Did Obama let Putin off easy?

President Barack Obama’s retaliatory strike against the Russian government hit Washington with an awkward clang on Thursday. Democrats, hungering for payback after the Kremlin’s meddling in the presidential election, cheered the expulsion of 35 diplomats and new sanctions against Russian intelligence agencies and individuals, while the move split Republicans into two camps: Donald Trump’s team and everybody else. On Friday, in one of the more surreal moments of 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin pointedly refrained from hitting back, saying he wouldn’t respond in kind. “Great move,” Trump tweeted. “I always knew he was very smart!”

But — what does Obama’s punishment mean, exactly? How do you, for instance, sanction Russia’s equivalent of the FBI? POLITICO Magazine spoke with Steven L. Hall, who retired from the CIA after three decades immersed in America’s running espionage war with Moscow. He doesn’t exactly think Putin is cowering in fear (“If I were on the Russian side, I’d be thinking I got off pretty light,” he told me) but he outlined what might work if the next administration wanted to get tough on the Kremlin — and just how unlikely he thinks that is.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. Excerpts:

POLITICO Magazine: So first of all, I need to know how you sanction intelligence organizations like the FSB and GRU.

Steven Hall: The answer to that is I really don’t know. The FSB is sort of like the internal Russian intelligence service. So, it’s like the FBI, but it also has some CIA-like components to it, as well, and the GRU is the military intelligence service, sort of similar to our defense intelligence agency, the DIA.

If I read the release from the White House correctly, it seemed to me that what they were doing was sanctioning them financially, which was to say that they were going to seize or freeze these two organizations’ finances in the United States. That, for me, is a much more symbolic and kind of a weak sanction, because it’s sort of like saying we’re going to freeze all of the FBI’s assets in Russia. Well, you know, the FBI doesn’t really have any assets in Russia.

So, my sense is that’s probably simply more of a symbolic thing, and the purpose of doing it would be simply to formally identify those two organizations, the FSB and the GRU, as the primary actors in this whole hacking affair.

Now, they also, as you saw, named individuals that were associated, at least with the GRU. And that also is a pretty weak thing. Again, that’s sort of like saying, “OK, we’re naming FBI Director Comey and all of his assets in Russia are going to be frozen.” Well, I don’t think Comey has any assets in Russia and I would be very surprised if the GRU director had any assets in the United States.

So, once again, this is kind of a symbolic thing more than an actual — you know, “he’s going to be in financial trouble, now” kind of thing.

POLITICO: So do you think they’ll be effective?

Hall: I think what the administration is doing is they’re taking sort of a multipronged approach here, because those aren’t — obviously those aren’t the only things they did. They did a couple of other things, too.

So, to the extent that you need some symbolism, that accomplishes your goal there, and I suppose the administration thought that it was worth doing that. They also named a couple of organizations that … the intelligence leads them to believe were involved in some of the actual hacking as well. And you know, sanctioning those organizations, I would assume, would have somewhat greater impact because if they are, indeed, commercial enterprises, even if they are sponsored or they’re being run by the Russian intelligence services, even if that’s the case, as a commercial entity, they’re going to be a little bit more susceptible, a little bit more vulnerable to some kind of sanction. But I suspect that that was actually more symbolic—a sort of a name-and-shame kind of thing as opposed to a real economic sanction kind of business.

POLITICO: Would it be more effective to go after higher-level people in the Russian government?

Hall: One of the things that would have a much stronger, at least immediate impact, is the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats from the United States. Those people will be named specifically. I can only assume that they will choose people that they feel were somehow involved in some of this hacking. So that actually will have an impact, because what it means is there are going to be 35 Russian officials who are no longer on the streets of the United States doing their jobs. I think they gave them 72 hours to leave the country. So, that’s going to be an immediate impact that the Russians are going to feel.

Ideally, what I would have liked to have seen would have been more senior-level sanctions. There is no doubt in my mind that Vladimir Putin was well aware of this operation. I’m sure he personally approved it, if not was personally involved with it, him being a former intelligence officer himself, and there’s a whole bunch of senior people that are around him who must have also been involved in that. And to me, if you were going to actually send a very strong message and have as much of a strong impact as you can, naming Putin and some of his key lieutenants would have been a stronger way to go about this. But they chose not to do that, obviously.

POLITICO: And you’d do that the same way, right, just by targeting his assets?

Hall: Yeah. And I’m not a lawyer and there’s certain things you can and can’t do, but you know, they did it to the GRU guy. So, if they can do it to the GRU guy, I don’t see that there’s any reason that you can’t do it to Putin and some of his key lieutenants. Just because he’s head of state doesn’t mean you can’t do that.

