The Quiet War on the West
DW’s film is a siren: witnesses outline a long, coordinated Russian strategy: money, kompromat and disinformation to fracture Western unity and hollow democratic resolve and our institutions.
Three days after a Berlin journalist told me to brace for it, Deutsche Welle published a film with a question for a punchline:
Spies in the White House? Russian agents in the US1.
It is the sort of title that ought to feel sensational—tabloid bait for a bored afternoon. It doesn’t. The documentary lands like a smoke alarm in a sleeping house, too shrill to ignore, too plausible to dismiss. Its witnesses, former FBI counter-intelligence leads, KGB veterans turned contrarians, prosecutors who followed money trails that never quite end, do not speak like ideologues. They speak like people in possession of a pattern.
That pattern begins long before the tanks rolled toward Kyiv on 24 February 2022, and even before the kompromat folklore of Moscow hotel rooms. It stretches back to the late Cold War, to the KGB’s doctrine of “illegals,” to a checklist of exploitable traits, vanity, greed, sexual risk that might, over time, bend a Western figure of influence into something more useful, not a marionette, exactly, but a predictable shape in a set piece. The documentary’s narrative is not ultimately about one American politician, however theatrically present he is within it. It is about an ecosystem of services, oligarchic finance, intermediaries, and cut-outs built to undermine Western unity by design.
Luke Harding’s earlier reporting2 pulls the lens back further. Through Christopher Steele’s career arc, MI6 Moscow hand, Litvinenko investigator, later the compiler of the dossier that detonated into the American bloodstream in 2016, we trace the re-consolidation of a post-Soviet security state that never truly left the room. There was a regime change, there was not a systems change. The services persisted, so did their reflexes, we are the masters here, we can do what we please.
Thread the DW allegations and Harding’s reporting together, and the outline hardens. This is not a series of coincidences. It is a strategy, elegant in its deployment, ruthless in its ambition executed across decades with a single lodestar fracture, paralyse, hollow, normalise. The ground is already shaking. The question is whether we still have the courage to admit what we are standing on.
Anatomy of the Threat.
The power networks
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