The FRONTLINE Interviews
Irina Borogan
Co-author, "The Red Web"
Irina Borogan is a Russian investigative journalist and co-author (with Andrei Soldatov) of The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk conducted on July 25, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.
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Vladimir Putin's Early Life
One of the things we're very interested in is [when] Mr. Putin becomes president, Putin comes from the KGB.… If I said, “He’s a KGB man,” what would that mean?
As a KGB [officer], he is [a] successor to Stalin's secret services.It was terrifying secret services that killed people, millions [of people], and imprisoned them in the tens of millions.1Putin joins the KGB in 1975, so it was quite a distance from that time.But at the same time, there were still people who started serving during Stalin’s time.So maybe he personally knew them, but he said he tried not to think a lot about this.In the ’70s and in the ’80s, the KGB was charged by the Communist Party of the USSR to control all the population in the country, so their task was to control all the people, everywhere—in the universities, in the secret research facilities, in the army, even in the Orthodox Church, everywhere.
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… They established a strong control over the exchange of information in the country, and they tried to prohibit every kind of information which wasn’t approved by the authority, from literature, books, to any news about what's really going on in the country, which was published by dissidents in the USSR.
On the other side, joining the KGB meant that you would have a prestigious job, good salary, and you don’t need to walk all the planks, [which] most of Soviet people walked at that time.
Is it a mindset that he would have had and never gotten rid of? Is it something that's embedded in you to be a successful KGB man?It’s almost like a way of thinking about things.
There is a special mentality about all the KGB officers, at least whom I know and whom I read about.Because the KGB was instrumental for the Communist Party to control people and to suppress people, the most pertinent features of all of the KGB's men, they were all suspicious.They were suspicious of everybody. Every person could be suspicious and [could] harm the Soviet state.I think that Putin still bears all those features, and he’s extremely suspicious of journalists.He’s extremely suspicious of the West.He’s suspicious of most people whom he didn't know from his youth, [those who are] also from the KGB.
You know, suspicion could also be paranoia. Is he paranoid?
… So far I don't think he’s paranoid; I think he’s extremely suspicious.If he were paranoid, we [would have] had a mass repression in the countries that we fought, and [we] don’t have [that] so far.So I think that he is suspicious. It is not very good for the president.
Putin's Political Rise
There's also a thing that the people we've talked to say that he has, and he develops increasingly, and that is a real sense of grievance; that when you talk to him, he spends the first 45 minutes saying all the things the West has done to Russia, all the things Europe has done to Russians, all the ways that the world has done shameful things to the Russian people.That's just part of his automatic makeup, the grievances.Does that sound right to you?
That sounds right to me for, say, the period since 2003, 2004.But before that, Putin is a complicated personality, because he left KGB on Aug. 20 in 1991 when the KGB coup against Gorbachev failed.2It was clear that it failed.He didn't try to support the KGB men, and he didn't try to defend his organization.He left the KGB, and he stayed at the St. Petersburg University that was led by Anatoly Sobchak, a very important democrat at that time.So [it's] clear that then Putin was not furious about the West.He worked with a prominent democrat, and he didn't leave him.… [The] next six years his career was dependent on Anatoly Sobchak, who was a really big friend of the West.
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But then Putin came to the presidential administration [of Boris Yeltsin], made a career inside the presidential administration, and was appointed as a chief of the FSB.In 2000, he was appointed as the acting president and then was elected as president of Russia.[At that point], he didn't demonstrate any feelings against the West, any anti-Western sentiments.He didn't say that the dissolution of the USSR was a huge catastrophe.It all started when he became the president, and mostly these feelings were [reinforced] after the U.S.A. invaded into Iraq, because George Bush did not ask Putin for any advice, and Russia was strongly against this decision, and the United States and the President Bush Jr.[George W. Bush], who was highly respected by Putin at that time, didn't pay attention to his opinion, Putin's opinion.
… By the time Putin is the head of FSB [Federal Security Service], so in 1998, there are a lot of other former KGB people around him and with him.They’ve all survived in some way.They call themselves FSB, but they are somehow back in security services.How do they do that?What happened to those people?What is that climb to the top like?