I think we could do it the same way they sanctioned the individuals they named. Freezing assets would be good — we’d have to find them first, but that could be done. A travel ban would also be a very good tool — simply denying Putin entry into the U.S., UK, Germany, France, etc. — any country that has either been a victim of Russian cyberattacks or fears them. That’s pretty strong stuff, but what’s the downside?

But like I said, I doubt they’ll do it. If they really wanted to, they would have done it this time around. Maybe the White House is afraid sanctions against Putin would simply be reversed in three weeks.

POLITICO: So, you think they didn’t go after Putin or higher-level officials just because of the possible retaliation?

Hall: I don’t actually know why they chose not to. If I had to speculate about that, I would say it’s probably simply because it’s kind of a big deal. I mean, he’s a head of state.

But then again, if I had been in the room where the decisions were being made, I would have said, “Well, yeah, that’s somewhat unprecedented, but it’s also somewhat unprecedented that the Russians tried to impact the outcome of U.S. elections and hack into the various parts of the DNC that they did.” So, perhaps unprecedented begets unprecedented.

POLITICO: Is there any kind of precedent for sanctioning these kinds of things, in your knowledge?

Hall: Well, there is certainly precedent for evicting diplomats on both sides. That happens on a semi-frequent basis. Thirty-five is a pretty big number. Usually, this thing is much smaller, kind of onesies, twosies, but 35 is a pretty big number.

The actual sanctioning of organizations, and specifically intelligence organizations — I spent 30 years in CIA and I can’t think of a time when either side formally sanctioned the other’s intelligence services or even senior officers of the other’s intelligence services. I mean, certainly the governments complain about the intelligence services of the other countries. We complain that the FSB is up to no good and they complain that the CIA is up to no good, but in terms of formal sanctioning like this, I can’t recall such an attempt.

POLITICO: In response, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said there was no proof that Russia was responsible, echoing earlier statements, but is there anything you think that could satisfy the burden of proof?

Hall: I can tell you that it’s sort of weird that both the Kremlin, and specifically the Kremlin spokesperson, who did come out recently say, you know, if the Americans have factual information, then they are to make it public and otherwise “it’s unseemly” — unseemly is an interesting word in Russian, but he’s saying unseemly for the Americans to continue to make these sort of unproven allegations.

It’s just sort of an interesting thing to compare what Trump’s transition has said, because it’s kind of the same thing. One of the Trump transition team [incoming Press Secretary] Sean Spicer said yesterday, “Well, you know, yeah, let’s find out what the facts are here before we” — and then Trump himself yesterday said we just need to put all this stuff behind us.

I can’t really speak to the president-elect’s incoming team, but I can tell you from the Russian side that it’s a very duplicitous statement. They know that the intelligence that we’ve collected on this is sensitive intelligence. So the Russians, I’m sure, would like nothing better than to see the facts that we have, what it is that we’re able to gain through the collections that we did, because it would give them a really good idea of how we got it and then allow them to take defensive measures to make sure that we can’t get that intelligence in the future.

We do need investigative work to see exactly what happened, but we just need to handle the information and the intelligence extremely carefully so we don’t end up shooting ourselves in the foot and not being able to collect in the future.

POLITICO: So do you think there might be more to come from the Obama administration?

Hall: Look, if I’m on the Russian side and I take a look at these sanctions, I’m thinking, “You know, with the exception of the 35 expelled diplomats, we got off pretty light.” Everybody’s going to be like, “Eh, so what?”

But I think they also recognize that in around three weeks’ time, some of this can be reversed. These are all executive orders, right? So, if a new president comes in and says, “OK, well, maybe we’re not going to sanction those people or maybe we’re going to work on lifting the sanctions against these individual GRU officers and maybe we’re just going to try get past this whole thing,” then yeah, they might think they got off pretty well. It all depends on what the new administration is going to do, whether they’re going to hold the line or they’re going to fold on this. Now, whether or not they would have a political fight in the Congress, I don’t know.

POLITICO: Right. So you don’t think Trump would have any problem essentially rejecting the findings of his own intelligence agencies?

Hall: It’s kind of what he’s done already, isn’t it? I can tell you that, for sure, President-Elect Trump has seen the same intelligence that the intelligence community itself has produced for the president which, you know, indicates that, yeah, it was the Russians. And for whatever reason, he’s rejecting that conclusion.

Katelyn Fossett is associate editor at POLITICO Magazine.