CIPHER Brief Report — As any good source will tell you, recruiting spies is hard work. Not only do you have to identify and recruit people who have access to the information you want, but you also have to take great personal risks to the undercover agent who accepts the assignment. The Russians are a particularly difficult target, as they are notorious for harassing CIA and embassy personnel (often sending teams of specialists to monitor their every move). You see the problem.
That’s probably one reason why enthusiasm began to build inside CIA headquarters two years ago for a tech-savvy idea that would complement traditional operations inside Russia. If successful, it could open up new ways to recruit spies, sometimes without ever setting foot in the country.
““We had to go where the people were, and evolve the way we communicate, the way we reach out, the way people reach out to us,” said a CIA official involved in the new recruiting program. Cypher Briefing In an exclusive interview:. [The Cipher Brief agreed to leave the official’s name out of this story because they are still a currently serving CIA Officer.] “I think this is a great example of innovation,” the official told us.
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The opening scene of the social media video looks like it came straight out of Hollywood. Russian intelligence officer In a dreary Moscow apartment, looking back at the corruption of his country’s elite while ordinary Russians struggle to make ends meet, the man recalls the words of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who wrote that change begins with oneself and that he dreams of a better future for his family. Ultimately, he believes that the best way to put that future within reach is to, Contact the Central Intelligence Agency.
A video recruiting Russian spies uploaded to the official CIA YouTube channel on January 22, 2024.
This video wasn’t conceived in Hollywood. It was an idea that came from within the walls of Langley, and is one of a series of short, elaborately produced videos that the CIA posts online, detailing how to contact the CIA for disgruntled Russians, and how to do so in a way that’s appropriate for maintaining an air of constant, critical secrecy.
“This is a little different from anything we’ve done before,” the official told us..“We are presenting them with compelling options that could change the trajectory of their country.”
“A once in a generation opportunity”
Last year, CIA Director William Burns said Russia’s “discontent” with the war in Ukraine was “A once in a generation opportunity“It is an organization for recruiting Russian assets.
“We won’t let it go to waste.” Burns said. “We recently used social media to… inform brave Russians how to safely connect on the dark web. We had 2.5 million views in the first week, and we are very open for business.”
The first salvo of the CIA campaign has arrived. May 2022When the agency produced what it described as a “very simple video… with just words on a screen,” it included step-by-step instructions on how to contact the agency using a virtual private network and the Tor web browser. The agency posted the video to Instagram and other social media platforms.
These videos were so well received that the CIA has since released three more Russian-language videos. May 2023Once in September 2023, most recently once january With each new installment in the series, the production values get better and the messages have “more emotional appeal than just revealing information,” said one insider we spoke to.
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The video aims to recruit people with access to the Russian security services, intelligence agencies, military, diplomatic posts, cybersecurity, technology and financial sectors. But the efforts don’t end there.
“We were ~ “I was surprised by the diversity of the response,” the official told us. “Overall. I can’t necessarily think of a particular category where there was a trend, but I think in some ways it’s a good thing, because we’re trying to show that the agency is no longer just interested in spy versus spy. We’re actually broadening the aperture and reaching out to people who might not realize that they have information that we’re interested in.”
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Russia’s war in Ukraine has been a boon to the spy business. It may not have been the impetus for the CIA to start a social media recruitment program, but it has certainly created a mass of disgruntled Russians who are tired of the war and its impact on the Russian economy.
“The worse things get inside Russia, the more likely we are to recruit spies,” said former CIA Director Dan Hoffman. Cypher Briefing.
Paul Kolbe, a former senior CIA officer who served in operational and leadership roles overseas in the former Soviet Union, said he saw similar dynamics while in Moscow.
“When there is a surge in unrest, we often see an increase in the number of Russians coming to the embassy,” Kolbe said. Cypher Briefing“There was a huge surge when the Soviet Union collapsed, of course, and East Germany was collapsing. The war in Ukraine is in some ways another event of that scale. It’s a cataclysm.”
One officer involved in the project said Russian insiders were responding to the CIA’s request for a variety of reasons. “For some, the war may be a very serious issue, but we’re two and a half years in, and whether the war was the initial motivator or not, the trends we’re seeing are symptomatic of a larger problem that we know is happening.”
Waiting for a message to arrive
The agency is careful about how it responds to outreach, and is well aware that those who want to game the system can exploit the opportunity. Officials said each individual contact is taken seriously and evaluated, and that when the agency determines it is timely, it contacts people through methods that are not publicly available for obvious operational reasons.
It may take several weeks for your message to be returned.
“We have tried to emphasize several things in every video we post and in the social media text attached to our posts, and we ask people to be patient,” the official said. “It may take time, but we really try to consider every message that is sent to us and emphasize it. You may not get the message right away, but we have seen people be extremely patient.”
The officials said the effort was paying off. “If it wasn’t working, we wouldn’t have continued with it…” “The results have been measured, and they’re probably higher than we hoped.”
A CIA spokesperson said earlier this year that the 2022 campaign and May 2023 videos had been viewed 2.1 million times across multiple online platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and X. The spokesperson said the videos “outreach” he said, but did not reveal any details about the actual hiring.
The latest video was also posted on the agency’s Telegram channel, which is a very popular source of information in Russia, perhaps because it is not part of the broad media that is part of the state propaganda apparatus.
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It may seem odd that the CIA would be looking for Russian spies in such an open forum. The footage and posts released are a far cry from the more familiar and traditional forms of espionage, such as secret meetings between secret agents and contacts.
“This is obviously different than how it used to be done, for a whole host of reasons,” Kolbe said. “Of course, back then there was personal contact, elaborate covert efforts, a lot of people coming into the U.S. embassy, and so on. You still have all those options, but this is a different approach.”
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Experts say these recruitment campaigns are another example of how espionage has evolved along with technology.
“Cyberspace is a tremendous power amplifier for free speech and free commerce, and Putin has used it to spread disinformation and propaganda and to conduct his own espionage operations,” Hoffman told us. “We’re giving him a chance to turn things around, which is good. All we’re doing is letting the Russian people know that we’re here and that we want to talk to them.”
The CIA campaign also provides a new way to reach the Russians as more traditional channels close. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the United States and its European allies have Hundreds of Russian diplomats expelled In protest against the war, Russia retaliated by expelling hundreds of Western diplomats, resulting in a sharp increase in the number of U.S. and other Western embassies. Service restrictionsThis has made direct access to the United States more difficult.
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The Russian government has flatly dismissed the CIA’s social media campaign, a Kremlin spokesman said. Dmitry Peskov “Intelligence agencies around the world often use the media and social networks to recruit new staff,” he said, suggesting the United States has failed to attract investment from popular Russian platforms such as VKontakte.
“Someone should tell the CIA that VKontakte is way more popular than the banned X. [formerly Twitter] “VKontakte has a much larger audience,” Peskov said, according to TASS.
It seems like the CIA already knows this.
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