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

Laundromat

FOR PUTIN’S LUCKY-7 OPERATION TO BE successful, the CYBER BEARS teams would need a dissemination platform once the information had been recovered. The hacking teams would store the main flow of data and assess the data for the most damaging files. FSB Kompromat disinformation campaigns rely on the theft of politically explosive data, then secretly leak it out to the global news media though a third party in order to protect the actual source. This third party is known in intelligence parlance as a cutout.

The LUCKY-7 information warfare management cell would distribute documents stolen by the Cyber Bears in a manner that would meet the results the Kremlin desired. This would require serious control of the data release scheduling, constant monitoring of the political landscape, and analysis of the contents of the documents so that the most damning could be released. Emails of immediate value could be released to the public via a trusted “cut-out.” Files that could harm Trump, such as the opposition file, would be made public to dilute their power and allow him to respond.

The cutout for these operations would be a globally-known person whose organization’s mission is to daylight secret documents. The FSB chose Julian Assange, a British citizen who is a vocal and vehement enemy of Hillary Clinton, and the founder of the online organization WikiLeaks. Assange has described WikiLeaks as a “giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents.”¹ By the end of 2015, the site claimed to have published more than 10 million documents, many of which have been controversial or classified. The site has drawn both praise and scorn since its inception.²

Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006 with the purpose of providing an outlet for leaked documents. “WikiLeaks is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis,” the website’s “About” page read in 2008. “Our primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East, but we are of assistance to people of nations who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations.”³

Born in Australia in 1971, Assange had inconsistent homeschooling during a childhood marked by constantly being on the move. His family moved thirty-seven times by his fourteenth birthday.⁴ By the time he was a teenager, Assange had developed an interest in computers, and in 1987, at age sixteen, he received his first modem, which he hooked up to his Commodore 64 to connect to a network that existed four years before the World Wide Web came into use.⁵

Julian quickly discovered the world of hacking and “established a reputation as a sophisticated programmer who could break into the most secure networks,” including that of the U.S. Department of Defense.⁶ In 1991, Assange was under arrest and charged with thirty-one counts of hacking and related charges stemming from his infiltration of telecommunications company Nortel; he pled guilty to twenty-five charges—the remaining six were dropped—but a judge ruled he only had to pay “a small sum” in damage, citing his “intelligent inquisitiveness.”^{--226, -193}

It wasn’t until 2010 that WikiLeaks entered the mainstream consciousness when the site published a video, dubbed “Collateral Murder,”⁷ showing two U.S. helicopters opening fire in Baghdad, killing at least a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists, and wounding two children.⁸ Reuters had been attempting to get the footage released under the Freedom of Information Act for years before WikiLeaks released it in April 2010. The New York Times wrote:

WikiLeaks then began publishing unprecedented numbers of classified documents related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and later the Guantanamo files—leaked by Army private Bradley Edward Manning, a U.S. Army soldier assigned to an intelligence unit in Iraq. Manning had access to the U.S. Army’s sensitive intelligence network and managed to copy and pass on to Assange hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documents. Authorities caught Manning, prosecuted her in a court martial, and convicted her of the Espionage Act and abuse of government computer networks. She was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for the leak.¹⁰ Assange referred to Manning’s prosecution as “an affront to basic concepts of Western justice.”¹¹ World leaders and the public had mixed reactions to Assange’s actions. The U.S. government response, however, was decidedly anti-WikiLeaks. The Defense Department wrote: We deplore WikiLeaks for inducing individuals to break the law, leak classified documents and then cavalierly share that secret information with the world, including our enemies. We know terrorist organizations have been mining the leaked Afghan documents for information to use against us, and this Iraq leak is more than four times as large. By disclosing such sensitive information, WikiLeaks continues to put at risk the lives of our troops, their coalition partners and those Iraqis and Afghans working with us. The only responsible course of action for WikiLeaks at this point is to return the stolen material and expunge it from their Web sites as soon as possible.¹²

