For a generation, from the rise of Solidarity onward, the global power of the Kremlin had eroded like a sand castle lapped by the waves of the sea. In the spring of 2007, Vladimir Putin began fighting to turn back the tide.
On June 4, a secret cable from the American embassy in Estonia reported an epochal event with an eye-popping headline: “WORLD’S FIRST VIRTUAL ATTACK AGAINST NATION STATE.” “Estonia has been the victim of the world’s first coordinated cyberattacks against a nation state and its political and economic infrastructure,” the embassy report began. “For over a month, government, banking, media, and other Estonian websites, servers, and routers came under a barrage of cyberattacks.… Experts cite the nature and sophistication of the attacks as proof of Russian government complicity.”
This assault was the sixth time over the course of a millennium that the Russians had attacked the people of Estonia, whose capital, Tallinn, lay two hundred miles from Putin’s birthplace, no longer called Leningrad, but once again Saint Petersburg, as its founder, Peter the Great, had christened it three centuries before.
The Soviet wartime reign in Estonia had been marked by rape, murder, the forced conscription of men and boys as slave laborers for the Red Army, and mass deportations to Siberia. One-third of the citizens had been killed or exiled. After the war, the Kremlin had ordered hundreds of thousands of Russians to colonize the country and consolidate the Kremlin’s control. At the end of the cold war, Russians were roughly a third of the population of Estonia, constituting a state within a state; they ran key industries, organized-crime gangs, and money-laundering rings; they watched Russian television and socialized with their fellow Russians. Clinton had had to strong-arm Yeltsin to withdraw Russian military forces from the country. The Kremlin resisted for many months before Congress authorized $50 million to buy them out. They left behind a war memorial that stood over the remains of twelve Red Army troops in downtown Tallinn, a six-foot statue known as the Bronze Soldier; the last contingent of the living had headed east on August 30, 1994.
“It was quite a day,” said Keith Smith, the chargé d’affaires at the new American embassy. “I remember walking around town and asking Estonians what they thought about it. I thought they’d be delirious. To a person, they said, ‘they’ll be back.’”
The Estonians found a unique way to liberate themselves from Russian economic, political, and social influence after they joined NATO in March 2004, having established a working democracy in a nation that had never known government by the people. By 2006, they had created an international exemplar of interconnectedness. Estonian software engineers had not only created Skype; they were helping to build a new society, where the only rituals requiring you to show up in person and present a document were marriage, divorce, and buying property. Everything else was online—government, banking, finance, insurance, communications, broadcast and print media, the balloting for elections. Wi-Fi was strong, ever present, and free. People began to call their homeland e-Estonia. They had created the first country whose political and social architectures were framed by an internet infrastructure—and perhaps the most technologically sophisticated nation on earth.
In April 2007, the authorities in Tallinn decided to move the Bronze Soldier from its pedestal to a military cemetery. Estonian patriots found it offensive, Russian nationalists came to Estonia to rally around it, and the statue became a flash point of confrontation. Russia’s foreign affairs minister, Sergey Lavrov, called the decision disgusting; he warned of serious consequences for Estonia. An angry mob of Russians ran riot in the capital. In Moscow, young thugs laid siege to the Estonian embassy and forced it to shut down. And then Putin waged political warfare in a way that made Estonia’s strength its weakness.
The first wave of the attacks started on April 27; its targets included the websites of Estonia’s president, prime minister, parliament, and its foreign affairs and justice ministries. The initial barrage was carried out by an online mob spewing an avalanche of spam and fake news on Estonian networks, urged on by Russian-language chat forums that furnished downloadable software tools to carry out the vandalism. One hacker posted a forged letter from Prime Minister Andrus Ansip on government websites, apologizing for ordering the removal of the Bronze Soldier. Another posted a militant mission statement on a public forum: “Take Estonnet the fuck down:).”
On April 30, the cyber riot became a war. A series of coordinated distributed denial-of-service attacks struck Estonia. A multiplicity of malevolent systems flooded the nation’s bandwidths, a DDoS blitzkrieg driven by Russian botnets, hundreds of thousands of computers hijacked by hackers overseen by the Kremlin’s military and intelligence agencies. The onslaught came from internet service providers based in seventy-five nations around the world—including the United States, Russia, Canada, Germany, Belgium, Egypt, Turkey, and Vietnam. Its intensity reached ninety megabits per second (five Mbps is plenty for streaming high-definition videos on a home computer). As the flood swamped the nation’s computer systems, Estonia went down. The attacks crashed not only the government’s systems but those serving banks, businesses, telecommunications, and the media; Estonians couldn’t use cash machines, pay their bills, or see the news. Russia also conducted economic warfare, cutting off oil deliveries and impeding over-the-road commerce between the two nations. The costs to Estonia, a country of 1.3 million people, were estimated at well over half a billion dollars. “They’ve basically been brought to their knees because of these attacks,” said Howard Schmidt, who was by turns the White House cybersecurity adviser and a chief security officer at Microsoft.
Web War I peaked on May 9, 2007, the Russian anniversary of the end of World War II. On that day, after reviewing a parade of seven thousand Russian troops in Red Square, Putin came close to endorsing the attacks: “Those who are trying today to … desecrate memorials to war heroes” were vandals, bent on “sowing discord and new distrust between states and people.” The lessons that the United States and NATO learned from the cyberwar were stark, though slow to take hold. “The potential exists for capabilities that are much more destructive,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn. “History will tell you that somebody will take it to the extreme.” The greatest lesson was this: “What they do to us we cannot do to them,” said Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the president of Estonia from 2006 to 2016. “Liberal democracies with a free press and free and fair elections are at an asymmetric disadvantage.… The tools of their democratic and free speech can be used against them.”
