And “yes” is the word Putin is most likely to hear from Klimenko, who quickly went on record as saying: “Now the Internet is flooded with money, and criminals, and terrorists. Of course, all this needs to be regulated.”[383]
Klimenko went after Google and Apple in much the same way the EU has, demanding that they pay significantly higher taxes than they currently do. He summed the situation up rustically: “We are breeding the cow and they are milking it.”[384] Klimenko has a strong ally in parliament who is sponsoring a bill that would impose an 18 percent value added tax on the revenue generated by Google, Apple, and other such companies. In the odd-bedfellows department, Klimenko’s ally in parliament is none other than Andrei Lugovoi, one of the two former KGB men accused of assassinating Alexander Litvinenko with polonium in London in 2006.
In the three years between the Guccifer revelation of Clinton’s private email account and the Guccifer 2.0 hack of the Democratic National Committee, a great change took place within the citadel of Putin’s mind. His initial responses to the Internet were those that were to be expected—curtail and control. At first, he failed to appreciate the full potential of hacking, being more interested in the gems of useful information that could thus be obtained and in the bragging rights that came with it—Russia’s hackers are stronger than yours.
But in the case of the hacking of Sidney Blumenthal’s correspondence with Hillary Clinton, there was very little useful information, and the hacker himself was a Romanian, hardly an occasion for nationalist chest-thumping (though Guccifer did use a Russian proxy server).
It was true that all the emails from Blumenthal, a former adviser to Bill Clinton and full-time employee of the Clinton Foundation, were marked “Confidential” and claimed to contain intelligence “from extremely sensitive sources.”[385] But then something rare and difficult to grasp began to happen that took Putin time to understand: It wasn’t the stealthy skill of the hacker that mattered, and it wasn’t the “sensitive” intelligence that was splashed all over the world’s media that mattered. What mattered more than any of that was that Secretary of State Clinton was using a private server for official communications. It was the delivery system that counted, not the content. Once again the medium was the message.
Another new use for the Internet was found in connection with former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who died so hideously and so publicly from polonium poisoning in London in 2006. In Putin’s eyes Litvinenko had committed three unforgivable sins. He betrayed the brotherhood of the KGB, the vilest of treasons. He incriminated Putin in the supposed FSB bombing of three residential buildings in 1999, which were to set the stage for the second Chechen war and thus strengthen Putin’s position as president. He accused Putin of being a pedophile.
No one can be more vicious in exchanging insults than ex-KGB. Their accusations should be considered baseless unless supported by hard evidence. There is some evidence that the FSB was involved in the detonation of the buildings, none whatsoever for Putin being a pedophile.
In April 2015 the British police brought six charges of “making and possessing” child pornography against Vladimir Bukovsky, an even less likely candidate for the charge than Vladimir Putin himself. Yet slander is adhesive.
Bukovsky was one of the great figures of the Soviet dissident movement, not as famous as Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn—there is always a second tier—but greatly respected for what he endured, twelve years in psychiatric hospitals and prisons, and for what he achieved as an activist and writer, especially for his memoir, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter. Bukovsky quipped about his literary output in Soviet-era samizdat (self-publishing): “I write it myself, censor it myself, print and disseminate it myself, and then I do time in prison for it myself.”[386] He had been a dissenter since the Hungarian Uprising was crushed in 1956. “Our parents had turned out to be agents and informers, our military leaders were butchers, and even the games and fantasies of our childhood seemed to be tainted with fraud.”[387]
In 1976 he was forcibly deported from the USSR in exchange for the leader of the Chilean Communist Party. He then devoted himself mostly to neurophysiology, working mainly in Cambridge University in England.
When Litvinenko defected to the UK in 2000, he made contact with Bukovsky, calling him some twenty to thirty times a day. And it was to Bukovsky that Litvinenko would reveal how assassinations were now casually arranged over a bowl of soup in the FSB cafeteria.
After Litvinenko was himself assassinated—Bukovsky was called to testify into the inquiry conducted by former judge Sir Robert Owen. Bukovsky’s conclusion was hardly a ringing condemnation: “I am pretty sure it was done on orders from the Kremlin.”[388] Owen himself went further, naming names: “I have concluded that the FSB operation to kill Mr. Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr. Patrushev, then head of the FSB, and also by President Putin.”[389]
A month after Bukovsky testified the British police brought the multiple child pornography charges against Bukovsky based on information received from Europol. For a man of Bukovsky’s proven integrity it was a particularly loathsome charge, one that would besmirch, if only by association, his last years of life.
Two things were clear to everyone but the British police: the child pornography had been planted in Bukovsky’s computer and the act was an obvious allusion to Litvinenko’s accusing Putin of pedophilia.
A year after the charges were brought against him, the British police forging ahead with their case, Bukovsky went on a protest hunger strike though he was in very poor health. He said of the possibility of dying: “I’m not afraid of it. How can you be afraid of something inevitable? It isn’t a senseless death. It’s a purposeful death. I’m an old man anyway.”[390]
In May 2016, after three weeks of a hunger strike by Bukovsky and a great international outcry, a British court postponed the criminal case against him. Bukovsky intends to file a civil case against the prosecutors, who say they need more time to determine whether his computer could have been hacked, a task difficult but doable.
One thing is clear here, one isn’t. It’s clear that the FSB was no more a match for Bukovsky than the KGB was. Men with that diamond-hard integrity can be killed but not broken. What isn’t clear is how the example of the attack on Bukovsky might convince future Russia dissenters that the game is not worth the candle.
The FSB and its predecessors had always been adept at finding or manufacturing compromising material, kompromat, that could then be planted and later “discovered” when needed. Now the Internet provided a swifter, surer means—no need to break into an apartment; hacking into someone’s email was all it took. Hackers had found a new purpose—not only to steal but to leave real evidence of imaginary crimes behind.
On November 9, 2016, Donald Trump, a man of boundless ambition and self-love uncorrected by character or conscience, was elected president of the United States by both the American people and the intelligence agencies of the Russian Federation. Not to be outdone by foreign competition, the FBI had also rolled up its sleeves and gotten down to work to thwart Hillary Clinton’s run for president. Was this an early example of the renewed Russian-American cooperation Trump hinted at in his campaign?
386
Ludmilla Alexeyeva,
387
Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich,
390
Claire Berlinski, “Did Britain Fall into Putin’s Trap in Prosecuting a Russian Dissident?”