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A dead dog in Moscow. A dead dissident in London. Twitter trolls run by the Kremlins Internet Research Agency. Denial of service attacks and ransomware deployed across Ukraine. News reports from the DC offices of Sputnik and RT. Spies hidden in the heart of Wall Street. The hacking of John Podestas creamy risotto recipe. And a century-old fabricated staple of anti-Semitic hate literature.

At first glance these disparate phenomena might seem only vaguely connected. Sure, they can all be traced back to Russia. But is there any method to their badness? The definitive answer, according to Russia experts inside and outside the US government, is most certainly yes. In fact, they are part of an increasingly digital intelligence playbook known as active measures, a wide-ranging set of techniques and strategies that Russian military and intelligence services deploy to influence the affairs of nations across the globe.

As the investigation into Russias influence on the 2016 electionand the Trump campaigns potential participation in that efforthas intensified this summer, the Putin regimes systematic effort to undermine and destabilize democracies has become the subject of urgent focus in the West. According to interviews with more than a dozen US and European intelligence officials and diplomats, Russian active measures represent perhaps the biggest challenge to the Western order since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The consensus: Vladimir Putin, playing a poor hand economically and demographically at home, is seeking to destabilize the multilateral institutions, partnerships, and Western democracies that have kept the peace during the past seven decades.

The coordinated and multifaceted Russia efforts in the 2016 electionfrom the attacks on the DNC and John Podestas email to a meeting between a Russian lawyer and Donald Trump Jr. that bears all the hallmarks of an intelligence missionlikely involved every major Russian intelligence service: the foreign intelligence service (known as the SVR) as well as the state security service (the FSB, the successor to the KGB), and the military intelligence (the GRU), both of which separately penetrated servers at the DNC.

Understanding just how extensive and coordinated Russias operations against the West are represents the first step in confrontingand defeatingPutins increased aggression, particularly as it becomes clear that the 2016 election interference was just a starting point. If there has ever been a clarion call for vigilance and action against a threat to the very foundation of our democratic political system, this episode is it, former director of national intelligence James Clapper said this spring. I hope the American people recognize the severity of this threat and that we collectively counter it before it further erodes the fabric of our democracy.

Indeed, Western intelligence leaders have warned throughout the spring that they expect Russia to use similar tricks in German parliamentary election this fall, as well as in the 2018 US congressional midterms and the 2020 presidential race. Russia is not constrained by a rule of law or a sense of ethicssame with ISIS, same with China, says Chris Donnelly, director of the UK-based Institute for Statecraft. Theyre trying to change the rules of the game, which theyve seen us set in our favor.

Russias active-measures playbook, according to public and private-sector investigators, dates back to Czarist Russia and the beginning of the Soviet Union. It has been honed and deployed over decades to advance Russian interests both at home and abroadand has long been driven by a consistent geopolitical worldview, executed in distinct ways, and guided by a unique tradecraft philosophy at odds with the approach of Western intelligence services.

But enough throat clearing. Lets break it down, shall we?

THE GRAND STRATEGY

When he began his run for president, Donald Trump had almost certainly never heard of Valery Gerasimov. But the Russian generals vision for war in the 21st century will almost certainly help define Trumps administration in the history books. Gerasimov, who has spent more than 40 years in the Soviet and Russian military, is a complicated figure in global geopolitics: He is under international sanctions for his role in Russias illegal annexation of Crimea and its destabilizing war in eastern Ukraine, yet by dint of his office is the man US Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, sat down with personally in March to discuss Syria.

Russia's first deputy defense minister and chief of the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces, general Valery Gerasimov, center, in Moscow's Red Square ahead of a Victory Day military parade, May 9, 2017.

Mikhail Metzel/Getty Images

A few months after taking over as Russias chief of the general staff, Gerasimov outlined his vision for a 21st-century style of warfare. It erased the boundary between peace and war and relied on emerging technologies to provide a level of deniability for the Russian military. In the 21st centurywars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template, he explained in a February 2013 article in the Russian journal, Military-Industrial Courier . Later, he outlined a coordinated and multi-pronged approach to warfare that relies on asymmetric tools to open up a permanently operating front through the entire territory of the enemy state.

