In his first indictments for Russian interference in the 2016 election, the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has revealed the inner workings of a shadow campaign—conceived in Moscow and deployed in the United States—that was far more disciplined than Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign. Focussed, creative, and persuasive, the Russian operation was a campaign to envy. Mueller has also given the American public a cautionary tale of contemporary American democracy—a story of deception, influence, and technology.
John Sipher, an expert on Russia’s intelligence services, who retired in
2014 after twenty-eight years in the C.I.A., told me that the details in
the indictment lay bare how audacious the Russian effort to get Trump
elected President was in its brazen, repeated contact with American
citizens. “You see a willingness to take risk that you hadn’t had
before, because Putin was so hateful toward Hillary Clinton. They had a
unity of effort, because they had one enemy: the United States. We’re
focussed on China, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan. I don’t think it was
brilliantly thought out, but they put an army out there to do what they
can.”
Ordinarily, U.S. prosecutors are wary of
releasing highly specific
accounts involving foreign-intelligence targets, in order to protect the
“sources and methods” that allow the government to pierce electronic
communications and hidden dealings. But, Sipher said, this
thirty-seven-page indictment suggests that Mueller’s team made a
strategic decision to include a level of detail that will help it elicit
relevant documents from businesses and banks. The indictments
open the way for “discovery that otherwise may not be allowed or would
be hard to do without a charging document,” he said.
In its particulars, the indictment, which charged thirteen Russian
nationals and three organizations with multiple conspiracies and frauds,
fills in the details of an “active measures” campaign that had been
described in general terms by analysts and journalists over the past
year. It offers a playbook for manipulating American democracy using a
mix of classic espionage, private-sector social-media tools, and
partisan ideology. The operation, centered on the now infamous troll
farm known as the Internet Research Agency, extended to scores of
undercover staff and associates in multiple countries, including the
United States, and deployed a range of political gambits.
Among the details in the document, I was struck, in particular, by three
themes—political weapons, in effect—that pose questions for technology
companies, the intelligence community, and voters:Source : newyorker
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