The Perfect Weapon

by David E. Sanger

  That second warning should have set off alarms—but there is no evidence that it did. Tamene’s information never made it to the DNC’s top leadership—the committee was then run by Debbie Wasserman Schultz—or so they insisted later. And the FBI, for its part, was focused elsewhere, including on the mysteries of Hillary Clinton’s Chappaqua computer server. With no one treating the issue with urgency, the ridiculous dance of cues and miscues between Hawkins and Tamene continued, extinguishing the last, best chance to halt the biggest political hack in history.

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  Anyone looking for a motive for Vladimir Putin to poke into the election machinery of the United States doesn’t have to look far: revenge.

  In December 2011, Russia had just completed a parliamentary election that all observers, foreigners and Russians alike, believed was riven with ballot-tampering and fraud. For the first time since Putin had come to power, protesters poured into the streets. The chants said it all: “Putin is a thief,” and “Russia without Putin!”

  Putin, of course, had won the election, but not by much. His party, United Russia, lost a lot of ground; it was barely hanging on to its majority after three smaller parties ate away at its numbers. United Russia surged at the end of the vote count, raising everyone’s suspicions. Golos, the only independent election monitoring group in the country, discovered that its website had been attacked so that it could not report suspicious activity, and that was after a court had fined it for violating the law by publishing accounts of campaign abuses. Monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, who had been invited to observe, reported blatant ballot stuffing, no surprise to Russians who had seen a YouTube video of an election commissioner filling out ballots as fast as he could. As the video went viral, Russians took again to the streets.

  Enter Hillary Clinton, in her third year as secretary of state, who by then had realized her ill-executed effort to stage-manage a “reset” with Russia was doomed from the moment she handed her Russian counterpart a giant button that had mistranslated the word “reset.”

  Several days after the voting, she issued a bland State Department declaration about the election, right out of the standard State playbook. “The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted,” she said, never mentioning Putin or his party by name. Repeating the boilerplate language of generations of secretaries of state, she later spoke out about the United States’ “strong commitment to democracy and human rights,” and particularly “the rights and aspirations of the Russian people to be able to make progress and to realize a better future for themselves.” There was no threat of sanctions.

  Clinton and her aides did not think they were saying anything particularly unusual; calling out Russia for antidemocratic behavior was standard stuff. Putin, however, took the declaration personally. The sight of actual protesters, shouting his name, seemed to shake a man known for his unchanging countenance. Then, in typical style, he smelled an opportunity. He declared that the protests were foreign-inspired. And at a large meeting he was hosting, he accused Clinton of being behind “foreign money” aimed at undercutting the Russian state.

  “I looked at the first reaction of our US partners,” he went on, with barely contained anger. “The first thing that the secretary of state did was say that [the elections] were not honest and not fair, but she had not even yet received the material from the observers.”

  “She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal,” Putin said. “They heard the signal, and with the support of the US State Department began active work.” The implication wasn’t exactly subtle: the United States and its Russian stooges—not Putin himself—had rigged the election. Putin’s charges may have been designed to draw attention from his own election meddling, but he quite cleverly tapped a vein of Russian conspiracy-mongering when it came to American foreign involvement. The United States did not exactly have clean hands when it came to influencing elections in other countries. Italy and Iran were notable targets for CIA election manipulation and coup-organizing in the 1950s, and Putin would cite American efforts to kill Castro in Cuba and to mount covert influence campaigns for elections in South Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, and Panama. He argued that the pro-Western colour revolutions in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine in the early 2000s, as well as the Arab Spring, similarly arose from soil tilled by the United States and fertilized with American cash. “Put your finger anywhere on a map of the world,” Putin said in 2017, “and everywhere you will hear complaints that American officials are interfering in internal election processes.”

  Putin’s moral equivalence didn’t hold much water. While in the bad old days the CIA would have brought bags of cash to Italian politicians and Chilean strongmen, election influence had since become the territory of the State Department, whose techniques were significantly more timid and transparent. When the United States intervened in contemporary elections, it usually did so to assure that more people had access to the vote. Rather than cash, it stuffed suitcases with an “Internet in a box” to defeat crackdowns on information. It sent out “consultants” to teach novice candidates how to campaign, helped build independent courts, and of course monitored election fraud.

  But Putin would respond that the United States tried to oust Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, and he would be right. He argued that the Americans merely wrapped their election-influence operations with flowery descriptions about “democracy promotion.”

  Not surprisingly, Putin quickly put down the 2011 protests and made sure that there was no repetition in the aftermath of later elections. But the mix of personal grievance at Clinton and general grievance at what he viewed as American hypocrisy never went away. It festered.

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  Patient Zero in the new Russian campaign to strike back at the State Department and Hillary Clinton was Victoria Nuland.

  The granddaughter of Orthodox Jews who emigrated to the Bronx after escaping Stalin’s rule, “Toria,” as she was often called, never wandered far from her Russian heritage, or from the bruises it left on the family. Her view of Putin’s Russia was no secret: The only thing the former KGB officer understood, she argued, was tough pushback.

