WASHINGTON -- A Russian troll using the name "Alice Donovan" has been published by at least 11 online publications over the past two years.
The FBI has tracked Donovan as part of a monthslong counterintelligence operation code-named "NorthernNight."
The events surrounding the FBI's investigation follow a pattern that has repeated for years: U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies saw some warning signs of Russian meddling in Europe and later in the United States but never fully grasped the breadth of the Kremlin's ambitions. Top U.S. policymakers didn't appreciate the dangers, then scrambled to draw up options to fight back. In the end, big plans died because of internal disagreement, a fear of making matters worse or a belief in the resilience of American society and its democratic institutions.
The first email from Donovan arrived in the inbox of CounterPunch, a left-leaning American news and opinion website, on Feb. 26, 2016, at 3:26 a.m. -- the middle of the day in Moscow.
[RUSSIA REPORT: Documents on Russian interference in election ]
"Hello, my name is Alice Donovan and I'm a beginner freelance journalist," the message read.
Her first articles as a freelancer for CounterPunch and other online publications weren't especially political. But as the 2016 presidential election heated up, her message shifted to stoking discontent toward Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and touting WikiLeaks, which U.S. officials say was a tool of Russia's broad influence operation to affect the presidential race.
"There's no denying the emails that [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange has picked up from inside the Democratic Party are real," she wrote in August 2016 for a website called We Are Change. "The emails have exposed Hillary Clinton in a major way -- and almost no one is reporting on it."
The tone of her articles shifted again after the election. According to U.S. intelligence reports, Donovan and other Russian trolls wanted to sow discord in U.S. society and undermine American global influence. President Donald Trump and his policies became a Russian disinformation target.
"They are all about disruption," said a former official briefed on the intelligence. "They want a distracted United States that can't counter [Russian President] Vladimir Putin's ambitions."
Donovan's name appeared this spring on articles criticizing Trump's conduct of the war in Syria and defending Russian-backed leader Bashar Assad. "U.S.-led coalition airstrike on Assad's troops not accidental," the headline of a May 20 piece on CounterPunch read. Her last piece for CounterPunch, headlined "Civil War in Venezuela: U.S. Joint Operation with Colombia," was published Oct. 16.
Other pieces under her byline have been published in recent months at Veterans Today, where Gordon Duff, the site's editor, said he knew nothing about Donovan.
"I don't edit what people do," Duff said. "If it's original, I'll publish it. I don't decide what's real and not real."
At We Are Change, Luke Rudkowski, one of the site's founders, wondered why the FBI didn't contact his publication with its suspicions.
"I wish we could get information from the FBI so we could understand what's really happening," he said. "I wish they had been more transparent."
The FBI, in keeping with its standard practice in counterintelligence investigations, has kept a close hold on information about Donovan and other suspected Russian personas peddling messages inside the United States. The bureau does not have the authority to shut down the accounts of suspected trolls.
"We're not the thought police," said one former senior law enforcement official.
In late November, The Washington Post informed Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch's editor, that the FBI suspects that Donovan is a Russian government persona. St. Clair said in an interview that Donovan's submissions didn't stand out among the 75 or so pitches he receives each day.
On Nov. 30, he sent her an email saying he wanted to discuss her work. When he got no response, St. Clair followed up with a direct message on Twitter, asking her to call him immediately.
On Dec. 5, Donovan replied by email: "I do not want to talk to anyone for security reasons."
St. Clair tapped out a new message, begging her to provide proof -- a photograph of her driver's license or passport -- that would show that she was the beginning freelance journalist she claimed to be in her first email.
As of Monday, he had yet to receive a response.
Late Cold War roots
Many in Trump's White House, including the president, play down the effects of Russian interference and complain that the U.S. intelligence report on the 2016 election has been weaponized by Democrats seeking to undermine Trump.
"If it changed one electoral vote, you tell me," said a senior Trump administration official, who, like others, requested anonymity to speak frankly. "The Russians didn't tell Hillary Clinton not to campaign in Wisconsin. Tell me how many votes the Russians changed in Macomb County [in Michigan]. The president is right. The Democrats are using the report to delegitimize the presidency."
But other senior officials in the White House, the intelligence community and the Pentagon have little doubt that the Russians remain focused on meddling in U.S. politics.
"We should have every expectation that what we witnessed last year is not a one-shot deal," said Douglas Lute, the former U.S. ambassador to NATO. "The Russians are on to something. They found a weakness, and they will be back in 2018 and 2020 with a more sophisticated and targeted approach."
The miscalculations and bureaucratic inertia that left the United States vulnerable to Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election trace back to decisions made at the end of the Cold War, when senior policymakers largely pulled the United States out of information warfare. Putin has said U.S. officials dismissed Russia as a "third-rate regional power."
