The Internet Research Agency set out to alter the mind of the American body politic in the spring of 2014. Working at the direction of the Kremlin and in concert with Russian intelligence, the IRA became the Information KGB.
Financed by an oligarch, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a convicted pimp who became a close confidant of Putin’s, the IRA began to assemble a workforce of four hundred trolls working twelve-hour shifts at a four-story building in Saint Petersburg; many were hipsters in their twenties and thirties, sporting stylish clothes and cool haircuts. Marat Mindiyarov, an unemployed teacher who lasted four months at the IRA, said the job required him “to write that white is black and black is white. Your first feeling, when you ended up there, was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line.”
The IRA created a new branch: the American Desk, also known as the Translator Department. It vetted its new hires for their fluency in American English, which was often slightly imperfect, and their feel for the nuances of American political discourse, which was usually quite impressive. It trained its internet-savvy young employees to understand the issues that divided Americans—gun rights, gay rights, immigration, the Confederate flag and its racist connotations. They learned how to argue online in ways that could deepen the fractures in the American political system. Aleksandra Krylova, the IRA’s third-ranking employee, and Anna Bogacheva, a new hire who oversaw the IRA’s data analysis, ran a coast-to-coast reconnaissance mission through the United States in the summer of 2014, making stops in California, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Louisiana, Texas, and New York, gathering insights and intelligence along the way. Another operative, posing as an American and chatting with a member of a grassroots organization in Texas, gained the insight that they should focus on politically fractious “purple states” like Florida, where the 2000 presidential election had been decided by a few hundred disputed ballots.
The IRA studied Americans to understand what made them angry, to learn how to think and speak and write like them and, in the fullness of time, to spearhead a new kind of political warfare against the United States. “Our task,” one of the Saint Petersburg trolls later told a Russian reporter, “was to set Americans against their own government: to provoke unrest and discontent.” From the outset, the mission was to incite a civil war within the American political system. As a report released by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee put it, the Russians sought to “blur the lines between reality and fiction, erode our trust in media entities and the information environment, in government, in each other, and in democracy itself.” It took years before Americans understood this. Neither the president of the United States nor any of his military and intelligence services had the slightest warning of the attack as it was looming early in 2015. By then, the United States had all but withdrawn from the realm of political warfare, while the Russians ran rampant.
American democracy was already in trouble, its strength sapped by self-inflicted wounds. As a consequence, the American government’s promotion of democratic ideals had arrived at death’s door. “Perhaps the most worrisome dimension of the democratic recession has been the decline of democratic efficacy, energy, and self-confidence in the West, including the United States,” Larry Diamond, a prominent American political sociologist, wrote in January 2015. “There is a growing sense, both domestically and internationally, that democracy in the United States has not been functioning effectively.” Voter turnouts were sinking. The cost of election campaigns was crushing. The role of dark money in politics was surging. Public trust in government was fading. Comity, courtesy, the consideration that the other person might have a point, were dying. Conspiracy theories were trending. Talking heads were shouting. Everyone was arguing with everybody else. The political discourse of Congress and cable news and Facebook and Twitter was growing coarser by the hour. Putin and his state-run media reveled in America’s travails, mocking democracy, promoting autocracy. “The world takes note of all this,” Diamond warned. The democratic recession let “autocrats perceive that the pressure is now off: They can pretty much do whatever they want to censor the media, crush the opposition, and perpetuate their rule.”
On June 16, 2015, one of the coarsest public figures in America announced that he was a candidate for president of the United States. Only someone “really rich”—like himself—could “take the brand of the United States and make it great again.” On the threat of jihad—“Islamic terrorism is eating large portions of the Mideast. They’ve become rich. I’m in competition with them”—money would change everything. On the threat of enemies within—“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you.… They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists”—his real estate expertise would save the nation. “I would build a great wall. And nobody builds walls better than me, believe me. And I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.”
Novelists had foreseen the rise of a man like this. It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 bestseller, told of the hate-mongering senator Buzz Windrip—“vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected”—who wins the 1936 presidential election by fueling fear against immigrants and proceeds to invade Mexico. The Dead Zone, Stephen King’s 1979 thriller, depicted a “cynical carnival pitchman” and real estate swindler rising to political power on a wave of populist fervor and taking aim at the White House. But those were fictions.
Few took Donald Trump too seriously at the start. The idea that he could be president was unnerving. He was a con man and a grifter. Trump had invented himself as a financial genius, though he had inherited his fortune, and what riches he hadn’t squandered through folly he had sustained through fraud. He polished his gold-plated persona on television and in the tabloids. He often said that he had invented the phrase “fake news”—“one of the greatest of all terms I’ve come up with”—and he had been generating it to tout himself and trash his rivals since the 1970s.
In 2009, Trump had discovered Twitter. He had trolled the president of the United States throughout 2011 and 2012, spewing the conspiracy theory that Obama was born in Africa, not a real American, an illegitimate president, an impostor. In June 2013, he had voiced a yearning for a political tryst with a certain KGB veteran: “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow—if so, will he become my new best friend?” Curiously, he said publicly, and repeatedly, that they already had a relationship. This was by all accounts false. Once in Moscow at the beauty show he owned, he was like a bride left at the altar, asking over and over whether Putin was coming or not. He got a consolation prize: at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2014, he had crowed that Putin had sent him “a beautiful present with a beautiful note.” This was true. It was a black lacquered box with a sealed letter inside. What the letter said is a secret unrevealed. A few days later, he tweeted: “I believe Putin will continue to re-build the Russian Empire.” In May, he deepened the mystery of this courtship: “I spoke indirectly—and directly—with President Putin, who could not have been nicer.” The two had never met. If anything had transpired between them, it was, as Winston Churchill had said of Stalin’s Russia, a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.
