Russians Among Us

by Gordon Corera

  A year and a half later, in July 2018, the FBI pounded on the door of her apartment in northwest Washington, DC. Butina, who had just finished a master’s at American University, was handcuffed and led away. But what was Maria Butina? “If I’m a spy,” she told journalist James Bamford, “I’m the worst spy you could imagine.” After she was arrested, Moscow said she could not be a spy because she had always acted entirely openly. But the FBI alleged that she had come as a “covert Russian agent” directed by Torshin as part of an “influence operation.” The intention, it was alleged, was to infiltrate US political organizations to advance Russia’s interests. One counterintelligence official says they were aware of at least half a dozen cases like Butina. But she was the one the FBI had decided to prosecute and bring into the public domain—the intention being to raise awareness of Russian activity in the United States and how it evolved. While superficially there were echoes of the illegals and especially Anna Chapman, the reality was that this was something different.

  Butina had grown up in Siberia before moving to Moscow. She became involved with the Young Guard of United Russia, the youth wing of Vladimir Putin’s party. She began traveling to the United States soon after she started to work as a special assistant to Alexander Torshin. He was then a senator for United Russia and had been building up contacts on the right of American politics beginning in 2009. The CIA had reportedly believed he had been doing so to advance Moscow’s interests and in 2018 he would be one of a group of oligarchs and senior officials sanctioned by the United States. In 2012, he acted as an election observer in Tennessee, a useful chance to see how the system worked. Torshin invited US politicians back to Russia as he began to build his contacts.

  In 2013, Butina met a conservative political activist. She was in her twenties and he was in his fifties but the two would end up in a relationship (he has denied any wrongdoing). By March 2015 she was emailing him from Russia with a plan called “the Diplomacy Project.” This, the US government alleged, aimed to establish unofficial lines of communications with people influential in American politics for the benefit of the Russian government. The Republicans were likely to win in the 2016 election, it was thought, and normally took a tougher line on Russia. Her plan was to strengthen links with influential individuals before the election. Butina had a way in. Her Siberian upbringing meant hunting and guns were part of her life. In 2011, she had founded “Right to Bear Arms,” a Russian version of America’s National Rifle Association (NRA). She already had contacts in the NRA and had attended events where she had been introduced to Republican leaders as a “representative of informal diplomacy” in Russia.

  In her communications there were references to a “funder” who was a well-connected Russian oligarch worth $1.2 billion. She sent her proposal to him and asked for a budget of $125,000 to participate in upcoming Republican Party events. In April 2015, she attended the NRA convention and reported back, as she did for future events. She invited members of the NRA back to Moscow, where they met senior officials, thanks to Torshin. Butina and her supporters have always argued that she was simply acting to try to improve relations between the two countries.

  The FBI claimed her contact with Torshin involved “taskings” of the type agents receive. Butina told him she had identified a specific candidate she thought might win in 2016 and said she had managed a “short personal contact” with the candidate as well as some of his advisers. Torshin asked for more details. Butina sent a report along with an election forecast. He asked if he could send it on to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In June 2016 Butina received a visa to study and she arrived in the United States in August.

  Her American conservative activist introduced her to contacts, explaining it would be easy to meet people if she could present herself as a potential line of communication into future Russian governments. Butina also discussed with another American plans to establish an “informal communication channel” by holding “friendship and dialogue” dinners with influential people. These would help “correct” the outlook toward Russia and avoid too “oppositional” a stance from the next administration. Butina said the Russian presidential administration had expressed approval “for building this communication channel.” The FBI alleged this activity “could be used by the Russian Federation to penetrate the U.S. national decision-making apparatus to advance the agenda of the Russian Federation.” Once the election was over, Butina told Torshin the next step would be for a handpicked Russian delegation to come to the February 2017 National Prayer Breakfast to develop a back channel. Butina’s profile was growing. Reporters were asking who this unusual Russian was who moved in Republican gun-rights circles. Suspicion of Russia was on the rise amid talk of election interference. She and Torshin did not want publicity but still found some of it amusing.

  “Are your admirers asking for your autographs yet? You have upstaged Anna Chapman,” Torshin wrote to Butina in March 2017, according to the FBI. “She poses with toy pistols, while you are being published with real ones.” In July 2018, Butina was arrested. The FBI was adamant she was working on behalf of the Russian state. In December 2018 she pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. The FBI claimed she was likely in contact with the FSB, but one note seems to suggest only that she had been approached by them and was unsure what to do. Evidence tying her directly to Russian intelligence was thin and far from conclusive. There was no sign of clandestine communications. The contacts with Torshin were over Twitter direct messages—hardly the stuff of steganography. Butina’s lawyers said she simply shared her “naïve, youthful optimism for better Russian-American relations” with others. Her attendance at conferences, networking, and organizing of dinners was consistent, they said, with her own beliefs and done on her own initiative to improve relations. There was no accusation that she was an “operative” who stole secrets or covertly plotted against the United States, they added. She hardly hid her pro-Russian views, those who met her recalled, even alluding to her contacts with people she met on campus.

