by Luke Harding
Additionally, Obama retaliated against the two agencies allegedly behind Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear: the GRU and FSB, respectively. In an executive order the president sanctioned nine entities and individuals from the two Russian spy agencies. They included the GRU’s top generals: its chief, Igor Korobov, and deputies Sergey Gizunov, Igor Kostyukov, and Vladimir Alexseyev.
Obama further sanctioned three companies said to have given “material support” to the GRU’s offensive cyber operations. They were the St. Petersburg–based Special Technology Center; an outfit called Zorsecurity; and the blandly titled Autonomous Noncommercial Organization “Professional Association of Designers of Data Processing Systems.” Allegedly it provided the hackers with special training.
The measures reflected Obama’s profound exasperation with Putin, at the end of eight tough years. During his first term—and with Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state—the president had tried to “reset” ties with Moscow. The policy had failed. It was predicated on the idea that Dmitry Medvedev—at the time Russia’s stand-in president—was a more liberal and malleable figure than the hawkish Putin. In fact, Putin continued to dominate Russian politics from Moscow’s own White House and from his temporary post as prime minister.
Viewed in the light of 2016, Obama’s well-meaning approach looked like folly. The president said all Americans should be “alarmed by Russia’s actions,” which had been conducted to damage Clinton and help Trump.
But if this were the case, why had the Obama administration not gone public with the evidence earlier? Before the election, in fact? There had been a report in October, but it had not revealed the full extent of the problem, and by December it was too late.
According to former Obama officials, the administration had a vigorous internal debate about Russia’s cyber attack. Some officials subsequently expressed deep regret that more had not been revealed. The administration had chosen not to publicize previously unsuccessful hacks, attributed to Russia, against the White House, the NSA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If they had publicized more earlier, the argument went, this might have deterred Russia’s all-out attack on the DNC.
The U.S. intelligence community did raise the alarm. On August 4, John Brennan, the CIA chief, called the head of FSB, Alexander Bortnikov, in Moscow. Brennan warned Bortnikov that Russia’s meddling in the U.S. election had to stop. Bortnikov conceded nothing but said he would pass the message to Putin.
A special report by The Washington Post gave further fascinating detail: later that month a courier from the CIA delivered an envelope with severe “eyes-only” restrictions to the White House. Inside was a report. It was to be shown to just a few people: the president and three senior aides.
Intelligence from deep inside the Kremlin said that Putin had personally directed the cyber operation against the United States. The objective was to defeat—or at least damage—Clinton and to help elect Trump. The material was so sensitive it was kept out of the president’s Daily Brief. Brennan set up a secret team of Russia analysts and officers, some from the NSA and the FBI, based at CIA headquarters.
Obama confronted Putin a month later at a meeting of world leaders in Hangzhou, China. According to the Post, he told the Russian leader that “we knew what he was doing and [he] better stop or else.” Putin demanded proof. And accused the United States of interfering in Russia’s internal affairs.
Obama’s decision to say little publicly could be explained. First, he—together with the rest of his party, as well as pundits and almost all senior Republicans—had assumed that Clinton would win.
Second, unmasking the scale of Russia’s hacking operation to aid Trump would have prompted outraged claims of bias and electoral meddling from the Republican candidate, who was busy embracing the hacked material.
One former senior Obama administration official told me that the intelligence indicating Russian interference got bigger. In the beginning it didn’t amount to much, but by the time Trump won the election it was overwhelming. The official said that the GRU hacking team was much less polished than the FSB team and left “lots of clues.” The evidence included “Russians talking to Russians” about hacking the election and other measures. The official saw the Steele dossier in November. And alerted people across government.
The Obama administration published a further report on January 6. It sought to answer a fundamental question.
Formulated by Soldatov, it went like this: the Kremlin had previously been fearful of the power of the Internet and understood little about the nature of the global network. Putin didn’t even use email. So how had Russia found a way to deploy the Web against the United States, the country that invented the Web and was still its innovative powerhouse?
The three leading intelligence agencies, the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA, coauthored this report. It came in several versions. One was highly classified. The intelligence agency chiefs, plus the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, briefed Trump on its contents during a two-hour session at Trump Tower. A second version—unclassified and with the same conclusions—was made public shortly afterward.
The report was a detailed assessment of what had happened in 2015–2016. It said:
We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.
The report said the operation represented the “most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order.” Putin’s influence effort was “unprecedented,” “the boldest yet” in the United States. There was a “significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort.”
At the same time the operation to hack the United States flowed directly from tactics employed during the Cold War. Back then the Soviet Union used agents, intelligence officers, forgeries, and “press placements” to disparage candidates who opposed the Kremlin. After communism’s collapse, Russian spies didn’t try to alter events. Instead they concentrated on collecting the inside line to help Russian leaders make sense of administration plans.
According to the agencies, Moscow’s approach evolved over the course of the election. As with its operation to win the 2018 World Cup, the Kremlin needed plausible deniability. So it made extensive use of cutouts. They included a hacker called Guccifer 2.0—who was in contact with Trump’s longtime associate Roger Stone—plus the platform DCleaks.com, registered in April.