In Saint Petersburg and Moscow, the leaders of the Russian attack on American democracy studied Trump closely, devising a political warfare strategy that dovetailed with his candidacy. Twenty-five days into his presidential campaign, on July 11, 2015, Trump spoke at FreedomFest, a libertarian convention in Las Vegas. In the audience was Maria Butina, a flame-haired Russian intelligence agent sent to infiltrate the National Rifle Association and influence right-wing activists. She put a question directly to him, planted by her superiors in Moscow. Would Trump continue the punitive economic and political sanctions Obama had imposed on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine? “I know Putin,” he said, another lie easily detected. “I would get along very nicely with Putin.… I don’t think you’d need the sanctions.” This was vitally important information for the Kremlin. The sanctions had sparked a collapse of the Russian ruble, which had prevented the nation’s energy industries, the only vital organs of its economy, from rolling over their debt. By some estimates, they had taken a quarter to a third of the Russian economy down in the course of a year. People’s salaries decreased, poverty increased, and political opposition to Putin grew in the face of his fierce repression.
A few weeks after the Las Vegas encounter, one of Putin’s leading propagandists went to work on Trump’s behalf. Konstantin Rykov had made millions and won election to the Russian Parliament through his mastery of the internet. He was also the Kremlin’s chief foreign policy troll on Twitter. He created a website—Trump2016.ru—giving the world a stream of support for Trump’s nascent campaign. Trump took notice. “Russia and the world has already started to respect us again!” he tweeted. Putin himself would soon weigh in, calling Trump “colorful” and “talented” and “absolutely the leader in the presidential race.” Trump expanded on those views. “When people call you ‘brilliant’ it’s always good,” he said, “especially when the person heads up Russia.”
He was distinguishing himself from the field of Republican candidates by praising Putin and insisting that NATO was “obsolete.” He called the alliance a bunch of deadbeats; nations from England to Estonia were “ripping off the United States,” not paying their fair share for the defense of the free world: “Either they have to pay up … or they have to get out. And if it breaks up NATO, it breaks up NATO.” All this was catnip for the Russians, who knew their chosen candidate was negotiating in secret with Putin’s cronies to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, a venture from which he would have pocketed $50 million or more, and where he planned to offer Putin a sumptuous penthouse for free.
Putin’s spies and the trolls at the IRA had entered the presidential race in full force on the heels of Trump’s announcement. Their campaign was “a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood,” the Senate Intelligence Committee reported in October 2019. The IRA reached tens of millions of voters. It connected with at least 126 million Americans on Facebook, 20 million people on Instagram, and 1.4 million on Twitter. This generated 76 million interactions on Facebook and 187 million engagements on Instagram; its Twitter accounts were retweeted by Trump, his sons, and his closest aides, among countless others, including some forty American journalists. The IRA’s posts and ripostes to support Trump—2,563 on Facebook, 13,106 on Instagram, 430,185 on Twitter—far exceeded its messages against his rivals. It uploaded more than a thousand videos to YouTube. It spent roughly $15 million all told, and it paid about one hundred Americans who organized forty different political protests across the United States. By midsummer of 2015, the IRA’s shock troops, an invisible division of thousands of fake personae posing as Americans, were at war on their chosen candidate’s behalf. Among the most common words in their Twitter profiles were God, Christian, and Trump.
The IRA army fought on three fronts: Right, Left, and Black.
The Right front strongly favored Trump, savaging his Republican opponents, working every wedge issue from immigration to Islamic jihad to racist hate for a black president, stoking up rage, urging conservative and right-wing voters to get behind Trump’s juggernaut. It launched a Kremlin narrative in July predicting that Trump was going to have a very sensible policy regarding Russia. A strong message in broken English soon followed: “@stop_refugees: Trump said that he is honored by Putin had called him an absolute leader, and expresses his support for Russian president.… If we can’t work with Russia, that’s not a good thing, Trump said. Well to my mind we need Russia on our side, not on the opposite, what’s your point? #usdaily #news #hotnews #newspaper #coffee #reading #local #cnn #foxnews #nbc #nytimes #morning #politics #usa #america #americannews #followme #trump #russia #putin.” This post represented the work of the IRA’s “Hashtag Gamers,” who created and promoted commentary on hot topics. Its hottest tags included “#Trump2016” and “#MAGA.”
The Left front had orders from the top to help defeat Hillary Clinton, whom Putin had loathed for years. She had formally announced that she was running for the White House in April 2015, via a YouTube video. Her success in pursuit of the presidency depended on the loyalties of both mainstream and left-leaning Democrats—Obama voters, young voters, and specifically black voters, many of whom were wary of her fund-raising affinities with Wall Street and corporate America. The IRA had a plan for that. It worked overtime not simply to attack Clinton, but to suppress voter turnout, promote an election boycott, and boost a fringe candidate, the Green Party’s Jill Stein.
