We Did Nothing
As I read Gordon Corera’s 2020 book, ‘Russians Among Us: Sleeper Cells & the Hunt for Putin’s Agents’, I am haunted by the cold truth that the US and UK responded to Russia’s attacks by doing nothing
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The US was hit in 2016 with Russian cyber espionage to interfere with a presidential election, and we did nothing.
A decade earlier, Russia carried out an act of nuclear assassination on the streets of London against a British citizen, and the UK government did nothing.
Putin, a spy bent on revenge, is at war with the West, but only one side declared.
In 2010, a decade into Putin’s rise to power, the FBI exposed a ring of Russian sleeper agents — undercover spies who were living in New York, Boston, and Washington. They were assigned ‘tombstoned’ names — stolen from dead children. These ‘ghost spies’ were directed to cozy up to US power brokers and gather information. Some had been in America for decades, living the suburban life, and tending to their children and gardens — post-Cold War agents who watched their country fall only to be reanimated into an organized crime state — ‘a wild form of capitalism and gangsterism’. This fact didn’t appear to reduce their nationalistic fervor.
The FBI had been secretly watching the ghost spies, thanks to a Russian foreign intelligence agent turned mole, Alexander Poteyev. The spies were called ‘Moscow’s illegals’, and Gordon Corera wrote a detailed book in 2020 that documents the life of the ‘illegals’ titled Russians Among Us: Sleeper Cells & the Hunt for Putin’s Agents.
“The illegals mission was to subvert America from within.”—Gordon Corera, Russians Among Us
A former BBC security editor, Corera reveals in stunning, granular detail the FBI’s ten-year counterintelligence operation against the illegals.
And he didn’t bury the lede. Throughout the book, he reminds us that the US and UK were morbidly slow to wake up to Putin’s malevolence.
We had opportunity. In 2011, when Putin was prime minister, he was publicly booed by mixed martial arts fans in Moscow’s Olympic Stadium. Putin is seen visibly shaken. He ‘had just announced he intended to return to the presidency. And something was going wrong’. Just days earlier, Muammar Gaddafi had been brutally killed, and Putin feared the Gaddafi ending. As protests over rigged parliamentary elections broke out, he ratcheted up spy fever.
‘A Book About Ghosts’
The eye-spy antics throughout Corera’s book seem antiquated in a post-cyber espionage world, and the 2010 bust of what amounted to an expensive failure by the SVR — the civilian intelligence service that in 1991 succeeded the First Chief Directorate of the KGB — was a profound embarrassment. Putin took it personally. Publicly, he gave the returning spies a hero’s welcome, while privately plotting revenge.
In a remarkable scene depicted in the book, after a spy couple was arrested at their suburban home in Montclair, New Jersey, shocked neighbors debated whether ‘it was wrong to the water the hydrangeas if they belonged to Russian spies’.
“The hydrangeas did nothing wrong,” said one neighbor.
On July 10, 2010, a spy swap occurred in Vienna — the ten ‘illegals’ were traded for four jailed Russians, who were alleged to have spied for the West.
Among those swapped was Sergei Skripal, a former member of the GRU (Russian military intelligence), who had spied for the UK’s foreign intelligence service, MI6. Eight years later, he and his daughter were poisoned by GRU agents at his home in Salisbury. Both survived the assassination attempt, but a resident in a neighboring town, Dawn Sturgess, wasn’t so lucky. A friend gave her a discarded perfume bottle he had found, and after she sprayed herself with it, she became ill and died. It had contained the nerve agent used to poison the Skripals.
Russians Among Us details the evolution from ghost spies to the proliferation of influencers and cyber espionage to subvert the West. Among those swapped was ‘true illegal’ Anna Chapman, a pin-up spy who worked in both the UK and the US. Like gun crazy Maria Butina, a Russian sent back to Moscow after affairs with multiple MAGA useful idiots, Chapman used her real name — a notable progression in spycraft. Dubbed ‘sleazy glitz’ by reporter Edward Lucas, these women were at the crossroads of ‘sex, spying, business, and politics’.
The sleazy glitz trend morphed and escalated, as Corera shows how oligarchs became vehicles for spreading pro-Kremlin propaganda. He also documents how ‘cyber illegals’ were used to target the 2016 US election, how they impersonated real Americans on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and how these cyber illegals created hundreds of real protests — all by remote from St. Petersburg, Russia.
Russian Facebook posts reached 126 million users. Hillary Clinton lost by a handful of votes in three states.
One dramatic failure of Corera’s otherwise compelling and well-researched book was his avoidance of any reporting on Russia’s impact on Brexit. He ignores it altogether, and the omission is glaring.
