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

Her response shocked us: we have known both the OCCRP project and its leader, the Sarajevo-based veteran journalist Drew Sullivan, since 2008. Sullivan was well respected in investigative journalism circles; for years he and his reporters have been exposing corruption in regions not particularly safe for journalists. Sullivan is also known for his integrity—just a year earlier, in the summer 2015, he stated that his organization would stay away from a $500,000 US government grant to combat Russian propaganda: “The problem starts with the grant title, ‘Investigative Journalism Training to Counter Russian Messaging in the Baltics.’” He continued, “The title implies the grant seeks journalists to actively counter a Russian message which, at best, is not a mission for journalism and, at worst, is propaganda itself.” [10] Drew Sullivan, “Journalism or Propaganda: Let’s Help Russian Media the Right Way,” GIJN, August 19, 2015, http://gijn.org/2015/08/19/journalismor-propaganda-lets-help-russian-media-the-right-way .

We were dismayed to hear WikiLeaks using the same line of argument as the Kremlin. We felt that this kind of logic was not compatible with the ideals of the free flow of information we believe in and that WikiLeaks itself had, in the past, professed. WikiLeaks appeared to take the Kremlin’s side, and we didn’t understand why.

The very same day, April 8, Putin summoned an urgent meeting of his Security Council in the Kremlin. These meetings are held in high secrecy—even official photographers are rarely admitted. This time the long, marble-covered hall on the second floor of the domed Kremlin Senate building was almost empty—at the grand table only eight of the twenty-one seats were occupied. Of these eight people, six were former KGB officers: Putin himself; his chief of staff Sergei Ivanov; Sergei Naryshkin, the speaker of the Duma; Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Security Council; Alexander Bortnikov, the FSB director; and Mikhail Fradkov, chief of the Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. Neither the minister of defense nor the chief of military intelligence were present. [11] The other two participants were Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko and Minister of the Interior Vladimir Kolokoltsev. See “Meeting with Permanent Members of the Security Council,” President of Russia, April 8, 2016, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/51688 . The transcript of the meeting was never made public. The relatively small number of participants and their known backgrounds leads us to think it was about a very sensitive matter, such as the need for a retaliatory response to the Panama Papers exposés.

In the United States the presidential campaign was in full swing, and the Kremlin was watching as Hillary Clinton seemed headed toward an almost-certain victory. Putin had strong feelings about her: he believed she had been a driving force behind the Moscow protests. He also believed that she and her people at the US State Department were behind most of the Western anti-Russian moves—from the US sanctions, to the activities of the Russian opposition, to journalistic investigations exposing corruption in Russia. Putin’s circle was certain that the Obama administration was working to get Clinton elected. In their conspiratorial eyes this meant that the result of the US elections had already been decided.

A week passed, and on April 14 Putin held his annual television phone-in show. The Direct Line is broadcast live by Russian television channels and major radio stations. At this show Putin again brought up the Panama Papers and felt the need to further defend his friend Roldugin. He also renewed his accusations against the United States: “Who is engaged in these provocations? We know that there are employees of official US agencies.”

Next he said something very strange: “An article was written—I asked [my] press secretary Peskov where it first appeared—in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. The Süddeutsche Zeitung is part of a media holding that belongs to the US financial corporation Goldman Sachs. In other words, the ears of masterminds are sticking out everywhere [a Russian expression, meaning their fingerprints are all over it]!” [12] “Direct Line with Vladimir Putin,” President of Russia, April 14, 2016, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/51716 .

It was a baffling connection, and it was wrong. Why on earth had the Russian president mentioned Goldman Sachs? Goldman Sachs does not own the German Süddeutsche Zeitung—and the respected newspaper immediately issued a statement to that effect. The next day the Kremlin responded with a rare apology: “It is more the error of those who prepared the briefing documents [than Putin’s], it’s my error,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

So why bring up Goldman Sachs at all?

By mid-April, including when Putin made his strange remark, a hacking group—later identified as APT29, or Cozy Bear—had for months been inside the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) computer system. In March a second team, known as APT28, or Fancy Bear, had joined in and launched its own attack on the DNC. On March 19 Fancy Bear hackers had made a breakthrough: a Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta, was lured into re-entering his Gmail password on a specially designed phishing web page, and hackers began pumping his emails off it. [13] Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, “How Hackers Broke into John Podesta and Colin Powell’s Gmail Accounts,” Motherboard , October 20, 2016, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-hackers-broke-into-john-podesta-and-colin-powells-gmail-accounts .

In the fall of the election year of 2016 one of the biggest news stories that came out of the hacking operation was the publication of Hillary Clinton’s transcripts of three paid speeches at Goldman Sachs. In these speeches she was embarassingly uncritical of Wall Street as she discussed the causes of and responses to the 2008 financial crisis. [14] Dan Merica, “WikiLeaks Releases Transcripts of Clinton Goldman Sachs Speeches,” CNN, October 17, 2016, http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/15/politics/wikileaks-hillary-clinton-goldman-sachs-speeches ; and David Dayen, “Behind Closed Doors, Hillary Clinton Sympathized with Goldman Sachs over Financial Reform,” Intercept , October 11, 2016, https://theintercept.com/2016/10/11/behind-closed-doors-hillary-clinton-sympathized-with-goldman-sachs-over-financial-reform . The hackers stole these transcripts from John Podesta’s email account in the spring—right around the time of Putin’s comments about the cellist Roldugin and his false statement about Süddeutsche Zeitung ’s connection to Goldman Sachs. WikiLeaks published the documents in October 2016. But in mid-April, when Putin gave his press conference, nobody except the hackers and those who had directed them knew that the hackers possessed Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs transcripts.

If someone had briefed Vladimir Putin about the hackers’ Podesta findings, he may have been encouraged to believe in a conspiracy theory whereby Clinton had prompted a Goldman Sachs connection to publish the Panama Papers. It’s difficult to see how the bank got into his head otherwise.

Four days later, on April 19, the domain DCleaks.com was registered.

In the summer DCleaks.com would become one of the two websites used for publishing emails from hacked accounts of American officials. Another would be WikiLeaks.

On June 14 Ellen Nakashima, the national security reporter at the Washington Post , broke a story: Russian government hackers had penetrated the network of the US Democratic National Committee. Ellen had been briefed by DNC officials and Shawn Henry, a former head of the FBI’s cyber division, now president of CrowdStrike, the private information security company hired to handle the DNC breach. [15] Ellen Nakashima, “Russian Government Hackers Penetrated DNC, Stole Opposition Research on Trump,” Washington Post , June 14, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russian-government-hackers-penetrated-dnc-stole-opposition-research-on-trump/2016/06/14/cf006cb4–316e-11e6–8ff7–7b6c1998b7a0_story.html . Nakashima’s story was met with furious denials from the Kremlin: “I completely rule out a possibility that the [Russian] government or the government bodies were involved in this,” said Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov. [16] Vladimir Soldatkin, “Moscow Denies Russian Involvement in U.S. DNC hacking,” Reuters , June 14, 2016, www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-hack-russia-idUSKCN0Z02EK .