Assange again drew fire from U.S. officials after the release of approximately 250,000 diplomatic cables in November 2010. The White House called the release a “reckless and dangerous action.”¹³ Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to the leak as “an attack against the international community.”¹⁴ The international community and the American public were less sure of what to make of the one-time hacker who facilitated the mass leaks. The New York Times wrote, “The Russians seemed to take a special delight in tweaking Washington over its reaction to the leaks, suggesting that the Americans were being hypocritical.” Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin criticized the U.S. response. “You know, out in the countryside, we have a saying, ‘Someone else’s cow may moo, but yours should keep quiet,’” Putin said, using a Russian proverb The New York Times described as roughly equivalent to “the pot calling the kettle black.”¹⁵ Meanwhile, Assange won TIME’s reader’s choice for Person of the Year in 2010, but lost Person of the Year to Mark Zuckerberg.¹⁶

WikiLeaks worked with a number of media organizations during these leaks. As executive editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller wrote he “would hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism” in an article in January 2011 detailing his dealings with Assange. Keller wrote, “We regarded Assange throughout as a source, not as a partner or collaborator, but he was a man who clearly had his own agenda.”¹⁷ This was not the first time—and wouldn’t be the last time—the site’s founder would be accused of having an agenda. WikiLeaks sprang from Assange’s belief in scientific journalism, an idea he elaborated on in an interview with Raffi Khatchadourian, who was profiling Assange for The New Yorker: I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.¹⁸

Assange, however, over time he has strayed far away from the traditional journalistic principle of striving for objectivity, and instead has focused on the idea of justice. Khatchadourian writes, “Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events.”¹⁹ Assange would later write in his 2014 book When Google Met WikiLeaks, “I looked at something that I had seen going on with the world, which is that I thought there were too many unjust acts. And I wanted there to be more just acts, and fewer unjust acts.”²⁰

It is this very idea that has gotten WikiLeaks into hot water. The site and Assange have been criticized as openly having an agenda while claiming to be a journalistic enterprise. In his column for Slate, author Christopher Hitchens had critical words for the WikiLeaks founder: The man is plainly a micro-megalomaniac with few if any scruples and an undisguised agenda. As I wrote before, when he says that his aim is “to end two wars,” one knows at once what he means by the “ending.” In his fantasies he is probably some kind of guerrilla warrior, but in the real world he is a middle man and peddler who resents the civilization that nurtured him.²¹

When WikiLeaks held off publication of the DNC emails until just before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks came under renewed criticism for having an agenda, for not being objective, and for straying from its original purpose: “It’s become something else,” John Wonderlich, executive director of the non-profit Sunlight Foundation, told TIME. “It’s not striving for objectivity. It’s more careless. When they publish information it appears to be in service of some specific goal, of retribution, at the expense of the individual.”²²

Even those critical of Assange and WikiLeaks, however, have acknowledged the value of some of the site’s revelations. Still, critics worry about the ideological motives behind the operation. German Journalist Jochen Bittner wrote in a February 2016 opinion piece in The New York Times that the “idea behind WikiLeaks is simple, and ingenious.” He continued: Whistleblowers submitted material that proved corruption of the former Kenyan president, tax-avoidance strategies employed by big European banks, and indiscriminate killings of civilians by an American attack helicopter in Iraq. News outlets, including The Guardian, Der Spiegel and The New York Times, helped Mr. Assange spread the scoops. Yet, even back then, observers and media partners felt that Mr. Assange had more in mind than transparency, that there was an ideology behind his idea. Over time, that ideology has become increasingly apparent, through his regular public statements and his stint as a host for a Russian state-controlled TV network.²³

In August 2010, just months after the first Manning documents were published, two women accused Assange of rape and sexual assault in Sweden. Assange denies the allegations and he has not been charged. Assange was arrested in London in December and a British court ruled he should be extradited to Sweden, a decision he appealed to the U.K. Supreme Court, which upheld the extradition decision in May 2012. To prevent extradition to Sweden after the sexual assault accusations, Assange went to Ecuador’s embassy in London and appealed for political asylum, a request Ecuador granted in August of 2012. However, since leaving the building would entail his leaving Ecuador’s diplomatic immunity he is effectively residing in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on house arrest.²⁴ In August 2016, Sweden and Ecuador reached an agreement to interview Assange at the embassy, although the statute of limitations expired on all crimes but the rape allegation.²⁵