The FSB [in] the beginning, it was called another name; it was called the FSK [Federal Counterintelligence Service].This security service wasn’t the same as the KGB, because [these were] very tremendous and difficult times.And the FSB became—you know that in Russia, a lot of politics in Russia [is] defined not only by the president and not only by the government, but also by a group of oligarchs who are real political players on the scene.The FSB and a couple of its predecessors were involved in [the] oligarchs’ war between each other, and it [went] quite badly.Partly this organization was a successor of the KGB tradition, but in many directions it was a very adventurous organization.A lot of officers started working on oligarchs, and there [were] many scandals that shook the FSB at times.
I just remember an episode when a group of FSB officers, including Alexander Litvinenko, the FSB officer who was poisoned later in London back in 2006, this group organized a press conference [in 1998] where they admitted in front of the public that they were ordered to kill Russian oligarchs and also tycoon Boris Berezovsky.3… There was an organized crime unit inside the FSB, which was publicly accused of robbing people, extortion and beating people, mostly businessmen.
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It also went public, all these facts, and that is not the same as the KGB.The KGB kept its secrets, but this new organization wasn’t the same.But of course, talking about separatists, given the situation with the Chechen war, it was the same.They knew only [one] way to suppress their opponents, to put them to prison, using even very brutal methods like torturous killings and so on.
What's the new nobility? Who are the new nobility?
The “new nobility” is a definition, firstly was given by Nikolai Patrushev, the former chief of the FSB.He described the FSB officers as a new nobility, a reference to the Russian aristocracy that was guard of the czar in the 19th century and until the Russian Revolution.He means that they are [as] brave as the aristocracy guard in defending the czar.
… The new nobility are the people from the former KGB who when Putin came to power became the new elite and united all the resources in the country, most of resources in the country, not only inside the security services, but also in the financial sector, in the banks, in major industrial complex and other sectors of Russian economy.
They were successful because they used their closeness to Putin and the possibilities [opportunities] that would give them as former KGB officers or FSB officers.
Putin Returns to the Presidency, Sparking Protests and a Crackdown
Let’s go to 2011, 2012, the protest movement.Putin has decided that he will be president again some time that fall of 2011.How much of the protest movement and the massing to the streets and all of it was the result of the Internet, the Web, Facebook, Twitter?Talk a little bit about the role of social media in the development of that protest.
To me, protest became possible only because of the Internet, because in 2011, all or most of the independent media [was] put under control of pro-Putin oligarchs.All TV channels were under the direct control of the state or were owned by the state.4In order to share information about the protest and for organizing protest, you need Internet.All of the protest was organized on VKontakte, which is the Russian social network modeled after Facebook, and on Facebook, mostly on these two sources.Also Twitter was very useful in terms of spreading information about what's going on during the protest.
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How did Putin react?Do you think Putin understood that this was happening and this was why the people were massing for the protests?
He was furious, as far as I know.… There [had] never been any protest bigger than 1,000, 2,000 people going into the square.I tried to visit all or most of the protests, [and they were] a very poor picture—a group of old dissidents, couple of anarchists, and most of the crowd were journalists who tried to get something interesting from this.That was really, really depressing for me.
But in 2011, there were really huge, massive crowds that gathered in Bolotnaya Square and other places in the center of Moscow.Putin was frightened and angered by this, because people [had] loved him for most of 10 years.The main reason why it was so is that there was instant economic growth in Russia.That is really because prices on oil had been growing, had grown over time, over this decade.
Most of the Russian authorities, especially Putin, were very arrogant.They didn't believe in the Internet.Putin personally considered [the] Internet as some toy for intellectuals and teenagers.A lot of attempts are [made]; some people in his entourage tried to explain to him that the Internet is newspaper and TV channels for the future. But they failed.Vladislav Surkov, his deputy chief of the presidential administration, put a lot of effort to organize themselves, to organize [a] Kremlin offensive on the Russian Internet.To some extent he was successful, but he failed to explain to Putin the importance of the Internet.He [Putin][was] faced with this challenge only in 2011, but it was too late because Internet was absolutely free to this point. It had developed as free.It was [a] free network, and there was no filtering, censorship, any technicalfiltering system or something or of some technicalities weren't put on the Internet in order to prohibit the free flow of information.This was great.This was free Internet and massive protests.
And he couldn’t do anything about it.I mean, there it was.What were the people protesting about?
