The Plot to Hack America

During Putin’s time at the KGB, “active operations”—shorthand for direct espionage—drew on a rich history. Russia had a long tradition of court espionage and intrigue among the European kingdoms. As far back as anyone could remember, the ancient methods of spying formed the basis for every thought and action of the Tsars. It was far more sophisticated in some ways than today, due to its heavy reliance on solid tradecraft and observation techniques in a world limited by foot and horse. The KGB taught its officers the traditions of using manual codes and ciphers, slow surveillance, concocting poisons, reading secret inks, and forging of false handwriting as skills to master and to appreciate.

Most importantly, learning to read people, their wants, dreams, likes, dislikes and desires—all to get them to betray their own country—was the most basic and oldest of all lessons in the Russian intelligence foundations.

Every one of the Russian Emperors and Tsars established secret intelligence collection; maintaining court influence required advanced information on plots and betrayals, as well as the occasional murder. The Oprichnina, established in 1565 by Ivan the Terrible, was the first known Russian intelligence agency. They were six thousand horse guard uniformed in all-black cavalry clothes, and their coat of arms was “The Broom and The Dog”—to sniff out and sweep up anyone opposed to Ivan.⁶ Their duty was simple. They were the police, bodyguard, and spies tasked to detect, hunt down, and kill Ivan’s enemies. When the Oprichnina outlived their usefulness, Ivan dissolved the organization in 1572, but in seven years they set the pace for state terror and espionage.

In 1697 Peter the Great established the Preobrazhensky Office; Empress Anne established the Chancellery for Secret Investigations in 1731, and Peter III had an organization called the Secret Bureau. All of these state organs opened illicit letters, listened to whispers at keyholes, assassinated enemies, and intercepted couriers. But it was Emperor Nicholas I who set up the Third Section. This group went far further than any of the previous amateurish gendarmerie. They did not just open letters from mistresses; the Third Section was the first agency to truly train, maintain and deploy professional Russian foreign intelligence officers for missions targeting foreign countries.

As rulers gained power they used increasingly brutal secret police tactics. Nicholas I’s successor, Alexander II, established the Okhrana, an organization that set the precedent of being completely above any law while acting in the defense of the realm. They carried out mass surveillance, arrests without warrant, summary executions as they saw fit—all in the name of the Tsar. They operated as deep cover spies in the European courts and ran spy networks in France, Switzerland, and Britain. While they watched and killed revolutionaries and anti-government plotters of all stripes, the Okhrana’s specialty was to infiltrate and suppress dissidents living abroad. Somehow these agencies could not stop the spread of ideologies and none had a great impact on the coming communist uprising. Tsar Nicholas II was well informed of the Communist unrest in his armed forces, but his secret police were either unable or unwilling to stop the Russian Revolution, or his death—along with his family—at the hands of the Bolsheviks.

In February 1917, over four hundred thousand industrial workers in St. Petersburg revolted and with the aid of the Russian army, overthrew Tsar Nicholas II. Vladimir Iliych Lenin gave them that revolution and in 1917 he knew, better than most, the necessity for a secret agency to prevent a Royalist counter-revolution. One of his first acts was to establishe the All Russia Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter Revolution and Sabotage, known simply as the Cheka, from the Cyrillic acronym.⁷

The first director of the Cheka was Felix Dzerzhinsky. The coat of arms for the Cheka organization was the Sword on a Shield. Dzerzhinsky organized his agency to be an absolutely ruthless internal security tool. To Dzerzhinsky the Cheka “…Stood for organized terror… Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution… We terrorize the enemies of the Soviet government in order to stop crime at its inception.” That philosophy permeates the belief system of every Russian secret service officer up to today. So famed was Dzerzhinsky that a statue known as the Iron Felix stood in in Lyubyanka square—also known as Dzerzhinsky Square—in front of the Moscow headquarters of the KGB for almost seventy years. Although the statue disappeared after the failed coup of 1991, the KGB’s successor organization, the FSB, still occupies the offices at that location.