I. The Hack The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.
To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app. Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.
“I’ve been doing cybersecurity since I was 18, since I joined the army in 1982,” Minin told me after we’d ducked out into the hallway so as not to distract the young contestants. He wouldn’t say in which part of the army he’d done this work. “At the time, I signed a gag order,” he told me, smiling slyly. “Do you think anything has changed? And that I’d say it to a journalist?”![]()
Victor Minin, who has close ties to Russian intelligence, runs hacking competitions at universities all over Russia—his way, he says, of preparing future generations. (Max Avdeev)After the army, Minin joined the KGB. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, he went to work in the Russian government’s cyber and surveillance division. In 2010, after he’d retired and gone into the private sector, he helped found ARSIB, which has connections to the Russian defense ministry, the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the interior ministry.
The hacking competitions are Minin’s way of preparing future generations, of “passing my accumulated knowledge on to the kiddies,” he told me. He said Russian tech firms regularly come to him to find talent. I asked whether government agencies, like the security services that conduct cyberoperations abroad, did the same. “It’s possible,” he demurred. “They also need these specialists.”
When the Capture the Flag competition broke for lunch, Minin and I stepped into the brightness and the wind outside. The university, a complex of stark white buildings, sits atop a steep hill with the city and the Volga River below. Once, the river was blood, and the hill was shrapnel and pillboxes and bones. Once, this was Stalingrad, a city made famous by the grueling battle fought here in the winter of 1942–43, when more than 1 million men died before the Germans lost the fight and a field marshal and the momentum of the war. Today, it is a haunted city.
“Have you been to Mamayev Kurgan yet?,” Minin asked me. He was referring to another hill, where the battle was so intense, it changed the hill’s shape. Now the Motherland Calls statue stands there, a 170-foot concrete woman raising a sword to summon her countrymen into battle. It’s where Nazi Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus was captured, Minin noted with reverence, and looked into the sunny distance. “You know, it’s important to see how young people defended their homeland.”
When we got to the cafeteria, I saw that it, too, was haunted by its Soviet past. Grouchy middle-aged women in hairnets dished out bland, greasy cuisine. If it weren’t for students tapping at their smartphones, it would have been hard to tell that the 21st century had ever arrived. I sat down at a table with a team from Astrakhan and told them I had been to their hometown once, a romantically shabby old city by the Caspian Sea.
The students smirked. “Everyone wants to leave,” a third-year named Anton said.
“There’s nothing to do there,” his teammate Sergei added.
“We did an amazing job … creating the illusion that Putin controls everything in Russia … Now it’s just funny” how much Americans attribute to him.Anton was hoping that Minin could help him get his foot in the door at one of the state security services. “It’s prestigious, they pay well, and the work is interesting,” he said. If he were accepted, he could hope for a salary of 50,000 rubles (less than $900) a month, which was almost double the average salary in Astrakhan. Was he motivated by any feelings of—“Patriotic conviction?,” Anton finished my sentence, and started to chuckle. “No,” he said. “I don’t care what government I work for. If the French Foreign Legion takes me, I’ll go!”
Isn’t it sacrilege to say such things in a place like Volgograd?, I asked them.
Sergei said the kind of patriotism being fostered in Russia these days was empty, even unhealthy. He’d been angered by restrictions of online behavior imposed after the prodemocracy protests of 2011–12, and by government monitoring of online speech, which he called unconstitutional. “And if you look at the state of our roads and our cities, and how people live in our city, you want to ask, why are they spending billions of rubles on storing people’s personal information in massive databases?”
“They’re going to lock you up, Sergei,” a classmate said, stealing a glance at my phone.
Sergei laughed. “Keep chewing,” he said.
Over the past year, Russian hackers have become the stuff of legend in the United States. According to U.S. intelligence assessments and media investigations, they were responsible for breaching the servers of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. They spread the information they filched through friendly outlets such as WikiLeaks, to devastating effect. With President Vladimir Putin’s blessing, they probed the voting infrastructure of various U.S. states. They quietly bought divisive ads and organized political events on Facebook, acting as the bellows in America’s raging culture wars.
