‘Compromised’ Democracy

Review by Bill Doughty

This is an important book for anyone who takes an oath of allegiance promising to uphold and defend the Constitution. It’s also a timely review of foreign and domestic attacks on U.S. democracy over recent decades.

Peter Strzok has taken that oath many times, including in uniform. He is a good writer, and there are a lot of hard truths in “Compromised” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2020).

As a child, much like many military family members, Strzok grew up overseas. He was an eye witness to the Iranian Revolution, and watched his father, an Army veteran and civilian contractor, burn documents before his family had to flee the country in December 1978.

Years later, Strzok followed his father’s path and joined the Army. He served as an artillery officer with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. “There I was embedded in an infantry company in the 502nd Infantry Brigade, which traced its proud lineage to World War II; its D-Day heroics memorialized in a famous picture of General Eisenhower speaking to its paratroopers before they loaded onto airplanes to cross the English Channel to liberate Nazi-occupied France.”

After his service in the Army, Strzok attended Georgetown University with an ROTC scholarship.

“By the time I entered college, I had lived through four revolutions on three continents. Whether in Iran, West Africa, or Haiti, all shared common characteristics, and all taught me lessons about dictators and authoritarians and their hunger to consolidate power and obtain –– or at least convey –– legitimacy. That quest for legitimacy played out in a host of ways. One was the desire to manipulate, control, or discredit media. A relentless distortion of reality numbs a country’s populace to outrage and weakens its ability to discern truth from fiction.

Another way dictators sought to secure power and legitimacy was by co-opting the power of the state –– its military, law enforcement, and judicial systems –– to carry out personal goals and vendettas rather than the nation’s needs.

Still another was by undermining dissent, questioning the validity of opposition and refusing to honor public will, up to and including threatening or preventing the peaceful transfer of power.”

In 1995 Strzok wanted to continue to work in government service. That opportunity came with expanded recruitment for FBI agents after the Oklahoma City bombing. White nationalist Timothy McVeigh murdered 86 people, including many children at a day care center in the Alfred P. Murrah federal building.

Here’s an example of the quality of Strzok’s writing:

“September 11, 2001, irreparably changed our country. It wounded the nation’s collective psyche, and it individually scarred anyone old enough to remember the sight of the Twin Towers collapsing, of the Pentagon’s smashed west face, and of the furrowed earth in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where Flight 77 disintegrated as it plowed into the earth. Thousands dead and missing. Nineteen perpetrators dead. The mastermind, Osama bin Laden, deep in Afghanistan, under the protection of the Taliban. A network of Internet-savvy radical Islamists spread across the globe, deftly manipulating technology to communicate and recruit new adherents. The crime scenes –– the planes and the buildings –– obliterated in a volcanic inferno. Evidence incinerated or crushed into the earth, pulverized into dust, and, in New York, belched out over the now hellish moonscape of lower Manhattan.”

The attacks changed how the FBI and other agencies conducted business, but back then counterintelligence was still conducted with analog systems in a burgeoning digital world.

FBI members learn how an Alternate Light Source as part of the tools and techniques used to collect evidence. (Courtesy Photo)

This book is marked with sublime storytelling, and the stories are true, including the case of Andrey Bezrukov and Yelena Vavilova (“Donald Heathfield” and” Tracey Lee Ann Foley”), Russian “illegals” who were spies the FBI investigated and caught. The fictionalized version of their story was depicted in the show, “The Americans.”

We get perspectives on Russian disinformation, cyber theft, and assaults on U.S. elections as well as an inside look at Operation Crossfire Hurricane, which Strzok named while thinking of The Rolling Stones song “Jumping Jack Flash.”

This book spells out in compelling detail the events known so far at the center of the nation’s devastating corruption case involving President Trump and Russia, hinting more will be revealed in the future about Trump Tower Moscow and other financial ties and arrangements.

McCabe and Strzok

Like former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe’s “The Threat,” this book shows how investigators take their oath to uphold the Constitution seriously –– even in the face of a “nerve-racking” decision to investigate then-President Trump. We get an inside look at the Mueller investigation and how the Mueller Report was misrepresented.

“Although I’ve said it before, I’ll repeat it here as plainly as I can: from McCabe down to the Crossfire team, everyone who had a hand in opening an investigation into the president was acting with a clearheaded purpose of upholding the Constitution and protecting the American people. No one had hoped or wished for this. No one was happy. No one celebrated. No one questioned it. We had avoided it as long as we could. So, as we had so many times before, we gritted our teeth and got on with our work.”

Threats to the Constitution continue in 2021, and the need for vigilance and commitment to core values remains. Strzok’s warnings are relevant even now with President Biden in office, “Because the Russians haven’t gone away,” Strzok warns.

“That is still my fear. I expect that future elections will see the Russians engaging in all the sorts of active measures we saw in 2016, and they’ll be bringing new tactics to the fight as well: Altering voter rolls. Tampering with voting results, in however limited a way, and amplifying the news of that meddling on social media. Hacking into and crashing voting infrastructure. Spreading false stories of disenfranchisement and voting fraud. Releasing kompromat that Russia has spent years collecting and that has the potential to be greatly disruptive.

We’ll find out soon enough.”

Strzok offers a mea culpa for his personal and professional mistakes while a lead FBI agent, and his honesty and perspective are inspiring and ought to be appreciated in context.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation reportedly tried to warn about the Capitol attack of January 6, 2021 by white nationalist insurrectionists. The deadly attack threatened people, the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, and our Constitutional democracy.