But he does point out an interesting detail — that the ‘most public bankroller of the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union’ was a millionaire insurance company director named Arron Banks, who married a Russian woman in 2001, who had arrived on a student visa in the late 1990s, married a retired ‘merchant seaman more than twice her age’. The marriage was short lived, according to Corea, and she fought deportation with the help of an MP, Mike Hancock, with ‘an interest in Russia’ — who had a previous relationship with a young Russian woman who worked with him in Parliament and then had an affair with a NATO official. Hancock was able to help the future Mrs. Arron Banks stay in the country, and according to Corera, both have ‘dismissed any accusations that she is a spy’. In what’s widely regarded as a SLAPP suit, Banks sued Carole Cadwalldr for libel after she gave a brilliant TED Talk and lost the case in High Court, but won on appeal.
In his review of Corera’s book, veteran Guardian reporter Luke Harding calls it “Russia’s blurred espionage war” and Putin flaunts this blurred espionage in the face of the West, which did absolutely nothing when it absolutely mattered.
“I can distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death.”—Alexander Litvinenko, in a posthumous statement read by friends
A month after he had become a British citizen, Alexander Litvinenko — a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service who had been granted asylum in the UK — was a ‘living murder victim’.
He had only taken a few sips of tea laced with a rare nuclear isotope —polonium — so his death was slow and brutal, giving investigators enough time to do thorough interviews.
“It seemed the British state did not want to confront the truth of what happened. And so it did its best over the coming years to bury it.”—Gordon Corera, Russians Among Us
All that nothing we did to prevent further attacks invited Russia to invest in ‘new weapons in their armory’.
“Our goal wasn’t to turn the Americans toward Russia. Our task was to set Americans against their own government: to provoke unrest and discontent.”—former Internet Research Agency worker
The Obama administration had been informed that the ‘Kremlin was building a massive machinery of disinformation that could be used to interfere in politics’ — and that ‘in the US, Russia has penetrated media organizations, lobbying firms, political parties, governments and militaries… but no one quite understood the risks’.
Corera wrote that former FBI officials from that time ‘acknowledge they were slow to recognize the evolution of Russian tradecraft and especially the shift to use technology and social media’.
Russian ghosts would start to haunt the American body politic, he wrote.
“New tools had made it possible to conduct influence operations on the mass of the population remotely… a new online world of social media offered the chance to do this at scale and at speed,” explained Corera.
Offering ‘implausible deniability’, cyberspace gave Russia the opportunity to ‘reinvigorate its intelligence capabilities’.
Corera does the usual ‘did it really have any impact’ calculation of the cyber espionage targeting America in the run-up to the 2016 election and post-election. That question always struck me as wrong-headed. Dr. Charles Kriel, who made two films about Russian cyber espionage, once told me: “An attempted murderer is still a criminal.”
In 2025, it’s pretty obvious that America is ailing. It’s been drinking the poison from the internet well — a metaphorical perfume bottle sickening the masses.
It’s worth noting that the only high-ranking member of the Obama administration war room who ‘pressed for the arrests’ of the ghost spies was Hillary Clinton — then, Secretary of State. Both Obama and his VP Joe Biden were worried about creating a ‘flap’ during an attempted reset with Russia. And in fact, the arrests took place after a meeting between Obama and former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, who was warming the bench for Putin’s return.
It’s important to note that Clinton — who was voted America’s favorite politician in 2013 before the cyber attacks began — wasn’t fooled by Putin. She called on international leaders to investigate the 2011 election in Russia for fraud. Putin blamed Clinton for the massive protests in Russia against him in 2011, and so she was targeted ruthlessly, by both a hack-and-leak and social media operations. The Translator Project of the Internet Research Agency had 80 employees working day and night shifts, who were told to turn up the criticism of Clinton, while supporting Sanders and Trump.
I’m having trouble forgiving my country for not defending citizens against cyber espionage. We had a chance, and we failed.
Greed appears to be at the root of the failure. Former directors of US intelligence, retired military, lobbyists, businessmen, accountants, lawyers, bloggers, reporters, influencers, politicians, academics, oligarchs, went to work for the Russians — the money too good, the kompromat too steep, the egos, too fragile.
Whatever.
They’re all traitors. I don’t think I can forgive them. At least, not today.
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Russians Among Us: Sleeper Cells, Ghost Stories and the Hunt for Putin’s Agents by Gordon Corera published by William Collins.
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I read this book and found it very interesting. Thanks for your excellent summary/ review.