The knowledge Russia reaped from the attack built on ideas established at the start of Putin’s long reign. Before Estonia, the thrust of Russia’s twenty-first-century political warfare had been defensive, as befitted a nation whose deepest historical memories were the invasions of Napoleon and Hitler, and whose leader perceived America’s promotion of democracy in Russia during the Yeltsin years as insidious subversion. The first “Information Security Doctrine” that Russia promulgated under Putin established a need to “counter propagandistic information and psychological operations from a probable enemy.” The threat was broadly defined as spiritual—dukhovnyi—especially when it came from “mass media use by foreign special services” to spread disinformation and undermine the Russian state.
After Estonia, retired major general Ivan Vorobyev, a former defense minister and, at the age of eighty-five, a grand old man of Russian military theory whose work was widely read by the political elites, wrote that it was time to go on a global offensive. He put forth a three-part shock doctrine: deceiving the enemy, getting inside his head to skew his thinking, and attacking his computers to disorient or disable his ability to command. Vorobyev wasn’t only talking about the military, but about foreign policy and geopolitics: he said Russia needed above all to manage the perceptions of foreign leaders and the people they governed. Like his spiritual ancestor, Clausewitz, he saw all politics as warfare and warfare as the continuation of politics by other means.
The United States, Putin had said at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, wanted to create “a world in which there is one master, one sovereign.” It ceaselessly preached democracy to Russia and the rest of the world—“but for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn themselves.” He continued: “Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper-use of force—military force—in international relations, a force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts.… The United States has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?”
In April 2008, NATO convened in Bucharest, and the alliance announced that it was open to admitting Georgia and Ukraine in the future, a move Bush endorsed in full. Putin was enraged. Those countries had been vitally important Soviet republics, and they held strategic and spiritual value for millions of Russians. Georgia was Stalin’s birthplace, and its Black Sea resorts were playgrounds for the wealthy; to its south lay Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. More crucially, the roots of Russian empire had lain in Ukraine for more than a thousand years. When the Russians controlled it, they were a superpower; but without Ukraine, Russia was just another country. The republic had been the Soviet Union’s breadbasket, Odessa its great trading port; it was now the largest nation in Europe, albeit one of the poorest.
“Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching,” Bush’s new secretary of defense—Bob Gates—wrote six years later. “Were the Europeans, much less the Americans, willing to send their sons and daughters to defend Ukraine or Georgia? Hardly. So NATO expansion was a political act, not a carefully considered military commitment, thus undermining the purpose of the alliance and recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests.” Gates had a good idea of how Putin would respond. He, too, had looked into Putin’s eyes. He said he had seen a stone-cold killer—and a man haunted by lost empire, lost glory, and lost power.
In no way would Putin allow these two nations to align with the West. He was going to change the colors of their revolutions. “NATO was created at a time when there were two blocs confronting each other,” Putin had told reporters in Bucharest, where NATO had let Russia look on as an outside observer. “Let’s not get into the question of who were the good guys at the time. But it is obvious that today there is no Soviet Union, no eastern bloc and no Warsaw Pact.”
Putin continued:
We have withdrawn our troops deployed in eastern Europe, and withdrawn almost all large and heavy weapons from the European part of Russia. And what happened? A base in Romania, where we are now, one in Bulgaria, an American missile defense area in Poland and the Czech Republic. That all means moving military infrastructure to our borders. Let’s talk about it directly, honestly, frankly, cards on the table.
He started laying down his hand.
He put plans for an attack on Georgia in motion days after he left Bucharest. He had two goals from the outset: to test Russian capabilities for information warfare, and to start a counterrevolution in Georgia that would stop the expansion of NATO once and for all. That spring, and into the summer, RT and other Russian media painted Georgia’s President Saakashvili as an unhinged warmonger and an American stooge. Putin deployed spetsnaz, Russian special-operations soldiers posing as peacekeepers, in the long-disputed Georgian enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, where loyalties to Russia and resistance to Saakashvili were strong. He signed decrees establishing political and economic ties with those separatist regions as if they were independent states, and the Kremlin issued Russian passports to their residents.
His talking heads and internet trolls beat the war drums by asserting that Moscow had to intervene to prevent an impending slaughter. Their theme was that NATO, led by the United States, was the real aggressor in Georgia, arming and training Saakashvili’s troops; therefore Russia was compelled to defend innocent people fighting a powerful enemy backed by the imperialist West. Putin launched military maneuvers on nearby Russian terrain. He sent warplanes aloft, a thousand miles south of Moscow, flying into Georgia’s air space to fray the government’s nerves. And before he made his move, he flew in fifty handpicked Russian reporters whose fealty to the Kremlin was unquestioned.
On July 29, 2008, paramilitary forces in South Ossetia began shelling Georgian villages. On the night of August 7, the government panicked. The Georgian military launched artillery into the enclave’s provincial capital. And then the Russians struck after midnight. Putin’s tanks and troops rolled south, the first Russian military invasion of a sovereign nation in nearly thirty years, after Afghanistan in 1979, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Hungary in 1956. The story quickly fell off the front page, another not terribly significant tragedy in a place few Americans could find on a map. But it was a watershed in the history of warfare.
