had seized control of key Crimean facilities, GRU turned its information warfare troops loose to rally public support among Crimea’s largely ethnic Russian population to break with Ukraine and support annexation by Moscow. To do so, GRU psyops teams blitzed social media platforms, including Facebook and the Russian-language social network VKontakte, with fake personas and pro-Russian propaganda. In one week alone GRU cyber teams targeted dozens of Ukrainian activist groups, hubs of protesters on social media, and English-language publications, sowing confusion and creating the impression of a groundswell of support for Russian intervention.
Three years later, the GRU joined the Putin-ordered operation to damage or defeat Clinton. Working out of a building on Komsomolsky Prospekt in Moscow, a GRU cyber-operative named Aleksey Lukashev sent a spearphishing email to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta on March 19, 2016. Lukashev had used a popular online service for shortening website addresses to help mask his baited missive and make it look like a legitimate security notification from Google. The breach was enabled when one of Podesta’s aides saw a supposed security warning from Google and had asked a computer technician to evaluate it. “This is a legitimate email,” the technician wrote. “John needs to change his password immediately.” With the ensuing mouse click, Russia gained access to a trove of messages stored on Podesta’s account.12 Within two days, Lukashev and his GRU unit had made off with more than 50,000 emails.
Lukashev was part of a GRU hacking group designated by its unit number, 26165. That same month, the hackers began probing the DNC network for gaps in defenses, seemingly oblivious to the fact that another Russian intelligence service was already rummaging through the files. U.S. spies said it was not uncommon for Putin to unleash separate agencies on the same target. In April, the Russian unit found an indirect route into the DNC system, stealing the computer credentials of an employee at a sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which occupied the same office and worked to help elect congressional candidates. Another spearphishing operation did the trick, luring the DCCC employee into clicking a link that effectively gave the GRU the keys into the network.
Once inside, Lukashev’s group installed a program known as X-Agent malware on at least ten DCCC machines, enabling them to steal passwords and data from other employees, and even monitor their keystrokes and take photos of their computer screens as they typed away unsuspectingly. The hackers tried to hide their tracks by transmitting the pilfered information to a server the GRU had leased in Arizona (paid for not with rubles or dollars but with bitcoin cryptocurrency). By April 18, the GRU used its access to the passwords and files of the DCCC—some of whom also had access to the DNC network—to sneak across a digital bridge into the main party organization’s network.
In April, GRU operatives registered a new internet domain—dcleaks.com—after discovering that the first address they wanted, “electionleaks.com” was already taken.
For all its advances, the GRU made a number of costly blunders that would help U.S. investigators reconstruct the incursion. The Russian hackers often used the same computers, email addresses, and phony online accounts for multiple transactions related to the operation—registering the dcleaks.com domain, accessing URL-shortening services, and facilitating bitcoin payments.
Those clues would be collected and revealed nearly two years later. But even at the time, the GRU arrived inside the DNC system with all the stealth of a cymbal crash. At long last, the committee’s overmatched security team finally encountered an intruder that its systems could detect.
The GRU’s hackers were “like a thunderstorm moving through the network,” recalled one investigator involved in the case. “They were actively compromising systems. They were remote accessing into systems in the middle of the night. They were deleting logs. They were opening up files on administrators’ desktops. They were archiving massive amounts of files.” At one point, the GRU crew began stashing pilfered material in a massive single file, presumably to make it easier to drag out when the raid was done. But they stuffed so much into the single container that it crashed the system they had set up to export their stolen data in the first place. Left behind, the copy of the busted file provided investigators a comprehensive inventory of the loot—but no firm sense of how much other material the GRU might have captured in other smash-and-grabs.
On April 29, little more than two months after the February Joe’s Cafe meeting between special agent Hawkins and three members of the DNC’s IT group, Tamene’s team of contractors saw strange activity on the network. He promptly notified his supervisors at the DNC and—after so many months deflecting calls from the FBI—dialed Hawkins to inform him of what he had found.
It had now been eight months since the FBI had first reached out to the DNC.
VLADIMIR PUTIN, A NATIVE OF LENINGRAD, NOW ST. PETERSBURG, was born in 1952 in the lingering shadow of World War II. His father had been badly wounded in combat and his mother barely survived the 900-day siege of Leningrad when the Nazis tried to starve the city into surrender. The death toll in Leningrad was 640,000, including one of Putin’s brothers. Both parents got factory jobs after the war and Putin grew up in a walk-up communal apartment building where he recalled chasing rats in the stairwells. “There was no hot water, no bathtub,” Putin said many years later. “The toilet was horrendous. It ran smack up against a stair landing. And it was so cold—just awful—and the stairway had a freezing metal handrail.” A bright boy, Putin attended a school for the city’s best students. He also studied judo, earning a black belt, a skill that invested the diminutive young man with a quiet confidence.
After earning a law degree at Leningrad State University, Putin joined the KGB in 1975. “I was driven by high motives,” he said of his choice of profession. “I thought I would be able to use my skills to the best of society.” He had an undistinguished career, however, making it only to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He served in counterintelligence, monitoring foreigners in Leningrad, and then as an officer in Dresden, a backwater assignment, where he almost certainly attempted to recruit Westerners who came to East Germany. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Putin returned to his native city and attached himself to the administration of the reformist mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, one of his old law professors. A fluent German speaker, Putin established a reputation as a competent but colorless bureaucrat who worked well with foreigners. His real skill was his ability to vault upward, almost unnoticed, on the coattails of powerful patrons.
In 1996, after Sobchak lost his reelection bid, Putin moved to Moscow, holding a series of positions in the administration of President Boris Yeltsin, until he was appointed director of the FSB, the intelligence and security agency that was rebuilding its power following the dismantling of the KGB. In August 1999, Putin was appointed prime minister in the chaotic Yeltsin administration, marked by the increasing decrepitude and alcoholism of the president. When Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999, Putin—looking very much like a nervous, pale junior staffer—became acting president. He won election to the post three months later with 53 percent of the vote.
The rich and powerful around Yeltsin had backed Putin’s rise because they believed he was malleable, but Putin, as ruthless as he was cunning, viewed them as a threat to his rule. He gradually used the powers of the state and the court system to bring the oligarchs under control, imprisoning those who crossed him and seizing their property. The man who’d once seemed destined for the background became the new tsar, and the country’s media, also brought to heel, portrayed the vigorous Putin as the embodiment of Russia’s revival, a state that he had returned to its proper place as a global power able to rival the United States—“the main enemy,” in the parlance of the KGB.
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