INSIDE PUTIN’S FAKE NEWS NERVE CENTRE
This is where an army of cyber trolls sowed seeds of division that may have helped Trump into power. But now, for the first time, a whistleblower says: We poisoned the Brexit debate too
FROM the outside, it is an unexceptional glass and marble building on the northern edge of St Petersburg. But this is the nervecentre for the shock troops of Vladimir Putin’s cyber army, whose round-the-clock outpouring of bile on to Western social media and comment forums is credited with playing a crucial role in sabotaging Hillary Clinton’s election campaign and propelling Donald Trump to the White House.
And now the MoS has uncovered dramatic new evidence that the same web warriors were brought in to back the pro-Brexit camp in last year’s EU referendum.
Russian interference in the vote has long been suspected, but we have spoken to an IT worker who admits posting fake messages purporting to come from British citizens during the Brexit campaign.
This is the first direct account of Putin’s meddling, and the whistleblower also revealed that Russia’s determination to sow dissent in the UK extended to this year’s general election. Fearful for the consequences of speaking out in Putin’s Russia – where dissident voices can be ruthlessly dispatched – the source has asked for anonymity.
The IT worker revealed: ‘We were active on social media including Twitter, mainly posting on contentious topics obsessing the Brits.’
A number of fellow ‘trolls’ had studied or worked in Britain, said the source, who added: ‘There were Twitter and for example Facebook accounts maintained by our teams and directed at the United Kingdom, and there still must be today.’
The troll, who speaks good but accented English, said the posts were in favour of leaving the EU, adding: ‘It was mainly stoking up online debates about the bad impact of immigration on working-class whites, and moaning about Brussels deciding everything, proud Brits ruled from abroad.
‘Our workers were given a line to take and what we wrote was monitored by our chiefs.’
The revelations will increase the focus on the detached four-storey block at 55 Savushkina Street, currently at the centre of the US Senate intelligence committee’s investigation into Russian interference with last year’s race for the White House.
Hundreds of well-paid young recruits, many students, man the terminals in 12-hour shifts to keep the venomous flow of anti-West ern propaganda and bogus stories spewing onto the internet and into Western media forums.
Workers, many posting in English, first cloak their Russian location by using proxy servers, then weigh in on the subjects of the day, dictated by their bosses, almost certainly on orders from the Kremlin.
Washington insiders suspect Trump’s victory in the 2016 Presidential election was engineered in this building and others like it – officially known as the Agency for Internet Studies – far more decisively than it was in any US polling booth.
One spectacular example of how sophisticated the agency has been emerged on Friday, with the revelation that a Twitter user named Jenna Abrams, supposedly a right-wing young American woman, was, in fact, a fictitious product of the troll factory.
‘Ms Abrams’ was astonishingly successful in getting her views on all kinds of matters aired, and they were picked up by media organisations, including the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post. As the US election loomed, the Tweets to her 70,000 followers became more overtly political, such as: ‘I’m not pro-Trump. I am procommon sense.’
Now it appears the Brexit vote might have been similarly compromised. Britain’s Electoral Commission last week launched an investigation into whether donations and loans from Brexit campaigner and Ukip donor Arron Banks and one of his companies broke campaign finance rules in the run-up to the referendum. They will examine donations worth £2.3m, assessing whether Mr Banks was the ‘true source’ of loans made in his name, and that of his company, Better for the Country Ltd.
Not surprisingly, the Kremlin officially denies all knowledge of the troll factory, even questioning its existence.
‘We know nothing about this agency and have never had any contacts with it… even if it exists indeed,’ Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. But one PR executive took a very different view. ‘If Joseph Goebbels was alive today, he’d be proud of this operation,’ he said, branding the facility as ‘sinister, powerful and skewing democracy’.
Despite the mantle of secrecy surrounding Savushkina, occasionally a small chink of light has been cast into the building by disaffected whistleblowers such as Lyudmila Savchuk, the 34-year-old single mother-of-two who turned the tables on the agency two years ago, following a two-month stint working there.
Most comments were in Russian, she said, ‘but I know that some also write English posts. Ukrainian also plays a major role. I also heard about German, but not in this building,’ she added, indicating that there were other ‘factories’ actively pumping out the Kremlin’s message.
She described an atmosphere of ‘utmost secrecy’ within the building and never once saw any sign of the shadowy bosses in overall charge. Postings flooded Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Livejournal.com, as well as Russian-language networks such as VK.com and Odnoklassniki.
Ms Savchuk recalled talk of other bases for this internet insurgency. ‘A few colleagues reported about work trips to a Moscow office,’ she said.
‘There is also information about a further, highly secretive, building in St Petersburg.’