Georgia was hit with a massive coordinated cyberattack in the first minutes of the war. It immediately struck fifty-four websites in the capital of Tbilisi, obliterating news and information. In a few hours, one-third of the nation’s computer networks went down, including the official sites of Saakashvili, his government, and his ministries of defense and foreign affairs. The Russians leaped into the information void with terrifying tales of war crimes committed by Georgian soldiers in South Ossetia—the killing of pregnant women and children, the spearing of the wounded with bayonets, the slaughter of the innocents. Russian television inflated the actual figures of civilian deaths and refugees in South Ossetia by thousands.
“Putin Accuses Georgia of Genocide,” read the headlines on RT on the second day of the war. He had flown from the Beijing Olympics to the edge of the war zone to conduct a staged television interview with two women who played the roles of terrorized refugees:
FIRST WOMAN: They burned our girls when they were still alive!
PUTIN: Alive?
FIRST WOMAN: Yes, young girls! They herded them like cattle into a house and burned them.…
SECOND WOMAN: They stabbed a baby, he was one and a half. They stabbed him in a cellar.…
PUTIN: I cannot even listen to this.
SECOND WOMAN: An old woman with two little kids—they were running and a tank drove over them.
PUTIN: They must be crazy. This is genocide.
Governments around the world found these reports so disturbing that they doubted the wisdom of lending diplomatic support to Georgia. Human rights groups launched investigations into Russia’s reports of pitiless atrocities. It was fake news, but it took time to prove its falsity, and while the fact-checkers tried to disprove one story, the Kremlin put out two more. Russia proved that it could use television and the internet as weapons, launching barrages of disinformation and demonization—aiming, as one analyst put it, to “dismiss the critic, distort the facts, distract from the main issue, and dismay the audience.” Russia’s war in Georgia revived an old joke among the bloggers of Moscow. Hitler comes back from the dead and reviews the annual May Day parade of Russia’s tanks and missiles. A silent smile plays on his lips. A Russian general leans over and says: “Bet you’re thinking if you had those weapons you wouldn’t have lost the war.” Nein, says Hitler: “I was just thinking that if I had a newspaper like your Pravda, no one ever would have found out that I did!”
In the twentieth century, when the Kremlin invaded a sovereign nation, the West had reacted with horror and outrage. Now, there were expressions of concern followed by silence. The military campaign was over in five days, and while the Russian army did not distinguish itself in battle, its soldiers split Georgia into two by seizing its east-west highway. Today Russian forces still occupy a fifth of the country, two hundred thousand people driven from their homes have not returned, and Georgia remains a wounded nation, frozen in a state of conflict, sundered and isolated. Putin’s goal had not been conquest. It was to show the world that he could marshal a counterforce against the West, contain its expansion of power, and control its perceptions.
The information war was more important than the war itself. Putin had given new meaning to the old saying that the first casualty of war is truth. Truth was the main enemy now.
Putin had launched “a new form of warfare” in which the human mind was the main battlefront, a comprehensive assessment by the Modern War Institute at West Point concluded a decade later. Using disinformation and deception, “Russia created the time and space to shape the international narrative in the critical early days of the conflict.” The West Point study saw four essential elements of Russian information warfare on display in Georgia and thereafter: “First, and most benignly, it aims to put the best spin it can on ordinary news; second, it incites a population with fake information in order to prep a battlefield; third, it uses disinformation or creates enough ambiguity to confuse people on the battlefield; and fourth, it outright lies.” The overarching Russian strategy was “to degrade trust in institutions across the world.” As Mikhail Zygar, the former editor in chief of TV Rain, the only independent Russian national television network, wrote: “Russian television doesn’t suggest that Russian leaders are any better or less corrupt, or more honest and just, than Western leaders. Rather, it says that everything is the same everywhere. All the world’s politicians are corrupt.… All elections are falsified. Democracy doesn’t exist anywhere, so give it up.”
Americans didn’t give much thought to a small war in a faraway place as it flickered across their screens that summer. The United States was teetering on the edge of a disastrous recession sparked by fraud and greed, and Senators Barack Hussein Obama and John McCain were contesting a presidential election in which the rest of the world looked insignificant next to saving the American economy from disaster. But Obama was looking beyond the borders of the United States in a way that transfixed the world’s attention. The forty-seven-year-old first-term senator with the highly inconvenient name had captured the nomination in June, decisively defeating Hillary Clinton in the campaign primaries. In July 2008, before the Democratic convention, he set out for Afghanistan, Kuwait, Iraq, Israel, the West Bank, Britain, France, and Germany. By the time he got to Berlin, where he spoke to a crowd of two hundred thousand people gathered at the Victory Column in the city’s central park, the Tiergarten, he was running for the vacant position of leader of the free world.
He invoked the memory of the 1948 Berlin Airlift, when American planes ferrying food had broken the Soviet blockade of the divided and desperate city:
In the darkest hours, the people of Berlin kept the flame of hope burning.… Hundreds of thousands of Berliners came here, to the Tiergarten, and heard the city’s mayor implore … “People of the world, look at Berlin!”
People of the world—look at Berlin!
Look at Berlin, where Germans and Americans learned to work together and trust each other less than three years after facing each other on the field of battle.
