THE NEW POLITICAL warfare (a term coined by the United States in the early Cold War for what it was doing in Europe to combat communism) was partly played out on social media but attempts to disrupt the West took place in the real world as well. If the West was divided and off-balance, Russia had more room to maneuver to pursue its own interests. The Kremlin began to step up its engagement with extremist groups left and right across Europe. Sometimes they would be pro-Russian, but often they were simply disruptive of the pro-EU and pro-NATO political consensus. On the right, this fit with Putin’s move to a more nationalist, orthodox worldview that focused on protecting traditional values against their erosion by Western liberalism. On the left, it focused more on anti-Americanism. Oligarchs sometimes paid for flights of European politicians to go to Russia or offered them business opportunities. Russia has invested heavily in long-term influence agents, the head of the Estonian intelligence service has said. It looked for people on the margins of political life and offered them money and media support. These may well be people either spotted by old illegals years ago or run by them now. Not all of these investments paid off but enough did to ensure there are people in national parliaments pushing a pro-Russian agenda. Such influence—as opposed to traditional espionage—exists in a gray area and can be hard to define and to challenge.
IT WAS ONLY looking back after 2016 that US intelligence officials would understand the extent of Russian ambition and put all the pieces together. Despite the presence of sources in Moscow, Western spies lacked the appreciation of Russian intentions, especially since operations were not always run out of the traditional institutions that were the targets of Western espionage. Spy-catchers talk of “collection bias,” in which they focus on things that are secret or people stealing secrets, but this often leads to them not spotting influence operations. The dilemma posed by the 2010 illegals foreshadowed what was to come. If your opponent was not stealing secrets, were they really an intelligence threat? The point about Russian influence operations was that they were not about “secrets”—they were about influence. This was how Russian hybrid warfare worked. The wariness of spy-catchers getting involved in politics also made them sometimes reluctant to look too closely into issues like party funding or contacts of politicians. The result was that almost no one was watching the new Russian illegals as they went about their work. Russian interference in the 2016 US election would be a successful intelligence operation (at least in the short term), yet it had nothing to do with classified material.
AS THE ELECTION year began, the Russians sharpened their focus. February 9, 2016, saw the New Hampshire primary. The next day in St. Petersburg, a plan was circulated. Specialists were instructed to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump—we support them).” Putin held a grudge against Clinton for what he perceived as her role encouraging the 2011 protests. It was personal. And now it was time for payback. Former workers say the IRA was targeting her a good two years before the 2016 election.
The new illegals did not just influence the online world. They could make things happen in the real world by organizing rallies and counterprotests, engaging real Americans by pretending to be US grassroots activists and getting them to do things. In some cases—in a high-tech echo of the doubles of the past—the Russians stole real people’s identities. They gathered Social Security numbers, home addresses, and dates of birth of real Americans. They then used those to open PayPal accounts to pay for ads on social media sites or for expenses for political rallies. Other times, communications were made and ads paid for by entirely fictitious US personas created by the IRA on social media. Whatever the case, the identities of these illegals could be built in hours, not years, like that of Heathfield. Of course they would not stand up to the same level of scrutiny. But they did not need to because they were disposable and they were legion.
MATT SKIBER WAS one of the new illegals. He got involved in politics in May 2016 even though he did not exist—a ghost controlled by a person in a computer in St. Petersburg. His Facebook account contacted a real American to ask them to act as a recruiter for a “March for Trump” rally in New York the next month. Ads were purchased on Facebook and Skiber contacted a real person to give them money to print posters and get a megaphone. Next, on August 2, Skiber sent a private message on Facebook to a real account, “Florida for Trump”: “What about organizing a YUGE pro-Trump flash mob in every Florida town?” On August 18, the real “Florida for Trump” Facebook account responded with instructions to contact a member of the campaign. In August, Skiber recruited a real American over Facebook to acquire a prison costume. Another person was paid to build the cage for the pickup truck. A Twitter account then organized for an actress to dress up as a caged Hillary Clinton in prison uniform in West Palm Beach. By August 24, more than one hundred real Americans had been contacted through fake US person accounts. None knew they were dealing with a Russian—just like those who had met Donald Heathfield or Cynthia Murphy. The IRA carefully tracked the real people—listing their contacts, political views, and the activities they had been asked to perform. They had unwittingly been recruited into a Russian intelligence operation. They came from across the political spectrum and included black social justice activists as well as moderators of conservative social media groups. Hundreds of real-world rallies were organized by the Russians remotely over social media. They would ask followers on social media to attend. Out of those who expressed an interest, they would pick an American whom they could ask to take over organizing the event, finding an excuse for why the original organizer could not make it on the day. They would promote these rallies in advance by contacting US media and putting them in touch with the real American coordinator and publicize the events afterward through their own Russian-controlled social media accounts.
