In all of this, Putin’s chief lieutenant was Yevgeny Prigozhin. In the months leading up to the US presidential election of November 2016, Prigozhin had been orchestrating the Kremlin’s efforts to trash Hillary Clinton’s campaign and manipulate American voters into backing Donald Trump, who the Kremlin was not convinced could win. The aim was to discredit the US electoral system and, if possible, foment civil conflict by accusing the Clinton campaign of dirty tricks. It was a role in which Prigozhin seemed to take great delight but, as would later become clear, US intelligence officials had been tracking Prigozhin’s own dirty tricks and knew full well what he was up to. So, when they switched on their TV sets on the morning of 1 June 2016, they most likely exploded with indignation. Standing in front of the White House, in the very spot where the international press corps train their cameras, an individual was holding up a banner bearing the words, ‘Happy 55th Birthday Dear Boss’. The images had already been transmitted worldwide before the DC Police Department was despatched to the scene. According to their deposition, the ‘real US person’ holding up the banner had been ‘informed by the defendants and their co-conspirators’ that the sign was ‘for someone who is our leader and our boss … our founder’. Knowing that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s birthday was 1 June 1961, and learning that the ‘co-conspirators’ who commissioned this person to carry out the stunt were Russian, the FBI and the CIA realised that their number one adversary in the murky world of cyber warfare was thumbing his nose at them.
We know about Prigozhin’s little jibe thanks to the FBI or, more exactly, the sixth director of the FBI, Robert Swan Mueller III. Bob Mueller was tasked with investigating the covert subversion carried out by Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin against the American people and the American system of electoral democracy – and he did his job so well that he uncovered absolutely everything, including the ‘real US person’ who stood outside the White House with a banner congratulating Yevgeny Prigozhin on his birthday, as well as the 16 ‘defendants and their co-conspirators’, all of whom had Russian names. Chief among them was Prigozhin.
The Mueller Report arose from an FBI investigation of alleged links between Donald Trump and the Kremlin. Operation Crossfire Hurricane had been triggered by claims that Russian agents were offering to supply the Trump campaign with information damaging to Hillary Clinton. The FBI established that the ‘damaging information’ consisted of emails hacked from the account of the Democratic Party in the same month as Prigozhin’s 2016 birthday stunt.
By the end of that year, Trump had won the presidency and did everything in his power to halt the investigation, including firing the FBI’s director and deputy director; but Congress voted to pursue the inquiries and Bob Mueller was appointed special counsel in charge of them. In May 2017, the remit of the inquiry was widened to include all forms of Kremlin interference in the presidential election, allegations of coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and the US president’s alleged obstruction of justice. In pursuit of his brief, Mueller would issue 2,800 subpoenas, execute 500 search warrants and interview more than 500 witnesses. His report, delivered in March 2019, resulted in 34 indictments, including against former members of the Trump campaign, and 448 pages of lurid detail of what Vladimir Putin and his agents had been involved in. According to Mueller, the Kremlin’s efforts to subvert the US electoral process began as long ago as 2014 and included the hacking and leaking of illegally obtained information, conspiracy-theory disinformation, coercive messaging and psychological operations, paid advertising, false-flag posts and information warfare. The aim of all the operations was to support the Trump campaign and undermine that of Hillary Clinton. Putin and the Russian Government, Mueller concluded, aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances whenever possible.
I read one particular indictment generated by the Mueller inquiry with especial interest. The defendants in it were named as ‘The Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), its leadership and affiliates’. Issued in February 2018, its 37 pages read like a spy thriller and made clear that the inoffensive-sounding ‘Research Agency’ was in fact a hotbed of subversion, and it was run by Prigozhin.
