Rather than deny the charges against him, Prigozhin chooses instead to intimidate and threaten those who question his illegal activities. When Prigozhin was challenged by Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, he successfully sued in the pliant Russian courts, promising to ‘ruin’ Navalny as he lay in a coma after a state- sponsored Novichok poisoning.
It was Yevgeny Prigozhin who, in March 2021, offered half a million dollars to any Russian who would kidnap me back to Russia. This action fits the same pattern. Angered by my support for the Dossier Center and its investigation into his African machinations, he made a series of inflammatory public statements about me, none of which bore any relation to the truth. Yevgeny Prigozhin is not interested in the truth, of course, but he is interested in deflecting attention away from himself and – in this instance – from an announcement a few weeks earlier that the American authorities had issued a warrant for his arrest. The FBI had accused him and 12 other Kremlin operatives of ‘involvement in a conspiracy to defraud the United States … for the purposes of interfering with the US political system, including the 2016 Presidential Election’. The charges detailed Prigozhin’s role in the Kremlin’s cyber-hacking campaign to undermine Hillary Clinton’s election bid and the FBI was offering a $250,000 reward for information leading to his conviction.
When I was asked about the case by journalists from the Moscow Echo radio station, I said that Prigozhin seemed to be facing quite serious allegations that should be properly resolved by an open and impartial legal process. I expressed the hope that such issues might one day be addressed by an independent judiciary in the territory of Russia. Prigozhin’s response was typical. ‘I am a patriot and a good guy; and Khodorkovsky is a villain! He is a former oligarch who bribed the country’s top leadership in the 1990s and stole huge funds from the people … The American charges against me are for non- existent crimes, but Khodorkovsky killed people in large numbers!’ Asked why he thought it was he, rather than Khodorkovsky, who was being accused by the FBI, Prigozhin gave an enigmatic answer: ‘I am a scapegoat for the US authorities to cover up the massive gap between the deep state and the [American] people … the only way I will ever go to jail in the United States is if some traitor in [Russian] law enforcement decides to betray the motherland. Luckily, I don’t think that is a real possibility in Russia, because in our country there are many, many more patriots than there are liberals willing to take dirty money from the West.’
Anti-Western invective has become the go-to excuse for anything that reflects badly on Putin’s Russia. For many Russians, this rhetoric is enough to convince them that the motherland is under attack from hostile Western forces and that the patriotic response is to rally to the support of the Kremlin.
In early 2018, I was invited to the hearings organised by the US Republican Party, at which Mark Zuckerberg was asked how Facebook was dealing with the threat of fake news. His answer was that people should be provided with honest information and this would allow them to figure out the truth for themselves.
In his subsequent speech to the US Senate in April that year, Zuckerberg admitted that fake news was being used as a tool by agents acting on behalf of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin to influence people’s thinking in the battle between the Kremlin and the West, and that Facebook and other platforms had been hijacked.
We build technical tools to try to identify when people are creating fake accounts – especially large networks of fake accounts, like the Russians have – in order to remove all of that content … But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm, as well. And that goes for fake news, for foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.
Putin’s propagandists were promoting conspiracy theories and anti-Western paradigms, driving them into people’s minds by the ruthless use of fake accounts, fake postings and fake activist groups, amplified exponentially through the power of social media. Because Western democracy was itself in crisis, beset by doubt and self-questioning, it proved singularly vulnerable to the Kremlin’s subversion. Putin was able to use the disputes and conflicts that were dogging politics in the West, fanning extremist rhetoric and promoting radical views.
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.