The image of Putin projected onto the whiteness of the low-ceilinged Holiday Inn conference room inspired feelings that might make a new bride blush. Here was the shirtless modern-day Nationalist Leonidas, riding his ursine mount, and the International Russian Conservative Forum delegates in that room were Sparta’s three hundred bravest, there to hold back the hordes until the rest of the West could work up a sufficient appreciation of the dangers that lurked. The Russian journalist Ilya Azar sat in on the keynote speeches and couldn’t quite believe their Putin worship: “Lenin died, Thatcher died, Buddha died, Muhammad died, but Jesus lives!…God will save Russia! God will save the Russian people! God will save Vladimir Putin!” Azar described the culmination of that little riff as “quite unexpected.”
The scene outside the hotel, however, betrayed the feebleness of the forum. The organization’s website had basically begged for protesters—“enemies of Russia will not stop the International Russian Conservative Forum from taking place”—but these fringe creeps didn’t even warrant a proper counterdemonstration. A dozen or so young men and women, easily outnumbered by police and Cossack guards, banged drums and pots, chanted, “Nazi fuck off! No to fascism!” and waved handmade signs: “Nazis licking Putin’s ass. Omg….We don’t want foreign Nazis in St. Petersburg. We have enough of our own.” The fascists in attendance complained about being called Nazis. The outright Nazis sporting swastika tattoos said they were a little hurt by that. A few of the loudest protesters were carted off to jail; one of the Cossack guards was wrist-slapped for ripping up a sign. Other than that, the only casualty seemed to be the hotel chain itself. “I will always spread information about how this hotel lets in neo-Nazis,” one young man told Azar. “And of course I will never set foot in another Holiday Inn.”
By the time a fake bomb threat broke up the conference—police suspected the call had actually come from one of the attendees, trying to drum up a little press—the first annual forum had been deemed by disinterested observers ineffectual and pathetic. “The flotsam and jetsam of right-wing fringe groups,” Anna Nemtsova called the attendees in The Daily Beast. “This confab was for losers who can feel, in Russia, like they’ve found people who really understand and sympathize with them.”
The whole scene invited more mockery than scorn, especially when it came to the sidebar participants, like Nathan Smith, the “foreign minister” of the Texas Nationalist Movement, a group advocating for the secession and reestablishment of an independent Republic of Texas. Smith made very little impression at the forum itself, his Texas-sized cowboy hat notwithstanding; he was not among the two dozen featured speakers. But he did take some time to explain to local reporters the ideals of this secession movement in Texas and how the U.S. government was “trying to artificially create the American identity.”
“[Texans] need independence because…we have a completely different vision of the world and of politics, and we are not at all in agreement with the policy of the U.S. federal government,” Smith was quoted in Vzglyad. “Today in power there are simply no people who represent the interests of the people of Texas. At the same time, we pay taxes that go up to Washington. Tell me, why do we need to belong to the United States?”
The Texas secessionists were a quarter-million strong, Smith insisted, and could point to comments by a recent governor of the state as more or less official proof that the movement was serious as a heart attack. “When we came in the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that,” Rick Perry had asserted, without benefit of factual underpinning. “You know, my hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention. We’ve got a great union. There is absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what may come out of that?” He had since walked that back a bit, but not exactly all the way. Most Americans might have understood that as Rick Perry being Rick Perry—flirting with Texas bad-boy chauvinism in the hopes of distracting people from the fact that he was about to attempt a run for president while under felony criminal indictment. Oops! But today’s stupid political machismo stunt might become tomorrow’s international flying wedge, and so Putin’s government threw in with the wing-nut Texans. Russia likened their desire for independence—not to mention the wishes of separatists you could find in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Catalonia to name a few—to that of the Russian speakers in Crimea, which Russia had heroically broken away from Ukraine, and in the Donbas, which Russia was trying to break away from Ukraine.