Stein, a Harvard-educated doctor, was unlike any presidential hopeful to proceed her. She practically ran on the United Russia ticket. She had announced her candidacy on RT’s American network, and Putin’s team clearly liked her critiques of American democracy and foreign policy. She had asserted in July 2015 that “we helped foment a coup against a democratically elected government” in Ukraine, “where ultra-nationalists and ex-Nazis came to power,” an exact echo of the Kremlin’s position. She was Putin’s honored guest at a televised banquet celebrating RT’s tenth anniversary. At the same table, smiling for the cameras, sat a remarkable contingent: Putin, Stein, a former KGB chieftain, Putin’s top propagandist, and retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn, who joined the Trump campaign six weeks after the banquet. Flynn was a hothead, fired for insubordination as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, infamous for using his analysts to chase down conspiracy theories. RT had paid him $45,000 for his appearance. His colleagues had warned him that taking Kremlin gold would fatally compromise him, and they also thought that he didn’t care. (Flynn’s twenty-seven-day stint as Trump’s White House national security adviser ended after he lied to the FBI about his conversations with the Russians.)
Stein said her campaign paid for her trip to Moscow, but RT paid her back. It ran more than one hundred stories on its American channel supporting her bid for the White House, amplifying her positions—“a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war”—which reliably corresponded with the party line of the Internet Research Agency. “She’s a Russian asset—I mean, totally,” Clinton said three years after the election, an intriguing and incendiary charge. The fact that Stein marched in lockstep with the Kremlin’s foreign policies went all but unnoticed at the time, as did the possibility that she might matter more than most fringe candidates in American political history. On Election Day, she won 1,457,216 ballots. The IRA had told Americans that “A Vote for Jill Stein Is Not a Wasted Vote,” and that turned out to be true: the votes for Stein in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—the three states that determined the winner in the Electoral College—exceeded Trump’s margin of victory.
The IRA’s Black front was by many measures its biggest. “No single group of Americans was targeted by IRA information operatives more than African-Americans,” the Senate Intelligence Committee found in 2019. “By far, race and related issues were the preferred target of the information warfare campaign designed to divide the country.” The IRA’s messages to the black community sometimes lobbied for Stein, but far more often argued for boycotting the election entirely. The voter suppression drive aimed at dozens of cities, especially communities where the killings of black citizens by white police officers created flash points for the Black Lives Matter movement. The Black front made an overwhelming effort to keep African Americans away from the ballot boxes with messages like “Our Votes Don’t Matter,” “Don’t Vote for Hillary Clinton,” and “Don’t Vote at All.” Its “Woke Blacks” Instagram account argued that “a particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils.”
One of its Facebook pages, “Blacktivist,” generated 11.2 million engagements. Ninety-six percent of its YouTube content dealt with race. The most inflammatory video recalled the forged letters from the Ku Klux Klan to African and Asian athletes attending the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. The YouTube video was titled “HILLARY RECEIVED $20,000 DONATION FROM KKK TOWARDS HER CAMPAIGN.” The IRA recruited assets in the black community, with posts seeking contacts with African American preachers from the Black Baptist Church, followers to attend political rallies, and photographers to document protests. Through a media mirage, a Facebook page called “Black Matters,” it reached out to writers, activists, and lawyers, seeking real Americans to give cover to the Russian political warfare campaign.
The Right front scored a direct hit on the American psyche with “Heart of Texas,” a Facebook page featuring pictures of longhorn cattle, pushing harsh gun-rights and anti-immigrant memes, and amassing more than a quarter of a million followers, 4.9 million shares, and 5.4 million likes. The Russians used it to drop gasoline on a brush fire of fear burning among conspiracy-minded Texans. The Pentagon had sparked that fear. It had announced that Green Berets and Navy Seals would join a two-month unconventional war exercise code-named Jade Helm 15 ranging across seven states from Texas to California, starting on July 15, 2015. In short order, “Heart of Texas,” along with the IRA’s Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube accounts, claimed Jade Helm was, by turns, a psyops plan to enable a Chinese occupation of Texas, a United Nations scheme to seize citizens’ guns, a commando onslaught to round up conservative Republicans in advance of Obama’s imminent imposition of martial law, or, as a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst noted, “a military plan to impose martial law and disarm citizens in the wake of an apocalyptic meteor strike predicted to occur the same day Jade Helm 15 concluded.” The idea that Jade Helm was a nefarious Obama plot to take away the guns of right-wing Texans, or to take over Texas itself, was amplified by the Republican governor of Texas, who mobilized the Texas State Guard to monitor the military, and by the Republican presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who said he was probing Pentagon officials because the Obama administration could not be trusted. The IRA had gotten into the heads of some powerful politicians—and millions of voters.
“At that point, I’m figuring the Russians are saying, ‘We can go big-time,’” Air Force general Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA and the NSA, said later. “And at that point, I think they made the decision, ‘We’re going to play in the electoral process.’”
