The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election

ACCORDING TO THE OFFICIAL KREMLIN BIOGRAPHY, Putin was interested in intelligence at an early age. When Putin attended a public KGB event as a teenager, he asked the amused officers how to achieve his goal of becoming an intelligence officer. They told him to either serve in the army or earn a degree in law, so he went to university for law at Leningrad State University, where he earned his degree in 1975. After graduation he joined and studied as a junior officer at the KGB 101st Intelligence School and later attended the Yuri Andropov Red Banner Institute. The spy craft programs he attended were designed to give the officer basic training including foreign language, surveillance, specialty photography, wiretapping, breaking and entry, small arms assassination, and how to manipulate people to become spies against their own nation. The school’s curriculum also included a heavy dose of indoctrination in Marxist-Leninist philosophy and an emphasis of service to the state above all else.¹ Here Putin would learn the organization’s unofficial motto: “Once KGB, always KGB.”

“Fairly quickly, I left for special training in Moscow, where I spent a year,” Putin said. “Then I returned again to Leningrad, worked there in the First Main [Chief] Directorate—the [foreign] intelligence service.”²

From 1985–1990 Putin was assigned to No. 4 Angelikastrasse, the KGB offices in Dresden, located in what was then East Germany. There he ran East German academics and businessmen across the Iron curtain and helped them spy or recruit sympathetic West Germans for the KGB. Most interestingly, he used agents with the East German computer company Robotron as cover stories for agents to steal computer technology secrets from the West with the help of the East German secret police, the Stasi. Putin’s pattern of theft using advanced information systems would come up again and again in his future. For this assignment, the KGB awarded Major Putin a Bronze medal.

During the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a crowd of East German protesters gathered outside Putin’s office and threatened to storm the building. Putin received orders to conduct emergency destruction of his field site’s files. The beginning of the end had come for Communism in Germany and the KGB needed to sanitize its many satellite offices before they abandoned them.³ For a short period he was also assigned to Directorate K, the KGB’s Counterintelligence division. This unit was designed to hunt spies, and his experience would build on a natural mistrust of people, a tendency that would come to serve him well in his future. Putin officially resigned from the KGB in August 1991 after the KGB old guard attempted to overthrow the government and keep communism in place. He went to work at a University in Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg.

Anatoly Sobchek, Mayor of St. Petersburg launched Putin’s political career. Vladimir was made Deputy Mayor of the city and appointed chair of foreign economic relations. The innocuous sounding body was actually a gold plated prize in the immediate post-Soviet era. It was Putin’s job to liquidate Soviet assets and real estate in St. Petersburg and control the buying of foodstuffs and assets for a population that was just feeling freedom for the first time in seventy years. His position brought in billions of dollars to the mayor and his friends in the second largest city. Needless to say this job required the toughness and guile of a former spy, but it also showed him how to work the new class of oligarchs that would make money hand over fist.

In the post-Soviet period, St. Petersburg became known as the “Gangster Capitol.” During that period under President Boris Yeltsin, Putin was alleged to have been stealing food and siphoning funds off from the sale of assets and reconstruction. However when corruption accusations hit Mayor Sobcheck and Yeltsin, Putin showed loyalty and stood behind those who backed him up when he was rising. Sobchek, a reformer would later die in suspicious circumstances, some say poisoning, after returning to St Petersburg to stump for Putin in February, 2000.⁴

Yeltsin, suffering from ill health, alcoholism, and under threat of removal due to the massive corruption in Russia, kept the strong young Putin by his side. Here Putin cultivated the public image of an unabashed KGB officer who mastered judo and politics. Putin even created his own public relations videos. In 1998 he became Director of the FSB, the Office of State Security, now centralizing all power both foreign and domestic. In August 1999 Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin to the office of Prime Minister and the Duma approved his appointment shortly thereafter.

Once he was appointed Prime Minister he would find a reason to quickly launch a second brutal war in Chechnya that would eventually kill over fifty thousand people—terrorism. As the political campaign started, terrorists detonated four apartment complexes in Russia and Dagestan, killing over three hundred citizens. When Putin hit the stumps and came out as a pit bull on a Russian nationalist platform against terrorism, he rose in popularity. When Yeltsin resigned the Presidency, Putin became President in accordance with the Russian constitution.

American Journalist David Satter, who investigated the apartment bombings, believes that a failed Hexogen bomb with advanced military detonators found in the city of Ryazan used technology and materials exclusive to the Russian army. The men caught planting them were FSB officers.⁵ In response, Satter, author of a book on Putin’s rise to power—Darkness at Dawn—was expelled from Russia in January 2014. Virtually all other high profile activists who investigated this attack ended up assassinated, including the ex-KGB officer Litvinenko, who was poisoned with an extremely rare Polonium-210 radionuclide while drinking tea. The substance could only have originated in Russian nuclear reactors. He died three weeks later.