"They thought it was all over and that we'd won the propaganda war," said Joseph Duffey, the last director of the U.S. Information Agency, which was tasked with influencing foreign populations.
When Putin came to power, Russia began searching for ways to make up for its diminished military. Officials seized on influence campaigns and cyberwarfare as equalizers.
Early warning signs of the growing Russian disinformation threat included the 2005 launch of RT, formerly Russia Today, the Kremlin-funded TV network, and the 2007 cyberattacks that overwhelmed Estonia's banks, government ministries and newspapers. A year later, the Kremlin launched a digital blitz that temporarily shut down Georgia's broadcasters and defaced the website of its president.
But for U.S. officials, the real wake-up call came in early 2014 when the Russians annexed Crimea and backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. An intercepted Russian military intelligence report dated February 2014 documented how Moscow created fake personas to spread disinformation on social media to buttress its broader military campaign.
The classified Russian intelligence report, obtained by The Washington Post, offered examples of the messages the fake personas spread. "Brigades of [westerners] are now on their way to rob and kill us," wrote one operative posing as a Russian-speaking Ukrainian. "Morals have been replaced by thirst for blood and hatred toward anything Russian."
Officials in the GRU, Russia's military intelligence branch, drafted the document as part of an effort to convince Kremlin higher-ups of the campaign's effectiveness. Officials boasted of creating a fake Facebook account they used to send death threats to 14 politicians in southeastern Ukraine.
Five days into the campaign, the GRU said, its fake accounts were garnering 200,000 views a day.
Road not taken
In the White House Situation Room in 2014, aides pitched President Barack Obama on creating several global channels -- in Russian, Mandarin and other languages -- that would compete with RT. The proposed American versions would mix entertainment with news programming and pro-Western propaganda.
The president brushed aside the idea as politically impractical.
In the Situation Room that day was Richard Stengel, the undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department, who, like Obama, disliked the idea. "There were all these guys in government who had never created one minute of TV content talking about creating a whole network," said Stengel, the former top editor at Time magazine. "I remember early on telling a friend of mine in TV that people don't like government content. And he said, 'No, they don't like bad content.'"
Across eastern Europe and Ukraine, Russian-language channels mixing entertainment, news and propaganda were spreading the Kremlin's message. Stengel wanted to help pro-Western stations on Russia's periphery steal back audiences from the Russian stations by giving them popular American television shows and movies.
But without American funding, Stengel had to turn to American studios in hopes they would donate content. It didn't work -- some studios turned Stengel away outright, while Sony was initially receptive before its executives realized that its agreements with broadcasters in the region prevented it from giving away programming.
Stengel got Voice of America to launch a round-the-clock Russian-language news broadcast and found a few million dollars to translate PBS documentaries on the Founding Fathers and the American Civil War into Russian for broadcast in eastern Ukraine. He had wanted programming such as Game of Thrones but would instead have to settle for Ken Burns.
"We brought a tiny, little Swiss Army knife to a gunfight," he said.
Meanwhile, the CIA, at the direction of Obama's top national security advisers, was secretly drafting proposals for covert action.
Proponents wanted U.S. spy agencies to create fake websites and personas to spread anti-Kremlin messages, drawing on U.S. intelligence about Russian military activities and government corruption. But others doubted the effectiveness of using the CIA to conduct influence operations against an adversary that operated with far fewer constraints. Or they objected to the idea of U.S. spies even doing counterpropaganda.
James Clapper, the top spy in the Obama administration, said in an interview that he didn't think the United States "should emulate the Russians."
Another potential line of attack involved using cyberweapons to take down Russian-controlled websites and zap servers used to control fake Russian personas -- measures some officials thought would have little long-term effect or would prompt Russian retaliation.
The covert proposals, which were circulated in 2015 by David Cohen, then the CIA's deputy director, divided the administration and intelligence agencies and never reached the national security Cabinet or the president for consideration. Cohen declined to comment.
After top White House officials received intelligence in the summer of 2016 about Putin's efforts to help Trump, the deadlocked debate over covert options to counter the Kremlin was revived. Obama did not want to take any action that might prompt the Russians to disrupt voting. So he warned Putin to back off and then watched to see what the Russians would do.
Before Trump took office, a U.S. government delegation flew to NATO headquarters in Brussels to brief allies on what American intelligence agencies had learned about Russian tactics during the presidential election.
Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary-general, gaveled the private session to order, and the Americans ran through their 30-minute presentation. When the briefers finished, the allies made clear to the Americans that little in the presentation surprised them.
"This is what we've been telling you for some time," the Europeans said, according to Lute, the NATO ambassador. "This is what we live with. Welcome to our lives."
Information for this article was contributed by Julie Tate of The Washington Post.
A Section on 12/26/2017