Chapter III
McCain had chosen Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate for the presidency. That pick was quite a surprise and rapidly very controversial. Palin was a character indeed. She only had to open her mouth and all sorts of drama followed. Speaking in Tallahassee during a campaign stop through Florida and the Deep South, Palin commented on the deaths in Moscow the morning after the bloody end to the protests there. As was the case with many things she spoke of during her time running for the vice presidency, Palin provided red meat for the base and fodder for the critics.
“There’re killing people on the streets of Moscow and… erm… you know… someone should see to it that it is stopped.”
The latter part of such a statement was something taken rather a lot out of context later. Palin wasn’t calling for the United States to stop protesters from dying in Russia’s capital. She certainly wasn’t stating that a McCain-Palin – stressing on the second name there in some sort of joint presidency – Administration would do anything to have that stopped. No, it wasn’t a case of anything like that. She just responded to a reporter’s question with the first thing that popped into her head. The campaign with her on the ticket was already all over the place. McCain had temporarily suspended his campaigning (Palin hadn’t) last month to return to the Senate to take part in organising the multi-billion dollar bail-out for Wall Street as the financial crisis following the collapse of Lehman Brothers got far, far worse. The momentum in the race for the presidency was with Obama. Palin would say many other things in the weeks following what she said in Tallahassee and was said to be ‘going rogue’ with how she campaigned: most certainly not on script as she was supposed to be.
The furore around the phase ‘someone should see to it that it is stopped’ would be in the main forgotten by Palin’s domestic audience but it was something remembered in Moscow. They didn’t like it at all. The suggestion made in elements of the American media that Palin was saying that the United States should act to enforce its values on Russia was taken to heart in the Kremlin. All expectation was the Obama-Biden would beat McCain-Palin, which, of course, turned out to be wholly correct, but those words just wouldn’t be forgotten about. Here was the United States once again acting with supreme arrogance when it came to internal Russian matters.
In the grand scheme of things, Palin’s remarks meant nothing though. She was a vice presidential candidate for a campaign soon to go down in flames. The Kremlin was elsewhere engaged in a war of words with those in the United States who did matter: that being the Bush Administration. Bush and Rice both made official public statements following the protests in Moscow and the deaths there which carried more weight. The criticism was more precise and phrased better in diplomatic terms.
Moscow reacted with anger here too. Their own foreign minister, ambassador to the United States and UN ambassador all criticised American ‘interference’ into internal domestic affairs of Russia. The existing sanctions were once again denounced too. One of the talking heads on Russia Today then referred to Bush as “nothing but a dead man walking”. Like Palin’s remark, there was a context missed here. There was also a translation issue. Moreover, this political commentator sitting in a studio in Moscow wasn’t an official voice of the Russian Government. When he said such a thing, he meant this in a political fashion. Bush was practically a lame-duck now with the election less than a month away and his term of office ending in January. Follow up remarks about dealing with either McCain or Obama – the commentator was hedging his bets – gave the context to that phrase.
As can be imagined, when replayed for American audiences in the US media, Bush being deemed as ‘a dead man walking’ didn’t go down well. It was treated as some sort of threat in some quarters but elsewhere as a direct disrespect to the Office of the Presidency. Bush’s opponents and fiercest critics reacted harshly to such a remark. Obama called it ‘outrageous’; liberal media outlets chose this as a time to stand by their president in the face of such open hostility from abroad. However, this came at the same time though as an election was ongoing nationwide and there were already other moves being made related to the ongoing situation with US-Russia relations. There was a strategy within the Democratic presidential campaign staff to tie McCain to Bush when it came to extending the president’s unpopularity to the Republican presidential contender. Support for the Office of the Presidency didn’t come from such behind-the-scenes figures who were playing dirty. Someone senior in the Obama campaign camp got their hands on a transcript of a recording made in the White House’s Situation Room back in early August. It would be a federal crime to have possession of such a thing and no one wanted to be caught red-handed when exposing the contents. It was handed off to an outside party, entirely separate from Obama’s campaign. He himself knew nothing of the whole matter.
The Roki Tunnel Memo was leaked on the internet yet soon picked up on the major news networks. It covered speculative talk during the Russo-Georgian War about how if, only if, American military force was to be used to aid Georgia during that conflict, that could be thus done. Bombing the aforementioned transport link under the Caucasus Mountains was one of those and the part which was discussed more than anything else, especially as it was suggested that it could be done by American stealth aircraft and then denied as something conducted by the United States in the manner of a plausible deniability. The Bush Administration hadn’t moved to the planning stage nor started making any preparations to do this. It was just one of many options put on the table. The intention behind the leak was all about sabotaging McCain by suggesting that electing him would see the American public vote for ‘four more years of Bush’s militaristic interventionism’. That didn’t work. The Roki Tunnel Memo had no real effect with regards to the political situation in the United States. Its leakers were actively sought by the FBI while both the McCain & Obama campaigns (each with their own reasons) sought to have attention focused elsewhere due to it helping neither once it played out like it did.
The intelligence value of this leaked documentation was something of great use for Russia’s intelligence agencies as it was posted on the internet completely unsanitised. All those letters and numbers which looked random to the human eye and the codewords that were too all included were of interest to organisations such as the GRU and the SVR. Its leakers thought nothing of such a thing as they had their own motives as their sole thinking. That issue aside, the clear evidence that there was that the United States had been plotting such a thing as bombing the Roki Tunnel when used by Russian forces and denying that when done went down as could be expected in the Kremlin. Palin’s remarks in Tallahassee were nothing in comparison to the contents of this leak. Here was confirmation of the hostile intent and the duplicity of the United States for them to see. There was no need for paranoia: here was the evidence.
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