Anne Applebaum of WaPo has more details on the Russian GRU hackers and their goal:
These have produced a trove of additional information. Among other things, the Dutch have proof that some of these men have been to Malaysia, where they were spying on the team investigating the crash of MH17 , the passenger plane brought down by a Russian missile in eastern Ukraine in July 2014. They have proof that these same men hacked a computer belonging to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the organization that revealed the drug use by Russian athletes. They found train tickets to Switzerland, where it seems the GRU team was planning to hack the laboratory tasked with identifying Novichok, the chemical nerve agent that their colleagues used to attack an ex-spy in England. They even found a taxi receipt from the cab the team took from GRU headquarters to the Moscow airport. …
[The Dutch and open source investigation by the folks at Bellingcat] also represented a new turning point in the West’s fight against the onslaught of Russian disinformation, for this particular GRU team was not engaged in a traditional form of spying. They were not looking for secret information; they were looking for dirt. They wanted embarrassing stories, catty emails or anything at all that would discredit organizations that seek to establish the truth about Russian crimes: OPCW, WADA, the MH17 investigation, the Swiss chemical lab. Had they found anything, they would not have analyzed it in secret, they would have leaked it.
This is a familiar pattern. A similar search for kompromat was one of the motivations for the GRU’s hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, as well as of Hillary Clinton’s election campaign. The GRU agents who ran that operation were also looking for material, however banal, that could be leaked and then spun into compromising, distracting stories that would dominate news cycles and discredit Clinton. In any institution, whether a laboratory or a campaign office, there are private conversations that differ, in language and tone, from announcements made in public. The GRU seeks to exploit this distinction in order to create distrust and suspicion. They can’t alter the verdict of the OPCW or the results of the MH17 investigation, but they can persuade people not to take them seriously.
Anne believes the Dutch did the right thing by advertising the attempted hack around the world, and I have no intention of disputing that suggestion. She also notes that Bellingcat blew another hole in the Russian intelligence operation – it’s an article worth reading in full.
But I still think the Dutch should have dumped their asses in jail. And then issued an arrest warrant for Putin.
Finally, it’s worth reconsidering skeptical opinions my readers may hold on many subjects. How many are the result of false or misleading information released by the Russians? It’s a question worth considering – by everyone.
