Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency was founded in 2013 in a suburb of St Petersburg. It was paid for by money from Prigozhin’s Concord catering conglomerate, a business entity described by Mueller as having ‘various Russian government contracts’ and which, as we have already seen, acts as a conduit for large-scale Kremlin funding of Putin’s black operations. The IRA set about recruiting IT-literate employees, mainly young marketing and computer graduates, offering salaries far higher than those available elsewhere, and put them to work producing a flood of pro-Putin, anti-Western propaganda. The online comments of the IRA trolls – attacking foreign and domestic critics of the Kremlin, including myself, and accusing Western countries of repression at home and abroad – hit the internet with a tsunami of disinformation and bile. Putin’s political opponents were mocked and slandered; the leaders of Ukraine were described as fascists and Nazis. Using bots and automated delivery algorithms, the IRA became so notorious that by 2014 it was widely referred to as the Troll Factory.
Prigozhin appointed three of his cronies to run the operation. Its chief executive was reported to be a former St Petersburg police officer, Colonel Mikhail Bystrov; its executive director, Mikhail Burchik, was a young tech entrepreneur; and its chief deputy director, Alexandra Krylova, had previously worked at Prigozhin’s Federal News Agency. Between them they ran the IRA as a streamlined digital marketing firm, with departments generating editorial content, graphics and search engine data analysis, and trolling targets. They had an HR unit to oversee recruitment, staff incentivisation, finance and budgeting.
By the spring of 2014, the operation had nearly 1,000 employees and was expanding. A new unit, at first secretive but then widely touted within the organisation, was set up. The blandly named Translator Project was tasked with ‘focusing on the US population and conducting operations on social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter’. An internal IRA memo defined its remit as American electoral politics and its aim ‘to spread distrust toward candidates and the political system in general’.
The Translator Project conducted research into American voting patterns, political campaigning and the demographics of party affiliation, coordinating with the Kremlin in defining the tasks that Vladimir Putin would set for them. As Robert Mueller would later report, the operation was always focused on the end goal of the 2016 presidential election, the political event that mattered more to Putin than any other: ‘The conspiracy had as its object impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful governmental functions of the United States by dishonest means in order to enable the Defendants to interfere with US political and electoral processes, including the 2016 US presidential election.’
The Translator Project infiltrated groups dedicated to politics and social issues on US media sites, monitoring the popularity and engagement of online conversations, including the frequency of posts and the nature of comments or responses. Its employees adopted fake social media identities, pretending to be Americans, and the IRA’s IT department set up a network of proxy servers to conceal the fact that they were posting from Russia. ‘In order to collect additional intelligence,’ Mueller reported, ‘defendants and their co-conspirators posed as US persons and contacted US political and social activists’, communicating with ‘unwitting members, volunteers, and supporters of the Trump Campaign involved in local community outreach, as well as grassroots groups that supported then-candidate Trump’.