But most Russians don’t recognize the Russia portrayed in this story: powerful, organized, and led by an omniscient, omnipotent leader who is able to both formulate and execute a complex and highly detailed plot.
Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant who helped Putin win his first presidential campaign, in 2000, and served as a Kremlin adviser until 2011, simply laughed when I asked him about Putin’s role in Donald Trump’s election. “We did an amazing job in the first decade of Putin’s rule of creating the illusion that Putin controls everything in Russia,” he said. “Now it’s just funny” how much Americans attribute to him.
A businessman who is high up in Putin’s United Russia party said over an espresso at a Moscow café: “You’re telling me that everything in Russia works as poorly as it does, except our hackers? Rosneft”—the state-owned oil giant—“doesn’t work well. Our health-care system doesn’t work well. Our education system doesn’t work well. And here, all of a sudden, are our hackers, and they’re amazing?”
The election hack “was a very emotional, tactical decision.” The Kremlin was “very upset about the Panama Papers,” which cast light on Putin’s wealth.In the same way that Russians overestimate America, seeing it as an all-powerful orchestrator of global political developments, Americans project their own fears onto Russia, a country that is a paradox of deftness, might, and profound weakness—unshakably steady, yet somehow always teetering on the verge of collapse. Like America, it is hostage to its peculiar history, tormented by its ghosts.
None of these factors obviates the dangers Russia poses; rather, each gives them shape. Both Putin and his country are aging, declining—but the insecurities of decline present their own risks to America. The United States intelligence community is unanimous in its assessment not only that Russians interfered in the U.S. election but that, in the words of former FBI Director James Comey, “they will be back.” It is a stunning escalation of hostilities for a troubled country whose elites still have only a tenuous grasp of American politics. And it is classically Putin, and classically Russian: using daring aggression to mask weakness, to avenge deep resentments, and, at all costs, to survive.
I’d come to Russia to try to answer two key questions. The more immediate is how the Kremlin, despite its limitations, pulled off one of the greatest acts of political sabotage in modern history, turning American democracy against itself. And the more important—for Americans, anyway—is what might still be in store, and how far an emboldened Vladimir Putin is prepared to go in order to get what he wants
“It wasn’t a strategic operation,” says Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist with deep sources in the security services, who writes about the Kremlin’s use of cybertechnology. “Given what everyone on the inside has told me,” he says, hacking the U.S. political system “was a very emotional, tactical decision. People were very upset about the Panama Papers.”
In the spring of 2016, an international consortium of journalists began publishing revelations from a vast trove of documents belonging to a Panamanian law firm that specialized in helping its wealthy foreign clients move money, some of it ill-gotten, out of their home countries and away from the prying eyes of tax collectors. (The firm has denied any wrongdoing.) The documents revealed that Putin’s old friend Sergei Roldugin, a cellist and the godfather to Putin’s elder daughter, had his name on funds worth some $2 billion. It was an implausible fortune for a little-known musician, and the journalists showed that these funds were likely a piggy bank for Putin’s inner circle. Roldugin has denied any wrongdoing, but the Kremlin was furious about the revelation. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, whose wife was also implicated, angrily ascribed the reporting to “many former State Department and CIA employees” and to an effort to “destabilize” Russia ahead of its September 2016 parliamentary elections.
The argument was cynical, but it revealed a certain logic: The financial privacy of Russia’s leaders was on par with the sovereignty of Russia’s elections. “The Panama Papers were a personal slight to Putin,” says John Sipher, a former deputy of the CIA’s Russia desk. “They think we did it.” Putin’s inner circle, Soldatov says, felt “they had to respond somehow.” According to Soldatov’s reporting, on April 8, 2016, Putin convened an urgent meeting of his national-security council; all but two of the eight people there were veterans of the KGB. Given the secrecy and timing of this meeting, Soldatov believes it was then that Putin gave the signal to retaliate.