A cyber-hacking campaign had gathered pace at the same time. On March 19, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta clicked on a link that looked like a security notification from Google telling him to change his password, but which instead gave GRU hackers access to fifty thousand emails. This was the result of a targeted reconnaissance campaign. The next month the GRU was inside the DNC and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). They were able to take screen shots of employees’ screens and began carrying out searches. In May, the DNC asked a cyber security company to investigate. They found not only the GRU but also a second Russian espionage team from the SVR who had been there back at least to July 2015. The GRU’s noisier approach had blown the cover for its stealthier rivals. “We did attribution back to the Russian government,” Shawn Henry, chief security officer of CrowdStrike and a former executive assistant director of the FBI, told me soon after. “We believed it was the Russian government involved in an espionage campaign—essentially collecting intelligence against candidates for the US presidency.” The DNC went public. But then something happened that no one had predicted. The SVR had been carrying out the type of espionage of political campaigns that had been going on for years but the GRU had been planning something else.
This was going to be an influence operation, an “active measure”—what became known as “hack and leak.” With the help of another GRU unit (based at “the Tower”), some of the material was published on a front website and other emails were allegedly transferred to the WikiLeaks organization. There was also contact with journalists, offering them juicy exclusives. On July 22, three days before the Democratic National Convention, damaging material appeared suggesting a bias in favor of Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders, leading to the resignation of the DNC chair. It does not take a lot of work by the hackers to analyze the data. Instead, in another piece of Russian judo, they used the competitive and free Western press to do the leg work of finding stories amid a mass of data that was published and, as a result, carried more weight.
A final component of the cyber campaign within the United States was to undermine the credibility of the election. The first signs of Russian intellig
ence researching US electoral processes and technology went back to 2014. GRU hackers in June 2016 researched state election boards looking for vulnerabilities. In August they hacked into computers of a company that supplied software used to verify voter registration information and sent more than one hundred emails to people involved in elections in Florida counties to try to get into their accounts. The likelihood—also from evidence of their social media plans—was that they were going to claim voter fraud after the expected Hillary win in order to delegitimize her election.
This was a multifaceted campaign but the cyber and social media aspects were not always coordinated. That was the way Russia worked—lots of actors were each trying to compete and show off to the Kremlin what they could do to serve their masters and pursue an overall goal set from the top. Covert activity—using false identities—was blended with overt information through Russian media outlets like RT. Too often those in the West focused on one element of this activity—hacking or social media—but failed to see the full spread. Intelligence had been coming into the Obama administration but it had not been pieced together. National security officials were convinced Clinton would win and feared that if they called out Russia for its campaign against her, they would be seen as trying to assist her. A response could wait until after election day.
There were other warning signs that the rules had changed. On June 6, a yellow taxi pulled up outside the US embassy in Moscow late at night. CCTV shows a man striding toward the main entrance. But as he does, a Russian runs out of the sentry booth outside and violently body-slams him, first into a brick wall and then into the ground. The two begin wrestling, the American underneath desperately trying to kick off his assailant. He somehow manages to slide, with the Russian still on top and punching him, toward the main door, which opens. He kicks first one leg and then the other over the threshold and into the embassy and onto American soil. The Russians said the American was a CIA officer. The attack was more serious than the arrest or harassment of diplomats under previous bouts of spy fever.
A few weeks later, in July, Carter Page, who had come up in the FBI’s Buryakov investigation, was in Moscow. He was there to give a speech on improving relations. He says he went as a private citizen, but there was considerable interest in him because in March he had been named as an adviser to Donald Trump’s campaign. He says he saw in Trump a man who might fix the problems that had damaged US national security since the end of the Cold War. He had promoted himself as a man who had good contacts, emailing the campaign in January saying he had spent the past week in Europe and had been in discussions with individuals who had close ties to the Kremlin and who recognized Trump could have a “game changing effect . . . in bringing the end of the new Cold War.” He said his contacts might be able to set up a meeting with Putin and he also criticized sanctions on Russia. During his Moscow visit in the summer he talked to an old Gazprom contact who now worked at Rosneft, the oil company. There may have been some passing remark by the Russian about the sale of a stake in the company. There were also other conversations about possible business deals. The speech attracted negative attention. Soon Page was no longer part of the campaign, although he would try to get an administration job. What he did not know until later was that he had been subject to a wiretap by the FBI, which would become highly controversial amid accusations that a “deep state” had been “spying” on one of the candidates.
