The feds say Maria Butina was a Russian spy sent to build a secret backchannel to the Kremlin. Sure, she allegedly seduced her way into the senior-most levels of the American conservative movement, but she left a trail of sloppy tradecraft a mile long in the process. So who is Maria Butina and what’s the deal with her sudden interest in cybersecurity after Donald Trump was elected?
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Compare and contrast: When Butina was direct messaging her mentor, former Russian central banker Alexander Torshin, he likened her work in the U.S. to Anna Chapman, one of 10 Russian spies busted by the FBI in 2010 after they’d been operating in the U.S. for years without diplomatic cover or immunity. Butina, like ginger-haired Chapman, stands accused of seducing American politicos for Russia and offering “sex in exchange for a position within a special-interest organization.” There is, however, a major difference between Butina and the Russian spies from 2010, and that is: Butina absolutely sucked at her job and didn’t have the faintest clue how to hide her dealings from the U.S. government.
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Training: The 2010 illegals worked for a proper intelligence agency—Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR)—which provided them with lots of training in spycraft. They used fancy tricks like hiding encrypted message data within boring old photographs posted on the internet (a practice known as steganography).
The FBI’s criminal complaint has more on their training subjects: “foreign languages; agent-to-agent communications, including the use of brush-passes; 2 short-wave radio operation and invisible writing; the use of codes and ciphers, including the use of encrypted Morse code messages; the creation and use of a cover profession; counter-surveillance measures; concealment and destruction of equipment and materials used in connection with their work as agents; and the avoidance of detection during their work as agents.” Other spies operating with non-official cover, the document says, operate under their real names and receive “roughly the same tradecraft as the other illegals” although “their training is typically shorter.”
Opsec? What opsec? Butina, by contrast, shows no sign of any intelligence training, much less an awareness that her tactics would make her easy prey for the FBI. Instead of using encrypted communications or radios, she used plain old email and direct messages to communicate the explicit details of her alleged criminal conspiracy to American citizens and Russian officials. She posted reams of evidence about said activities to social-media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, VK, and LiveJournal without so much as a tweak to her privacy settings.
In one post on her Facebook page, she mentions that she’s considering keeping a diary—hardly the smartest move for a covert operative—and an exhibit offered into evidence by the FBI shows she took handwritten notes on an offer of employment from the FSB, Russia’s domestic intelligence agency.
Now compare Butina’s life-out-loud with the more discreet behavior of another Russian illegal, Evgeny Buryakov, arrested in 2015 and convicted of being an SVR spy. Buryakov, according to the FBI, “avoided speaking about intelligence-related matters with Igor Sporyshev [an SVR operative under diplomatic cover] over the telephone, by email, or via any other means of communication other than face-to-face meetings.”
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Who does Maria work for? Butina’s utter lack of tradecraft may clarify her alleged role on behalf of the Russian government. We know she had some association with Russian intelligence agencies. In its pretrial detention motion, the FBI emphasizes that Butina had contact with Russian intelligence services—plural—with contact information for FSB officials and a note entertaining an FSB job offer. The document says she was "likely in contact with the FSB throughout her stay" in the U.S. and that she met with a Russian “diplomat” believed to be an intelligence official.
But her bumbling suggests that, whatever agencies she may have worked with, she probably didn’t go through an official training pipeline. That may be because the Russian government thought of her more as an agent—defined by the U.S. intelligence community as “a person who engages in clandestine intelligence activities under the direction of an intelligence organization, but is not an officer, employee, or co-opted worker of that organization.”
Cybersecurity: One of the tantalizing threads in the Butina case is her interest in cybersecurity. In a January 2017 post on her Facebook page, she abruptly announced that she was now interested in the dark art of hacking. She asked if any of her friends could recommend books on the subject. The interest appeared to be more than a fleeting social-media whim. Butina enrolled in American University’s cybersecurity program and a source tells the The Daily Beast that she attended at least one cybersecurity event on the Washington, D.C. think-tank circuit.
Butina’s interest in hacking freaked out at least one D.C. civil-rights group when she tried to interview employees about the vulnerabilities in their network that led to a recent hack. An employee for the cybersecurity firm that investigated the breach has described Butina’s interest “incredibly suspect activity.”
Don’t hold your breath for a trade: In November 2015, Butina posted to Facebook that the most Oscar-worthy movie that year was Bridge of Spies, the Steven Spielberg film about how the U.S. swapped a KGB spy operating outside diplomatic protection inside the U.S. for Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of a downed U2 spy plane, on a bridge between East and West Germany. The Russian Foreign Ministry is doing its trolly best to launch a #FreeMariaButina hashtag on Twitter, but don’t expect it to push for a Cold War-style spy swap. Butina is charged with conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign government and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government.
As it happens, Buryakov, the SVR illegal busted in 2015, was convicted of the same charges Maria faces and his case may be instructive about what Butina can expect. Buryakov was a formally trained intelligence officer for the SVR, but Moscow didn’t go to much trouble to win him back. Instead, he was sentenced to 30 months in prison, released early and back on a plane to Moscow by early 2017. It’s hardly a slap on the wrist, but not exactly the kind of stiff sentence that would motivate Russia to pull out all the stops to spring their new favorite redhead.
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