In other words, times have changed. The focus of applied methods of conflict has altered in the direction of the broad use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary measuresapplied in coordination with the protest potential of the population, he wrote. These tools, he said, would be supplemented by military means of a concealed character, like special forces. Only in the final stage of a conflict would uniformed military be deployed, usually under the guise of peacekeeping and crisis regulation.

Gerasimovs conception of modern conflictnow enshrined as Paragraph 15(a) of the official Russian military doctrine, published in December 2014is perhaps the clearest current-day explanation of the coordinated doctrine that Lenin and Stalin might recognize. And it is almost stage-by-stage the playbook Russia used to annex Crimea and destabilize eastern Ukraine. Russias concept of conflict does not distinguish between hybrid and classical warfarethere is simply warfare, says Ben Nimmo, who studies Russian influence operations for the Atlantic Council.

The roots of those active measures go deepand they are key to comprehending the way that Russias leaders have viewed global affairs for a century. Looking back at the Soviet Union, theyre establishing an understanding that the world is completely hostile to them, Donnelly says. Theyre in a constant state of conflict with the capitalist world. Theyve developed from the very start a military doctrine which is a structured framework of thinking, a very disciplined approach, and a precise terminology.

Perhaps the first identifiable active-measures operation, Nimmo says, was the 1903 publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated anti-Semitic pamphlet circulated by the Czarist Russian police that described a Jewish plot for world domination. Its purpose: to give a pretext for Russias anti-Jewish pogroms. In the decades since, the active-measures toolbox has expanded and evolved as technologies and adversaries have, but the core of the efforts remains the same. In some ways, its very old-fashioned, says Robert Hannigan, who until this spring headed the Government Communications Headquarters, the British equivalent of the National Security Agency.

Its the same playbook they used in the Cold War era, says Clint Watts, a researcher at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. In the 2016 election, he says, Russia just used a digital battlefield instead of an analog one. They didnt do anything in terms of strategic doctrine that was different. It was just much easier to execute in cyberspace and social media than they could have ever done in the 1980s, for example.

And why not? As far removed as US politics may feel from the dark days of the Cold Warat least until recentlythe Russian leadership remains dominated by those who began their careers rising through ranks controlled by stalwarts of the Communist Party. Putin began as a KGB officer, and today nearly all of his top advisers are aging products of the Cold War: Gerasimov is in his early 60s. Putins top foreign policy adviser, Yuri UshakovSergey Kislyaks predecessor as ambassador to the USturned 70 in March, and the long-serving foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, is 67. The men who head the three main intelligence services are all in their early 60s and graduates of the Soviet Unions top intelligence and military academies. Theres no X-ray into someone elses thoughts, but judging from my own soul, which I know well, we grew up in the Soviet Union seeing the US as the enemy, Andrei Kozyrev, who served as Russias foreign minister in the 1990s, tells me.

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Putin came to powerand held onto itduring a violent and turbulent time in Russia, a period that reinforced his mentality that the West is a constant, sustained adversary in geopolitics, not a partner for peace. That approach has given him and his leadership a fundamentally different worldview. In the main, Western politiciansespecially in Europehave a peacetime approach, Donnelly says. Theyve thrived amid slow rates of change and a stable, rules-based system. Putin is the antithesis of this.

While the operations against the 2016 election caught many in the US by surpriseofficials in both the White House and the intelligence community have explained in recent months that their response was slowed by their failure to imagine that Russia would be so bold and coordinated in attacking the foundational pillars of a democratic electionRussias leadership simply sees it as the latest chapter in a long-running shadow battle.

Indeed, all of the operationsfrom those used in Russias war with Georgia in 2008 to those used to influence the Brexit referendum and the US election in 2016are deployed with a singular goal in mind: to undermine Western democracies and weaken the multilateral alliances that Russia sees opposing its future, from NATO to the European Union (not to mention the international institutionslike the internet itselfthat were created without much Russian input).

