The U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference
The Intelligence Community Campus-Bethesda, a vast office complex covered in vertical panels of maroon siding and mirrored glass, sits on a cliff overlooking the Potomac, surrounded by a forty-acre lawn and a tall wrought-iron fence. Roughly three thousand employees of various United States spy agencies work there. About two dozen of them are assigned to the Foreign Malign Influence Center—the command hub of the battle to protect the Presidential election from manipulation by foreign powers. The center, which opened in 2022, is responsible for deciphering, and defeating, surreptitious efforts to rig or tilt the American vote. The October before an election is the busy season.
Jessica Brandt, a forty-year-old newcomer to the intelligence world, is the center’s first director. Before her appointment, last year, she’d spent her career writing research papers at Washington think tanks, most recently on “digital authoritarianism”—the way dictators use technology to control or manipulate people, at home and abroad. At a thirty-seat conference table in the center, we talked about her move from theory to practice. Now that Brandt has access to classified intelligence, she knows as much as anyone about how foreign powers are trying to tamper with American elections. But she has also experienced firsthand how the polarization of U.S. politics is making it harder to protect the fairness and credibility of the vote. These days, a warning from the U.S. intelligence agencies is no longer accepted at face value. It’s immediately spun for partisan advantage.
Intelligence officials use the term “election interference” to describe attacks on the actual mechanics of vote counting. This is now considered an extremely slight risk. The hodgepodge of state voting systems makes a mass hacking impossible, and recent security upgrades have insured the preservation of paper backups for almost every ballot. The more realistic danger is what officials call “malign foreign influence”: hacks and leaks, bots and trolls, hidden payments and targeted attack ads. Adversaries can use these underhanded tactics to twist public opinion, discredit the vote, and sway its outcome. The center’s job is to mitigate the effects of such machinations, and one of its main tools is forewarning voters through public bulletins.