The original aim was to embarrass and damage Hillary Clinton, to sow dissension, and to show that American democracy is just as corrupt as Russia’s, if not worse. “No one believed in Trump, not even a little bit,” Soldatov says. “It was a series of tactical operations. At each moment, the people who were doing this were filled with excitement over how well it was going, and that success pushed them to go even further.”
“A lot of what they’ve done was very opportunistic,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, the Russian-born co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which first discovered the Russian interference after the company was hired to investigate the hack of the Democratic National Committee servers in May 2016. “They cast a wide net without knowing in advance what the benefit might be.” The Russian hackers were very skilled, Alperovitch says, but “we shouldn’t try to make them out to be eight feet tall” and able to “elect whomever they want. They tried in Ukraine, and it didn’t work.” Nor did it work in the French elections of 2017.
Alperovitch and his team saw that there had been two groups of hackers, which they believed came from two different Russian security agencies. They gave them two different monikers: Fancy Bear, from military intelligence, and Cozy Bear, from either foreign intelligence or the FSB. But neither bear seemed at all aware of what the other was doing, or even of the other’s presence. “We observed the two Russian espionage groups compromise the same systems and engage separately in the theft of identical credentials,” Alperovitch wrote on CrowdStrike’s blog at the time. Western intelligence agencies, he noted, almost never go after the same target without coordinating, “for fear of compromising each other’s operations.” But “in Russia this is not an uncommon scenario.”
It was almost like one of Minin’s hacking competitions, but with higher stakes. The hackers are not always guys in military-intelligence uniforms, Soldatov told me; in some cases they’re mercenary freelancers willing to work for the highest bidder—or cybercriminals who have been caught and blackmailed into working for the government. (Putin has denied “state level” involvement in election meddling, but plausible deniability is the point of working through unofficial hackers.)
American officials noticed the same messy and amorphous behavior as the summer of 2016 wore on. A former staffer in Barack Obama’s administration says that intercepted communications between FSB and military-intelligence officers revealed arguing and a lack of organization. “It was ad hoc,” a senior Obama-administration official who saw the intelligence in real time told me. “They were kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what would stick.”![]()
Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama at the G20 Summit in September 2016. Obama warned Putin against election meddling, but did not sanction Russia before Election Day—Hillary Clinton, he believed, would handle Putin after she won. (Alexei Druzhinin / Sputnik / AP)This chaos was, ironically, one reason the Russians ended up being successful in 2016. The bickering, opportunism, and lack of cooperation seemed to the Obama administration, at least initially, like the same old story. A reportpublished in January 2017 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence assessing Russian involvement in the election noted that in 2008, a ring of 10 Russian spies, the most famous of whom was the fiery-haired Anna Chapman, had been in the U.S. in part to monitor the presidential election. But a Department of Justice complaint from 2010 paints a picture that is more The Pink Panther than The Americans. The spies, dubbed “The Illegals,” went to think-tank events and summarized press coverage for Moscow; Chapman registered a burner phone with the address 99 Fake Street. (Chapman was arrested in 2010, and she and her compatriots were deported in a dramatic spy exchange.) The Obama administration seemed to be expecting something similar early in 2016. “They’ve nibbled on the edges of our elections” in the past, the former Obama-administration staffer told me. In 2008, the Illegals “had been trying to cultivate think-tank people who might go into the administration.” But Russia hadn’t tried “to affect the result of the election until this time.”
When the Obama administration began to realize, in the summer, that the Russians were up to something more wide-ranging than what they’d done before, the White House worried about only half the problem. At that point, the most alarming development was Russian probing of states’ voting systems. The dumps of hacked data and the churn of false stories about Clinton seemed less troubling, and also harder to combat without looking political.
In September, Obama approached Putin on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hangzhou, China, and told him to “cut it out.” That fall, National-Security Adviser Susan Rice hand-delivered a warning to the Russian ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak. The White House tasked the Treasury and State Departments with exploring new sanctions against Russia, as well as the publication of information about Putin’s personal wealth, but decided that such moves might backfire. If the White House pushed too hard, the Russians might dump even more stolen documents. Who knew what else they had?