Michael McFaul, a Stanford political science professor who served as Barack Obamas second-term ambassador to Moscow, says that as much as Obama tried to adopt what he called win-win outcomes, Putin sees the world as zero-sum game. And given Russias economic and demographic weaknesses right now, its easier to tear down the West than it is to build up things domestically. The long-run objective is to have democracy break down, Watts says. To have so many internal divides and so many fights between elected officials that there is no policywhich is exactly where were at in the United States right now.

THE TOOLS

So what, specifically, is in the bag of tricks?

At the broadest level, modern Russian active measures break down into at least eight distinct types, ranging from traditional diplomacy to covert assassinations. While each tool is important in its own way, its the combination of Russias efforts that make them so effective internationally. And they are self-reinforcing, because in Russia the intelligence apparatus, business community, organized crime groups, and media distribution networks blend together, blurring and erasing the line between public and private-sector initiatives and creating one amorphous state-controlled enterprise to advance the personal goals of Vladimir Putin and his allies.

Whereas many Kremlin efforts encompass two or more of these tools at onceand nearly all of them are visible in the still-unfolding investigation into the Trump campaigns ties to RussiaWestern intelligence officials break down Russias active measures into these distinct tactics:

Disinformation

Dezinformatsiya , as its known in Russia, is an umbrella term for so-called information influence operations that seek to muddy the political waters. It can involve both overt state-sponsored medialike the Russian news channels RT and Sputnik, which recently launched a radio station in DCas well as less fringe news sites and, in recent years, a rising number of Twitter trolls and social media bots.

Yet as much as Twitter trolls dominate the headlines, driving online conversation by appearing to cause groundswells of conversation around pro-Kremlin hashtags, they represent just the tip of a coordinated and voluminous Russian message spear. The bots and trolls are important, but theyre maybe 10 percent of the tools that are used. Theyre used for amplification and theyre used for bullying, says one European official who requested anonymity because he wasnt authorized to speak publicly about the Russian threat. Theres so much more in the disinformation ecosystem that we should be concerned about.

For instance: Russias legions of highly paid Washington lobbyists. The PR firm Ketchum represented the country for nine years, until 2015, and collected more than $60 million, according to federal lobbying disclosures, to advocate for and guide Russia through the capital. Its high-profile public victories were few, with the highlight being a September 11, 2013, op-ed in The New York Times by Vladimir Putin in which the Russian leader criticized American exceptionalism.

Russian President Vladimir Putin

Maxim Strashko/Getty Images

Beyond those PR efforts, which include regular Russia Beyond the Headlines inserts into The Washington Post , the Kremlin also appears to finance a number of less-visible news outlets around the world, often targeted to specific audienceslike financial news readersor language populations. Their readership is much higher than you might think. Theyre really good on social media, the European official says, explaining that one survey had mapped thousands of Russia-linked channels in dozens of countries. We dont know how many disinformation channels there are, he says. They have the full spectrum from full conspiracy to more trustworthy-appearing. Its information carpet-bombinglets hit as many tools as we can. (In 2015 The New York Times documented at length the countless hoaxes launched by just one of these groups, the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm in St. Petersburg.)

The reach of these efforts encompasses all levers of Russian power. One European researcher recalled with dark appreciation meeting a Russian Orthodox priest in a small city in the Czech Republic who ably parroted Kremlin propaganda and explained how he regularly received church bulletins reporting the truth about Russia. As the researcher says, Here was a priest speaking to a tiny population in a mostly atheist country, and he was still looped into the latest from the Kremlin.

Of course, not all of these efforts succeedSputnik shuttered many of its Scandinavian-language sites after they failed to gain traction in countries where English is widespreadbut the cumulative impact can be quite effective, muddying the waters across the political spectrum. According to a report that examined the effect of Russian disinformation efforts in central Europe, Although Russia has not been able to win the hearts and minds of the people in this region, it has managed to enchant them, ensuring that they are confused and frustrated, full of negative emotions toward their own values and institutions. The report concluded that, the goal of Russian propaganda is not necessarily to convince people that the Russian view of the world is the right one or that their interpretation of events is better, but rather to destroy and undermine confidence in the Western media.