Look at Berlin, where the determination of a people met the generosity of the Marshall Plan and created a German miracle; where a victory over tyranny gave rise to NATO, the greatest alliance ever formed to defend our common security.…
When you, the German people, tore down that wall—a wall that divided East and West; freedom and tyranny; fear and hope—walls came tumbling down around the world.…
People of Berlin—people of the world—this is our moment. This is our time.… We are heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of improbable hope. With an eye toward the future, with resolve in our hearts, let us remember this history, and answer our destiny, and remake the world once again.
Healing the world would prove harder than raising its hopes. No president ever had been left a more dismal legacy by his predecessor. Untamed fire had scorched the earth at home and abroad. Obama inherited a howling recession that wiped out millions of Americans’ jobs and savings; two wars, with 161,000 American troops in Iraq and 38,000 more in Afghanistan, some on their third and fourth tours of duty, their commanders with no clear goal in sight nor any glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel; and an American political warfare machine that now resembled a rusting 1948 Cadillac resting on cinder blocks. Bush had run it off the road.
Having come to power from farther on the left than any president before him, Obama tacked sharply to the center in the realm of national security. He asked the old cold warrior Bob Gates to stay on as secretary of defense, chose the four-star marine general Jim Jones as his national security adviser, and after twisting her arm made Hillary Clinton his secretary of state. Clinton’s six years on the Senate Armed Services Committee—she never missed a meeting—had made her something of a hawk. She had supported, while Obama had opposed, Bush’s resolve to go to war in Iraq, which now looked like the worst foreign policy decision any president had ever made, and on the campaign trail, she had called Obama’s stated willingness to talk to America’s most strident enemies as “irresponsible, and frankly naïve.” At her confirmation hearings, she said she would use “all elements of our power—diplomacy, development, and defense”—and the fourth d of democracy was mentioned only in passing. “While our democracy continues to inspire people around the world,” she said, “we know that its influence is greatest when we live up to its teachings ourselves.”
America had not done that. Its influence had fallen to a seventy-year ebb under Bush, and the inspirational rhetoric of Obama could not revive it. Promoting democracy and pushing back against Putin were not in the first rank of the new president’s priorities. He now was in charge of the war machinery of the Pentagon and the CIA, the lethal weapons of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, and as Obama sent more troops into Afghanistan and deployed a barrage of Predators and special-operations forces to hunt and kill America’s enemies abroad, the greatest part of the foreign policy of the United States was not executed by diplomats and democracy advocates but by soldiers and spies. “It too often became surge surge surge, drone drone drone,” said Harold Hongju Koh, the Yale Law School dean who had left to serve as Clinton’s legal adviser at the State Department.
Political warfare lived, though barely, and it was often incoherent at best. Obama’s vainglorious envoy Richard Holbrooke tried to fix the 2009 presidential election in Afghanistan, but he did it brazenly, and he failed miserably. Bob Gates later called that effort “our clumsy and failed putsch.” At a meeting of the NATO defense ministers, the UN high representative, Kai Eide, leaned over to Gates and whispered: “I am going to tell the ministers that there was blatant foreign interference in the Afghan election. What I will not say is it was the United States and Richard Holbrooke.”
Obama had a highly centralized power structure at the White House, but he handed the Russia portfolio to Clinton. She, too, had scoffed at Bush’s claim to have formed a spiritual bond with Russia’s leader. “This is the president that looked in the soul of Putin,” Clinton had said during the primaries. “He was a KGB agent. By definition he doesn’t have a soul.… This is nonsense, but this is the world that we’re living in.” The world, on the surface, had changed. Putin had been barred by Russia’s constitution from a third consecutive term, so he became the prime minister and, on paper, ceded the presidency to Dmitry Medvedev, a good-looking young Saint Petersburg politician who served as the velvet glove for Putin’s iron fist. While Putin still called the shots, Medvedev and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov handled diplomacy with the United States. Clinton set out to reset American relations with Russia, writing Lavrov to propose that they work together on START, a new strategic arms reduction treaty, as well as Afghanistan, Iran, and the Middle East. Their first meeting started off on a false note. In March 2009, at a news conference in Geneva, Clinton gave Lavrov her best smile and handed him a big red button mounted on a yellow box and labeled with the word reset in English and the word peregruzka in Russian. “We worked hard to get the right Russian word,” she told him. “Do you think we got it?”
“You got it wrong,” Lavrov said. Someone at the State Department had screwed up: peregruzka means “overload.” Despite the awkward beginning, over the course of more than a year, the Americans and the Russians cooperated as Clinton had proposed. They agreed at the United Nations to impose harsh economic penalties that coerced Iran into negotiating limits to its nuclear program. They worked to reduce their teeming nuclear weapons stockpiles. The Russians let American military planes use their airspace to resupply soldiers in Afghanistan. Obama invited Medvedev to the White House, and they set the date for June 18, 2010. The day before Medvedev landed, an urgent meeting took place in the Situation Room, led by Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Bob Gates, FBI director Robert Mueller, and CIA director Leon Panetta, an intelligence novice who had served sixteen years in Congress and four years as President Clinton’s chief of staff.