  “I didn’t mind attempting a reset; all administrations try that,” she told me. “But it had to be a reset with no blinders on.” Putin, in her view, was a superior tactician. He had a spy’s sense of opportunism, particularly if he could play the spoiler. But he was far weaker when it came to long-term strategy. So when he poked—with military action, a cyberattack, intimidation—he needed a sharp poke back. Let him get away with something, and he would only take more.

  Nuland cemented that view as she began to move into the upper echelons of the State Department. Many members of her Foreign Service class quickly learned how to file the burrs off their speech as they described American interests. Nuland, though, made no effort to hide her realpolitik view of what the United States needed to do to defend its interests, and when she wasn’t on the State Department podium she might lace her views with a few well-chosen epithets. If one was wandering the halls of the State Department looking for someone to make the strongest case for diplomacy backed by the threat of force, her office was always a good place to start.

  Putin was highly aware of her role. Early in her career, she had worked for Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of state and an old friend of both Clintons. Talbott was a Russia hand, and Nuland’s hawkishness was often useful in giving his outreach to Russia some bipartisan appeal. That became clear in later years: after all, not many foreign service officers who rose in the Clinton camp made it into Dick Cheney’s inner circle—Nuland was his deputy national security adviser—and went on to become a favorite of Barack Obama. For all his caution, Obama was impressed by Nuland’s willingness to get in Putin’s face.

 
Before Obama was elected, Nuland and Putin already had developed an unhappy, if distant, history. As American ambassador to NATO during Bush’s second term, she pressed the allies to resist Russia’s nascent efforts to move from cooperation to confrontation. That was an uphill push. Many in NATO believed the narrative that Russia, its economy roughly the size of Italy’s and its population shrinking—could not afford to take on Europe and the United States. “Toria is breaking a lot of china at NATO,” an ambassador from another NATO ally told me during a visit to the alliance’s headquarters at the end of her tenure. “Most of it needs to be broken.”

  By the time of the 2011 Russian parliamentary election, Nuland had returned to Washington and was serving as the State Department spokeswoman under Hillary Clinton. Putin may have thought Nuland was behind Clinton’s decision to call out the voting fraud. He had good reason for the suspicion: it was Nuland’s job to denounce the election fraud from the State Department’s podium.

  But by early 2014, when the Maidan revolution was in full swing in Ukraine, Nuland had moved on from the podium and was the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, and the point person for the Ukraine crisis for a new secretary of state, John Kerry. After years in the field, she knew all the players, but she also knew the stakes for Putin and for Russia should Ukraine prove capable of resisting the Russian tractor beam.

  “If countries like Ukraine really can elect their own leaders,” she said, “if young people can really say and do whatever they want, if the country gets rich by knitting into Europe rather than being a big gas station, then the Russian people themselves will look and say, ‘We’d like more of that.’ ”

  In her usual type-A style, Nuland was working the phones constantly during the protests, trying to negotiate a way for a peaceful settlement that would ultimately get President Yanukovych out of power. While Yanukovych turned to Paul Manafort in a desperate bid to remain in office, Nuland was trying to broker a new election. Getting there would require putting together a coalition government between Yanukovych’s party and the opposition, but the opposition politicians so distrusted the Ukrainian strongman that they would not negotiate without a neutral observer. Nuland thought that role should be played by the European Union. The Russians, of course, wanted the entire process upended—it could only lead to trouble for their chosen puppet, Yanukovych.

  One weekend, in the midst of the Ukraine crisis, Nuland was home in Virginia discussing the dilemma of getting to an election over the phone with Geoffrey Pyatt, the American ambassador to Ukraine. They ran through the question of who might serve in a Ukrainian government if Yanukovych were pushed out of office, and how they might privately urge some of the opposition leaders to serve.

  The conversation turned to how the European Union was balking at its role as a neutral observer, declining to name someone to fill the role.

  Nuland is not known for her patience for diplomatic dithering.

  “Fuck the EU,” she told Pyatt.

  “Exactly…” he responded.

  Nuland’s mistake, of course, was that she and Pyatt were speaking over an open, unencrypted line. No surprise there—the State Department’s secure phones were perpetually broken. Nuland fully understood the risk, and she was pretty certain the Russians were listening in. But she was undeterred. She and Pyatt were talking in private about a strategy they had already described in public. Maybe it would be a good thing, she thought, if Putin’s henchmen reported back that she meant business.

  The conversation ended, one of many in a series of urgent phone calls as the crisis played out on Kiev’s streets. Then, two weeks later, the audio, edited, suddenly appeared on YouTube, highlighting her “Fuck the EU” line. Nuland and Pyatt, alongside many others, were stunned. “They had not dumped a phone call on the street in twenty-five years,” she told me later. This was a new tactic. Only later would Nuland discover that she had been the canary in the coal mine. The YouTube video represented a new Russia, determined to exploit new techniques.

  Nuland later said she had been expressing a “tactical frustration” with her European allies. Yet the tape was edited so that it didn’t sound that way. Instead, her words seemed to signal a breach in the relationship between the United States and the EU, exactly the kind of split Putin would love to exploit.