People are angry that—firstly, people are angry that then-President [Dmitry] Medvedev refused to run for president for next president term.But they were also angry at shrinking possibilities for growing middle class in the oil economy, because at that time, the rise of the oil prices stopped.Putin's entourage wanted more and more money, and they wanted much more control than they had.
[The] small IT sector and Internet sector in economy stopped growing, and it was very disappointing for those people who lived in Moscow and considered themselves as European middle class and worked in advertising sector, in media, even in e-commerce.All these things were connected to the Internet, and all these things, it was clear, wouldn't be supported by Putin.This sector was supported by then-President Medvedev.At that moment, the people understood that he is not going to run for the new president term.They were very disappointed and even angry, and they went to the street.
Putin and Hybrid Warfare
Putin reacted in some ways, the way we hear it, by trying to turn off the Internet, by trying to come up with other technical means to stop it.But it really was too late, and from what I understand, he built his own team, both cyber warriors but also information warriors, propagandists, lots of other countermeasures that he could try to fight the growth of the Internet.Is that the way the story goes?
Yes.There [were a] few attempts to restrict free flow of information on the Internet.The first, the authorities in 2012, the authorities introduced the Internet filtering system in the country.[This] consisted of [a] blacklist of prohibited websites and started to block websites that could be considered as extremists.That means anything in Russia, mostly any kind of political offense, political dissent.Also a lot of things like information about pornography, information about news site, information about casinos, prostitutes and so on.The blacklist has been growing, and it is [still] growing.
These attempts weren't very successful, because people started using circumvention tools.Today you can easily get access to prohibited information using any proxy servers like Thor, any VPN service, anonymizer and even simpler things.You can read easily all websites that are blacklisted and blocked.
After that, there were a lot of attempts to put pressure on global Internet services like Twitter, Google, YouTube … Facebook, but it was not successful so far.The authorities tried to force the services to relocate their services into Russia in order to get direct access to the user’s information to surveil them and to control them.
Also, they tried to force the services to block all information that the Kremlin wanted.These directions, there was a bit [of success] because Google, Facebook and Twitter blocked something from time to time, and it seems they have been blocking more and more information on the Internet.
But at the same time, because the Internet is the network, it's very easy to replicate any blocked information on YouTube, Facebook or Twitter many, many times, thousands of times, so they couldn’t consider this as a real success.It didn't stop [the] free flow of information.
A much more dangerous and aggressive attempt was from the Kremlin.When the Kremlin understood that they are too late on the Internet, they launched an army of trolls on the social networks.It was tools for spreading pro-Kremlin propaganda and also spreading fake news, and it was, and is, a big, intimidating tool for independent journalists, opposition politicians, activists and other people who have another point of view than the Kremlin.
Tell me about trolls. What are they?We hear about troll factories in Russia. What are they?
Trolls are people who are hired by the Kremlin and paid by the Kremlin to intimidate [the] Kremlin’s opponents or disrupt free discussions on social networks, or spread propaganda or false information on the Internet.5
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How?
Because trolls are not people who act independently, they are all doctored by the presidential administration.They are directed by these people.For instance, these troll factories, people in these troll factories get some guidelines every day, what they have to do on social networks.One day is [they] have to criticize [the] last Obama decision to do something.Next day, they have to launch a smear campaign against Ukraine activists or Ukrainian army.Every day, [a] new task for the Kremlin.But the most sensitive issues for them, in terms of trolls, was always the Obama administration, United States policy to Russia, the war in Ukraine and the war in Syria.These were the most sensitive issues for them.
Tell me about the propaganda, the information-war side of it.How did the Kremlin employ it in the invasion of Crimea and Ukraine?What kind of fake news, what kind of things would they do?
It was a flow of fake news that is spread around the Net. I'll just give you one example.I remember a heartbreaking photo of a young girl who was crying, sitting by the dead body of a woman.It was a caption like: “This is a democracy, baby. Ukrainian army is killing people.”This photo went viral under the hashtag #saveDonbasspeople.But in fact, this photograph was borrowed from the very popular movie about the Nazi invasion into the USSR in 1941, and the movie was called <i>Brest Fortress</i>, [about the defense of the Brest Fortress from German advances in 1941].It was real fake news, but it really went viral. I saw those pictures many times.