Ricardo Patiño, Ecuador’s foreign minister, cited fear of political prosecution as a reason for granting his asylum request. “There are serious indications of retaliation from the country or countries that produced the information published by Mr. Assange; retaliation that could endanger his safety, integrity and even his life,” Patiño said at a news conference.²⁶ Patiño further suggested Assange would not receive a fair trial if extradited to the U.S., adding that it was “not at all improbable he could be subjected to cruel and degrading treatment and sentenced to life imprisonment or even capital punishment.”²⁷

Russia’s connections to Assange and WikiLeaks have been the subject of discussions and internet conspiracy theories, but tangible evidence of a real connection has started to accrue only recently.²⁸ The misgivings about Assange developing an agenda, coinciding with his embassy imprisonment, were drawn in much starker relief when his relationship with the Russians grew closer.

In the Soviet era, all Russian media was considered tainted and ideologically controlled from a central communications authority. Tass, Pravda (Truth!) and the Izvestia distribution networks acted as mouthpieces for the Soviet politburo. Today Putin’s Russia has diversified that portfolio and added BBC-style media of Russia Today to introduce negative propaganda by adopting sloppy Fox News–style reporting (“Some people say…”) to air conspiracy theories or further their anti-US propaganda. For example, “Islamic State operative confesses to receiving funding through US: report.” They then link to and “investigate” unscrupulous or deliberately false news stories from “blogs” or unnamed sources.

Julia Ioffe, a journalist who has written extensively about Putin and Russia, wrote in The Columbia Journalism Review that the RT network began in 2005 “as a soft-power tool to improve Russia’s image abroad, to counter the anti-Russian bias the Kremlin saw in the Western media.”²⁹ However, Ioffe wrote, today the network has “become better known as an extension of former President Vladimir Putin’s confrontational foreign policy.”³⁰

Powerful Russian financial backing has given RT the legitimacy of many international news agencies. They use it to pay American contrarians to appear on their RT America channel and offer an air of debate, frequently on Kremlin-directed themes. Not surprisingly, Assange hosted his own twelve-episode television show called The World Tomorrow, or simply, The Julian Assange Show. It ran from April to June 2012, airing from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

The Guardian journalist Luke Harding, who was the paper’s Moscow correspondent from 2007 until 2011, referred to Assange as a “useful idiot” in a review of the show.³¹ Assange’s first interview was with Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group who hadn’t spoken to the media for six years, but Harding writes it “wasn’t quite the incendiary event that Russia Today had promised.” He continues, “The questions were clearly agreed in advance. Some were softball, others fawning, with Nasrallah’s answers unchallenged.”³² In a preview posted by RT on April 16, 2012, Assange said he imagined forthcoming criticism: “There’s Julian Assange, enemy combatant, traitor, getting into bed with the Kremlin and interviewing terrible radicals from around the world.”³³ In response to this expected critique, he said, “If they actually look at how the show is made: we make it, we have complete editorial control, we believe that all media organizations have an angle, all media organizations have an issue.³⁴

A year and a half earlier, events unfolded that indicate a connection between Assange and Russia. Princeton University professor of American History Sean Wilentz writes in The New Republic: In October 2010, just before WikiLeaks reached the acme of its influence with the release of the State Department cables, Assange vowed that WikiLeaks would expose the secrets not just of the United States but of all repressive regimes, including that of Russia. In an interview with Izvestia, a formerly state-controlled daily, he explained, “We have [compromising materials] about your government and businessmen.” The same day, Kristinn Hrafnsson of WikiLeaks told a reporter, “Russian readers will learn a lot about their country.”

Unlike the Americans, though, the Russians put WikiLeaks on notice. The day after Hrafnsson’s interview appeared, an anonymous official from Russia’s secret police, the FSB, told the independent Russian news website LifeNews.ru, “It’s essential to remember that given the will and the relevant orders, [WikiLeaks] can be made inaccessible forever.”