Mueller told the president that the United States urgently needed to extract a highly valued intelligence source from Moscow. The source had identified a ring of ten “illegals”—an underground network of sleeper agents working for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. They had been living in the United States for a decade, since the start of the Putin era. They had come to the United States with fake passports and invented identities, and they worked as teachers, real estate brokers, travel agents. They included married couples with young kids who didn’t know their parents’ true names. And they couldn’t be charged with espionage—because they hadn’t done any actual spying yet, as far as the FBI could tell. The role of a sleeper is to await orders to awake and act. One of them was going back to Moscow, signaling something big was afoot. So now the FBI wanted to round up the whole web at once, and that, in turn, could expose the source. Medvedev probably didn’t even know this Russian underground existed. But Putin surely did.
Obama exploded. “Just as we’re getting on track with the Russians, this? This is a throwback to the Cold War. This is right out of John le Carré. We put START, Iran, the whole relationship with Russia at risk for this kind of thing?” Gates, the intelligence veteran, told the president to play political hardball: confront Medvedev, really stick it to him—is this your idea of a reset, Dmitry?—and drive a wedge between him and Putin. Panetta, the political pro, advised the president to follow the cold war intelligence playbook—deport the sleepers and swap them for four Russians imprisoned by Putin for spying for the United States and Britain. Obama took his advice. Putin gave the sleepers a hero’s welcome when they returned. Their story became a popular television series, The Americans, and the White House moved on to the next crisis, which at any given moment was usually fifteen minutes away.
The men in the Situation Room that day, along with Hillary Clinton, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Obama’s counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, were sitting “at the bottom of the huge funnel pouring problems from Pandora’s global trove into Washington … dealing daily with multiple problems, pivoting on a dime from one issue to another … then making decisions, always with too little time and too much ambiguous information,” Gates wrote, “and that is a problem in its own right: exhausted people do not make the best decisions.” This human factor helped to fuel a terrible choice Obama made after the uprisings of the Arab Spring gained force in 2011.
In February, immense demonstrations in Cairo forced the aging strongman Hosni Mubarak to end his thirty-year reign in Egypt, a move openly endorsed by Obama. Four days later, protesting lawyers and students took aim at Muammar Qaddafi, the half-mad dictator who had ruled Libya since 1969. Qaddafi started massacring them, igniting an armed rebellion in which some of his own security forces sided with the people. The opposition took control of the sprawling city of Benghazi, and Qaddafi sent his soldiers to take it back, threatening a bloodbath in which thousands would die. Obama said Qaddafi had to go. The question was how. Clinton wanted to use military force to stop him from slaughtering civilians, by bombing his military bases and command headquarters, including his residences. Biden, Gates, and Brennan were adamantly against starting another war in the Middle East. On the campaign trail, Obama had argued that a president could not launch a military attack absent an actual or imminent threat to the United States. As commander in chief, he chose force, backed by the Republican-led Congress, a NATO coalition, and a UN Security Council resolution, which passed with Russia abstaining, a last result of the reset. Putin denounced that vote. Borrowing Qaddafi’s own words, he said the resolution resembled medieval calls for a Christian crusade.
The NATO military campaign—fueled by American warplanes, bombs, missiles, drones, intelligence, and reconnaissance—destroyed the regime. And when it dissolved, Libya swiftly descended into a war of all against all, with rival militias backed by Saudi Arabia and Turkey killing one another, and a million migrants trying to flee the chaos, all going down a road to hell paved by the best humanitarian intentions. Obama later called this debacle the worst choice of his presidency. It was the death of America’s militant drive to remake the Middle East in the name of democracy.
On October 20, 2011, the rebels overran Qaddafi’s last stronghold, found him hiding in a drainpipe, sodomized him with a bayonet, and killed him, capturing his last moments on video. Putin watched that tape over and over again, probably thinking that this was what happened when America wanted to change a regime—Milošević dead in a prison cell, Saddam with a noose around his neck, Qaddafi on the wrong end of a spear.
Four weeks before, the United Russia party, created by Putin for Putin and his power, had held a convention in a stadium outside Moscow. The Russian-born American journalist Julia Ioffe was there taking notes. “Medvedev takes the stage, and he says, ‘I’ve done a lot of thinking,’” she recounted. “And immediately people can tell something’s wrong. He looks like he’s been up all night, either drinking or crying. He doesn’t look good. And then people start listening to what he’s saying. Nobody usually listens to what he’s saying.… And he says, ‘I’ve decided that I think Vladimir Putin should run for the presidency in 2012.’ And jaws drop.”
United Russia retained control of the Russian parliament in December 2011. The election was entirely fraudulent: Putin’s apparatchiks harassed the opposition, stuffed ballot boxes, manhandled poll watchers, and launched cyberattacks on the websites of election observers. “Russian voters deserve a full investigation of electoral fraud and manipulation,” Secretary Clinton said in a speech in Lithuania a few days later. “The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted. And that means they deserve fair, free, transparent elections and leaders who are accountable to them.” Thousands of Russian citizens now took to the streets. Putin accused Clinton of inciting them. The demonstrations grew, the biggest since the fall of the Soviet Union. “Putin is a thief!” protesters chanted. “Russia without Putin!” The specter of the Arab Spring demonstrations haunted the Kremlin. Putin said, louder this time, that hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign money was influencing Russian politics and that Clinton was the opposition’s puppet master, working in secret to subvert him. “She set the tone for certain actors inside the country; she gave the signal,” he insisted on December 8. “They heard the signal, and with the support of the U.S. State Department began active work.” He issued an ominous warning to anyone who would dare to influence Russian politics on behalf of the United States.