And did it work?
Given the situations at that time, most of Russians supported the annexation of Crimea and [the] Russian military presence in Ukraine that had never been admitted by the authorities.It was a part of propaganda, [and] to some extent, it was successful, I think.There are a lot of reasons why Russian citizens supported this Kremlin policy at that time, but I think this was an important element.
So is it fair to say that Putin and the Kremlin, having learned from the 2011 and 2012 protest movements and the role of social media, practiced, road-tested, their own version of it in Ukraine and Crimea, and that was, in a way, a new kind of war for the Kremlin to fight?Helicopter, fake news, here they come.
Putin learned from this event at Maidan.The Ukrainian revolution should never be repeated in Russia because he didn't want to follow the way of the Ukrainian President [Viktor] Yanukovych, who fled the country because of revolutions and now [lives] in Russia.But he also decided to put the Internet under control, as he did with traditional media like TV channels and newspapers and magazines.He started his offensive on the Internet.This offensive is going on [still] because, just last week, the Russian parliamentarians adopted the law that prohibited using encryption for anonymizers, VPN, messengers, to force them to block prohibited websites from the blacklist.That sounds really crazy. Even I cannot understand how they're going to put this into practice.But at the same time, they still have been trying to block information and to identify users and to restrict them and their rights to be anonymous on the Net.
Intervention in the U.S. Election
By 2016, when the hacking begins in the American presidential election, when did you hear about it, and did you know it was Russia?
I've heard about Russian hackers since the beginning of 2000, but most of the attacks were inside the country and directed against the former USSR republics that became independent countries.Very often, they were quite competitive or even under authority to the Kremlin.
But at the same time, I didn't believe that Russian hackers are so strong as they demonstrated themselves [to be] because I knew that the United States cyber capabilities is very strong.I didn't believe that Russians have the cyberweapons and they can organize hackers to gain their goals. …
Was there a period of time where you didn't believe that it was Russia, or did you know almost from the beginning?
No, because the technical expertise provided by the American cybersecurity companies was so strong, and given the fact that these attacks against the United States, the United States resources and the European websites started in 2007, back in 2007, 2008, it was clear that the Russians stayed behind the attack.
They could do it?
They could do it, yes.
Under Putin, any question about whether Putin ordered it?When we were in Russia talking to people, they were uncertain.Many people we talked to said individual hackers, maybe, troll factories, maybe, but probably not Putin, probably not the Kremlin.
Hackers usually try to get some benefits from what they are doing.That's really a very dangerous adventure to be a hacker because you always violate the law, and every day you can go to the prison.So what is the primary interest?The primary interest for hackers to get some money, but this kind of attack, I mean attack on the DNC [Democratic National Committee] or attack on the State Department resources, these attacks don’t promise any profit.Nobody [is] interested in paying money for [Clinton campaign chair] John Podesta’s files.6I don't know any oligarchs or businessmen, or I don't know criminals, who are interested in buying John Podesta’s files.
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So it should be some state who [is] interested in these.Given the Kremlin's position to [Hillary] Clinton, and we've had a lot of proof—Putin was always very clear about her, and he criticized her publicly.Russian television, which is just a propaganda tool for Kremlin and for Putin, always depicted her like an unstable person who could start the new nuclear war, even like just a nervous woman, an old woman and so on.There was no secret that Putin and his entourage [were] angered by the sanctions imposed in Russia after annexation of Crimea.There was no secret that sanctions [were] incited by Hillary Clinton [and] Obama, and there was no problem for them doing this.
Putin considered Clinton as his personal enemy.7Given the situation that hackers interfered into the DNC servers, for me it was crystal clear that it was made in the interest of the Kremlin.But of course there is a huge obstacle, because there could not be a direct attribution to the Kremlin, because there is no direct Kremlin traces in these hacker attacks. …
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So you have no doubt that Putin knew and maybe even ordered it?
To interfere into Democratic National Committee files, this is such a big deal.To release all this information and post it on the Internet, it’s much bigger than just to steal this.I don't think that such an operation could be carried out by some adventurous people.It should be directed from the Kremlin and Putin.For me, Putin had to know about this.
When Trump wins, what is the reaction in Russia?
