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.
Seen from Moscow, the operation to sway the U.S. election had a long prologue. It was carried out by a regime that has fine-tuned the politics of grievance into a sophisticated propaganda weapon. Putin believes the United States engineered the breakup of the Soviet Union, eagerly plundered the fallen empire’s spoils, and has been using its influence ever since to keep Russia weak. His innovation has been to sharpen and magnify those charges into his raison d’état—and to point to them to show why responding to U.S. aggression was not only justified but a necessity.
His resentments, nurtured over many years of perceived slights and betrayals, had found a particular focus in his animus for Hillary Clinton. As Russians voted in the parliamentary election on December 4, 2011, videos documenting widespread fraud at the ballot box rocketed around the internet. The next day, Clinton offered her view on the sidelines of a conference in Bonn, Germany. “Russian voters deserve a full investigation of all credible reports of electoral fraud and manipulation,” she told reporters. “The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and votes counted.”
As she spoke, activists in Moscow were readying a protest of the election results in the city center. They had registered an expected five hundred attendees with the police; five thousand showed up, the biggest anti-government demonstration of the Putin era. The frustrations of an urban middle class that increasingly yearned for not just material well-being but also for political freedom burst into the open. It would take months for the protests, which soon drew some hundred thousand participants, to subside.
Putin was furious. To him, the fact that the first protests erupted just hours after Clinton’s remarks was far from a coincidence. His German biographer Hubert Seipel described Putin’s anger that day as a seminal moment in shaping his disdain for Clinton and his conviction that the United States sought regime change in Russia.
“I saw the first reaction of our American partners,” Putin told supporters a few days later. “The first thing the secretary of state did was to characterize and evaluate the elections and say that they were dishonest and unfair, even though she had not yet received the materials from the [election] observers. She set the tone for certain actors [in] this country—she gave them a signal. They heard that signal and, with the support of the U.S. State Department, began their active work.”
Putin would survive the challenge and eagerly start pushing back—with the same tools he accused the West of using against him.
FEBRUARY 2016 BROUGHT ST. PETERSBURG SNOW FLURRIES AND ICE fog, a curtain of crystals in the frigid air. The districts that hug the northern bank of the Neva River had for decades been dotted with factories that rose during the nineteenth century. The area had seen its fortunes fade with the Soviet Union’s collapse. But its tree-lined streets, historic apartment buildings, and green spaces had maintained their charm, and the closed factories gradually gave way to office buildings beckoning a digital-friendly