fronts. One was referred to internally as “govnostrana”—which the NSA translated as “crap country”—and referred to attacks meant to damage a nation’s reputation and sap its citizens’ confidence. This effort involved the creation of two types of trolls (the term for online provocateurs), one focused on influencing public opinion by amassing loyal followings, and another that used teams of four or five people to churn out a mass volume of posts to overwhelm any competition from those posting contrary opinions.
In a February 2018, interview with The Washington Post, Marat Mindiyarov, a teacher by training, explained that he began working at the agency in late 2014 because it was close to home and he needed to make money during a stretch of unemployment. “I immediately felt like a character in the book 1984,” he recalled. The agency, he said, was “a place where you have 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.” Others hired at the Internet Research Agency described their assignments and the atmosphere there as similarly Orwellian. Lyudmila Savchuk, an activist and journalist who infiltrated the Internet Research Agency in 2015 as part of an investigation of the outfit, said, “Their top specialty was to slip political ideas inside a wrapping that was as human as possible.”
Like many employees at the agency, Mindiyarov’s main tasks involved producing pro-Putin propaganda for Russian-speaking audiences, particularly to drum up support for Russia actions in Ukraine. A former Soviet republic, Ukraine had since the fall of communism struggled to balance its close cultural and economic ties to Moscow against a desire to build a more independent and Western identity, developing democratic institutions and pursuing closer ties to Europe. That struggle had first taken on a frightening new dimension in 2004. During that year’s presidential campaign, reform candidate Viktor Yushchenko had become badly disfigured after ingesting what authorities later determined was a near-lethal dose of the same dioxin used in Agent Orange, a poisoning that few seemed to doubt had been carried out by the Kremlin. Yushchenko survived only to lose the race to a rival politician, Viktor Yanukovych, who was seen as a puppet of Moscow.
Amid evidence of widespread electoral fraud, Ukraine had been convulsed by prodemocratic protests that came to be known as the Orange Revolution. It was one in a series of popular uprisings inside and outside Russia that unnerved Putin, who came to suspect clandestine interference by the United States. A revote ordered by the country’s supreme court reversed the disputed outcome, handing the election to Yushchenko. Putin looked to the Russian military and intelligence services to undermine the democratically elected leader, and some of the strategies that did just that would be models for his later intervention in the American presidential contest.
Yushchenko was unable to fully stabilize the country, and after five years the pro-Moscow Yanukovych regained power. Drawing upon (and paying heavily for) the advice of an American consultant, Yanukovych lasted four years before an uprising removed him from office. Moscow responded to the disintegration of the government it backed by sending in Russian forces—the insignias stripped from their green uniforms—to begin dismembering the country. Russia annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and sent arms and “volunteers” from the ranks of its own military to bolster pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine. Putin claimed that Russian speakers in Ukraine needed to be protected in the wake of a nationalist revolution, but much of the world saw the Russian invasion as a violation of international law and Ukraine’s sovereignty.
When Russia’s currency began tumbling under crippling sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union, Mindiyarov was enlisted in a campaign to post glowing comments on Russian news sites and online magazines. “I was writing that everything was the opposite: how wonderful our life was, how wonderful it is that the ruble was strengthening … that sanctions were going to make us stronger and so on and so forth,” he recalled.
Days at the agency were divided into two twelve-hour shifts, Mindiyarov said, with quotas requiring employees to deliver 135 website comments per shift, 200 characters apiece. “You come in and spend all day in a room with the blinds closed and twenty computers,” he said, adding that he was paid 40,000 rubles, or about $800, a month after Russia’s currency crashed in late 2014. It was decent money at a time when Russia’s economy had been crumpled by Western sanctions.
Mindiyarov said he wasn’t involved in the “Translator Project,” but knew there were other sections of the company aimed at an audience in the United States. An unnamed troll told an independent television station in Russia that Internet Research Agency employees were told to engage with Americans online and “get into an argument in order to inflame it, and rock the boat.” The troll said their orders by 2016 were to specifically attack Clinton. “The main message is: aren’t you tired, brother Americans, of the Clintons, how long have they been around?” the station quoted the troll as saying. To ensure that their use of English was seamless enough for online political debate, employees in St. Petersburg watched the Netflix drama House of Cards, a show about a corrupt American pol who rises to become president.1
As an English speaker, Mindiyarov had been approached to apply for the “Facebook department,” where pay was twice as high. (The employees who emerged from that section for smoke breaks were younger, hipper, with newer phones and better haircuts.) But Mindiyarov was tripped up by the entrance test: his English wasn’t strong enough to pass as native in the rapid-fire encounters of social media, where you had to be fluent even in American idioms. In response to the essay question “What do you think of Hillary Clinton?” he wrote that she seemed to have a strong chance to be the next U.S. president. It was unclear, he reflected later, whether the answer itself was disqualifying or merely the caliber of the English he used to articulate it.
THE WEEKEND OF THE WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS’ ASSOCIATION Dinner at the start of May was supposed to bring a momentary respite from the pressure of the presidential campaign. Many Washington insiders, including senior officials at the DNC, would be donning gowns or tuxedoes for the annual bash near Dupont Circle. The so-called nerd prom always attracts an influential if eclectic crowd—cabinet secretaries, cable news anchors, and a smattering of Hollywood stars. Five years earlier, with Trump in attendance, Obama had mercilessly taken full advantage of the chance to return fire on the reality TV star who had used his fame to fan a baseless conspiracy about the president’s place of birth. The jokes mocked Trump’s ego and boorishness, and as the audience roared, Obama’s target was visibly annoyed, so much so that some would later wonder whether that moment of humiliation had motivated him to mount his own serious run for the White House.
Saturday night’s event, Obama’s last as president, was expected to have a more valedictory tone for the Democrats, but the prospect of another Democrat in the Oval Office come 2016 also provided reason to celebrate. Preparation for the pre-event parties was already under way on Friday when DNC executive director Amy Dacey learned for the first time around four P.M that the committee’s network had been penetrated. Immediately she picked up the phone and dialed Michael Sussmann at Perkins Coie.
“We’ve had an intrusion,” she told him. The contract IT team first thought they could contain the damage and keep the committee’s systems up and running, she explained, but it seemed obvious they were overmatched, especially if the bureau’s suspicions proved correct and the hackers were Russian. Finally Tamene and his team were getting it: the DNC was in big trouble. “They were mature enough to know that they couldn’t fight the Red Army,” Dacey said.
While still on the phone with Dacey, Sussmann fired off a text to Shawn Henry, a former top cyber official at the FBI who had left the bureau to take a top job with a Silicon Valley cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike. With his shaved head and dark suits, Henry would never be mistaken for a member of the hacker crowd, but he had been on the front lines of previous election-cycle cyberattacks. In 2008, he was in charge of the FBI cyber division when Chinese officials hacked the computers of the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Barack Obama, looking to steal intelligence that would give them