Almost nobody in the West took much notice of the sudden explosion in “Free Texas” tweets in the wake of that garrulous interview with the Republic of Texas’s “foreign minister,” Nathan Smith, in St. Petersburg in March 2015. Politico’s Casey Michel was on this story early, reporting the strange happenings in real time, but experts and Russia watchers in the West waved off all the Texit business as absurdist political theatrics from the Kremlin. “It’s just another mischief-making gambit. Nothing seriously to be worried about,” NYU professor Mark Galeotti explained to Michel. “Were the [Texas separatists] not both noisy and willing to play nice with Moscow, I doubt it would get much play. It’s just another case of taking advantage of whichever ‘useful idiots’ happen to present themselves.”
Maybe in an earlier age, but this was a different time—a moment when Vladimir Putin had growing, urgent (and increasingly hostile) geopolitical imperatives and when his intelligence apparatchiks were beginning to understand the power of certain new political tools at their disposal. Those “Free Texas” tweets were the first little pinholes that allowed a glimpse of a really weird future to come. To see how and where that future was being charted—to see how the freakish, the virulent, and the ugly were being weaponized for new uses—all you’d have to do is hail a cab under the portico of the St. Petersburg Holiday Inn that March day and ride ten miles north, to the squat four-story office building at 55 Savushkina, home of the Internet Research Agency.
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The dark, heavy drapes were pulled tight on the windows day and night, so 55 Savushkina was a mystery even to people who lived and worked in the neighborhood—a subject of much gossip and speculation. There were suspicions that the Internet Research Agency was a seven-day-a-week, round-the-clock operation, but outsiders didn’t know the half of it. There were only a few minutes a day when the hundreds of laptops in the warren of offices were idle. The bosses of the Internet Research Agency ran the operation on two separate twelve-hour shifts, which meant if you were in the area just before nine o’clock in the morning or just before nine o’clock at night, you could see small contingents of twentysomethings streaming in and out of 55 Savushkina. “They’re so cool, like they’re from New York,” one observer told American reporter Adrian Chen. “Very hip clothing, very hip tattoos.”
Many of these young professionals had been drawn to the Internet Research Agency by the ads that started appearing back in 2013. “Internet operators required! Task: posting comments on specialized Internet sites, writing thematic posts, blogs, social networks. Screenshots reports. FREE POWER SUPPLY!!! Learning is possible!” Setting aside the weirdness that in a country floating on gas and oil a FREE POWER SUPPLY at work is an advertisable perk, it’s clear that jobs at Internet Research were coveted. Most of the hundreds of young people who worked at 55 Savushkina made around $700 a month; under the table, in cash. No need to report it to the tax authorities. This was very good money indeed for playing make-believe on your computer, twelve hours a day (two days on, two days off). The salary was equal to that of a full professor at a local university or close to that of “a journalist armed with legitimate facts and at considerable risk of being killed or imprisoned,” noted Sam Zelitch in an essay for PEN America. “In the Russian workforce, there’s as much money in chaos as there is in news.”
Most all of the fun at Intern
et Research was in creating personas that could comment and blog and post and tweet and network with people anywhere in the world: a European fortune-teller who opined on dating, dieting, crystals, and feng shui; a young professional woman who unleashed bons mots about Kim Kardashian’s latest nekkid selfie; a specialist in vintage automobile repair living on a sunny coast in Central America; a movie critic in Los Angeles. “It was an opportunity for them to live a life they always dreamed about and to pretend to be somebody else,” explained Lyudmila Savchuk, who in March 2015 had only recently left the company. “They can be a gorgeous knockout. They can be bodybuilders. They can live in any part of the globe. In America. They could live the life they’ve always wanted to live—through the internet.”