  The FBI told a court she should be considered “on par with other covert Russian agents.” But her communications are open to different interpretations. They certainly suggest efforts to keep a low profile. But do they—and the other evidence—show she was an actual spy? Perhaps not in the traditional sense. She was certainly not a trained SVR officer like the illegals. Nor was she even a “special agent” or “true name” SVR illegal in the manner of Anna Chapman, despite some superficial similarities. “It is not an element of any of the charged offenses that the defendant worked for a foreign intelligence operation,” the US government said in court documents. But that, US counterintelligence officials say, is because Butina is an example of how Russian activity had continued to evolve. “Butina’s work involved building a rolodex of information about powerful people who had, or were likely to get, access and influence over the next presidential administration,” a sentencing memorandum in her case argued, adding, “Butina’s reports back to the Russian official on the people she was meeting have all the hallmarks of spotting-and-assessing reports.” In other words, even if she was not an actual spy working directly for the Russian government or even a fully conscious agent, she was doing the kind of work Heathfield and Murphy had been undertaking before her. The information she provided was of “substantial value” and the Russian intelligence services would be able to use it for years to come to identify and target those who might be susceptible to recruitment by trained intelligence officers, according to a former FBI official’s declaration. He argued that her reports had “all the hallmarks of targeting packages used in spot-and-assess operations” focusing on people with political influence. In other words, Butina could be used by Russian intelligence even if she was not a spy herself.

  IN THE PAST, Western spy-catchers saw the Russians work along lines that had barely changed over the decades with the same kind of tradecraft, such as illegals and regular spies under diplomatic cover. But in the last few
years, they have begun to improvise much more. There appears to much freer rein to try things and see what works. Russian spying was becoming more opportunistic—more tactical. If the Russians see an opportunity, they grab it, is how one recently retired US counterintelligence official puts it.

  Already during the Ghost Stories investigation, the FBI could see the evolution away from illegals who required years of investment and toward the Anna Chapman model—with lighter or minimal training. The time of the deep-cover family illegals had passed—they were expensive and 2010 had shown their limits. Special agent illegals like Chapman worked for the SVR but had less cover—they were openly Russian. But a further evolution was the increasing use of “co-optees.” They were Russians who were not trained spies at all but who were co-opted in to help. In some cases, these people might not even have known they were working for Russian intelligence. The advantage was they provided more plausible deniability—if they were caught they (and Moscow) could say they were just a student. If you catch an illegal and can prove they are using a fake identity, it is over. The SVR uses this approach but so does the FSB and other parts of the state. The other hard reality is that those who are co-opted are “disposable”—they are not trained officers with secrets in their head who need to be retrieved (or swapped). If they end up in jail, that is embarrassing but less of a problem for the intelligence services.

  The ability to run co-optees and special agents with less training is also aided by technology. In the past, communicating with Moscow securely required tradecraft training on invisible ink or steganography. But now you can use commercial encryption systems that everyone can download. A decade ago, using high-end, military-grade encryption was enough to get you noticed by security services. Now commercial encryption is so widespread, it is much easier for a nontrained co-optee to use it and not look suspicious, hiding amid the noise. This model involves less investment and less risk. It is also much better suited to a model in which your goal is influence operations rather than classic espionage.

  Another change was the role of oligarchs. It is telling that both Maria Butina and the Internet Research Agency were, the United States alleges, linked to oligarchs and businessmen. This is another shift. When Putin came to power the oligarchs had been told to bend the knee. You were not allowed to survive as an oligarch unless you worked with the state (which is not quite the same as working for the state). A decade or so later, as the Kremlin turned to influence campaigns, the oligarchs were now ideal tools to work through abroad. They had two advantages. One was that there was a level of deniability to their actions when discovered. The Kremlin could always say that these were people acting on their own in a way they could not when an illegal or a GRU officer or a diplomat was caught interfering in politics. Second, the oligarchs had deep reach into the West. These were the men (and they were all men) who owned football clubs and sponsored art shows, who had politicians over to stay on their luxury yachts or at their Italian and French villas. Increasingly oligarchs have been used for both intelligence collection and influence operations, counterintelligence officials say. This includes offering business deals to Westerners as a means of securing influence over them (sometimes even just the possibility of a deal is enough to lead to a change in behavior). This was part of a wider shift toward using “cutouts”—the United States alleges this was how they started to spread some of the hacked material in 2016, not just through WikiLeaks but also fronts like online hackers such as Guccifer 2.0. In the past, Russian intelligence agencies would have wanted control of such activities to be kept “in-house” for reasons of secrecy. But now this was changing. In practice, the Kremlin only needed to set an overall direction and could then allow oligarchs and spy agencies to all compete to please their master with relatively little oversight.

