The oil paintings accounted for most of the pickup in the wider media. “I gazed at the former president’s legs and toes in the bathtub, overcome with relief that W. was now under the influence of Lucian Freud rather than Dick Cheney,” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd opined the next day. The Times art blog weighed in as well, with a semi-serious critique: “The forms are handled with care, but awkwardly, which is the source of their appeal….Everything is honestly accounted for, not sharply realistic, certainly not finicky….Whatever is going on psychologically, the paintings suggest a man, a painter, at ease with his body.”
The whole thing seemed sort of like a good-time lark, right down to the strange watermark stamped across every item sent: “Guccifer.”
Guccifer’s hijinks took a darker turn a month later, when the hacker gained control of former secretary of state Colin Powell’s electronic accounts. “You will burn in hell, Bush,” read a new post on Powell’s Facebook page. “Kill the illuminati! Tomorrow’s world will be a world free of illuminati or will be no more!” Guccifer didn’t stop at Powell’s Facebook page. He sent dozens of news organizations an email from the former secretary of state’s AOL account that read, “The 9/11 victim’s blood is on my hands.”
Three days later, a WikiLeaks-before-WikiLeaks site called Cryptome, along with the Smoking Gun and the state-owned Russian media company RT, received a new missive from Guccifer announcing the breach of the email account of Sidney Blumenthal, who had been a trusted senior adviser in the Clinton White House. “The online prankster known as ‘Guccifer’ has crossed party lines and hacked the AOL account of a former Bill Clinton aide,” the New York Daily News reported. A few days later, scores of reporters, congressional staffers, and political operatives received an email blast that originated, inexplicably, from the AOL account of the wife of Arrested Development actor Jeffrey Tambor. Mother of God! Attached were four private and confidential memos Blumenthal sent to Hillary Clinton in the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya. Guccifer had modified the documents just a tad, but only in terms of their visual presentation. The memos were rendered in the hacker’s preferred and decidedly creepy Comic Sans typeface, then set against a pink background.
The mere existence of the memos caused some real heartburn in the White House. Blumenthal had famously been denied a position in the State Department, because he was regarded as one of Hillary Clinton’s most vicious hit men against Barack Obama during the 2008 primaries. The Obama brain trust was not happy to learn that Secretary of State Clinton had been regularly receiving information and advice from Blumenthal. The publication of these emails was likely to invite new questions from the rabid House Republicans about the tragic and deadly incident in Benghazi. Buried deep in the Smoking Gun’s story was a strange fact, barely noted at the time. “Blumenthal’s memos and emails to Clinton,” the Smoking Gun reported, “were sent to her at a non-governmental email address through the Web domain ‘clintonemail.com.’ ” The website Gawker had a sinister but decidedly narrow read on why Hillary Clinton would use a private email account to conduct semiofficial business: “There seems to be little reason to use a different account other than an attempt to shield her communications with Blumenthal from the prying eyes of [Freedom of Information Act] requesters.”
The bosses at Russia’s RT went with the Blumenthal story in a big way. Watchful editors at Forbes magazine ran a quick follow-up story about RT’s coverage, which allowed them to report on the substance of the Blumenthal memos but at a comfortable remove. “RT, which is a propaganda arm of the Putin regime,…focuses on two of the four hacked emails, citing sensitive sources, on the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi,” said Forbes on March 19, 2013. “The reader should be warned that these are first and partial accounts of hacked emails that may be fabricated by someone with a hidden agenda. Time will tell whether they have any credence. The RT selection of excerpts appears to fit into Putin’s agenda.”
Guccifer was perhaps proving useful to Putin’s RT propagandists, but no one in Russia or anywhere else knew who was actually behind these hacks or what his or her motivation was. One thing was clear, though: Guccifer was proving remarkably capable of flinging mud all across the American political map. It was one thing to steal documents from important people. Such stolen material could always be used for a ransom demand, or the files could be copied and handed over (or sold) to a spy service interested in foreign secrets. But stealing the materials and then making a public spectacle of their display—reformatting and repurposing the purloined material to inflict maximum humiliation and reputational damage on even the most elite public figures—that wasn’t just mischievous and impressive; it was properly destructive. This was no longer Allen Funt’s Candid Camera. This was a shot-to-the-groin compilation on America’s Funniest Home Videos. Sure it was painful, but you can’t look away! Russia’s actual spies were eating cookies in an FBI-bugged, not-at-all-safe room, complaining that they couldn’t get American women to talk to them, while this who-knows-who Guccifer character had successfully ripped off and then ripped open the private correspondence of the immediate former president, the current secretary of state, and the most revered figure in American national security, himself a former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Nice work, whoever you are. And no FBI bugs anywhere to be seen.
* * *
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Guccifer kept that mud flying fast and furious for the next four months, in what appeared to be a random and unconnected series of electronic thefts. The seemingly unaffiliated mystery agent hacked Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell and treated her fans to the first fifty unedited pages of her novel in progress; hacked a billionaire venture capitalist from a firm where Colin Powell had been a paid consultant; hacked famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein and offered up to chosen media outlets his stock portfolio balances and his private correspondence with the movie director Steven Soderbergh. When the Smoking Gun wrote to Guccifer and asked about his method of electronic thievery, the mysterious digital housebreaker waved it off: “These are irrelevant extraneous technical questions.”
