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

In 2016 Velikovsky was invited to join a large-scale investigation being conducted by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which consists of reporters based all over Europe and the former Soviet Union, from Azerbaijan to Romania to Ukraine to Russia. The project had gotten their hands on an extensive trove of documents detailing offshore Panamanian companies that government officials and oligarchs all over the world—Russians included—used for illegal purposes, including fraud, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions. When the journalists’ findings were eventually published, the “Panama Papers” made headlines all over the world.

Before that, though, the internationl team spent months digging into the documents and connecting the dots. Each national team was given data on their compatriots. Using this data, each group tried to zero in on the financial activities of their country’s high-placed government officials and their personal friends. The Russian team consisted of reporters from Novaya Gazeta , one of the most respected independent outlets still operating in Russia. The publication exists under constant government pressure, and its journalists risk their lives for their work: contract killers assassinated Anna Politkovskaya, critical of the war in Chechnya, in October 2006. Now Velikovsky joined the team.

The OCCRP broke its first story on April 3, 2016. Velikovsky was proud to be part of it, especially as it turned out that his team unearthed the biggest news contained in the Panama Papers. The Russian journalists identified multi-million-dollar accounts owned by Sergei Roldugin, a personal friend of President Putin. Roldugin was a cellist, and although he had some business dealings, including oil and the media, he was no oligarch. And yet it appeared he had been put in charge of Putin’s private money. [4] Luke Harding, “Sergei Roldugin, the Cellist who Holds the Key to Tracing Putin’s Hidden Fortune,” Guardian , April 3, 2016, www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/sergei-roldugin-the-cellist-who-holds-the-key-to-tracing-putins-hidden-fortune .

These findings quickly developed into a major news story when Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, commented on them. [5] Luke Harding, “Kremlin Dismisses Revelations in Panama Papers as ‘Putinphobia,’” Guardian , April 4, 2016, www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/04/kremlin-reaction-putin-dmitry-peskov-panama-papers-putinphobia . This was highly unusual: Russian officials generally do not comment on sensitive stories in order to prevent them from gaining traction. To the team of Russian journalists, this looked like an endorsement of their findings.

But then Velikovsky was confronted with something totally unexpected. WikiLeaks launched a vicious attack on the OCCRP report on Twitter. On April 5 WikiLeaks posted:

#PanamaPapers Putin attack was produced by OCCRP which targets Russia & former USSR and was funded by USAID & Soros.

In another tweet they developed the accusation:

US govt funded #PanamaPapers attack story on Putin via USAID. Some good journalists but no model for integrity.

The tweet implied that the journalists had been used, either as paid agents or as dupes of the US government. USAID and George Soros are conspiracy theorists’ totems. For years the Kremlin has seen the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, as a CIA front that is plotting to undermine the Russian political regime. Meanwhile George Soros, along with his foundation, Open Society, have been accused of sponsoring “color revolutions” in Russia’s neighboring countries. Russia expelled USAID in September 2012 and listed Soros’s Open Society Foundation as an “undesirable organization” in November 2015 after the General Prosecutor’s Office said it threatened Russia’s constitutional order and security. [6] The website of the Russian Ministry of Justice, the list of unwanted organizations, http://minjust.ru/ru/activity/nko/unwanted .

Mika Velikovsky was outraged. His friends at WikiLeaks—people he worked alongside for years—had turned against him. It was personal, and it was unfair. In Velikovsky’s eyes Assange betrayed the very principles he had explained to him during their conversations: “Assange told me many times that it’s not important what the leaker’s motivations are or who he works for. The only important thing is the authenticity of the documents. If you have doubts, you can start thinking about why and where and how. But if you don’t have any doubts [about the documents’ authenticity], then it doesn’t matter who leaked…. That’s why it was so disgusting to see this coming from WikiLeaks!” [7] Mika Velikovsky, interview with the authors.

Days went by, and the Roldugin story didn’t die. Instead, with each passing day it gained more media coverage all over the world. On April 7 Vladimir Putin attended a media forum in St. Petersburg where he personally commented on the Panama Papers. He immediately attacked journalists: “What did they do? They manufactured an information product. They found some of my friends and acquaintances—I will talk about that shortly—and they fiddled around and knocked something together. I saw these pictures. There are many, many people in the background—it is impossible to understand who they are, and there is a close-up photo of your humble servant in the foreground. Now, this is being spread!”

He was clearly personally affronted. Putin could barely hold himself together: “There is a certain friend of the Russian president, and they say he has done something, so probably something corruption-related. What exactly? There is no corruption involved at all!” [8] “Truth and Justice Regional and Local Forum, President of Russia, April 7, 2016, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/51685 .

And then Putin did something unexpected: he tried to debunk the findings by citing WikiLeaks’ claim that the whole thing was an American conspiracy: “Besides, we now know from WikiLeaks that officials and state agencies in the United States are behind all this!”

The next day we were both at the Journalism Festival in Perugia. Sarah Harrison, the head of WikiLeaks’ investigative team who had spent forty days alongside Snowden in Moscow’s airport in 2013, was there too. She was giving a talk about WikiLeaks and Snowden.

During the question-and-answer session Andrei asked Harrison about WikiLeaks’ response to the Panama Papers. Andrei also pointed out that, to Russian journalists, WikiLeaks’ conspiracy claim sounded strange: after all, the journalists who took part in the Panama Papers investigation worked for Novaya Gazeta , a newspaper whose commitment to exposing corruption has led to the high-profile murders of several of its journalists. Yet just the day before, Andrei continued, Putin had quoted the WikiLeaks’ tweet about US funding to publicly call into question the Panama Papers’ investigation findings.

Referring to “bias” and “spin,” Harrison immediately deflected responsibility: “Please, do not make me responsible for what Putin says! What Putin says and does has nothing to do with me!”

Then she went on the offensive. The fact that a Russian story was the first to make headlines was, in her eyes, enough to justify WikiLeaks’ attack. “It is very clear, from the reporting that came out, that it’s being used as basically an attack on Putin,” she said. Then, echoing the longstanding Kremlin line, she added, “And the funding of this organization as a whole does come from the USAID!” [9] The video of the talk is available on the website of the International Journalism Festival, www.festivaldelgiornalismo.com/programme/2016/from-wikileaks-to-snowden-protecting-high-value-sources-in-the-age-of-mass-surveillance .