After his preordained reelection as president in March 2012, Putin cracked down on Russian news outlets that didn’t dance to his tune. “The Kremlin successfully erodes the integrity of investigative and political journalism, producing a lack of faith in traditional media,” the Soviet-born author Peter Pomerantsev wrote as the noose tightened on what remained of the free press in Russia. He saw “new propaganda” emerging, and he said its goal was “not to convince or persuade, but to keep the viewer hooked and distracted, passive and paranoid.” RT, which received more than $1 billion a year from the Kremlin, began to fine-tune its English-language shows, targeting the fringes of the American political spectrum on the right and the left. After the BBC, it was now the most popular foreign news source in the United States, reaching millions of viewers in the United States. Its mission, as Putin put it in an interview with RT, was to “break the monopoly of Anglo-Saxon global information streams.”
Putin repressed or expelled an array of international human rights groups. Under intense pressure from the Kremlin, the United States Agency for International Development shut its doors after two decades of trying to support democracy and the rule of law in Russia. Putin forced dozens of nongovernmental organizations out of the country and created in their stead state-sponsored NGOs that served as propaganda platforms. They became “a real-world equivalent of the Internet troll armies that insecure, authoritarian, repressive regimes have unleashed on Twitter,” as an American ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe put it. “They use essentially the same tactics as their online counterparts—creating noise and confusion, flooding the space, using vulgarity, intimidating those with dissenting views, and crowding out legitimate voices.”
Shortly after Putin began his third term, a shadowy organization called the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm in Saint Petersburg financed by a Kremlin oligarch, began planning to target American voters, using techniques of disinformation and deception that it was already testing on Russian citizens and their neighbors in Eastern Europe. At the same time, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and private security firms detected a growing wave of cyberespionage attacks conducted by the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, and the foreign intelligence service, the SVR. They were stealing information to gain a strategic advantage for the Kremlin. They often used spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments crafted to attract their targets’ interest. And their targets included governments, embassies, militaries, political parties, think tanks, international and regional defense groups, and media outlets from the United States to Ukraine. The information they stole was ammunition stockpiled in a virtual arsenal.
On February 26, 2013, a justly obscure Russian newspaper called the Military-Industrial Courier reprinted a speech that General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, had given at the end of January. It might have gone unnoticed in the West but for the efforts of Rob Coalson, a talented reporter at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, who translated it and posted it. Months later, Mark Galeotti, a prolific Kremlinologist, picked it up and published it online with a snappy title, “The Gerasimov Doctrine.” As Galeotti later noted with chagrin, after it had gained worldwide attention and stirred considerable alarm, it was neither a doctrine nor a declaration of war on the West. But it was a deep look into how the Russian military saw the color revolutions and the Arab Spring as anarchic creations of American intelligence, and it was a foreshadowing of how Moscow might fight back against the power and influence of NATO and the United States without using tanks and missiles.
“In the 21st century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace,” Gerasimov began. “Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template.… A perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict, become a victim of foreign intervention, and sink into a web of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war.” He continued:
The very “rules of war” have changed. The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness.… All this is supplemented by military means of a concealed character, including carrying out actions of informational conflict and the actions of special-operations forces. The open use of forces—often under the guise of peacekeeping and crisis regulation—is resorted to only at a certain stage, primarily for the achievement of final success in the conflict.
All war now depended on political warfare in the eyes of the Kremlin.
Putin fixed on his next target: Ukraine, bordering Russia to its east, the warm waters of the oil-rich Black Sea to its south, four NATO allies to its west. The imprint of seven decades as a Soviet republic lay deep in its soil. A statue of Lenin still stood on one end of the main street of the capital, Kyiv, and another in the image of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the father of Soviet spies, graced a town named after him. No one had dared to tear them down. The power of the Kremlin still resonated.
When the Soviet Union dissolved, it had left 2,000 strategic nuclear warheads and 2,500 tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine; the unstable and insecure country possessed the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. The threat of loose nukes haunted Washington. Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin had cut a deal with Ukraine in December 1994. It would send the weapons to Russia to be destroyed with American know-how. Ukraine received promises in exchange for giving up that power: Russia would respect its sovereignty and its borders, forswearing “the threat or the use of force” against its independence, and the United States would protect it against Russian aggression through the United Nations. The Ukrainian people would soon find out how ironclad these assurances were.
The corrupt Viktor Yanukovych had returned to power in the last election, thanks to the efforts of the equally crooked political consultant Paul Manafort, whose office manager in Kyiv, Konstantin Kilimnik, had deep ties to Russian intelligence. Their paymasters included tycoons enmeshed with both organized crime and the Kremlin. Manafort collected many millions in fees from Yanukovych, laundering them in offshore accounts, and attracting the attention of the FBI, which began wiretapping him in a foreign intelligence investigation. Manafort also cut business deals with the country’s richest and most odious oligarchs, including Dmytro Firtash, a Putin crony and a prominent associate of Russian organized crime indicted on federal corruption charges in Chicago in October 2013. Firtash was the Ukrainian middleman for Gazprom, the Russian state-run natural gas giant. Putin used the company as an instrument of statecraft and an engine of corruption. Firtash bought gas from Gazprom at a steep discount. He marked it up threefold when he sold it to Ukraine, pocketing $3 billion and paying pro-Russian politicians, chiefly Yanukovych, to do the Kremlin’s bidding. Through the oligarch’s largesse, the president paid Manafort his millions.