Then there was WikiLeaks, a platform that Trump openly praised in the months before the election. “We assess with high confidence that the GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks,” the report said, adding: “Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity.”
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ editor in chief, disputes this and says the leaks didn’t come from a “state party.” The agencies don’t believe him. The report suggests that WikiLeaks had become, in effect, a subbranch of Russian intelligence and its in-house publishing wing. In September WikiLeaks moved its hosting to Moscow.
There were further intriguing details. Russian hackers penetrated local and state U.S. electoral boards, the report said, but made no effort to alter voting tallies. According to the Department of Homeland Security, they targeted twenty-one states. The hackers scanned systems. Their efforts were compared to burglars who shook and rattled doors, trying to break in. (Later the story partly unraveled when the department admitted voting systems hadn’t always been targeted. In Wisconsin and California, the hackers hit a network belonging to other state agencies, it said.)
The hackers also collected
material on some “Republican-affiliated targets.” None of the Republican stuff was ever leaked.
The report speculated as to why Putin had ordered the operation. Russia’s president, it said, had a long list of grudges. They included anti-Kremlin protests in 2011–2012, which Putin blamed on Clinton; the exposure of Russia’s state-sponsored sports doping program; and the Panama Papers. I had been involved in the last project and was one of a consortium of journalists who had discovered the offshore fortune of Sergei Roldugin, one of Putin’s oldest friends.
The January 6 document argued that Putin had a clear preference for international partners in the mold of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi or Germany’s Gerhard Schröder. Both were “Western political leaders whose business interests made them more disposed to deal with Russia.”
Trump was definitely in that category.
Overall the CIA-FBI-NSA report was persuasive: Moscow had indeed sought to tilt the election in Trump’s favor, even if the result—a Trump victory—had caught the Kremlin by surprise. It omitted one big truth. Namely that the operation was so successful because it exploited preexisting fault lines in American society.
From June 2015, Russian operatives purchased a series of advertisements on Facebook. The Russians were sitting in St. Petersburg, but they pretended to be American activists. Their fake Facebook accounts promoted anti-immigrant views. One slogan pasted over a U.S. flag said: “We’re full, go home.” Another depicted a cartoon of Trump holding a mini-Mexican with the headline: “You have to go back, pal!” There were “divisive social and political messages,” as Facebook put it, on race, guns, and LGBT rights.
Facebook would eventually admit that Russia had employed 470 “inauthentic accounts and pages” as part of its influence campaign. It worked. One page, Secure Borders, got 133,000 followers before it was closed down. The page dubbed immigrants “freeloaders” and “scum.” Moscow spent $100,000 on more than three thousand ads, Facebook said. The numbers could be higher, Mark Zuckerberg, its CEO, acknowledged later.
According to the Times, Russian intelligence also made extensive use of bots. These spread anti-Hillary messages on Twitter.
The bots in conjunction with the leaked emails and the Facebook ads fueled an anger that Trump voters already felt toward Clinton. As General Hayden, the former NSA director, put it, the divisions in U.S. society ran deep. Trump modeled himself on Andrew Jackson, the United States’ seventh president, whose portrait he hung in the Oval Office. Jackson was an outsider and a white nationalist, who viewed the United States as a nation, a Volk, a narod, Hayden said, citing the German and Russian equivalents.
Those who supported Clinton took another view. For them, the United States was an Enlightenment idea, rather than a chunk of land that belonged exclusively to one ethnic group. It was best expressed by Alexander Hamilton, President Woodrow Wilson, and the dictum: “We, the People.” The Hamiltonian approach was fact-based, humble in the face of complexity, and respectful of evidence, Hayden said. None of which applied to Trump’s incoming White House.
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Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department said the expulsions of Russians weren’t only because of hacking. They were also retaliation for the “pattern of harassment” meted out to American diplomats in Moscow over the previous four years. There had been, it said, a “significant increase” in aggressive activity in 2015–2016.
This harassment carried out by the FSB was pervasive and unpleasant. It included the home intrusions my family had experienced in Moscow from 2007 to 2011 and that Steele and his wife got earlier. U.S. diplomats found themselves routinely followed and hounded by police. In June 2016 a policeman wrestled a U.S. diplomat to the ground as he tried to get inside the U.S. embassy. Moscow said the diplomat was a CIA spy; state TV channels broadcast personal details of diplomats that, Washington said, put them at risk.
The expelled Russian diplomats had seventy-two hours to pack their bags. Moscow sent a plane to collect them. The reaction from the Kremlin was predictably scathing, with Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, indicating that Russia would respond in kind. Writing on Facebook, ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova described Obama and his team as a “group of foreign policy losers, angry and ignorant.” The Russian embassy in London tweeted a picture. It was a duck with the word “lame” on it. The controversy was “Cold War déjà vu,” it said.
