The Agency’s success was breathtaking (despite the occasional tell-tale grammatical error like ‘Rabid Squirrels Is Terrorising Florida’). Heart of Texas – just one of its thousands of fake accounts – garnered a quarter of a million followers (and almost started a riot outside Houston’s Islamic Da’wah Center). Its YouTube videos and Instagram messages have reached more than twenty million people. Its 80,000 Facebook posts, replete with inflammatory images, were seen by 126 million Americans during the presidential election.
The Agency also targeted Britain. The ‘proud TEXAN and AMERICAN patriot’ @SouthLoneStar – in fact another Russian account – tweeted to its thousands of British followers: ‘I hope UK after #BrexitVote will start to clean their land from Muslim invasion!’ Another bellowed: ‘UK vote to leave future European Caliphate!’ On the day of the EU referendum, 3,800 fake accounts were mobilised tweeting 1,102 posts with the hashtag #ReasonsToLeaveEU. Every post, meme, video and deepfake photograph was designed to sow distrust, to exacerbate division, to exploit fear and to discredit truth.
Critics were ravaged by vicious retaliatory attacks. After exposing the ‘troll army’, the Finnish whistle-blower, Jessikka Aro, was vilified as a drug dealer on social media and mocked as a delusional bimbo in a YouTube music video. In the UK, after the publication of her articles on the manipulation of the Brexit campaign, the investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr was Photoshopped into a clip from the film Airplane! In the video – which was promoted online by the registered political organisation Leave.EU – an ‘hysterical’ Cadwalladr was told to calm down and then hit, repeatedly, around the head. As the Russian national anthem played, a line of people queued up to take their turn. The last person in the line had a gun.
I’d arrived at the factory in time for the afternoon shift and watched people entering and leaving the building. I didn’t kid myself that I was a thrusting journalist. I was no Aro, Cadwalladr, Woodward or Bernstein. No Pulitzer Prize would be forthcoming as no one stopped to talk to me. I simply wanted to look into the faces of the men and women who worked at the Agency.
Unsurprisingly only the security guard met my eyes and, although he didn’t speak English, I caught his drift. I recognised the word ‘ob’yekt’. In Russian ‘ob’yekt’ means ‘government building’, often property of the military, administration or the FSB. When he picked up the phone, I beat a hasty retreat.
On the tram ride back to town I looked over my shoulder. No one appeared to be following me. My mobile didn’t start playing ‘The Internationale’. And that made me worry. I’d grown up in an era when the enemy was known. He or she had a face (albeit distorted by our own propagandists). But today we don’t know our enemy. We are approached with an enticing tweet, a Facebook friend request or irresistible holiday bargain. We click the link and, in an instant, our own account may be enslaved, to be used to distribute false information at some point in the future.
When I stepped off the tram my head was full of worries of anonymous power, electoral fraud and big data. I crossed the street to reach the hotel and a passing policeman collared me. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that jaywalking was illegal in Russia. A minor infringement and I was in the wrong. I’d have to pay.
I was flustered and on edge. Had I been followed? In my anxiety I reached for my passport, and didn’t feel it in my breast pocket. It wasn’t in my jeans. The policeman saw the blood drain from my face. He saw my real distress, and he empathised with me.
‘Check pocket again,’ he said in English, now sincerely concerned. ‘Maybe you leave in hotel?’
He didn’t march me off to the Big House. He didn’t search my phone or ask for my Facebook profile. Instead he tried to help, even to reassure me that it would be wise to carry a photocopy. He seemed to forget about the jaywalking.
When I found my passport, tucked into the back of my satchel, I laughed out loud. The policeman shook his head in relief. Now we could resume the bribery game, and not confront any real transgression.
‘Go back to hotel and not be stopped again,’ he advised me as I slipped him $20.
In the room, Sami was waiting with the television tuned to a programme on polar bears. Appropriately, as it would turn out.
‘I have found a way,’ he said.
Aboard the Queen Elizabeth? In a rubber dinghy across the Barents Sea?
‘I’m heading north.’
‘North?’ I said, collapsing on my bed. ‘But there are only submarine bases and old gulags in the north.’
‘I’m going to the Arctic.’
At midnight my phone pinged me awake. Most Russians use WhatsApp, favouring the security of its end-to-end encryption. But even though no one could read our messages, the suggested meeting place seemed to be a joke.
On Tuesday morning I pushed open the door at the appointed hour. In the shadow of the Church of the Spilled Blood, near to the spot where a tsar was most unkindly murdered, groups of young men in baseballs caps pored over black-and-white screens. A father and son sniped at croaking 8-bit ducks in Ni Pukha, Ni Pera (No Fluff, No Feathers). Primary school kids battled with virtual armour on the clunky Tank-o-drom. Teens crashed and burned their blinking fighter jets in Interceptor.
In 1975 the USSR’s Ministry of Culture had set about cloning American and Japanese arcade machines. Over the coming years millions of copycats were built in military factories. But with the fall of the Wall, and the influx of Sony PlayStations and the Microsoft Xbox, the old arcade games had been scrapped. Twenty years later three collectors had hit on the idea of saving the remaining digital relics. Around me in the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines, retro-loving hipsters and nostalgic retirees dropped 15-kopek coins into slots to launch torpedoes at enemy ships, to shoot toy shotguns at flickering targets and to travel back to a simpler time.
‘My father’s favourite is Morskoi Boi,’ murmured the woman who appeared at my side.
Morskoi Boi, or Sea Battle, was a pirated version of Midway’s 1976 Sea Wolf, produced in a military factory that became part of Almaz-Antey, today the world’s twelfth largest arms contractor and best known for its Buk missile system.
‘I bring him here, now that we have time.’
We found a table at the back of the ping-ponging alternative universe and ordered tarragon sodas. I thanked her for her midnight message.
‘People are becoming silent again,’ she volunteered in a voice so faint as to be almost a whisper. ‘That’s why I decided to meet you after all.’
Adina was of delicate build with quiet grey eyes, a small mouth and a scar on her left temple. She wore neither jewellery nor make-up. Her fingernails were brushed with colourless lacquer.
‘Also my blood is not Russian. I am Jewish.’
Adina then told me her story: she was an only child, her engineer father had moved to St Petersburg in the early 1980s in search of the better life, he’d met her mother by chance, she had come from the same small Belarus town.
‘It was like a fairy tale come true,’ sighed Adina.
But the fairy tale turned to tragedy. With the collapse of the Soviet economy, thousands of firms had shut down and millions were cast adrift. Both her parents had lost their jobs.
‘I hated being hungry. I hated standing in queues for bread, wearing hand-me-downs. I didn’t get new dresses like my friends,’ she said, almost under her breath. She stroked her nails in an absent-minded manner. ‘It made me feel so’ – she paused to find the words – ‘second rate.’