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Maria Butina has flipped. The gun-loving Russian spy who built a secret back channel from the Kremlin all the way to the heart of the American conservative movement will now be cooperating with the feds in any matters they’re interested in. So what can prosecutors get from her that her sloppy spycraft hasn’t already leaked? And now that she’s singing to the FBI, how long until the Russian foreign ministry changes its #FreeMariaButina Twitter avatar?
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What kind of spy was Maria? Butina straddles a few blurry lines that are important to understand when trying to assess her value to law enforcement. First, there’s the as-yet unclear line between whether she was a trained intelligence officer, meaning someone who recruits human sources for an intelligence agency, or an agent, meaning someone who gathers information and provides access for an intelligence officer.
The public record puts her closer to the latter. Butina demonstrated almost no understanding of spy tradecraft while the feds had her under observation. She talked openly over insecure apps about her influence campaign on behalf of Moscow and kept notes on her ongoing criminal conspiracy. She also fielded a job offer from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in the course of her activities in the U.S.—a hint that she might not be a trained officer for a Russian spy service.
The upshot of her likely status as an agent would be that she might not have so much knowledge about the Russian intelligence bureaucracy, like the names of other officers she worked with or the spies they may have copped to recruiting.
Cops vs spies: The other blurry line that’s important in the Butina case is the one between American law enforcement and counterintelligence. Agencies like the FBI have the sometimes competing responsibilities of busting crooks and collecting intelligence on what foreign governments are up to. Butina could have some scraps of useful intelligence the government hasn’t already collected by surveilling her. But she could also be useful on the law-enforcement side of the ledger. Prosecutors are reportedly mulling whether or not to charge her boyfriend, conservative activist Paul Erickson, for espionage—and the feds could ask Butina to testify in that case.
Her plea agreement, however, gives no clues as to what prosecutors want Butina to talk about. It simply states that she agrees to help out “in any and all to matters as to which the Government deems this cooperation relevant.”
Prep work: Russia’s foreign ministry may not have expected this, but they been preparing for it. Russian diplomats have beaten a path to the Alexandria jail where she’s being held. Diplomats have sent letters of protest to the State Department decrying her placement in segregated detention, raised her confinement conditions with the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, and tried to make her a social media cause célèbre—they changed their Twitter avatar to a Butina portrait and pushed a #FreeMariaButina hashtag. Some of that can be chalked up to a country’s normal consular responsibilities and the sensitivities of Moscow—which forbids extradition of citizens in the Russian constitution.
But prosecutors argued that the six consular visits between Russian diplomats and Butina and the four diplomatic notes sent to U.S. officials were evidence that Butina was no ordinary case for Moscow. Former spies told McClatchy that much of the effort on her behalf is likely an attempt to assess her mental state and the likelihood that she’ll talk—and to demonstrate their support to dissuade her from cooperation with the Americans.
Pause the welcome wagon: Butina’s fate, should she decide to return to Russia once her sentence is over, remains unclear. She’d hardly be the first Russian national charged with spying. The FBI has busted others, like the infamous sleeper cell comprised of 10 “illegals” in 2010 and Evgeny Buryakov, a Russian spy arrested in 2015. The U.S. swapped the spy ring for American and British spies held in Russia and one of them, Anna Chapman, has since become a national hero. Buryakov finished his sentence in February 2017 and was deported to Russia.
But neither Buryakov nor any of the members of the spy ring agreed to talk to American officials once arrested. Butina’s decision to spill her guts could affect the reception she gets if and when she goes home. As the allegedly Russian-orchestrated murder of former FSB officer turned MI6 informant Alexander Litvinenko and the poisoning of GRU defector Sergei Skripal illustrate, Moscow can be pretty unforgiving when it comes to former spies talking to the West. Butina’s status in Russian intelligence and thus the gravity of her betrayal in Moscow’s eyes is hard to parse, but she probably shouldn’t expect the red-carpet treatment if she goes home.
No reprieve for her reputation: When the FBI first arrested Butina, court filings accused her of trading sex for access to the conservative movement. The government’s claim was sensational but ill-founded. In September, prosecutors admitted that the sex-for-access line came from a text message joke Butina sent a friend that the feds then misinterpreted. Butina has already served five months in prison and her estimated sentence after a plea deal is about six months. If she gets credit for time served, she could be out in a month. But it’s unclear when, if ever, she’ll be able to shake off the Justice Department's erroneous branding.