Wary news outlets that refused to traffic in the stolen goods Guccifer provided had to endure the hacker’s scorn. “And last but not least I have a word for the Main Stream Zionist Media,” Guccifer wrote. “You will fall like a house of cards!” He also embedded ongoing taunts aimed at the FBI and the Secret Service in his correspondence with the media: “i have an old game with the fucking bastards inside,” Guccifer boasted. “this is just another chapter in the game….i can figure out the feds have a finger up their ass; haha….AND TELL THE FUCKING BASTARDS THAT…I NEVER STOP!”
At the end of July 2013, Guccifer circled back to Colin Powell, having successfully stolen into the email account of a Romanian politician who had sent the former secretary of state some slightly racy correspondence and some slightly racy photographs of herself in bikini-wear. “This hacker is driving everyone here crazy,” Powell wrote to the Romanian woman. “Our security people have been chasing him for months.” He advised her to delete any emails she had ever sent to him, but alas, by then it was too late. Guccifer uploaded the embarrassing correspondence and photographs of Powell and the Romanian pol to a Google Drive account. Then he used the hacked Facebook account of an air force general who had served with Powell on the Joint Chiefs of Staff to provide a link to the material. Powell must have known he had lost control of this story when five of General Merrill McPeak’s Facebook friends “liked” the post. And he had certainly lost control of it after the New York Post published the bikini photograph. The popular, real-life American hero was forced to issue a public denial of any untoward relationship with the much younger Romanian woman. “Those types of emails ended a few years ago. There was no affair then and there is not one now,” Powell said. “This was a friendship that electronically became very personal and then back to normal.”
Guccifer remained committed to bipartisanship. In early December, the hacker released a set of doodles sketched by Bill Clinton on official papers from his White House years. One of the documents included Bubba’s unfortunate but not altogether surprising “boner doodle.” The one with the little happy-face guy, next to the delicious-looking chicken drumstick, next to the giant boner. Ah, good times.
All this Guccifer-spewed electronic detritus had caused plenty of heartache and embarrassment to some of the country’s most celebrated private citizens. But what was really worrisome to U.S. law enforcement was Guccifer’s reach into private email and Facebook accounts of men and women who were currently serving in national-security-related jobs, with security clearances. Guccifer had pilfered and disseminated private correspondence from a sitting U.S. senator, from the current chairman of the National Intelligence Council, and from the acting head of the National Nuclear Security Administration—the agency that, by official description, “works to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons is safe and secure.”
“Good night America,” Guccifer signed off on one of his emails to his media partners, “where ever you are.”
The week before Christmas 2013, two websites Guccifer had come to count on, Cryptome and the Smoking Gun, received word from the hacker that law enforcement might finally be closing in. “I don’t know what near future holds for me so i will schedule an email link for you…in case I disappear.” The next day, as promised, he shipped them a link to the entirety of the “Guccifer Archive,” which now resided in what the hacker called “the cloud of Infinite Justice.”
The Smoking Gun wasted no time in reporting the contents. Seems Guccifer had been much more active than anybody had realized, and incredibly opportunistic, using hacked accounts’ email directories to hop from one electronic lily pad to another—and another and another. The only real connection between the victims was fame. Modern-day illuminati you could call them, no matter how weak the flicker of renown. Guccifer had infiltrated the email accounts of the editor Tina Brown, the mean-girl biographer Kitty Kelley, the fitness guru Denise Austin, and the British actor Rupert Everett. He managed to hack the email of the Downton Abbey creator, Julian Fellowes, from which he stole the script for the finale of an upcoming season. (In an act of kindness, Guccifer had spared Downton’s millions of ardent viewers by keeping the script under wraps.)
And then, two weeks later, after nearly a full year of hacking mania, Guccifer was suddenly arrested, and his identity revealed. The revelation was kind of, well, unsatisfactory. Here was Marcel Lehel Lazar, a nondescript-looking forty-two-year-old wearing a pair of sunglasses and a tight-fitting “Authentic Vintage Clothing” T-shirt, being perp-walked to jail. Police had picked up the cyber pirate without incident at his modest little home in Sambateni, Romania, a remote village in the foothills of Transylvania, 350 miles from the capital city of Bucharest.
So Guccifer was unmasked, but as yet unexplained. Even the origins of his chosen cyber alias were shape-shifty. Lazar liked to add strange layers to the meaning of “Guccifer.” It was a name meant to combine “the style of Gucci and the light of Lucifer,” he once said. Lucifer was an angel who rebelled, one Romanian journalist pointed out. To which Lazar added, cryptically, that numerology was also at play: “Split Guccifer into numbers and you’ll get 72, which is known as an absolute number of divinity. Google it.” Lazar occasionally took off on rhetorical flights of vicious anti-Semitism and raging paranoia about the secret pact among leaders of the United States and Great Britain to rule the world. He claimed to have a very extensive tool kit with which he hoped to arrest the evil march of the Western illuminati: “I use any possible method to break electronic correspondence—including contact lists and metadata, like the NSA programs do, only that’s artificial intelligence. I also use Kabbalah”—which seems strange for an avowed anti-Semite—“numerology, and the occult. Jung’s archetypes.”