Whatever the psychological benefits of the fantasy elements of the work, the physical work environment on Savushkina Street was no Silicon Valley start-up with foosball and craft beer and office dogs. Didn’t matter if you were a member of the graphics team, the data analysis team, the department of commentators, the department of bloggers, the department of social networking professionals, or the rapid-response department. “They created such an atmosphere that people would understand they were doing something important and secretive,” says Savchuk. “Humourless and draconian,” was how a reporter from The Guardian described the outfit in a long investigative piece early in 2015. The Internet Research Agency was engaged in constant, rapid-response-driven information warfare. Speaking to co-workers was frowned upon. Talking about the work to anybody outside the building was forbidden. The nondisclosure form was the first thing a new employee signed. Show up late and you were docked pay. Fall short on the quota of work and you were docked pay. The folks on the social media teams were expected to produce five political posts, ten nonpolitical posts, and more than 150 comments every two days. Without fail.
The topics and tenor of the political content were decided at the top, every day. “We’d come in, turn on a proxy server to hide our real location and then read the technical tasks we had been sent,” an Internet Research Agency employee explained to The Guardian in March 2015. Most of the technical tasks the previous year, as the agency was getting its sea legs, centered on Ukraine—looking for ways to justify Putin’s invasion and takeover of Crimea and his ongoing military effort to do the same in the Donbas. Daily tasks called for savaging the new democratically elected, pro-EU, pro-U.S., anti-Russian government in Kyiv. They were fascists, anti-Semites, baby killers. Ukrainians fighting in their own country against out-of-uniform Russian soldiers and artillery and tanks were invariably described as “terrorists.” The more shocking the fake stories about heinous atrocities committed by the Ukrainians against the Russian “freedom fighters” in the Donbas, the better.
In the first days of March 2015, immediately following the assassination of the Putin critic Boris Nemtsov, technical task orders spurred hundreds of posts and tweets pointing fingers at Ukraine for the murder. It wasn’t Putin but the government in Kyiv that had killed Nemtsov! How does that even remotely make sense? Oh, follow along, why don’t you. See, the Ukrainians killed him as an exercise in reverse psychology. Shooting Nemtsov on the night before his big antiwar march was designed to stir up anti-Putin opposition in Russia! Killing an anti-Putin leader—that’s obviously a plot against Putin. “The murder is pure provocation….The state is doing everything to catch Nemtsov’s murderers….[Putin’s] best specialists have been sent to fulfill this goal.” There was no evidence, no hint of corroboration, to back up this nonsensical claim. Which means you just have to make it more loudly and more frequently. The Internet Research Agency ops counted on a sentiment that had been invoked by one of the white nationalist speakers at that galactic freak-show International Russian Conservative Forum across town: “One hundred repetitions make one truth. The defenders of the truth can be overwhelmed by repeated lies.” No lie was too outlandish, as long as it could at least plausibly confuse the real news, and as long as it increased anti-Ukraine, anti-Western online traffic and noise. The analytics department at 55 Savushkina tracked the metrics—how many comments, how often shared or forwarded or re-tweeted—and fed all that information to the technical taskmasters for message refinement.
And it wasn’t just about shaping the response to real events that people would normally be talking about. The Internet Research Agency spread word of stories and ideas and characters that would otherwise not get a second glance if it weren’t for the artificial hype its employees were churning out on a twenty-four-hour no-rest double-shift schedule. The morning after Foreign Minister Nathan Smith (Texas National Movement) gave his interview across town in St. Petersburg, Internet Research trolls were tasked to weigh in on the momentous secession crisis facing the Lone Star State. Dozens of tweets and social media posts started popping up, ready to be shared and retweeted, all across America. And in not particularly bad English. Some linked to what appeared to be earnest editorials, such as this ditty: “Perhaps nowhere else in the United States have local people discussed the topic of the annexation of Crimea to Russia, as in the state of Texas. The reason for the keen interest of the Texans to this problem is that the history of Crimea has much in common with the history of their own state.” Sure, that’s what Texas separatists were all about—solidarity with Russian-speaking Crimeans in the Ukraine. In the hands of Putin’s internet trolls, any secessionist movement anywhere—however lame and parochial—could be adopted, mislabeled, and harnessed to help run down the West. And the social media fakery didn’t end there, either. Internet Research soon set up its own Facebook page promoting secession—and it was a hit! “Heart of Texas” drew followers by the tens of thousands, all of whom could be spoon-fed content devised by Russian agents in St. Petersburg and in turn pass it on to who knows how many Facebook friends and Twitter followers. “Heart of Texas” was one of scores of separate IRA-controlled Facebook pages—not to mention thousands more social media identities and accounts operating on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube—all created at 55 Savushkina.