School of the Second Profession

During Putin’s time at the KGB, “active operations”—shorthand for direct espionage—drew on a rich history. Russia had a long tradition of court espionage and intrigue among the European kingdoms. As far back as anyone could remember, the ancient methods of spying formed the basis for every thought and action of the Tsars. It was far more sophisticated in some ways than today, due to its heavy reliance on solid tradecraft and observation techniques in a world limited by foot and horse. The KGB taught its officers the traditions of using manual codes and ciphers, slow surveillance, concocting poisons, reading secret inks, and forging of false handwriting as skills to master and to appreciate.

Most importantly, learning to read people, their wants, dreams, likes, dislikes and desires—all to get them to betray their own country—was the most basic and oldest of all lessons in the Russian intelligence foundations.

Every one of the Russian Emperors and Tsars established secret intelligence collection; maintaining court influence required advanced information on plots and betrayals, as well as the occasional murder. The Oprichnina, established in 1565 by Ivan the Terrible, was the first known Russian intelligence agency. They were six thousand horse guard uniformed in all-black cavalry clothes, and their coat of arms was “The Broom and The Dog”—to sniff out and sweep up anyone opposed to Ivan.⁶ Their duty was simple. They were the police, bodyguard, and spies tasked to detect, hunt down, and kill Ivan’s enemies. When the Oprichnina outlived their usefulness, Ivan dissolved the organization in 1572, but in seven years they set the pace for state terror and espionage.

In 1697 Peter the Great established the Preobrazhensky Office; Empress Anne established the Chancellery for Secret Investigations in 1731, and Peter III had an organization called the Secret Bureau. All of these state organs opened illicit letters, listened to whispers at keyholes, assassinated enemies, and intercepted couriers. But it was Emperor Nicholas I who set up the Third Section. This group went far further than any of the previous amateurish gendarmerie. They did not just open letters from mistresses; the Third Section was the first agency to truly train, maintain and deploy professional Russian foreign intelligence officers for missions targeting foreign countries.

As rulers gained power they used increasingly brutal secret police tactics. Nicholas I’s successor, Alexander II, established the Okhrana, an organization that set the precedent of being completely above any law while acting in the defense of the realm. They carried out mass surveillance, arrests without warrant, summary executions as they saw fit—all in the name of the Tsar. They operated as deep cover spies in the European courts and ran spy networks in France, Switzerland, and Britain. While they watched and killed revolutionaries and anti-government plotters of all stripes, the Okhrana’s specialty was to infiltrate and suppress dissidents living abroad. Somehow these agencies could not stop the spread of ideologies and none had a great impact on the coming communist uprising. Tsar Nicholas II was well informed of the Communist unrest in his armed forces, but his secret police were either unable or unwilling to stop the Russian Revolution, or his death—along with his family—at the hands of the Bolsheviks.

In February 1917, over four hundred thousand industrial workers in St. Petersburg revolted and with the aid of the Russian army, overthrew Tsar Nicholas II. Vladimir Iliych Lenin gave them that revolution and in 1917 he knew, better than most, the necessity for a secret agency to prevent a Royalist counter-revolution. One of his first acts was to establishe the All Russia Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter Revolution and Sabotage, known simply as the Cheka, from the Cyrillic acronym.⁷

The first director of the Cheka was Felix Dzerzhinsky. The coat of arms for the Cheka organization was the Sword on a Shield. Dzerzhinsky organized his agency to be an absolutely ruthless internal security tool. To Dzerzhinsky the Cheka “…Stood for organized terror… Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution… We terrorize the enemies of the Soviet government in order to stop crime at its inception.” That philosophy permeates the belief system of every Russian secret service officer up to today. So famed was Dzerzhinsky that a statue known as the Iron Felix stood in in Lyubyanka square—also known as Dzerzhinsky Square—in front of the Moscow headquarters of the KGB for almost seventy years. Although the statue disappeared after the failed coup of 1991, the KGB’s successor organization, the FSB, still occupies the offices at that location.

With the death of Lenin in 1924, Joseph Broz Stalin took over. During this time Stalin used the secret police forces to arrest and execute an estimated 50 million people in order to maintain order among citizens. In 1930 the NKVD appeared, and later established the Administration of Special Tasks. Their job was to infiltrate agents and convert socialist supporters of the revolution in Western and fascist countries, in addition to exterminating dissent among potential NKVD backsliders. During the 1930s some of the great successes would be to develop spies in British and American universities and recruit members of the Cambridge Five spy ring, including Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby, an officer of the British Secret Service MI6, Guy Burgess, and Don McLean.

