Андрей Солдатов - The Red Web - The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries

The Twelfth Department of the KGB, which conducted eavesdropping, was beyond Bykov’s reach during the Soviet years. This was because the Twelfth Department had been always directly subordinated to the KGB chairman due to its sensitivity, and the chief of the section had been chosen for loyalty, not professionalism. But after the August coup attempt and the Soviet collapse, Bykov took over the Twelfth Department, incorporating it into his domain, and he became deputy director of the new Russian security service. The arrangement lasted only for a few years, then the Twelfth Department was raised to the level of a directorate inside the FSB. Its emblem proudly displays an owl. And it is this directorate that is in charge of SORM black boxes all over Russia.

Bykov told Andrei that in 1991 his most immediate problem had been to withdraw the KGB’s technical equipment and secret documentation from the Baltics to Moscow. The Soviet Union fell apart, and all of the KGB’s surveillance and eavesdropping equipment had been manufactured by two factories, Kommutator and Alfa, in Riga, the capital of newly independent Latvia. When he managed to get everything out, he had to respond to criticism of the KGB’s eavesdropping practices from dissidents and journalists. Legally the KGB’s eavesdropping was regulated by an order, No. 0050, signed by Soviet leader Yuri Andropov in 1979, but it had only one principal rule: it directly banned eavesdropping on party officials.

Bykov came up with the idea of “sanctioned surveillance.” The new system required some outside body to approve surveillance in advance—entirely a defensive move to fend off the criticism. Initially the security services toyed with the idea of having sanctions approved by the prosecutor’s office, but in 1995 it was decided that a court warrant would be required for advance approval. [13] On May 27, 1995, Valentin Stepankov, the general prosecutor of Russia, issued order No. 21/13/20, which established that permissions to conduct surveillance were to be issued by the general prosecutor and his deputies and main military prosecutor.

But the technical method of full, unrestricted access to all communications, developed at Kuchino in the 1980s, was not altered according to the new requirement. In practice it meant that the Russian secret service would get the court’s approval and then do whatever surveillance it wished. Bykov was confident the procedure would not hinder the way the surveillance was technically organized. When Andrei asked why they didn’t follow the American example, Bykov simply waved the question away. “Ah, they also sniff all information from the servers. It was proved by Assange and the like, and it didn’t start yesterday.”

As Bykov walked round and round the little park area with Andrei, the real situation became clear. The methods of SORM directly descended from when no one thought of court-approved warrants—from the Soviet system of phone wiretapping.

We searched hard to find someone who had experience back then, in the secret KGB recording chambers, sitting in front of the whirring tape recorders in the earlier days of phone wiretapping, the days when SORM eavesdropping began. The trail eventually led to a cheap café in the east of Moscow.

It was a woman’s job—to sit for long hours, facing metal stands with reel-to-reel tape recorders on the wall, mostly a West German brand, Uher Royal de Luxe, later replaced by eight-channel devices converted from video tape recorders. [14] Based on authors’ conversations with former KGB technical officers. The women appeared to be similar to phone operators, with headphones ready on the table, and there was indeed a telephone switchboard in the room. But there were also a few officer-technicians in the large room, and the women were not operators but rather “controllers” of the Twelfth Department of the KGB. Their rank was usually an ensign, the lowest possible rank in the KGB, and it was not up to them but to an officer at the switchboard, also a woman, to decide which stand to choose to connect the phone number marked for control. The job of controller was, in this sense, relatively easy—just make sure all reels moved properly and replace the tape when a reel was full. Sometimes the controllers were ordered to conduct “auditory control”: when they put on their headphones and grabbed the work notebooks to scribble notes. The women were trained to type and in stenography. They also were trained to remember over fifty voices and to recognize instantly who was calling. [15] Sergei Koval, interview with authors, Speech Technologies Center, June 2009. For these skills they received a handsome Soviet salary of 300 rubles per month (an engineer or scientist earned around 180 rubles), with the real possibility they might become deaf in fifteen years. [16] According to the testimony provided by Kalgin before the internal investigation comission of the KGB in 1991. The testimony was quoted by Andrei Uglanov, “Na Lybyanke posle putsha” [On Lubyanka After the Putsch], Argumenti Nedeli , Moscow, August 17, 2011.

Andrei found one of these controllers. We met at the café Nikolai on Staraya Basmannaya Street, two hundred meters away from her current job, a pro-Kremlin website called Pravda.ru. A small woman in her early fifties, with black hair, black eyes, and wearing a modest business suit, she sat at a table in a corner of the café and looked around nervously. Her first name was Lyubov, and Andrei just showed her the report signed with her name, which we had discovered in a small-circulation book published in 1995. [17] Urushadze Georgy, Izbrannie mesta iz perepiski s vragami [Selected Passages from Correspondence with Enemies] (St. Petersburg: European House, 1995), 349–350. After the putsch Urushadze was given access to the documentation of the internal investigation of the KGB and put copies of employees’ reports of the Twelfth Department in his book. A KGB document about the surveillance of Yeltsin’s people during the August coup showed that Lyubov was then a KGB senior lieutenant, an “interpreter of special purpose” of the Twelfth Department.

She confirmed that she was indeed a KGB “controller,” and in her report Lyubov described how, on the evening of August 20, 1991, the second day of the putsch, she eavesdropped on the conversations of Vitaly Urazhtsev, a democratic deputy of the Supreme Soviet and a Yeltsin supporter. Urazhtsev, a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Army, became well known in 1989 when he was expelled from the Communist Party for his ideas about democratizing the army. In the early morning of the first day of the putsch he was arrested at a bus stop and interrogated by KGB officers who asked Urazhtsev whether he was planning to oppose the putsch. They urged him to support the coup, but he refused. In a few hours he was released. However, the next day he was put under surveillance of the KGB’s Twelfth Department.

Silently listening to his conversations was Lyubov. She was a 1984 graduate of the best university in the country, Moscow State University, with a degree in geography. She pursued work as a specialist economic geographer and Portuguese interpreter, but she didn’t remain a geographer; the KGB recruited her to join the Twelfth Department as an interpreter. If the KGB needed to eavesdrop on the Portuguese, Brazilians, or Angolans, Lyubov got the job. The rest of the time she listened to whomever was of interest to the KGB.

In the days of the putsch this meant eavesdropping on the parliamentarian Urazhtsev. Now, in January 2015, Lyubov looked worriedly at her report, published in a 1995 book. She looked at the once-secret report lying there, in the open. “It’s our internal things,” she said. “It should be secret.” She clearly didn’t know what to say: in the first line of a report written at the time for the investigation, Lyubov acknowledged that on August 20, 1991, she took part in the “anticonstitutional, unlawful operation” to eavesdrop on Yeltsin’s people. She wrote that she was ready to take responsibility. She even offered to reorganize the activities of the Twelfth Department to make it lawful. At that time she seemed contrite for what had happened.