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

Putin didn’t leave it there; he made a point of adding, “Besides, does it really matter who hacked Mrs. Clinton’s election campaign team database? Does it? What really matters is the content.” [31] “Interview to Bloomberg,” President of Russia, September 5, 2016, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/52830 .

This exactly echoed Julian Assange, who had said in a July interview with NBC that commentators should be focusing on what the documents say, that “the real story is what these emails contain.” [32] Alex Johnson, “Wikileaks’ Julian Assange: ‘No Proof’ Hacked DNC Emails Came from Russia,” NBC, July 25, 2016, www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wikileaks-julian-assange-no-proof-hacked-dnc-emails-came-russia-n616541 . (A hardly consistent claim given WikiLeaks’ April attack on Mika Velikovsky and his friends.)

Putin gave the Bloomberg interview in Vladivostok, on his way to the G20 Summit in China. There he met US president Barack Obama. There was no proper conversation between them—Obama just pulled Putin aside and told him to “cut it out and there were going to be serious consequences if he didn’t.” [33] Russell Berman, “Obama: I Told Putin to ‘Cut It Out,’” Atlantic , December 16, 2016, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/obama-russia-hack/510974 . Putin responded that the United States had long funded media outlets and civil-society groups that meddled in Russian affairs. [34] Evan Osnos, David Remnick, and Joshua Jaffa, “Trump, Putin and the New Cold War,” March 6, 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-cold-war .

The sticky question of attribution remained unresolved despite the cyber community’s new guidelines. Although several cybersecurity companies confirmed CrowdStrike’s findings and US intelligence supported the thesis that two Russian intelligence agencies conducted the DNC hack, the Kremlin continued to deny any responsibility. Meanwhile informal actors, like Guccifer 2.0, kept claiming they were behind the hack.

Inside Russia, Kremlin propaganda mocked US hacking claims while private Russian cyber companies were busy briefing journalists, apparently with one objective: to destroy the credibility of the CrowdStrike June report. The media were trying to figure out whether the Russian military intelligence cyber capabilities were up to the task of hacking the DNC servers. Cyberwarfare had been an FSB monopoly for more than two decades, and the Russian Ministry of Defence set to form its own so-called cyber troops relatively late, only in 2014. [35] Eugene Gerden, “$500 Million for New Russian Cyber Army,” SC Magazine , November 6, 2014, www.scmagazineuk.com/500-million-for-new-russian-cyber-army/article/541257 . See also Aleksander Stepanov, “Minoboroni obyavlayet nabor v nauchnuyu rotu, gde gotovyatsa spetsialisti radioelectronnoy borbi” [Defense Ministry Announces Recruitment for Science Troops: Students Will Be Put to Cyber Arms], Moskovsky Komsomolets Online, April 6, 2015, www.mk.ru/politics/2015/04/05/studentov-postavyat-pod-kiberruzhe.html . Although the military immediately joined the FSB in actively recruiting at Russian technical universities, spotting the best and brightest, this didn’t quite support the claims that Fancy Bear was a military intelligence front—most cybersecurity experts thought Fancy Bear had been operational since at least 2007, long before the Russian military had joined the cyberwar scene.

On September 26, 2016, we were in Moscow when we got a message on WhatsApp from a friend at an American TV network: “Let me know if you have a few mins to chat.” He then sent us a collection of scraps from what appeared to be intelligence briefings on Trump’s connection with the Kremlin. Three days later another journalist from a top US newspaper contacted us with something that looked like it was coming from the same source. This information gave some insight into the Kremlin’s thoughts about the US election.

The document—the now-famous dossier prepared by Christopher Steele—read like a series of reports and included prurient details of an alleged assignation during Trump’s stay in the Ritz hotel in Moscow, among other things. It also made strong allegations about Trump’s closeness to Putin’s people. The American journalists were hesitant and wanted us to check the facts in the report. “It’s starting to smell like BS…. It seems like a smear campaign,” one of them told us.

So what was it? Was it a smear campaign? The answer was not immediately clear. Kremlin outsiders had no way of verifying most of the claims in the document. Some details, including names, were clearly erroneous—misspelled or misattributed. For instance, the name of the Russian diplomat withdrawn from the embassy in DC was Kalugin, not Kulagin, and the FSB unit named as responsible for gathering compromising material on Hillary Clinton, Department K, has nothing to do with eavesdropping or cyber operations. (Apparently, it was a confusion—there is another Department K in the Interior Ministry, and this is what oversaw cyber investigations.)

But the dossier was accurate in one thing: it correctly described the decision-making process in the Kremlin, and this suggested human sources in high places in Moscow.

The dossier also included some information about the DNC hacking, and it was strikingly different from the story told by CrowdStrike and repeated by the US intelligence. It implied that it was not the GRU or FSB but rather Sergei Ivanov who was “ultimately responsible for the operation,” though he was not entirely happy with the outcome. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, “remained a key player in the operation” and played the crucial role in “handling and the exploitation of intelligence” by his “PR team.” And Ivanov was one of the six KGB officers present at the April meeting of the Security Council in the Kremlin Senate. In terms of foreign intelligence Ivanov was the most experienced person at the meeting. On August 12 he had been removed from his position of chief of Putin’s administration, but he maintained access to the marble-covered hall of the Kremlin Senate—Putin preserved his seat on the Security Council.

The dossier also asserted that the hacking operation had been organized through informal channels and used informal actors—hackers’ groups and companies. The FSB, not military intelligence GRU, was named as “the lead organization within the Russian state apparatus for cyber operations”—something that meshed better with what we had been finding when we investigated CrowdStrike’s report. The report further claimed that the FSB “often uses coercion and blackmail to recruit the most capable cyber operatives in Russia for its state-sponsored programmes” with the goal “to carry out its, ideally deniable, offensive cyber operations.” Further, the dossier said that Putin knew about the hacking and “was generally satisfied with the progress of the anti-Clinton operation up to date.”

Still, it was full of unverified claims and mistakes. Nobody knew what to do about it, and despite its wide circulation among reporters, it wasn’t made public until January 2017, when Buzzfeed posted it online and it became known as the Trump Dossier. [36] Ken Bensinger, Mark Schoofs, and Miriam Elder, “These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties to Russia,” Buzzfeed , January 10, 2017, www.buzzfeed.com/kenbensinger/these-reports-allege-trump-has-deep-ties-to-russia?utm_term=.mnwx71QK0#.oqNmP5w7Y .

In early October 2016 the US government took an unprecendented step: they officially accused Russia of a hacking operation, apparently trying to force the Kremlin to stop. The denunciation, made by the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, stated that “the U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.” The statement went on to say, “We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” [37] Homeland Security, “Joint Statement from the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security,” October 7, 2016, www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-department-homeland-security-and-office-director-national . Washington just raised the stakes for the Kremlin.