After more than a decade of tumultuous leadership, Lavrenti Beria expanded the NKVD, which was under the OGPU, to the point where a separate organization needed to be created. This became NKGB, in charge of internal security, espionage, and guerilla activities in World War II. When Stalin died in 1953, Beria tried to replace him, but the politburo arrested, tried, and executed Beria in 1953. Nikita Khrushchev would head the new soviet government and on March 13, 1954 formally established the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (“Committee for State Security”) or KGB. It would be responsible for all facets of state security including internal security, police, and border patrol, and for the next four decades would operate a ruthless campaign against the West—as well as the citizens of the Soviet Union.

Ivan Serov was named the first Chairman of the KGB. Its first task was to eradicate Beria supporters. With reorganization under Khrushchev, the Soviet Union relaxed censorship, reduced the size of prison camps, and became more active in foreign affairs. In 1958, Aleksandr Shelepin became KGB chairman. “Shelli” sought to enhance the USSR by destabilizing “enemy” nations including the U.S., Britain, and Japan. This led to almost three decades of Soviet-sponsored anticolonial terrorism in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Latin America.

By 1967 Yuri Andropov, the longest-serving KGB chairman with fifteen years in the post, headed the KGB. Andropov headed the KGB’s “golden age,” continuing Khrushchev and Shelepin’s organizational restructuring, while stepping up intelligence gathering and foreign espionage. He helped build an organizational structure to fund and supervise technological advancements in Russian defense while actively suppressing any government dissidence. Andropov stepped down in 1982, to lead the Politburo.

After a short series of leaders, Vladimir Kryuchkov became the last chairman of the KGB in 1988, leading a failed coup August 18, 1991 to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev. The Communist party was effectively dissolved December 25, 1991, ending the bloody seventy-year legacy. What was left was a nascent post-Communist Russian state, and every state needs an intelligence agency; the KGB would survive after the Soviet Union expired.

Putin’s New Nobility

After the Soviet Union’s collapse, the KGB became the FSK (Federalnaya Sluzhba Kontrrazvedki), Federal Counterintelligence Service. It was designed to be similar to Britain’s MI5. In 1995 FSK turned into the FSB—the Counterintelligence “K,” being replaced with the Security (Cyrillic “B”) Bezopasnost—effectively becoming the Federal Security Service.

In December 2000, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev, the successor to Vladimir Putin, spoke to the Russian daily tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda on the founding anniversary of the Cheka secret police. He described the role and stature of the new FSB:

The founders of the Soviet Union and now Russia harnessed this rich history of the dark arts, and where necessary, applied them precisely and ruthlessly. The modern techniques of electronic intelligence collection, planting listening devices, and using computers to conduct breakins, lives up to its centuries of spy pedigree. In fact Putin’s lifelong worldview stems from maintaining faith with a long tradition of Russia’s agencies dedicated to spying, assassination, and political influence. Now as leader of Russia, he is a master of applying espionage as well as a consumer of its fruits.

The Illegals Take Manhattan

A recurring theme in FSB operations in the United States is real estate. From the end of the Soviet Union to the rise of the oligarchs, Russian state money has been buying property and making real estate deals all over the United States. It was a flush market for Russians and a good place to hide illicit cash. Real estate was the perfect investment instrument for the FSB to also introduce its officers into the United States.

In the old KGB, the First Chief Directorate also was known as the Foreign Directorate or the INU. This Directorate was responsible for overseas operations related to foreign intelligence collection and active measures performed by KGB officers, cultivating the KGB’s competence of infiltrating spies into foreign countries as well as recruiting and maintaining sources of intelligence.⁹ Although it is unlikely that Putin is directing United States external intelligence operations, one can be sure he gives them his opinions based on his own experience. In an British government inquiry about the murder of ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, Sir Robert Owen stated:

The answer to that question would be solved in 2010 when the U.S. Department of Justice arrested a network of ten Russian spies operating in the United States. All of them were non-official cover (NOC) agents, The Illegals.

With the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir Putin, several structural changes came to the agency. The INU functions were detached and became the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), responsible for intelligence activity.¹¹ Underneath First Directorate was Directorate S—home of The Illegals. They were the deepest of deep cover spies to infiltrate foreign countries and conducted background operations in preparation for other active operations.

According to Justice Department documents, federal law enforcement agents began surveillance of a key Russian SVR officer named Anna Chapman in January 2010, across various locations in New York City. Surveillance uncovered regular interactions between Chapman and a Russian Official operating out of the Russian Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan. Using network surveillance equipment, the federal agents were able to observe that the Russian official and Chapman would connect to the same private wireless Ad Hoc network and covertly communicate electronically.