She said one group of workers operate fake news portals posing as genuine news sites in Ukraine with names such as ‘Kharkiv News’ or ‘Federal News Agency’.
‘We had video bloggers. Some made themselves look like members of the Russian opposition,’ she told Der Spiegel.
Tasks from her mysterious superiors included sickeningly branding
‘It was mainly stoking up online Brexit debates’ ‘It’s a real factory – there are production quotas’
Barack Obama a ‘monkey’ and dismissing Ukrainians opposed to Putin as Nazis.
And when Putin rival Boris Nemtsov was shot dead in the shadow of the Kremlin in 2015, Ms Savchuk recalled feeling sickened as she and colleagues were ordered to smear him on the web, claiming he was probably killed by his friends who had turned on him.
Another whistleblower, Marat Burkhart, 40, recently spoke of his time at the troll factory. He said that trolls were paid according to their output. ‘It’s a real factory. There are production quotas,’ he said.
‘The quota is 135 comments per 12hour shift.’
A journalist from investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta who got a job inside the troll factory said he was shown screenshots of his predecessor’s work to help him understand the requirements.
Americans were depicted as ‘oafish and grasping, and the movies are soulless’.
Some of the output of the factory is subtle, but other material is far more heavyhanded.
One fake video they are said to have produced showed a black man having sex with a prostitute made up to resemble Mrs Clinton.
Student Alan Baskaev, 25, who worked there for six months, told opposition Russian channel TV Rain that he was shown one video aimed at discrediting Mrs Clinton, made sometime before 2015.
‘Nobody would ever believe it – so this is how all was done there, with this kind of foolishness,’ he said.
Baskaev’s salary of 55,000 roubles a month (€800) for using his good English to pose as Americans commenting on stories was almost 50 times his monthly student allowance.
Recently, respected anti-Putin campaigner Alexei Navalny, who runs an organisation called the Anti-Corruption Fund, said he had confirmed what many suspected – that the man behind the troll factories including Savushkina Street was a 55year-old former convict nicknamed ‘Putin’s Chef’.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former hot dog salesman, was a modest restaurateur in 2001 when Putin happened to dine at his establishment, and the pair struck up a rapport when the owner waited on the Russian premier personally.
Soon he emerged as ‘something like a court jester’ in the president’s circle, said Navalny. ‘Later he was in charge of organising Putin’s birthdays.’
Prigozhin once spent nine years in a Siberian prison on robbery and violence charges, but since his elevation to Putin confidant, has raked in an astonishing €2.8bn over the last five years in Kremlin contracts, including his covert IT work, claimed Mr Navalny. The sums would explain the opulent lifestyle of Prigozhin, who lives in a splendid €8.5m St Petersburg mansion on its own 10-acre estate in a coastal nature reserve, boasts a portfolio of other luxury property and owns a private jet. According to his glamorous daughter Polina, her father’s €5.5m, 37metre yacht, St Vitamin, has six bedrooms as well as a dining room, two decks, two terraces and quarters for the staff. When she got married, the ceremony was held in the Konstantinovsky Palace, a glittering former royal property in St Petersburg dating back to the Romanovs. ‘The most difficult thing was to get millions of natural flowers,’ said Polina – ironically enough on her own social media account – explaining how they cascaded from the ceiling. Just as critics of Putin live in fear of their personal security, anyone who criticises Prigozhin can expect to be dealt with viciously. Take independent liberal commentator Yulia Latynina – a strong critic of the country’s ruling elite – who was attacked on her way to work by a man who accused of ‘pouring c**p’ on her motherland.
The attacker emptied a bucket of excrement over her head.
‘I have spoken about Mr Prigozhin several times,’ she said.
‘I don’t doubt that I got on the list because of this... and the most horrible thing is that if we don’t stop it, this will end with dead bodies.’
This year her car and house were attacked with a mysterious ‘military poison’.
‘It is an extremely toxic substance that affects your kidneys and liver,’ said Dmitry Muratov, her editor at Novaya Gazeta newspaper, who is now arming his journalists to protect them.
The authorities have failed to find out who ordered or carried out the attacks, but there seems little doubt that it was linked to Latynina’s story linking the internet addresses from the troll factory to attacks on antiPutin activists in Moscow and St Petersburg.
A spokesman for Concord Management and Consulting – the company linked to Prigozhin – said aspects of the Navalny report were ‘not consistent with reality’, and that the campaigner had misinterpreted the facts.
In particular, the company disputed the amount it had received in state contracts – but it gave no alternative figure.
‘Lawyers who represent the interests of Yevgeny Prigozhin are now working at legal evaluation of the declarations made by Alexei Navalny and further legal moves are not excluded,’ said the spokesman.