The first presidential primaries were still four months away when the NSA saw the footprints of Cozy Bear again in September 2015. The cybercommand at Fort Meade, Maryland, sent a report to Special Agent Adrian Hawkins at the FBI’s headquarters in Washington: the Russians had been sending spear-phishing emails to a multitude of American government agencies, contractors, and think tanks; anyone who clicked on a phishing message would let the Russians into their network to ransack their files and documents. Now they had struck the office that had been the target of the Watergate burglars back in 1972. Hawkins read the report, picked up the telephone, and called the Democratic National Committee.
He asked to speak to the head of the computer-security team. There was no head, and no team, so he was transferred to the help desk. He spoke to a young IT contractor named Yared Tamene, who didn’t grasp what Hawkins was telling him, nor fully believe that he was talking to the FBI. “I had no way of differentiating the call I just received from a prank call,” Tamene wrote in an internal memo. Hawkins called back repeatedly, leaving messages. Throughout October, Tamene never replied. “I did not return his calls,” he explained, “as I had nothing to report.” In November, Hawkins finally reached Tamene. He said in no uncertain terms that a DNC computer was “calling home” to Moscow. The IT guy saw the picture now. He sent another memo to his bosses—“the FBI thinks that this calling home behavior could be the result of a state-sponsored attack”—but the DNC’s leaders didn’t see it at the time. Four long months went by before they confronted reality and considered calling in a cybersecurity team.
By February 2016, the Russian intelligence services had turned their collective energies to the presidential election in full force. That same month, Paul Manafort proposed to manage Trump’s campaign. The two men had first met in 1982, when Trump hired Manafort as a lobbyist, joining a client list that included the likes of General Mobutu, Rupert Murdoch, and the National Rifle Association. In March, Manafort went down to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and offered his services for free, which sounded fine to the candidate. There wasn’t any vetting or due diligence; Trump didn’t bother with such details. When the news broke, Victoria Nuland, the State Department’s top Russia hand, recoiled in revulsion. “Manafort!” she said to herself. “He’s been a Russian stooge for fifteen years.”
The Kremlin had high-quality kompromat on Manafort. The money-laundering Russia lobbyist owed many millions to Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire aluminum magnate who counted both the leaders of the Russian mafia and the Russian nation among his allies. (American diplomatic cables called him “among the 2–3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis.”) The debt came from a failed plan to buy a cable network in Ukraine, and Deripaska was suing to the tune of $19 million. Manafort had bought a lavish Trump Tower condo in New York after signing a lucrative political consulting contract with Deripaska in 2005; his political skills, Manafort had written, would “greatly benefit the Putin Government.” He boasted at the time that he was already pushing policies on behalf of the once and future Ukraine president Victor Yanukovych “at the highest levels of the U.S. government—the White House, Capitol Hill, and the State Department.” All told, Manafort had received more than $17 million from Yanukovych—$12.7 million off the books—and he had been laundering the money for years. He had been under FBI investigation for nearly two years in connection with those dealings, but the bureau hadn’t yet made a case. His ascent to the top of the Trump campaign must have been met with delight in Moscow, especially when Manafort helped to rip a plank out of the Republican Party’s political platform—a pledge of military support for Ukraine in its fight against Russian occupation. That ploy came at the behest of his longtime business associate, the Russian intelligence operative Konstantin Kilimnik; Manafort in turn gave him inside information from Trump headquarters to try to barter his debt with Deripaska.
Putin’s spies possessed a deeper understanding of his corruption than the FBI did. “To keep kompromat on enemies is a pleasure,” the Russian author and journalist Yulia Latynina had written when Putin first came to power. “To keep kompromat on friends is a must.”
The Russians wanted a polezni durak—a “useful idiot”—inside the Trump campaign, someone who would do their work without knowing he was doing it. They had several to choose from within Trump’s small foreign policy cluster, a collection of oddballs and wingnuts. On April 26, a newly minted member of that team, a twenty-eight-year-old energy lobbyist named George Papadopoulos, had breakfast in a London hotel with a new acquaintance, a mystery man named Joseph Mifsud. Once chef de cabinet in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Malta, Mifsud was a regular at the Valdai Discussion Club—a very Russian version of the elite conferences held in Davos and Aspen—led annually by Putin, whom Mifsud heartily embraced. Mifsud had latched on to Papadopoulos like a limpet upon learning that he worked for Trump. This was, as they say in Russia, no coincidence. Mifsud was a recruited Russian agent and, in the parlance of espionage, he was talent-spotting. He cultivated Papadopoulos, introducing him to a woman he called “Putin’s niece” (Putin has no niece) and connecting him by email to a man he said was a high-level official in the Russian Foreign Ministry, most likely an intelligence officer. Papadopoulos, a fish out of water, was gaffed. Mifsud shared a deep secret with him: the Russians had dirt on Clinton. They had her emails. Thousands of them. Papadopoulos was enthralled, and he went to work trying to arrange a meeting between Trump and Putin, a task infinitely beyond his grasp. Then, on May 10, clawing his way up the greasy pole of international intrigue, Papadopoulos had too much to drink in a posh London bar and shared his secret with a diplomat whom he had just met: Alexander Downer, Australia’s envoy to the United Kingdom. Downer didn’t know quite what to make of it all until later. The CIA and the FBI would hear the story in a few months.