AT THE SAME time, a former MI6 officer was investigating Russian activity and had come across Page’s name as well as others. As a young recruit, Chris Steele had been one of the handful of MI6 spies operating in Moscow at the time of the August 1991 coup. He had specialized in Russia, dealing with the aftermath of Alexander Litvinenko’s murder in London. In 2009, he left MI6 and, with a former colleague, founded a private business intelligence company. It had been subcontracted by a US company, Fusion GPS, which had been asked to carry out research on Donald Trump’s links to Moscow, first for a Republican candidate and then for the Democrats. Steele began to tap his sources and wrote a series of reports—never intended to be a single “dossier”—on what he found. It was raw intelligence, not written for public consumption, and not every element would be corroborated. But it seemed to suggest links between the Trump campaign and Russia that went far deeper than anyone understood. He became so alarmed by what he saw that he passed the material to contacts at the FBI. In the aftermath of the election, he was worried about the impact on Britain’s security (including the possibility that any British sources in Moscow could be at risk if details were shared with the Americans) and so contacted officials in London, including Charles Farr. Farr had run operations against Moscow in the 1990s and risen to become the chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Details would also be passed to the police and MI5 but British officials would remain silent, fearful of being drawn into American politics. On the American side, the dossier and Steele’s role would become the subject of bitter partisan debate after it was published on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration with questions as to why a foreign national was carrying out research on American politicians. Former FBI director Robert Mueller would in 2019 report that he found no evidence of collusion by the Trump campaign but plenty of evidence of Russian interference.
RUSSIA INTERFERED IN the elections but the much harder question to answer is what difference it made. The social media operations were extensive—Russian Facebook posts are estimated to have reached 126 million users. But how many minds did they change? That is harder to measure. Much more of the division was homegrown. The hack-and-leak operations surrounding the DNC and the Clinton campaign may have been more effective than social media influence operations. While it is hard to judge the precise impact on voting, one thing Russian activity did do was attract enormous attention. One result of the hacking, dossiers, and cyber illegals was that suddenly awareness of Russian activity would go from near nothing to all-consuming and the focus of intense political infighting as to its true nature. In this sense, Russia would achieve one of its goals in dividing its adversary and keeping it off balance, playing on existing political splits. It would also create an image of a Russian intelligence operation that was actually more powerful and coordinated than the often messy reality. From being barely aware of Russian activity, people would start to see its hidden hand everywhere. Russian ghosts would start to haunt the American body politic.
AFTER THE LEAKED DNC emails first appeared, Russian officials told journalists in Moscow that there was nothing to the allegation that the Kremlin was behind it all. One commentator made some rather perceptive comments about Western politics in July 2016: “We see that in the West, including the United States, people no longer trust the elites. . . . In the UK, there has already been a protest vote—Brexit. Now Clinton could suffer from a protest vote. People will not vote for Trump, but against Clinton and the elites.” The commentator was Andrey Bezrukov, formerly Donald Heathfield. Clinton was in a much worse position than the polls suggested, he argued, and she had failed to see that her links to Wall Street were damaging. The former illegal would be proved right where many US commentators got it wrong. He would later cowrite a profile of Donald Trump, saying Clinton and Obama symbolized “the end of the Cold War political culture.” “Trump’s historical function was to shatter the United States’ old, inaccurate, politically correct picture of itself. . . . Only an outsider can accomplish this,” he and his coauthors wrote. Bezrukov was a man who understood both sides in a way few others did. The old illegals had been busted but the new online illegals had embedded themselves in American society in a different way. It was a sign of Russia’s persistence in its aims but also its flexibility in its methods of pursuing them. It had developed a multifaceted campaign that used hacking, social media, cutouts, and businessmen. As well as trained intelligence officers, there were other types of Russians inside the United States, one of whom would come to be seen as the “new Anna Chapman” even though she was actually something quite different.
> 27
The New Ways
IN THE EARLY hours of November 9, 2016, as news of the victory of Donald Trump was making its way around the world, Maria Butina was busy on Twitter. Butina was an attractive redheaded Russian student in her twenties, living in America. She was sending direct messages to Alexander Torshin in Moscow. Torshin was deputy head of the Russian Central Bank. Butina suggested they talk on the phone. But Torshin was reluctant: “All our phones are being listened to!” he said. Eventually she signaled it was getting late: “I’m going to sleep. It’s 3 am here. I am ready for further orders.” Two days later, she asked Torshin to find out how “our people” felt about her prediction of the person who would be appointed secretary of state. Next she sent a series of proposals about establishing a dialogue with US politicians through a conference.
Russians Among Us Page 34