  The uproar that followed was predictable. Pyatt, a Californian who had come to the Foreign Service in 1989 via Yale, wondered if his career were over. (It wasn’t—he went on to be ambassador to Greece.) In Washington, Nuland spent a lot of time apologizing. Though she was one of the State Department’s top diplomats, she also briefly wondered about her job, until a few days later when she attended a state dinner at the White House and, seeing President Obama, repeated her apology directly to him.

  When he smiled and said, in a low voice, “Fuck ’em,” a clear reference to the Russians, she knew she was OK.

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  The broadcast of the Nuland-Pyatt phone call marked a turning point for Russian “active measures.” The public release of the recording was just the start. As the year wore on Russia kept pouring non-uniformed troops into parts of Ukraine, and accompanying the surge with what Gen. Philip Breedlove, the NATO commander, called “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of information warfare.” Ukraine and other states, he urged, needed plans to launch counter-propaganda efforts, and perhaps counter-cyberattacks.

  Breedlove knew that NATO was totally unprepared. It had hesitated to enter the cyber age. While decades ago NATO had worked out elaborate plans to use nuclear weapons in defense of Europe, even storing some near its headquarters in Brussels, it had no cyber counterattack unit, nor any expertise in “information warfare.” While visitors were often taken to a giant, gleaming computer security center, it was designed to protect only its own networks. And until a few years ago, one senior American told me, it protected those networks only during the weekday.

  “No one had budgeted to get 24/7 monitoring, even of our most sensitive networks,” he said, shaking his head. “The only thing they forgot to do was send a postcard to the Kremlin with a note that they could save themselves a lot of hard work if they just attacked NATO on nights and weekends.”

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  The one time I encountered Yevgeny Prigozhin, the man who would work to alter the 2016 election, he was not surrounded by trolls, and his employees were not creating bots. It was May 2002, on a river in Saint Petersburg, and he was serving dinner to George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin.

  In retrospect, Bush’s trip was the high point in the relationship between Washington and Moscow. It was the Texan politician’s first trip to Russia as president. In Moscow, the first stop, the two men had just signed a nuclear arms–reduction treaty. Bush called it a moment to “cast aside old doubts and suspicions and welcome a new era,” and that seemed like it might still be possible.

  I caught only a glimpse of “Putin’s Chef,” as he became known, in the few minutes a group of correspondents traveling with Bush were escorted in and out of Prigozhin’s floating restaurant, one of the city’s most fashionable dining spots, so that they could describe the scene to readers. I thought he was just a chef. Was I ever wrong.

  A decade and a half later, Prigozhin re-emerged an oligarch. It wasn’t a bad landing spot for a guy who’d spent his youth in jail and started his culinary career running a hot-dog stand. Before the 2016 election had heated up, he already stood accused of cooking up a far larger project for Putin: a propaganda center called the Internet Research Agency, housed in a squat four-story building in Saint Petersburg, Prigozhin’s hometown. From that building, tens of thousands of tweets, Facebook posts, and advertisements were generated in hopes of triggering chaos in the United States, and, at the end of the process, helping Donald Trump—a man who liked oligarchs—enter the Oval Office.

 
Stalin would have been proud of the Internet Research Agency. It existed in plain sight and yet was not what it appeared. It was not an intelligence agency, yet it learned some of their skills. It was nothing fancy: a building, filled with young talent willing to spend twelve hours a day peddling pure fiction, some of it aimed at the Russian market, some aimed at Europe. The best talent was assigned to the American desk, stuffed with some of the agency’s highest-paid, most imaginative writers. Fake news didn’t come cheap.

  Stalin used Soviet propaganda to recruit Americans, undermine capitalism, and sow fear and distrust. The Internet Research Agency did the same, but Facebook and other social media sites gave it reach Stalin could scarcely have imagined.

  It is still unclear if the idea behind the IRA came from Prigozhin, Putin, or someone in between. But its creation marked a moment of profound transition in how the Internet could be put to use. For a decade it was regarded as a great force for democracy: as people of different cultures communicated, the best ideas would rise to the top and autocrats would be undercut. The IRA was based on the opposite thought: social media could just as easily incite disagreements, fray social bonds, and drive people apart. While the first great blush of attention garnered by the IRA would come because of its work surrounding the 2016 election, its real impact went deeper—in pulling at the threads that bound together a society that lived more and more of its daily life in the digital space. Its ultimate effect was mostly psychological.

  There was an added benefit: The Internet Research Agency could actually degrade social media’s organizational power through weaponizing it. The ease with which its “news writers” impersonated real Americans—or real Europeans, or anyone else—meant that over time, people would lose trust in the entire platform. For Putin, who looked at social media’s role in fomenting rebellion in the Middle East and organizing opposition to Russia in Ukraine, the notion of calling into question just who was on the other end of a Tweet or Facebook post—of making revolutionaries think twice before reaching for their smartphones to organize—would be a delightful by-product. It gave him two ways to undermine his adversaries for the price of one.