On May 26, Trump clinched the Republican nomination. The next day, he called Putin a strong leader, the twenty-eighth time he had praised him or predicted they would have a great relationship. On June 3, two Russians who had befriended Trump at the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow reached out to tell his son, Donald Trump Jr., that emissaries from the Russian government wanted to deliver damaging information about Clinton. “If it’s what you say I love it,” the younger Trump replied, “especially later in the summer.” On June 7, he set up a meeting at Trump Tower in New York, where Manafort and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, met the Russian delegation. Thirty-eight meetings and 272 contacts between Team Trump and Team Putin have been documented by the FBI. Thirty-three high-ranking campaign officials and advisers knew of these contacts. Every one of them, Trump included, concealed these liaisons by lying and dissembling when questioned by investigators, journalists, and members of Congress. No innocent explanation for this clandestine conduct exists. The FBI never resolved the question of why they all lied.
On June 8, a Russian military intelligence front called DCLeaks.com, hosted by an online persona named Guccifer 2.0, started dropping stolen Democratic National Committee documents like confetti into the political arena. The IRA went into overdrive, blasting out the message: “Trump is our only hope for a better future!” The Russian attack was now a hydra-headed war, as the IRA’s ever-intensifying propaganda campaign—“#Trump4President, #Hillary4Prison”—was supercharged with gigabytes of information stolen by Moscow’s spies. John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, had clicked on a spear-phishing message, and Moscow’s hackers had stolen his account—more than fifty thousand emails. A Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee worker had opened a link to a fake log-in page, letting the Russians break into the committee’s computer network, install malware, and rifle through its files, searching for keywords like Clinton and Trump. The Russians turned the stolen information into weapons of political warfare. They were ready, and they aimed. On June 12, Julian Assange, the warlock of WikiLeaks, gave an interview to Britain’s ITV: “WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead,” he said. “We have e-mails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication.”
The DNC had hired the cybersecurity sleuths from CrowdStrike to find out who was behind the theft. They now had an answer: Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear. But no one knew that the Bears were feeding the IRA and Assange. WikiLeaks had started in 2006 as a radical force against government secrecy, feared and loathed by those who kept the secrets, but not by those who published them. At some point—certainly after he skipped bail on a charge of rape and sought asylum at Ecuador’s embassy in London in 2012—Assange had become an instrument of Russian intelligence. Shortly after he made his threat on British television, he had been visited at the embassy by RT’s London bureau chief, who slipped him a USB drive. On July 14, Russian hackers using the Guccifer 2.0 persona sent him encrypted files titled “big archive.” On July 15, the selfsame Guccifer issued a public threat: “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks. They will publish them soon.” And on July 22, Assange tweeted: “Are you ready for Hillary? We begin our series today with 20 thousand emails from the top of the DNC.” Soon Russian intelligence officers posing as whistleblowers were sending direct messages to American reporters with passwords to protected sites housing hacked Democratic National Committee documents.
The DNC’s leaders had written some acerbic things about Clinton’s strongest rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, which set off a storm of outrage among his ardent supporters when the Democratic convention opened in Philadelphia four days later. Thanks to CrowdStrike, the Clinton campaign now knew it was under a skillful and stealthy attack from abroad. The campaign’s manager, Robby Mook, told CNN: “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.” Trump ridiculed this idea in a tweet—“The new joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC e-mails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me”—and many in the mainstream media thought Mook might be spinning the surpassingly strange story. The campaign press corps, that million-footed centipede, was transfixed by the existence of Hillary’s emails, not by the fact that the Russians had stolen and released them.
On July 24, the New York Times published a prescient piece by the perceptive reporters David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth, which began: “An unusual question is capturing the attention of cyberspecialists, Russia experts and Democratic Party leaders in Philadelphia: Is Vladimir V. Putin trying to meddle in the American presidential election?” Trump tried to shut the story down. He declared at a press conference that “this whole thing with Russia” was “ridiculous.” He said: “I have nothing to do with Russia,” and repeated that five times. In the next breath, he gave a shout-out to the Kremlin: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing.” Russia was listening: five hours later, its hackers attacked a domain used by Clinton’s personal office.
In London, the Australian envoy Alexander Downer took note of the political hullabaloo across the pond. It stirred memories of the braggadocious Trump aide Papadopoulos and his excitement over the Russians having dirt on Clinton. His story reached the American embassy at the Court of St. James’s. The CIA station chief in London, Gina Haspel, sent word to agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Her boss, CIA director John Brennan, was becoming convinced that the answer to the question posed by the Times reporters was yes. His colleague, FBI director James Comey, weighed and assayed the emerging evidence after dispatching two agents to debrief Downer. The cybersecurity consensus was clear—the Bears were mauling Clinton. The British and Dutch intelligence services had shared information showing beyond a doubt that the Bears danced to the music of Russian masters. And by now the FBI had read a riveting report by the veteran British spy Christopher Steele, who was working for Washington private eyes hired by the Clinton campaign. The bureau had joined forces with Steele before and knew him as a highly reliable reporter on Russia, his field of expertise. He had shared his work with a trusted confidant, the FBI’s legal attaché in Rome, who had relayed it to headquarters. The report began:
Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.…
A former top-level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin … asserted that the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN. Its aim was to sow discord and disunity both within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance which was viewed as inimical to Russia’s interests.…
A senior Russian financial official said the Trump operation should be seen in terms of PUTIN’s desire to return to Nineteenth Century ‘Great Power’ politics anchored upon countries’ interests rather than the ideals-based international order established after World War Two.
