The Apprentice. Greg Miller
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had set up a special department for what was referred to internally as the “Translator Project,” an effort to infiltrate America’s dominant social media platforms—YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And unlike the costly stratagems of the Cold War—planting sleeper agents, recruiting and running Western turncoats, launching satellites and spy planes, underwriting proxy wars—the disruptive potential of the internet was vast and unbelievably cheap.
The project required an immersive understanding not only of the way Americans interacted online but also the fault lines of the country’s political landscape. In June 2014, two of the company’s employees boarded flights for the United States. Aleksandra Krylova and Anna Bogacheva spent the next three weeks crisscrossing America, making stops in at least nine states, including California, Texas, Michigan, Louisiana, and New York. Posing as tourists, the travelers studied the contours of the country’s charged political atmosphere. The report they compiled upon their return was valuable enough that the agency sent another employee on a subsequent excursion, in November, to Atlanta, for a more focused, four-day mission whose purpose remains murky.
Even by tech start-up standards, the Internet Research Agency had an unusual business model. There were normal-seeming departments—graphics, data analysis, search-engine optimization—but no evident source of revenue. Nor were there any meetings with clients; the agency’s “research” was all consumed in-house. And yet it had kept adding employees, hundreds of them, with an annual budget in the millions of dollars.
The firm’s founder had no apparent background or expertise in online ventures. The incomplete accounts of his life indicate that Yevgeny Prigozhin was born in St. Petersburg in 1961 and appeared headed for athletic glory as a cross-country skier before being imprisoned in 1981 for crimes including robbery. After his release amid the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, Prigozhin opened a hot dog stand, but the move that truly altered his fortunes in Russia came seven years later, with his purchase of a rickety vessel that he turned into a floating food establishment. New Island Restaurant, as it was called, attracted a different category of clientele—most notably another St. Petersburg native, Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin endeared himself to the future Russian president with an attention to detail and a willingness even as proprietor to engage in the more quotidian aspects of running a restaurant. Putin “saw how I built my business starting from a kiosk,” Prigozhin said in an interview with a St. Petersburg magazine. “He saw how I was not above serving a plate.”
The connection ultimately helped position Prigozhin for a series of lucrative catering contracts, supplying food to schools in St. Petersburg and the Russian military. (His bond with the increasingly powerful politician paid off in other ways, too: in 2002, Putin brought world leaders, including President George W. Bush, aboard the New Island for meals taken while drifting along the city’s waterways.) Those deals led to even greater riches as Prigozhin branched out, earning billions from contracts that came to include providing soldiers for hire to guard oil wells in Syria. Prigozhin family social media accounts offered glimpses of sprawling estates, private airplanes, and Yevgeny’s adult children cavorting on a luxury yacht. As he ascended into the ranks of the Russian oligarchs, the entrepreneur who so impressed Putin by personally busing dishes acquired the nickname “Putin’s cook” and was soon handling other kinds of dirty work.
According to a top-secret NSA report issued more than a year after the U.S. election, the Internet Research Agency conducted information warfare along several 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?”