Nevertheless, with just a month to go until the election, the Obama administration took the extraordinary step of alerting the public. On October 7, 2016, a joint statement from the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said, “The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails” from U.S. political organizations. “These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.”
The White House expected the media to run with the story, and they did—“from 3:30 to 4 p.m.,” Ned Price, a former National Security Council spokesperson under Obama, said at this summer’s Aspen Security Forum. But at 4 p.m., the statement was overtaken by a revelation of a different sort: the Access Hollywoodtape, in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women. Both the media and the Clinton campaign focused almost exclusively on the explosive tape, not the intelligence-community statement.
Even if the public notice went unheeded, the Obama administration felt that the Russians had heard its warnings behind the scenes. According to Soldatov and two former Obama-administration officials, Moscow seemed to have backed off its probes of U.S. election infrastructure by October. But the leaks and bogus news stories never stopped. Obama feared that going public with anything more would look like he was putting his thumb on the scale for Clinton. And he was sure that she would win anyway—then deal with the Russians once she took office.![]()
Jeff Elkins; Alexey Kurbatov and Muti
The coup de grâce, perhaps, was the receipt by the FBI of a dubious document that seemed to paint the Clinton campaign in a bad light. The Washington Post reported this spring on a memo, seemingly from Russian intelligence, that had been obtained by an FBI source during the presidential campaign. The memo claimed that then–Attorney General Loretta Lynch had communicated with a Clinton campaign staffer, providing assurance that the FBI wouldn’t pursue the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state too strenuously. Sources close to James Comey told The Post that the document had “played a major role” in the way Comey, who as FBI director took fierce pride in his political independence, thought about the case, and had pushed him to make a public statement about it in July 2016. (He said he would bring no charges, but criticized Clinton sharply.) Comey’s public comments about the investigation—in July and then in October—damaged Clinton greatly, possibly costing her the presidency. The document, the article noted, was a suspected Russian forgery.
A forgery, a couple of groups of hackers, and a drip of well-timed leaks were all it took to throw American politics into chaos. Whether and to what extent the Trump campaign was complicit in the Russian efforts is the subject of active inquiries today. Regardless, Putin pulled off a spectacular geopolitical heist on a shoestring budget—about $200 million, according to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. This point is lost on many Americans: The subversion of the election was as much a product of improvisation and entropy as it was of long-range vision. What makes Putin effective, what makes him dangerous, is not strategic brilliance but a tactical flexibility and adaptability—a willingness to experiment, to disrupt, and to take big risks.
“They do plan,” said a senior Obama-administration official. “They’re not stupid at all. But the idea that they have this all perfectly planned and that Putin is an amazing chess player—that’s not quite it. He knows where he wants to end up, he plans the first few moves, and then he figures out the rest later. People ask if he plays chess or checkers. It’s neither: He plays blackjack. He has a higher acceptance of risk. Think about it. The election interference—that was pretty risky, what he did. If Hillary Clinton had won, there would’ve been hell to pay.”
Even the manner of the Russian attack was risky. The fact that the Russians didn’t really bother hiding their fingerprints is a testament to the change in Russia’s intent toward the U.S., Robert Hannigan, a former head of the Government Communications Headquarters, the British analogue to the National Security Agency, said at the Aspen Forum. “The brazen recklessness of it … the fact that they don’t seem to care that it’s attributed to them very publicly, is the biggest change.”
That recklessness nonetheless has clear precursors—both in Putin’s evolving worldview and in his changing domestic circumstances. For more than a decade, America’s strategic carelessness with regard to Russia has stoked Putin’s fears of being deposed by the U.S., and pushed him toward ever higher levels of antagonism. So has his political situation—the need to take ever larger foreign risks to shore up support at home, as the economy has struggled. These pressures have not abated; if anything, they have accelerated in recent years.
No comments:
Post a Comment