On July 30, Comey opened an FBI counterintelligence investigation code-named Crossfire Hurricane, a tip of the hat to the Rolling Stones. The agents on the case confronted questions that had no precedent in history. Was the Republican running for president of the United States a polezni durak, a useful idiot uncomprehendingly propagandizing for Putin’s causes? (Yes, without a doubt, the acting director and deputy director of the CIA from 2010 to 2013, Mike Morell, opined in the Times a week later: “In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”) But idiocy and witlessness were not federal crimes under the FBI’s jurisdiction. The agents had to think about the unthinkable. This required a leap of the imagination. Was Trump being run by the Russians? Did they have kompromat on him? Was he an agent of influence? The term came from the KGB itself, and its nuances had been laid out in the 2014 edition of an American counterintelligence manual: “An agent of some stature who uses his or her position to influence public opinion or decision-making to produce results beneficial to the country whose intelligence service operates the agent.”
One man who might have had insights into these matters wasn’t talking. Paul Manafort was fired as Trump’s campaign manager in mid-August after his corrupt dealings in Ukraine and his secret partnership with the Kremlin oligarch Deripaska were exposed by the New York Times. After his indictment for conspiracy and fraud, he lied to the FBI about his political contacts with his crony Kilimnik, known to be a Russian intelligence agent. The judge who sentenced him to seven-and-a-half years wondered aloud if he had lied about those contacts to protect only himself, or his superiors too. She answered her question: we don’t know. The stonewalling of men linked to Putin’s inner circle—like Manafort and the disgraced national security adviser Mike Flynn—made it impossible to resolve key questions of the counterintelligence case. As the special counsel Robert Mueller concluded: “Those lies materially impaired the investigation of Russian election interference”—and the question of whether any Americans aided and abetted an attack on American democracy.
Manafort’s successor at the helm of the campaign was Trump’s ideologue in chief, Steve Bannon, the progenitor of a prominent far-right news site, who had once proclaimed himself a bomb-throwing Bolshevik in a cocktail party conversation with a neoconservative historian: “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon said. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down.” Bannon would carry his anarchic influence on Trump into the White House, all the while polishing his pithy theory of American electoral politics: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
The Russians were flooding the zone with a fire hose as the fight for the presidency went into full swing. But the American intelligence community, still consumed by counterterrorism after fifteen long years, was watching the reboot of Russian active measures without quite knowing what it was seeing. This failure of imagination was not solely their fault. The entire American political establishment, inside and outside the government, stood stock-still, staring wide-eyed and uncomprehending, like a cow watching a train go by.
Not a soul at the top of the Obama administration mobilized to stop the attack on the election once it was detected. No one was prepared to stop disinformation from spreading at the speed of light. No one comprehended how Russian political warfare had deployed the power of social media to transform the politics of the United States. No one thought to revive the Active Measures Working Group. A technologically savvy member of that dream team might have seen things clearly: two-thirds of the American people now got their news from the internet, and a majority of the electorate was walking half-blind into a free-fire zone of falsehood. In the fall of 2016, the top fake stories on Facebook outperformed the top news stories from the nineteen biggest news outlets in shares, reactions, and comments; the two top stories, both pushed heavily by the IRA, were that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump for president and that WikiLeaks had confirmed Hillary Clinton’s sale of weapons to ISIS. Those particular falsehoods reached nine million people. No one in America grasped the scope and the impact of the IRA’s fabrications.
With the battle for the White House joined, Trump’s pronouncements became a palimpsest of propaganda. He repeated and retweeted themes and conspiracy theories straight from the fertile minds of the IRA’s trolls and the farthest reaches of the internet. When Iran executed a nuclear scientist for espionage, Trump told his 10.8 million followers on Twitter: “Many people are saying that the Iranians killed the scientist who helped the United States because of Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails.” At a raucous rally in Florida, he proclaimed that Obama, the African Muslim masquerading as an American, was “the founder of ISIS. He’s the founder. He founded ISIS.” He added, with a flourish, “I would say the co-founder would be Crooked Hillary Clinton.”
Trump was a past master of old-school propaganda, which called for the construction of an alternate reality. Now he was practicing propaganda as Putin did, which demanded the destruction of reality itself. The philosopher Jason Stanley, author of How Propaganda Works, summed up the teachings of this new school. “It’s crucial to understand this: transforming politics into a post-truth contest of tribal identity is an explicit goal of modern propaganda.” That contest was now like a violent video game, a virtual blood sport in which your side won when the other side died.
Trump, the IRA, and WikiLeaks all made a scalding accusation at the start of August: Clinton was going to steal the presidency. The theme and the memes charging her with a gigantic fraud exploded on social media and across the spectrum of the internet as Russian trolls bombarded Americans with the idea and the images of a rigged ballot. The IRA’s Facebook group “Being Patriotic” and its Twitter account @March_for_Trump worked with Trump supporters to stage rallies in Florida, Pennsylvania, and New York. The Russians paid Americans to build a cage on a flatbed truck and portray Clinton inside the cage wearing prison stripes. Trump stoked the fear of a fraudulent vote at his campaign appearances, and the crowds went wild, chanting “Lock her up!” when he went after Crooked Hillary. He said that if Clinton won—which seemed highly likely at the time—it would be the result of a plot to “rig the election at the polling booths, where so many cities are corrupt and voter fraud is all too common.” She, like Obama, would be an illegitimate president, empowered by a conspiracy so immense that it staggered the imagination.
