry showed that her antennae are acutely tuned to what Russian intelligence services may be up to but, sadly, also displayed a striking naiveté about the machinations of U.S. intelligence.
Hill's education on Russia came at the knee of the late Professor Richard Pipes, her Harvard mentor and archdeacon of Russophobia. I do not dispute her sincerity in attributing all manner of evil to what President Ronald Reagan called the "Evil Empire."
But, like so many other glib "Russia experts" with access to Establishment media, she seems three decades out of date.
I have been studying the U.S.S.R. and Russia for twice as long as Hill, was chief of CIA's Soviet Foreign Policy Branch during the 1970s, and watched the "Evil Empire" fall apart.
She seems to have missed the falling apart part.
Selective Suspicion
Are the Russian intelligence services still very active? Of course.
But there is no evidence — other than Hill's bias — for her extraordinary claim that they were behind the infamous "Steele Dossier," for example, or that they were the prime mover of Ukraine-gate in an attempt to shift the blame for Russian "meddling" in the 2016 U.S. election onto Ukraine. In recent weeks U.S. intelligence officials were spreading this same tale,
lapped up and faithfully reported Friday by
The New York Times.
Hill has been conditioned to believe Russian President Vladimir Putin and especially his security services are capable of anything, and thus sees a Russian under every rock — as we used to say of smart know-nothings like former CIA Director William Casey and the malleable "Soviet experts" who bubbled up to the top during his reign (1981-1987). Recall that at the very first meeting of Reagan's cabinet, Casey
openly told the president and other cabinet officials: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."
Were Casey still alive, he would be very pleased and proud of Hill's performance.
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