The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

by Ben Rhodes

I was stunned. The Russians had almost certainly intercepted the phone call. That was hardly surprising—in these jobs, you have to assume that any number of governments could be listening in if you’re on a nonsecure phone. What was new was the act of releasing the intercepted call and doing it so brazenly, on social media—the Russian government had even tweeted out a link to the YouTube account. Doing so violated the unspoken understanding among major powers—we collect intelligence on one another, but we use it privately, for our own purposes. A Rubicon had been crossed—the Russians no longer stopped at hacking information; now, triggered by the threat of Ukraine sliding out of their sphere of influence, they were willing to hack information and put it into the public domain. “I don’t know what we can say about this,” I said. “What have we said so far?” “State hasn’t commented.” We ended up noting that the Russians were the ones who had published the video and calling it “a new low in Russian tradecraft.”