Mirroring Manafort’s outrageously expensive tastes, Yanukovych had built a $250 million mansion north of Kyiv with marble staircases and golden toilets and a zoo stocked with peacocks and wild boars, all with funds stolen from his nation’s treasury. These two men personified the corruption and greed that had permeated the country’s political and economic systems.
In the fall of 2013, Manafort urged his client to strike a free-trade agreement with the European Union, linking Ukraine to the West and corporate America. Yanukovych openly embraced the deal. Public opinion overwhelmingly favored it. But Putin didn’t. He would no more let Ukraine associate with the EU than he would allow it into NATO. He believed it was his country: a core element of Russia itself. (At the sidelines of the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, he had tried to make Bush grasp this idea in simple language: “You don’t understand, George. Ukraine is not even a state. What is Ukraine? Part of its territories is Eastern Europe, but the greater part is a gift from us.”) The greatest gift was the Crimean Peninsula, home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, and a land that Russia had controlled since the eighteenth century, until Khrushchev had transferred it to Ukraine in 1954, in atonement for Stalin’s genocidal repression of its people.
Putin met with Yanukovych twice, in late October and again in early November 2013, and he threatened him in no uncertain terms, as a KGB case officer would talk to a deeply compromised recruited foreign agent. He had two ways of making him balk. Russia could, and would, inflict deep economic pain on Ukraine, or it could loan it billions. And Russian intelligence had gathered an encyclopedia of kompromat on Yanukovych that it could unleash at any time. An EU summit was set for November 28 in Lithuania, and everyone expected that Yanukovych would sign the pact. But he pulled out. One thousand protesters marched down the streets of Kyiv to the Maidan that night. Three nights later, there were one hundred thousand. Soon there were hundreds of thousands. They weren’t waving orange banners, but the blue flags of the European Union. Russian media depicted them as a rabble of neo-Nazis. Yanukovych forced a law against the protests through the Ukrainian parliament and tried to add Putinesque clauses to the constitution. The demonstrators now wanted two things: their country in Europe and their president out of office.
The United States pressed the European Union to midwife a power-sharing pact between Ukraine’s president and his political opponents, but the EU’s ministers were dithering, nervous about picking a fight with Putin. On January 27, 2014, the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, Victoria Nuland, telephoned the American envoy in Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt. Nuland held the highest diplomatic rank in the Foreign Service, career ambassador, and the relationship with Russia was part of her portfolio; she had dealt with the Russians in one way or another for thirty years.
She thought it was high time to get the United Nations involved in brokering a change in the government of Ukraine.
“That would be great,” Nuland said, “to help glue this thing and to have the UN help glue it and, you know, fuck the EU.”
“Exactly,” Pyatt said. “I think we’ve got to do something to make it stick together because you can be pretty sure that if it does start to gain altitude, that the Russians will be working behind the scenes to try to torpedo it.”
Russian spies were monitoring and taping the call, in which the American diplomats discussed whom among Yanukovych’s opponents to support. A few days later, the eavesdroppers posted the conversation on YouTube for the world to hear. “They hadn’t put a phone call on the street publicly in twenty-five years,” Nuland later observed. “Putin knew exactly what we were doing.… It was later very useful to him to make me and us the poster child for interference in another country’s affairs.”
This theft of strategic information was part of a bigger Russian campaign in Ukraine that had been going on for months. “Operation Armageddon,” a persistent cyberespionage program aimed at disrupting the effort to link up with the EU, targeted Ukrainian government, law enforcement, and military officials. While Putin was proudly presiding at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, six hundred miles southeast of Kyiv—Russian athletes won at least fifteen medals at the games with the aid of a state-sponsored doping program overseen by intelligence officers—his minions were bombarding Ukrainian TV stations, news outlets, and politicians with repeated distributed denial-of-service attacks.
On February 18, Yanukovych’s soldiers and snipers began using live ammunition to slaughter protesting civilians; they killed one hundred people over the course of three days. His political allies began to abandon him. Five days later, in an evacuation overseen by Putin, he fled to Russia. The Russian media went into high gear: a fascist junta had taken power in Kyiv, in a coup ordered by the United States and the EU, ousting a democratically elected president by force. As Yanukovych went underground, Putin led the closing ceremonies in Sochi and ordered Russian special-operations forces and troops based at the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet to seize Crimea’s airfields and its regional parliament. Thousands of Russian soldiers, their uniforms bearing no insignia, took control of the peninsula. Putin insisted that they were local militias. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu denied that Russian troops were in Crimea even as Ukrainian soldiers surrendered to them. The Ukrainians started calling the invaders “little green men,” evidently from outer space.
The Russians cut Ukraine’s fiber-optic cables and attacked the national telecommunications company, which lost its connections between the peninsula and the rest of Ukraine; mobile, landline, and internet access were all afflicted. The main Ukrainian government and media websites were knocked out by DDoS attacks and the cell phones of Ukrainian parliamentarians were hacked. Putin summoned Yanukovych to his home and ordered him to sign a backdated letter asking Russia to invade Ukraine. On March 18, he walked into the Kremlin and announced to thundering applause that Crimea was reunified with Russia.
Putin had broken the rules, treaties, and understandings about the sovereignty of nations and the inviolability of borders that had kept the peace in Europe since World War II. No nation on earth had taken another’s land like this since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. And the Russians hadn’t fired a shot. Cyberwarfare, media manipulation, and psyops had done the trick. It was twenty-first-century political warfare at its most potent.