At the highest levels of the Obama administration, a realization was slowly dawning. The election really could be rigged—by the Russians. All concerned knew that the Russians had hacked the vote and posted fraudulent results in the Ukraine election of 2014. All worried that they might do it again in the United States by monkey-wrenching the nation’s antiquated voting machinery, altering registration data, erasing voters from the rolls, planting Trojan horses in computers calculating the tally. In theory, they had the capability to do all of that and more.
Early in August, the guardians of American national security, including the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, and the heads of the CIA, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security, belatedly began to hold a series of tense meetings in the White House Situation Room. The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, a retired air force lieutenant general, was first among equals at these conclaves. A fifty-five-year veteran of America’s military and intelligence services, Clapper had served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under Bush 41 and Clinton, as the undersecretary of defense for intelligence under Bush 43 and Obama, and since 2010, as the DNI, the top post in the American intelligence community, overseeing the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA. He was seventy-five, bald as a cue ball, borderline brilliant, and crusty as old bread.
“My dashboard warning lights were all lit,” Clapper wrote two years later.
Homeland Security reported that the voter registration database in Illinois had been under cyberattack for weeks, and information on two hundred thousand voters had been stolen. Then it was Arizona. Then Florida. The election systems of at least twenty-one states were targets. The possibility was remote, but the fear was real: election night could turn into chaos. No one would know who had won. Clapper reminded his counterparts that Russians didn’t need to go to all that trouble. They already had malware—christened Energetic Bear by American cyberwarriors—implanted at key nodes throughout the American electrical grid. They had used that angle of attack to shut off power to hundreds of thousands of people in Ukraine in the dead of winter only eight months before. They could black out American cities at will as citizens went to vote, or as the polls closed, and the country would be sitting in darkness waiting for results that weren’t coming in. What were the odds they would do that? No one knew.
But the Russians weren’t only inside the American grid. They had gremlins inside the Trump campaign machine. By early August, Clapper wrote, it was becoming clear that “both the Russians and the Trump campaign were, in parallel, pushing conspiracy theories against Secretary Clinton with three identical themes: she was corrupt, she was physically and mentally unwell, and she had ties to Islamic extremism.” The FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation had started to track and trace some of the many meetings between members of Team Trump and Team Putin, but far from all of them. The June meeting at Trump Tower—a Russian delegation led by a former KGB officer promising dirt on Clinton to Manafort, Kushner, and Donald Trump Jr.—was still a secret. WikiLeaks, fueled by the relentless cyberespionage of Russian intelligence, was in direct communication with the Trump campaign, and this, too, was a secret, though not for long.
More grievously, the Russians were inside Americans’ heads, but no one grasped how deeply. The National Security Agency and the Crossfire Hurricane team had barely glanced at the IRA, the subject of a highly detailed 2015 expose in the New York Times that hadn’t been heeded, and they still had the dimmest understanding of what it was doing. But by now, the intelligence community began to understand this much: the Kremlin was on the campaign trail.
After the second Situation Room meeting, on August 11, with Obama’s approval, the CIA director John Brennan began to brief the Gang of Eight: the Senate and House Republican leaders, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan; their Democratic Party counterparts, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi; and the heads of the congressional intelligence committees, all of whom had a right to know some deep secrets of state. Brennan gave it to them with the bark off: the Russians were trying to undermine the democratic process, denigrate Clinton, damage her electability and her potential presidency, and catapult Trump into the White House. The election was seventy-five days away by the time Brennan reached Senator Reid at home in Las Vegas on August 25 and asked him to get to the nearest secure telephone, the FBI’s field office in Sin City. Reid got the full import of what the CIA director was telling him, slept on it, and then composed a letter to FBI director James Comey. “The prospect of a hostile government actively seeking to undermine our free and fair elections represents one of the gravest threats to our democracy since the Cold War,” Reid wrote. “The American people deserve to have a full understanding of the facts from a completed investigation before they vote this November.” They were denied those facts.
A few days later, at the start of September, America’s national security chiefs met again. The picture was becoming clearer. Relying on an exquisitely rare source, a recruited Russian agent working high up in the Kremlin, the CIA had concluded that Putin was presiding over the attack on American democracy. “We all agreed this kind of effort could only be approved at the highest levels of the Russian government,” Clapper wrote. “We knew Putin was personally involved.” This insight shifted their world on its axis. What were they going to do about it? Who was going to tell the American people?
It was up to Obama to decide. The deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, shut out from the struggle in the Situation Room, had nonetheless caught wind of what was happening and broached the issue with the president. By his account, Obama said: “They’ve found the soft spot in our democracy.”