The Russian government was equally dismissive of the hacking report—a baseless, unsubstantiated, rather amateurish, and emotional document, according to Peskov. President-elect Trump agreed. Earlier he had dismissed claims of Russian meddling as overblown, absurd, and a ridiculous ploy by “Dems” to distract from their humiliating election failure.
Who the hell knew who was responsible? It could have been Russia or China, he had said in a debate, or even an overweight four-hundred-pound guy sitting on a bed in New Jersey. Trump now modulated his position. He said that he would meet with the intelligence community to be briefed on the “facts of the situation” but suggested “it’s time for our country to move on to bigger and better things.”
It seemed inevitable that Putin would kick out thirty-five American diplomats from Moscow and the U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg. In earlier crises the Kremlin had delivered a symmetric response. In 2007 the UK’s then Labour government expelled four Russian diplomats in protest at Putin’s refusal to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, one of Litvinenko’s two polonium killers. Russia expelled four British envoys. This, by Kremlin standards, counted as restraint.
Lavrov announced that Russia was shuttering the U.S. embassy’s dacha in Serebryany Bor, Moscow’s Silver Forest.
The island was a bucolic territory of pines and sandy beaches protruding into the Moskva River. It was one of our favorite spots during our time in Moscow, reached by taxi, tram, or clanking trolley-bus, and home to many expatriates and their families. There were log cabin cafés selling ice tea and kebabs. In summer you swam or sunbathed; in winter you could skate on the river, take your kids on ice slides, and—on Orthodox Epiphany—plunge beneath the freezing water with the Russian faithful.
Across from the island is Troitse-Lykovo. The village with its twinkling silver-domed baroque church was the home of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who revealed the Soviet gulag system and in later life gave Putin broad approval.
The U.S. embassy dacha wasn’t much. It had a pool table, a dart board, and a picnic area. One visitor likened it to a scout hut. Still, it offered a weekend refuge for Americans keen to escape from Moscow’s remorseless urban grind.
The Kremlin’s answer, when it came, was a surprise. After sixteen years in power Putin had mastered the art of wrong-footing his enemies and keeping everyone guessing. This was one such moment. In a statement Moscow said that it wouldn’t expel any U.S. diplomats: “We will not drop to this level of irresponsible diplomacy.” Instead, Putin’s administration would “take further steps to help resurrect Russian-American relations.”
The president-elect was enthralled. His reaction was obsequious. He tweeted:
Great move on delay (by V. Putin)—I always knew he was very smart!
Clearly, Putin had calculated that a Trump White House would be more sympathetic to Moscow than a Clinton one. But was that it? The Obama White House was taken aback by Putin’s uncharacteristic restraint. And suspicious that there may have been some kind of backroom accord with the incoming Trump team. According to The New York Times, U.S. intelligence agencies began looking for information, clues.
In the period between Obama’s announcement on sanctions and Putin’s clement response, General Michael Flynn spoke to Kislyak, Moscow’s Washington ambassador. Flynn was about to become Trump’s national security adviser. There were five phone calls. The conversations, Flynn initially insisted, didn’t touch on U.S. sanctions against Russia or the possibility that the new administration might lift them.
Flynn said he had merely wished the ambassador a Happy New Year.
5
General Misha
Moscow–Cambridge–London
Suvorov: “What sort of fish are swimming there?”
Boss: “There’s only one kind there—piranhas.”
—VIKTOR SUVOROV, Aquarium: The Career and Defection of a Soviet Military Spy
The Aquarium was a nickname given to a Moscow building. It belonged to the most secretive organization in Russia—the GRU. Or, to give it its full title, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Of the three Russian agencies involved in espionage, the GRU was the biggest and the most powerful.
Its job was to collect military intelligence. This was done through various methods—eavesdropping, military satellites, and traditional spycraft. The GRU is believed to have a larger network of agents abroad than the SVR, its foreign intelligence counterpart. Very little is known about its organizational structure. Since there’s no press office, there isn’t anybody to ask. Its activities are a state secret.
Inside the Aquarium’s cavernous entrance is a large yellow and blue map of the world, with Russia at its center. A symbol of a winged bat is engraved on the granite and marble floor. This represents the Spetsnaz, the troops of “special purpose.” These are the GRU’s own brigade of elite special forces, deployed in Afghanistan and Chechnya and in Russia’s recent military actions, such as Syria.
Senior generals have offices looking onto a cozy inner courtyard. There is a fountain; in winter and summer you can sit, drink coffee, and chat. Other officers live with their families in a surrounding colony of gray tower blocks that screen the building from outside. Retired officers are housed there also. There is a basement pool, a gym, and a helicopter pad on the roof. Putin landed there in 2006, when he opened the new Aquarium complex.
In 2013 the Aquarium got an unusual visitor. The visitor who arrived at the GRU’s HQ was a career soldier. He had spent thirty-three years working in military intelligence. He had served in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Central America. Now he was the director of a mighty spy agency. Nothing odd about that, apart from the fact that the visitor was from the United States and had grown up in Middletown, Rhode Island, one of nine children from a poor Irish Catholic family.
