The best story surrounding this was a mole who was identified via taps on Russian cables. They were unwilling to prosecute him for fear of tipping off the Russians so he got off and was used to funnel disinformation.
I am fascinated by the fact that this leak happened, because it's so hard to imagine why.
Most other wars there are understandable reasons on both sides, and it's easy to imagine people in the military or with the right security clearance who are motivated to leak something because they genuinely believe the US or the West is the bad guy.
But who has access to this stuff who wants to help Russia and harm Ukraine? When this is not a war where people are siding with the Russians. I just... it's so hard to see where that Venn diagram overlaps.
Do the Russians have spies in the US government that can access this stuff? How have our security processes not caught that?
Or did Russian spies pay someone with clearance to get these? Why did that person go along with it? Did they know they were Russian spies or did they think they were helping good guys, like Ukrainian spies? (Something like that was depicted in the TV show The Americans.)
Most leaks it's pretty easy to understand how somebody with access to information would have had motivations. This one, it seems very non-obvious.
Remind me of the recent case where a person (Google tells me that her name is Maria Butina) got busted as a Russian spy after she had a habit of bragging that she was a Russian spy when drunk.
Even more silly to me is that certain Russian operatives had accounts on Russian social media under their real name, with profile pic and everything. So once under suspicion it was embarassingly easy to confirm who they were.
One of them was arrested this year here in Norway.
It still doesn't make sense. Why blow a super-valuable asset to 'undermine trust in western democracy'? I mean, you have a mole in the NSA and your next step is... TV interviews in Moscow? To make him a Russian agent you have to explain or make up a whole pile of things for which there is no evidence at all, so far.
Based on your post history, I can't tell if you're a troll or actually believe what you're saying, but 30 seconds on google would alleviate you of your ignorance.
This has ALREADY HAPPENED. Russia has enticed people they secretly indicted on spy charges back to Russia, and then stuck them in prison.
The interesting thing about this is that one of the indicted spies was arrested by the FSB and charged with treason for spying for the CIA. That was just 2 months ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd. comes to mind. Of course the charges were ultimately dropped, but only on condition that Sklyarov testify against his employer. On the other hand this as a DMCA case, not espionage. The reaction was massively unbalanced. If you had a researcher who was deemed to be revealing state secrets, it seems fairly likely that the state would use whatever powers it had to keep the lid on things.
Sounds like a surprisingly detailed scenario they've been able to reconstruct based on just $100k of ad spend.
It's funny the Russians didn't funnel the money through US based organizations to cover their tracks, it's almost like whoever did this wanted to be discovered. But gosh, why would that be?
Understood. I think the idea that it could be traced back to the GRU is highly likely, though I do have some trouble with the idea they were able to identify a specific agent based on the IP address - what, does Russia assign static IPs to each and every agent in the office? Of course, there could have been more legwork we're not told about, or this could be a case of parallel construction, but who knows.
I did want to point out the sourcing either way, though. It's really distressing to me the way anonymous sourcing has really taken off lately, and that most people appear to be entirely credulous despite the lessons we learned back during the Bush administration. It rarely even gets questioned, though even the past year in particular has served up frequent and egregious object lessons of why anonymous government sources cannot simply be taken at their word. The sad fact of the matter is that the vast majority of anonymous sources are not leaking information to edify the American people. They are leaking information because they have an agenda.
That doesn't mean that we can simply ignore them. Sometimes the information is false, sometimes critical context is left out, but sometimes it is true and extremely important. It means we have to consider what they say very carefully and why they might be saying it.
It is definitely still happening today. The most famous recent example would probably be Maria Butina[0], a Russian woman who infiltrated the National Rifle Association and the US Republican Party during the 2016 election cycle to influence US politics. She was arrested, convicted of federal crimes and eventually deported back to Russia where she is now a member of the Duma (Russia's Parliament) after previously working for RT.
There's also the Chinese spy Christine Fang[1] who allegedly had an association with Eric Swalwell, a Democratic US Representative from California and also allegedly had affairs with 2 mayors in the midwest.
It's a pretty safe assumption that other governments are also doing the same thing. They just haven't gotten caught yet.
You're making a very big leap from 'Russia arrested someone and charged him with treason' to 'That person was actually a US spy' and even 'The arrest of this person who was actually a US spy is the driver behind a particular US policy'. We just don't have any reasonable insight into why Russia arrests people and what, if anything, they're guilty of.
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