Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference

David Shimer — a Yale-educated historian who later served on the National Security Council as Director for Russian Affairs — traces a century of covert electoral interference, from Soviet KGB operations in Western Europe through CIA interventions in Italian and Chilean elections to the Russian operation against the 2016 US presidential campaign. The research is exceptional: Shimer conducted more than 130 interviews with senior officials from the CIA, NSA, FBI, State Department, and their foreign counterparts, producing the most authoritative account of electoral interference available.

Rigged matters for practitioners because it establishes electoral interference as a consistent, bipartisan feature of great power competition rather than a novel development requiring entirely new frameworks. The techniques have evolved — from cash payments and planted newspaper stories to social media manipulation and cyber operations — but the underlying logic has remained constant: undermine adversaries by corrupting their democratic processes. Understanding this historical continuity is essential for accurate threat assessment and for designing effective institutional responses. The New York Times called it "extraordinary and gripping"; it is also one of the most thoroughly sourced books in the field.