The emerging biographical details didn’t offer much help either, even those in a deeply researched and authorized profile by the Romanian-born journalist Matei Rosca. It seemed to stretch credulity past the breaking point to consider that this Lazar fellow was behind Guccifer’s remarkably successful cyber attacks in America. He was high school educated and chronically unemployed—a former factory worker, a former paint salesman, and a sometimes taxi driver who had never received a minute of formal computer training. Even his wife, Gabriela, didn’t really get it. She knew her husband spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling around on his laptop computer in the year before his arrest, but never thought it was a big deal. He always made time to look after and entertain their young daughter, she insisted, and remained diligent in his quest to keep their little backyard garden hoed and weeded.
Gabriela Lazar’s first inkling that something strange might be afoot was in early January 2014, when she found her husband in the backyard with an ax in hand, smashing his laptop and cell phone to smithereens. She was only certain something was up when Romanian authorities showed up a few days later to take her husband off to jail. Later, while Marcel was serving his seven-year jail sentence in Romania, Gabriela was defensive. Her husband never took a dime from anybody, she insisted, though he clearly had the chance. “What did he steal?” she told Rosca. “He was just curious.” Mrs. Lazar could also be defiant. “Such a man is born once every few decades,” she said. “I’m proud I have a smart man.”
Guccifer’s actual motivation remained murky, too. “I was interested in the people, usually celebrities,” he told investigators a few weeks after his arrest.
“Were you interested in something that would be the topic of news, or something that would put them in embarrassing situations?” the investigator asked.
“No, I was looking for something that would serve my interests.”
The Romanian prosecutor who eventually secured Lazar’s conviction theorized that he was a loner with an obsessive personality, way too much time on his hands, and a hero complex. “He is just a poor Romanian guy who wanted to be famous,” the prosecutor said. “A compulsive need to be famous.” The motivations were just too complicated, or too flighty, to really pin down.
Guccifer’s operational methods, however, were not so hard to reckon. A New York Times reporter who got three hours with Lazar, as well as help from the Romanian prosecutor and the FBI, seemed to come away somewhat underwhelmed by the secret of Guccifer’s success. “The answer,” wrote Andrew Higgins, “turned out to be disappointingly banal: Mr. Lazar simply guessed the answers to security questions.” Pet name. First car. Grade school attended. Street you grew up on. Mother’s maiden name. All the standard stuff. Who doesn’t use those? And all the answers are pretty easy to get if the person is a public figure. Many were available on Wikipedia and other public sites. Others might require the kind of down-the-rabbit-hole googling that can become addictive. Lazar was a stone-cold addict. At one point, he constructed a genealogy of the Colin Powell family four generations deep. He also spent days gathering and testing the street names near the grade school that Powell’s Romanian lady friend had attended in her youth. And it worked. Security question answered. Bikini shot secured. Lazar never claimed any great genius. In fact, he once figured his success rate was somewhere south of 10 percent. But, hey, he had a lot of time on his hands. Lazar was, explained the Romanian prosecutor, “just a smart guy who was patient and persistent.” And sometimes a hack was easy.
“Breaking into [Sidney Blumenthal’s] email address book took me a few minutes.”
Looking back on the Guccifer lark of 2013, with the remarkable cyber-shenanigans-filled political season of 2016 behind us, it’s pretty clear that whatever was motivating that random Transylvanian, sitting at his kitchen table, patiently unraveling the online lives and habits of America’s elite, it ended up being a beautiful test run for something way more destructive. Why throw good money after bad, shipping Cold War–style agents off to enemy terr
itory to pretend to be bankers and trade attachés, so they could deal with wordy birds like Carter Page, when instead you could just steal everything you needed from the comforts of home? The Guccifer saga was a weird few months in the annals of criminal hacking, but apparently somebody in Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin was paying very close attention. Why should some underemployed Romanian paint salesman be having all the fun in America?
This was to be Vladimir Putin’s triumph—the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. An event the Russian president had been working toward for almost a decade. Putin had flown to Guatemala back in 2007 to make a personal plea to the International Olympic Committee electors choosing the site of the 2014 Games. And it took some convincing. Sochi was not the obvious choice for an international winter sports festival, to say the least. The resort town on the Black Sea was a subtropical city with minuscule annual snowfall, doubtful utilities, and a dearth of lodging. The ski slopes were about thirty miles from the town center, and there was only one aged and crumbling highway from the seacoast to the slopes. This thoroughfare was entirely inadequate to handle the traffic the Olympics would bring. But Putin gave the committee his personal presidential guarantee. The Russian Federation would spend whatever money was required to remake Sochi into a worthy host city. The government had already set aside $12 billion for construction projects, a Winter Olympics world record and double the amount Canada was spending on the 2010 Games in Vancouver. Sochi would be ready, on time, to stage the most extravagant Winter Olympics the world had ever seen. President Putin could make it snow if he had to.
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