By early 2015, when the St. Petersburg Holiday Inn was spinning its international lazy Susan of Nazis and fringe separatists, the Internet Research Agency’s secret drive to expand the malevolent presence of covert Russian trolls in Americans’ online lives was already a busy and expanding operation. The United States was the key and crucial target; Putin’s Kremlin was committed to the mission of mucking with American democracy in general and the 2016 election in particular. And committed to a very modern method. The days of depending on hapless Illegals and mopey spies at the UN mission in New York were over. The return on investment had been too paltry. But the American virtual world was wide open and fertile with new possibility. It was also a fraction of the cost of active and actual human intelligence operations. Think of the Internet Research Agency’s English-language department as a team of four hundred Guccifers, only with quality control engineers to fix up cultural references, usage, and grammar, and data analytics specialists, and IT specialists, and an endless array of protected virtual private networks behind them.
The heart of Putin’s cynical play was information warfare, featuring cyber nuisances like trolling, and cybercrimes like identity theft, email hacking, and outright stealing. Putin’s military intelligence and his foreign service pros were handling the most daring cybercrimes. The savvy well-paid kids at Internet Research were handling the rest, which meant the English-language department at 55 Savushkina had already become the favored elite in the building. They were the highest-paid crew at 55 Savushkina, and the hardest working. Even those with the best English-language skills had to master new areas of expertise. Learning is possible! They had to know how to use stolen identities to set up fake American-sounding accounts on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. They had to study up on information provided by fellow agents recently returned from intelligence- and contacts-gathering trips in (the actual) Nevada, California, New Mexico, Illinois, Michigan, Georgia, New York, and Texas. They had t
o know where the most damage could be done. (A guy in Texas had told Russia’s agent on tour it was the “purple states,” but what exactly were those?) They had to discern which politically connected figures and follower-heavy celebrities sprinkled internet traffic magic dust that might just rub off on anybody who engaged them. And they had to be schooled in how to engage those mighty influencers. National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre, we’re looking at you. E! Entertainment’s Kim Kardashian, we’re looking at you, too?
They had to get up to speed on American culture and politics, and specifically the most contentious and divisive issues of the day—immigration, gun laws, race, the Confederate flag. They had to spend hours screening one slightly cartoonish but very popular political series on Netflix. “At first we were forced to watch the ‘House of Cards’ in English,” said one of the trolls who worked at IRA in 2015. “It was necessary to know all the main problems of the United States of America. Tax problems, the problem of gays, sexual minorities, weapons. Our goal wasn’t to turn Americans toward Russia. Our goal was to set Americans against their own government. To provoke unrest, provoke dissatisfaction.”
After two years of investigation by the FBI and the Office of Special Counsel, and more investigation by a handful of congressional committees, not to mention the relentless digging by dozens of able and talented professional reporters, we pretty much know how the Russians did it. How they mucked with our electioneering in 2016 in what the special counsel’s final report called “sweeping and systematic fashion.” We know that agents inside Unit 26165 and Unit 74455 of Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) “used a variety of means to hack the email accounts” of the Hillary Clinton for President Campaign and its chairman, and to infiltrate—and then monitor and infect—the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee. We know from federal indictments they were able to “capture keystrokes entered by” Democratic Party officials and employees and to take screenshots from their computers. We know Russian military intelligence officers released tens of thousands of stolen emails and documents through online entities they created, like “DCLeaks” and—as homage to that lonely but inspiring Romanian hacker—“Guccifer 2.0.” (The GRU-controlled Guccifer 2.0 claimed falsely to be just another lone wolf operative who had stolen all the goods from a laptop on his kitchen table. “Fuck the illuminati and their conspiracies!!!!!!”)
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