  The new ways of Russian spying were more opportunistic, more fast and loose. Rather than sending agents out like the illegals or Anna Chapman, if the state sees a Russian in a position of influence, then it can approach them to recruit or co-opt them. It could be a student or a businessman. They may work wittingly or unwittingly, perhaps not knowing who they are ultimately working for. It moves away from some of the traditional concepts of sleeper cells who embed themselves and try to slowly work their way into circles of influence. Sometimes they are not even Russian—Directorate S has always had Department 10, which looks at people like foreign students or businessmen or women in Russia to see if they can be recruited to work for them. The results can be impressive. However you view Maria Butina, she had managed to build up a far larger repertoire of American political contacts than the deep-cover illegals had managed and in a far shorter time. The Kremlin could now work through a much wider range of outlets than just the spy agencies but use the deeper contacts with the West in the Cold War era—through businesses and the like—to seek out those with influence.

  THESE NEW, CHEAP, fast, flexible agents were good and bad for the FBI. The good side was that more opportunistic and more tactical almost certainly also means more sloppy and more likely to make mistakes. The bad news was that it challenged the way counterintelligence had traditionally been done. The FBI excelled at developing sources and recruiting agents like Poteyev, bugging embassies and homes and following diplomats around Washington, DC, New York, and San Francisco. But that was based on a model of traditional intelligence officers who communicated with Moscow Center and could be identified and tailed. Now ordinary people were co-optees—perhaps working through cutouts, loosely connected to the state, and with not everyone considering themselves to be a spy. That was harder to find and harder to prosecute. One former senior FBI intelligence officer describes it like the parallel challenge in dealing with the transition between the old model of counterterrorism in which you traced cells connected back to Al Qaeda leadership and the new model in which you have ISIS cells that are self-starting. There are many, many Russians in the West and only a tiny percentage of them will be co-opted. But working out who they are is not easy.

  British officials say they also see this new and evolving Russian tradecraft but see it alongside everything that came before rather than replacing it. They still see spies under traditional or diplomatic cover, or nondiplomatic (working for, say, Aeroflot), and also illegals who have never disappeared. They still see old-fashioned dead-letter boxes—although now it may be more likely a sticker than a chalk mark to signal a site needs to be cleared. The Russians will not get rid of anything that worked for them, reckons one. There are certainly changes even in the old ways of spying, though, particularly thanks to technology—you may not need to give someone a precise description to find a drop site if their phone can ping when they are near it. But now Russia has more options—new ways of spying and using Russians and technology around the world.

  THE US ELECTION of 2016 and the growing exposure of its new agents and methods did not end Russian activity. Immediately after the votes had been counted, the cyber actors started sending malicious links to US government employees and individuals associated with US think tanks and NGOs in national security, defense, and foreign policy fields.

  In St. Petersburg the pace actually increased. The highest peak of Internet Research Agency ad volume on Facebook was in April 2017 but it continued into 2018. It sought to divide by ramping up the rhetoric on divisive issues like race relations, immigration, gun control, LGBT rights, and the NFL national anthem debate. It would take advantage of events like shootings in Parkland, Charleston, or Las Vegas or of African Americans by the police to increase the temperature. It also began to react to the inquiry into Russian interference itself. Specialists were told to react to one article about Robert Mueller by saying, “Mueller is a puppet of the establishment. List scandals that took place when Mueller headed the FBI.”

  The new cyber illegals were also still out there, such as supposed New Yorker Bertha Malone on Facebook, demanding to “Stop All Invaders,” her content reaching nearly 1.4 million individuals in just a few days. Russia had found a syste
m that it believed worked and it was not going to stop. But the newfound aggression was not confined to what it was doing online. For Moscow, it was also expressed in its desire to settle old scores, scores that went back to the destruction of its American illegal network. Murder was on its mind when it came to chasing those ghosts of the past.

  28

  Revenge

  IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON on March 4, 2018, when emergency services received a phone call from members of the public in Salisbury. There was a strange couple—an old man and a young woman—ill on a bench in the cathedral city. “The lady was sort of passed out and leaning on the guy and he was doing some strange hand movements,” a passerby recalled. “They looked totally out of it.” Some people thought they were addicts or drunks and simply walked past. But one or two noticed their clothes did not quite fit that description. An ambulance whisked them away to a hospital. Heavily sedated, their lives hung in the balance.

  A CALL CAME in to the duty officer at MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross that evening. The duty officer is the overnight port of call for any emergencies, staying in a small apartment with three TVs and four phones. The officers are normally “old warhorses” of the service who have been around the block and are reaching the end of their careers but who know how to handle the unexpected. They receive a briefing document on the twenty or thirty things that might make one of the phones ring and which desk officer to contact when it does—perhaps an agent who had missed a meeting or, at the most dramatic, someone who was compromised and needed to get out fast. Most nights pass without incident. But that evening’s call was not covered by the list. Local police in Salisbury had identified the man who had been taken into the hospital. They had done a Web search on his name. And that had set off alarm bells. He was a Russian spy who had been living among them.