Sometimes, too, Russia finds a witting or unwitting ally in its information efforts. The most high-profile example of the past 18 months, of course, has been Donald Trump. Every time he tweets #FAKENEWS about a story that is, in fact, true, he helps undermine the trust and confidence in a free and independent press. As Watts says, Not only was the Trump team willing to discuss with the Russians how to go about thisthats sort of coming outbut they were repeating verbatim themes pushed by the Kremlin: Clinton isnt healthy. She cant endure. Clinton is corrupt. Clinton emails. All of that was pumped very heavily by the Russians even before Trump was a serious candidate. Then going into the last two months: Election fraud, vote rigged, Sanders got a raw deal. It was all started by the Kremlin, and Trump repeated all of it.

Cyber

Perhaps nowhere is the blurring of lines between intelligence operations and organized crime groups more clear than in cyberspace, where Western law enforcement officials say that theyve seen a steady rise of hybrid operations involving both organized crime and Russian officials. During the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, the FBI watched as Evgeny Bogachev, who was indicted for running the GameOver Zeus botneta complex financial fraud that stole more than $100 million from US banksused his network of malware-infected computers to mine for classified information about Ukraine, Georgia, Turkey, and other Russian adversaries. Similarly, this spring, US authorities indicted four peopletwo Russian intelligence officers and two notorious Russian cybercriminalsfor the hacking of nearly a billion Yahoo accounts.

The FBI's wanted poster for Evgeniy Bogachev, who, during the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine, used his network of malware-infected computers to mine for classified information about Ukraine, Georgia, Turkey, and other Russian adversaries.

FBI/AP

The government itself employs sophisticated hacking teams. According to US investigators, the hack of the DNCs servers was apparently the work of two separate Russian teams, one from the GRU and one from the FSB, neither of which appears to have known the other was also rooting around in the Democratic Partys files. From there, the plundered files were laundered through online leak sites like WikiLeaks and DCLeaks, the later of which, cybersecurity researchers say, is a front for the GRU. Their impact on the 2016 election was sizable, yielding months of damaging headlines and helping confuse voters about whether Hillary Clintons emails as secretary of state had been compromised by the Russian government. Trump himself mentioned Wikileaks and the emails at least 164 times in the final month of the campaign, saying at one point, Boy, that WikiLeaks has done a job on her, hasntit?

But Russias cyber efforts have not been limited to financial fraud and information operations. More nefariously, Russia has repeatedly deployed cyber-activities in countries like Estonia and Ukraine, as WIREDs Andy Greenberg traced in his cover story this spring, How to Turn a Country Off. The targeting of critical infrastructure like electrical grids and the mass disruption of online commerce and services through distributed denial of service attacks (which flood computer networks with bogus web traffic) remains just shy of overt warfare, allowing Russia to advance its geopolitical goals while remaining below the threshold that would prompt a real-world military response.

Beyond attacks on nation states, though, these cyber operations relentlessly pursue individual critics of the regime as well. Last summer, the World Anti-Doping Agency announced that hackersbelieved to be linked to the Russian governmenthad accessed the personal information and address of Yulia Stepanova, an 800-meter runner who had been a key whistle-blower in Russias long-term athletic doping efforts. The announcement forced Stepanova, who had already fled to the US for safety, to move again to a new, undisclosed location.

Energy

Russia boasts the worlds largest natural gas reserves and the seventh-largest oil reserves and has long viewed Europes dependence on its hydrocarbonsroughly a third of Europes oil comes from Russian pipelines, as does even more of its natural gasas a tool to be deployed geopolitically, especially since its top energy companies, like the state-owned Rosneft and Gazprom, are closely allied with Putins inner circle.

Since 2006, Russia has repeatedly played politics with its gas exports, each time with the goal of punishing Ukraine. In the winter of 2009, during a dispute with Ukraine, Russia dramatically reduced the amount of natural gas piped into that country, which had the downstream effect of paralyzing other eastern European neighbors like Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, and Croatia. The move sparked immediate crises, as industry was hobbled and fuel for heat became scarce in the middle of a cold snap.