Then, something strange happened: A few days after Assange was arrested on sexual assault charges, Kremlin officials emerged as his most vocal defender. The Moscow Times reported that Vladimir Putin himself had condemned Assange’s arrest: “If it is full democracy, then why have they hidden Mr. Assange in prison? That’s what, democracy?” Putin’s indignation was echoed by other top Russian politicians, including State Duma Deputy Gennady Gudkov, who observed, “The real reason for his arrest is to find out by any means who leaked the confidential diplomatic information to him and how.”³⁵ But Journalist Jochen Bittner observed in a New York Times op-ed: [I]t’s curious that one of the world’s most secretive governments has gotten a pass from WikiLeaks. Why, in all its time online, has WikiLeaks never revealed any Russian intelligence scandal? Because there is none? Or because Mr. Assange doesn’t want to embarrass Mr. Putin?³⁶

Assange has also said that he is the one who encouraged NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to seek asylum in Russia. According to The Guardian, Assange said, “He preferred Latin America, but my advice was that he should take asylum in Russia despite the negative PR consequences, because my assessment is that he had a significant risk he could be kidnapped from Latin America on CIA orders. Kidnapped or possibly killed.”³⁷

Hillary Derangement Syndrome

Assange has made no secret of his dislike of Hillary Clinton. In an article titled “A Vote Today for Hillary Clinton Is a Vote for Endless, Stupid War” published on WikiLeaks in February 2016. In the article Assange wrote that Clinton “certainly should not become president of the United States.” He continued, “I have had years of experience in dealing with Hillary Clinton and have read thousands of her cables.” And, “Hillary lacks judgment and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism. Her personality combined with her poor policy decisions have directly contributed to the rise of ISIS. She’s a war hawk with bad judgment who gets an unseemly emotional rush out of killing people.”³⁸ Assange has also accused Clinton of pushing to indict him after WikiLeaks release of over 250,000 diplomatic cables, which Clinton condemned at the time.³⁹ Assange has claimed more leaks related to the former Secretary of State are to come. “We have a lot of material, thousands of pages of material,” Assange told Megyn Kelly on Fox News.⁴⁰ “It’s a variety of different types of documents from different types of institutions that are associated with the election campaign, some quite unexpected angles that are, you know, quite interesting, some even entertaining.”⁴¹

Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, drew a connection between Russia and the DNC hack in a July 24 interview with CNN. “What’s disturbing to us is that experts are telling us that Russian State actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump,” Mook said. “I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention here, and I think that’s disturbing.”⁴²

Assange affirmed that WikiLeaks did time the release to come before the start of the DNC. “That’s when we knew there would be maximum interest by readers, but also, we have a responsibility to,” Assange told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “If we published after, you can just imagine how outraged the Democratic voting population would have been. It had to have been before.”⁴³

As for the allegations that Russia was involved in the leak, Assange told CNN, “I think this raises a very serious question, which is that the natural instincts of Hillary Clinton and the people around her, that when confronted with a serious domestic political scandal, that she tries to blame the Russians, blame the Chinese, et cetera, because if she does that when she’s in government, that’s a political, managerial style that can lead to conflict.”⁴⁴

He said, “What we have right now is the Hillary Clinton campaign using a speculative allegation about hacks that have occurred in the past to try and divert attention from our emails, another separate issue that WikiLeaks has published.”⁴⁵ Assange held that the organization liked to “create maximum ambiguity” about the identities of its sources, saying, “Obviously, to exclude certain actors is to make it easier to find out who our sources are. So we never do it.”⁴⁶

A month and a half before the publication of the DNC emails, Assange teased the release during an interview with Britain’s ITV. “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton, which is great.”⁴⁷

With that said, Operation LUCKY-7 had its cut-out. The FSB’s Information Warfare Management Cell (IWMC) would create a false flag source to feed Assange the data taken from the DNC and any subsequent hacks through Guccifer 2.0. Assange was desperate to be relevant and the IWMC was going to create a new era where his own hatreds and agenda could be skillfully manipulated by the FSB’s active measures officers, while the cyber teams would keep him well fed. Assange was primed to do LUCKY-7’s bidding and now only needed the data they had stolen. WikiLeaks was now a wholly owned subsidiary of the FSB and essentially the cyber equivalent of a Laundromat, a Russian laundry—ready to clean and give a white appearance to the dirt.