The president confronted Putin at a summit in Hangzhou, China, on September 5, staring down at him in anger, telling him to knock it off or else. What or else meant was a matter of conjecture at the time, but Obama had a lot of options. He could shutter every Russian consulate in America; they were dens of spies. He could impose sanctions so severe as to make the Russian economy scream. He also had some secret weapons. The CIA could leak the details of Putin’s personal wealth, conservatively estimated at $40 billion. The NSA had the capability, through its cybercommand, to freeze and evaporate a sizable portion of that fortune. For the moment, Obama did nothing more than summon the four top members of Congress to the White House upon his return to Washington. His goal was to put out a bipartisan statement, based on Brennan’s briefing, to tell the nation at least part of what they knew.
Mitch McConnell refused. The senator was the leader of the modern conservative movement in America, started in 1955 by the public intellectual William F. Buckley, who had an immaculate 1950s pedigree—Yale, Skull and Bones, CIA—and represented a political coalition to the right of President Eisenhower. Buckley had proclaimed it was the duty of conservatives to stand athwart history, yelling Stop. This was McConnell’s credo. He was the grim reaper of the government. He killed legislation that smacked of bipartisanship, he killed the requisite hearings for Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, and now he killed the chance for the American citizenry to hear that their democracy was under attack by Russia. McConnell didn’t care what kind of man Trump was, or how he got elected, or whether the Russians were behind him, so long as he won.
At this moment, America was no longer governed by two political parties but by two warring tribes, and with that, the Russians were on their way to glory.
For a month, as September turned to October, the Obama administration tried to craft a statement that could let the electorate know what was happening. The effort was agonizing. Should they name and shame Putin? They wouldn’t. Brennan and Comey were loath to tip the Russians about the sources and methods of American intelligence. Should they say the Russians were trying to elect Trump? They couldn’t. Obama was leery of appearing to put his thumb on the scales of the vote, and out of an overabundance of caution, he wouldn’t put his name on the statement at all. No one seemed able to find the right words; the arguments went around and around in circles, with cabinet officers and intelligence czars quibbling over commas and clauses in the Situation Room. Finally, Clapper turned to his counterpart, Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson. He said the two of them had to cut the knot. “Jeh and I felt,” he wrote, “not only was saying something the right thing to do, but if we did not disclose the information we had, there’d be hell to pay later.”
They tried to tell the truth but they didn’t tell the whole truth. They took a draft statement into their own hands, and following the instincts of the president and the consensus of their colleagues, they filed off its sharpest points. They kept Putin’s name out of it, and they kept Trump’s name out, too. The words disinformation and Russian intelligence did not appear. But all agreed that the message was clear, and they thought it would be electrifying:
The US Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.… We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.
The statement was set for release on Friday afternoon, October 7.
But first came an enormous burst from the IRA’s trolls—a tweet every five seconds, nearly eighteen thousand in all on the sixth of October, with a potential reach of twenty million people. The messages overwhelmingly came from the IRA’s Left front. They aimed at suppressing the vote against Trump, infuriating Sanders supporters with the accusation that Clinton and the Democratic Party had defrauded their candidate, saying she had stolen the presidential nomination through deceit and cunning. The payload powering this blast was political dynamite—a bombshell of emails stolen by the Bears and stockpiled by the IRA and WikiLeaks—and the tweets were just a taste of it. The full force would explode on Friday.
The breaking news about the Russian attack from the American intelligence community went out at 3 p.m. that day. It was the top story for less than an hour. At 4:03 p.m., it was knocked off America’s airwaves when the Washington Post showed the world the Access Hollywood tape of Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women: “When you’re a star, they let you do it.… Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” (A few members of the dwindling Republican establishment condemned him; his response was to bring three women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct decades before to the next presidential debate.) And a half hour later, at 4:32 p.m., WikiLeaks tweeted: “RELEASE: The Podesta Emails.” Stolen by the Russians from the Clinton campaign chairman in March, sifted and weighed for six months, and strategically set forth in installments that day and throughout October, the first of the files revealed the Clintons’ buckraking on Wall Street, unlikely to endear the candidate to the Bernie brigade. She didn’t have a quick comeback that night or the next.
The Russians had sent millions of minds spinning. The fact that they were inside American heads was beyond understanding. And at that moment their political warfare had triumphed. Their attack on American democracy was not part of the national discussion the next day, or the next week, or the next month. The political discourse was crystallized three weeks before Election Day, at the third and last presidential debate in Las Vegas on October 19, when Trump boasted that Putin had said nice things about him.
“Well, that’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president of the United States,” Clinton said.
“No puppet,” Trump sputtered. “No puppet. You’re the puppet.”
The Russians had strung them up and made them dance.
Too late, long after the election was over, American intelligence began to understand how the Kremlin’s political warfare campaign helped elect Putin’s chosen candidate as the president of the United States. The failure to foresee the approach of the attackers, the failure to warn Americans in real time, and the failure of imagination that enabled the success of the sabotage mirrored the saga of September 11 and its awful aftermath. No one died in the great active measures campaign of 2016. But it was a glorious triumph for Russia and a grievous wound for American democracy. We were fools to let it happen.
The Crossfire Hurricane team finally busted the Internet Research Agency ten months after Trump won the White House. After breaking into its servers and its files, they found a note, like a message in a bottle, from a Russian soldier on the front lines of political warfare.
On November 9, 2016, a sleepless night was ahead of us. And when around 8 a.m. the most important result of our work arrived, we uncorked a tiny bottle of champagne … took one gulp each and looked into each other’s eyes.… We uttered almost in unison: “We made America great.”