And Putin wasn’t finished. In southeastern Ukraine lived thousands of people who spoke Russian and identified with the Soviet Union. On April 17, Putin referred to this land as Novorossiya—New Russia—as it had been in the eighteenth century under Catherine the Great. Official websites in that name had already been registered. Within days, new battalions of little green men took municipal and regional government buildings and proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lubansk. The outgunned Ukrainian army struggled to mobilize throughout the spring and into the summer as Putin sent tens of thousands of soldiers without uniforms and many tons of arms and ammunition into the region, all the while insisting that they weren’t there. Ukraine would lose more than thirteen thousand soldiers fighting the Russians over the next five years; the war created millions of refugees and left four million more stranded in the separatist republics. The stakes of the conflict were great. “If Ukraine succeeds in breaking free of Russian influence, it is possible for Europe to be whole, free, democratic, and at peace,” said William B. Taylor Jr., the American ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009. “In contrast, if Russia dominates Ukraine, Russia will again become an empire, oppressing its people, and threatening its neighbors and the rest of the world.”
On May 25, Ukraine held a presidential vote. The Russian military intelligence service unleashed its most potent malware against it. The American security firms CrowdStrike and FireEye had already identified the cyberespionage weapon that ran the operation. CrowdStrike nicknamed the malware’s masterminds Fancy Bear. FireEye reported a few months later that the operation had “a government sponsor—specifically, a government based in Moscow,” and that similar cyberweapons had been targeting government, military, and security organizations since at least 2007. Fancy Bear enabled Russian hackers to get inside the Ukrainian election commission’s computers, compromise them, destroy their tally of votes, and post results on the commission’s website showing that a right-wing Russophile fringe candidate had won the presidency. Russian television networks reported the fake news. It took forty minutes before the commission detected the attack and corrected the facts. It wasn’t long before Fancy Bear and its cousin, Cozy Bear, started burrowing into the government of the United States.
On July 17, Putin’s troops shot down a civilian plane, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17, bound from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, over southeastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. He insisted Russia had nothing to do with it. “Of course not!” he said indignantly. To counter the harsh facts, the Kremlin put a conspiracy theory out on the internet. “I saw people claiming the CIA had put dead bodies inside a plane and purposely shot it down to create propaganda against the Russian government,” said Sri Preston Kulkarni, the campaign director for the Ukraine Communications Task Force. “People were repeating that story again and again.… And I realized we had gone through the looking glass at that point and that if people could believe that, they could believe almost anything.” It took more than three years before the Dutch and Australian governments published an official report holding Russia responsible for shooting down the aircraft.
The fog of war was now a toxic miasma of disinformation spewing from Russian television and social media. Russian talking heads and internet trolls peddled all manner of conspiracy theories and shameless concoctions. The brave separatists of New Russia were being slaughtered. Ukrainian soldiers had tortured and crucified a three-year-old boy in a public square. The government in Kyiv was building concentration camps financed by the European Union. It had filled the forests with neo-Nazi assassins. It had poisoned the region’s water supply. And the United States and NATO were aiding and abetting all of it. On September 4, General Philip Breedlove, NATO’s top military commander, said this cascade of lies was an aspect of “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen.” The message from the Kremlin was that reality could be bent to its will, because objective truth did not exist, and thus falsehoods could trump facts. As Kennan had written in the Long Telegram back in February 1946: “The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth—indeed, their disbelief in its existence—leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another.” Now the internet could magnify their clandestine ambitions a millionfold.
The United States did little in direct response to Putin’s war on truth. “We had a massive information gap,” Ambassador Nuland said. “We didn’t have the kind of intelligence assets where we could prove that he was lying about Russian involvement. We knew internally, we knew as a matter of policy debate, but we weren’t doing well in the court of public opinion.”
The Russians’ information warfare attacks now began striking at the heart of American government. By August 2014, Cozy Bear was prowling in the Pentagon; the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s unclassified email system was hacked. In October, the White House discovered that the Kremlin’s spies were reading Obama’s unclassified emails and collecting the addresses of his correspondents. In November, the National Security Agency found the Russians rooting around in the computer archives of the State Department, likely seeking dirt on Hillary Clinton, already the unannounced front-runner for the next presidential election. Richard Ledgett, the NSA’s deputy director, later described a weekend in which his cybercommand fought “hand-to-hand combat” against a Cozy Bear attack within the State Department’s networks. Instead of disappearing when detected, the hackers battled back. “We would take an action; they would then counter that,” he said. “It was about a 24-hour period of parry-riposte, parry-riposte, measure, countermeasure. That was new. That’s a new level of interaction between a cyber attacker and a defender.” It was as if the Russians wanted the president of the United States and his presumptive successor to know they were lurking in the shadows, looking over their shoulders in silence.
When Putin invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea in the name of a resurgent Russia, Obama had been at a nuclear security conference in The Hague, where he disdainfully disparaged his rival as the embattled leader of a second-rate nation. “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors—not out of strength but out of weakness,” Obama had said. “They don’t pose the number-one national security threat to the United States. I continue to be much more concerned when it comes to our security with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan.”
But Putin had another kind of weapon at the ready, and its long fuse was about to be lit. He wanted to undermine democracy in America, and how better to achieve that aim than to elect a dangerous demagogue as president?