Celebration. After Trump's win, there was a huge celebration around Moscow, across Moscow.A bottle of champagne was opened in the Russian parliament.All TV channels celebrated and congratulated Trump with his win because these people show that Trump's policy to Russia will be different from Obama's, and Trump is a big friend of Russia.
So did Putin win?
As we know so far, no. There is no result.We couldn't see any improvement in U.S.-Russia relationship.Sanctions are still in place, and maybe this worsened it.There is not any kind of cooperation in any area between the United States and Russia.The Kremlin did a big mistake.That was tactically successful, but strategically this is a huge failure.
Strategic failure?
This is a strategic failure.
Yeah.Let me see what we missed. Anything, David?
Putin and Hybrid Warfare
Irina, was there a change in the nature of hackers from the early years, like from the boys in Tomsk, and from the informal nature of it to the last few years?Was it a different kind of people who were doing this in Russia, and who were they?How did it change over the years to get better?
The first massive hacker attacks started in the early 2000s when—I mean, attacks that could be considered as political, not just hackers attack[ing] to steal some money.In 2002, some students from the Siberian city Tomsk attacked a Chechen separatist website, Goldkafkas.org, and they launched a DDoS [Distributed Denial of Service] attack and took down the website for a while.Soon after that, that local FSB branch issued a press release that they supported this attack and even encouraged these people.The press release said that the attack was an expression of position of the people.
That was the first time when security services publicly supported hackers and their actions.After that, there [were] a lot of hackers’ attacks on opposition politicians’ emails, and a lot of documents were stolen and published on the Internet.There [were] many other cases, and always it was done for the benefit of the Kremlin and for the benefits of presidential administration and the Russian government.
The number of attacks has been growing, and the result was bigger and bigger from time to time.[Every] case was more successful than previous.
Different kind of person?
They are all hackers.So, until they are put in prison, we don't know who they are and how they operate.I think all hackers are the same.They are doing anything to get money.They don’t do something without money, for free.But there [were] some cases when Russian hackers were unleashed by pro-Kremlin youth movements like Nashi or Molodaya gvardiya, the first [Nashi] means "Ours," and the second means "Young Guards."
[There was an] attack on Estonian websites in 2007, DDoS attack, and the Estonian government agencies’ websites was blocked for a while.Three years passed, and a guy called Konstantin Goloskokov, who was a commissar in this pro-Kremlin movement Nashi, admitted to <i>Financial Times</i> that he was behind these attacks.8He said that he was angered by the Estonian authorities’ decision to move the Soviet monument out of the city center, and it was his personal and his friends’ actions against those Estonian authorities.But it was crystal clear that it was supported by the Kremlin or the presidential administration.
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Good? Jim?
Just one.You and Andrei write about the arrests made in early December of last year of some folks at Kaspersky Labs and also the FSB general.Describe what took place, what you guys found out, what you recorded and what the meaning of it is.
The FSB arrests came in December last year [2016].The news came in January of this year by the people who are arrested in December, and for months the FSB kept all this information about arrests in secret.The people who [were] arrested are quite interesting people, because they were people from the FSB, people from the union that was in charge of the investigator hacker attacks and cybercrimes in the country and outside the country.Another guy who was arrested was Ruslan Stoyanov.He was also in cyber, and he was a chief of [the] unit at the Kaspersky Lab company, and he was in charge of cybercrime investigations.
Those people knew very well who hackers are and what they are doing in the country, outside the country, [and] on the Internet.… All of them were in the close connection with American and European law enforcement agencies and security services.Also these officials were in charge of cyber investigation.
They knew very well what's going on in this area, who attacked whom, who hackers are and so on.For me, I think this is some kind of cover-up operation to isolate [them].The goal is to isolate people who knew about [the] hackers’ world and what's going on there from the public completely.… They are accused of state treason and nothing else.
It's, as you say, maybe it’s a cover-up.Maybe it’s the cleaning up.Maybe it’s to close, as Andrei said, maybe it’s the closing of the door on this chapter.
Given the fact that all these people are in the FSB prison, Lefortovo Prison, which is very distant and isolated from the world, so nobody is allowed to talk with the world outside from there; all prisoners are under very strong FSB surveillance everywhere in their cells—the FSB so far didn't [give] any detailed explanation what their crime is, so given all these facts, I think it is some attempt to shut down the curtain.
Thank you.
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