Their secret communications would often take place in coffee shops, book stores, other public places, across the street or nearby one another, rather than communicating directly person to person. On multiple occasions, using network surveillance equipment, federal agents observed the transfer of data between the two. An undercover agent, posing as a Russian Official from the Russian Consulate in New York City, arranged with Chapman to have a fake passport delivered to an undercover Russian operative who was using a false name, also working in New York.¹²

After the meeting with the undercover U.S. federal agent, Chapman was observed purchasing a temporary Verizon cellphone from a Verizon store in Brooklyn, NY. She used the cell phone to call her father, a Russian intelligence officer in Moscow. Her lawyer later revealed that she was wary of the passport assignment and was calling her father for advice. Her father instructed her to turn the passport into a police station, where the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested her for espionage, along with nine others.^{13, 14} The Department of Justice charged them with conspiring to act as unlawful agents of the Russian Federation within the United States.¹⁵

Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko on February 23, 1982 in the industrial city of Volgograd, Russia, to math teacher Irene and Russian diplomat Vasily. She suffered from scoliosis as a child and lived with her grandmother as her father was sent to work in the Russian embassy in Kenya. She briefly attended a creative studies school in Volgograd from 1996–1997. She went on to study economics at the People’s Friendship University in Moscow, graduating at the top of her class in 2004.

In 2001 and 2002 she spent her summers visiting London, where at the age of nineteen she met twenty-one year-old student Alex Chapman. The two were married in Moscow in 2002. Soon after, now with the name Anna Chapman, she received a British passport. According to Alex Chapman, Anna’s father never took a liking to him and seemed to trust no one. Alex reported that Anna told him her father was a former KGB operative.

After eventually settling in London, Anna began habitually lying about her work experience, claiming to sell private jets to Russians on behalf of Net Jets and working closely with owner Warren Buffet. Alex began to observe her becoming increasingly secretive around this time, often meeting with other Russians in private, boasting about influential people she was meeting, and suddenly having large sums of money. The two eventually divorced in 2006.¹⁶

When Anna Chapman arrived in New York, she moved into an apartment one block south of the New York Stock Exchange. She also claimed on her LinkedIn page to run an internet real estate company valued at $2 million.¹⁷ The Daily News reported that she likely became involved with then sixty year-old millionaire Michael Bittan, who made his money in the restaurant industry, real estate, owner of a jeans manufacturer, and in pharmaceuticals.¹⁸

After being arrested by U.S. federal agents in June of 2010, the U.S. and Russian governments arranged a swap in July of the same year, exchanging the ten arrested in the U.S. for four former Russian spies who were detained in Russia for helping the U.S. One of them was instrumental in arresting former U.S. FBI Agent Robert Hansen, who had been providing the Russians with information for years.¹⁹

Upon returning to Russia, Chapman has received national celebrity status, modeling for the Russian version of Maxim magazine and appearing in multiple fashion shots. She has also met and has been praised by Putin, and made appearances in Russian military recruitment and propaganda videos. The British tabloid magazine Daily Mail, reported that Chapman posted a picture to her Instagram account this April, expressing support for 2016 GOP Presidential nominee, Donald Trump. In her account she wrote “Trump will ‘get along with Putin,’ he approves of the Russian operation in Syria and is surprised why the USA supports Ukraine. Changes in America are closer? What do you think?” An additional post also mocked Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

Chapman’s return as a conquering hero, even if she was a failed spy, is not surprising in Putin’s Russia. Putin values loyalty to the nation above all else and an attractive, loyal FSB officer is propaganda gold. His sense of loyalty to the spy service propelled him to national fame under Yeltsin and keeps his position safe today. In fact, in order to be put under Putin’s “roof” of protection, it is nearly essential for that individual to have a prior association with the KGB/FSB. An estimated 78 percent of Russia’s top one thousand leading political figures worked for FSB or its predecessor the KGB or GRU.²⁰ When asked about a book written by a dissident Putin said, “I don’t read books by people who have betrayed the Motherland.”²¹

This deep history of espionage, intrigue, and murder shaped Vladimir Putin’s worldview toward the West. Forged between decades of a poverty-stricken Soviet Union and tantalized by the riches of U.S. and European economic dominance, Putin’s actions and public statements hint at a world where he and his nation receive the respect and preeminence they deserve. Apparently, Putin surmises that America and NATO are waning, with the U.S. military stretched thin beyond capacity due to two failed wars costing trillions of dollars.

Russia is changing Russia’s face and not towards democracy. Karen Dawisha, a Professor at Miami University, told PBS Frontline that “Instead of seeing Russia as a democracy in the process of failing, see it as an authoritarian system that’s in the process of succeeding.”²² Putin is that authoritarian. For him to succeed at the mission of damaging the United States he will use all tools of the Russian statecraft such as forging alliances, but also including blackmail, propaganda, and cyberwarfare.

To Putin, the best of all possible worlds would be an economically crippled America, withdrawn from military adventurism and NATO, and with leadership friendly to Russia. Could he make this happen by backing the right horse? As former director of the KGB, now in control of Russia’s economic, intelligence and nuclear arsenal, he could certainly try.