The weaponization of oil and gas, though, has been only partially successful. For one thing, Russia is simply too reliant on the hard currency that foreign oil and gas sales provide, and the sustained low cost of oil is wreaking havoc on the Russian economy. Meanwhile, the rise of shale oil, liquefied natural gas, and renewables like wind and solar is allowing European nations to diversify and draw on a wider set of options to heat their homes and power their economies.

At the same time, though, Russia and Europe are moving forward with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would bypass eastern Europe and deliver natural gas straight to Germany, increasing that countrys reliance on Russian exports even as it provides a potential pathway for Russia to cut off Ukraines gas supply without affecting its neighbors.

A Rosneft oil rig in the Khatanga Bay, photographed on April 3, 2017. The company is closely aligned with Putin's inner circle, and since 2006 Russia has repeatedly played politics with its gas exports.

Vladimir Smirnov/Getty Images

Money

The long-standing ties between Russian business and the more shadowy worlds of intelligence and criminal enterprise has meant that theres no shortage of cash to throw around to advance Russias interests overseas and woo possible help.

According to US and European intelligence officials, Russia regularly funnels cash to fringe political parties across Europe that might trumpet pro-Kremlin rhetoric, a practice datindg back to the Cold War. The US has not been exempt from this practice: During the 1968 presidential campaign, the long-time Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin offered financial assistance to Richard Nixons opponent, Democratic candidate Hubert Humphreyonly to have the aid firmly rejected.

Not all candidatesor business leadersare as quick to refuse Russian money. Money is a weapon used to buy weapons, Donnelly says. How many Brits take consultancy payments from Russian companies? How seriously is the British ability to respond to Russian geopolitical aggression compromised because of the hundreds of millions that have been launderedI mean invested in London? The answer is: considerably.

In many ways, these ties between Russian officials, oligarchs, and commercial enterprises make it hard to separate out business, politics, and espionage. According to Senate testimony this summer by hedge fund leader turned anticorruption activist Bill Browder, Putin has struck a deal with the countrys oligarchs that allows them to pillage the countrys economy in exchange for personal kickbacks. From that moment on, Putin became the biggest oligarch in Russia and the richest man in the world, Browder said . Recent revelations from the Panama Papers have shown that Putins closest childhood friend, Sergei Roldugin, a famous cellist, received $2 billion from Russian oligarchs and the Russian state.

When the Russian SVR intelligence service tried in 2013 to recruit Carter Page, who went on to be a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, it was partly because Page wanted to do business with Gazprom. One Russian SVR officer was caught on an FBI listening device saying about Page: He got hooked on Gazprom thinking that if they have a project, he could rise up. Maybe he can. I dont know, but its obvious that he wants to earn lots of money. For now his enthusiasm works for me. I also promised him a lot: that I have connections in the Trade Representation, meaning that you can push contracts [ Laughs .] I will feed him empty promises.

Donnelly says he thinks that if Trump himself were ever targeted by Russian intelligence as part of his business dealings in Russia, it wasnt because of any prescience. It was just business as usual inside Russia. The Russians didnt identify Donald Trump six years ago as a likely president. Donnelly says. Every rich powerful person heading to Moscow is going to be targeted.

Violence

Then theres what is known as Mokroye Dyelo , the so-called wet business of beatings and assassinations that have long targeted regime critics and potential threats like Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, murdered in Mexico City in 1940. The goal isnt the elimination of overseas criticism but merely to inject enough fear into the Russian diaspora that it remains quiet and docile.

In the past few decades, dozens of Russian officials and Putin critics have died under suspicious circumstances. Often the assassinations are brazen, intended to send a message that public criticism will only be tolerated for so long. In 2006, former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London by radioactive polonium, a particularly noisy method of murder. Just a month before Litvinenkos death, the muckraking journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot to death in Moscow on Putins birthday. More recently, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down within view of the Kremlin. And this spring, another opposition candidate, Alexei Navalny, suffered an eye injury after he was attacked on the street with a chemical agent. Another political activist, Vladimir Kara-Murza, who testified before the US Congress this spring, said that hed twice been poisoned, both times hovering near death in a coma.

Russian police investigators stand near the body of Russian opposition leader and former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, who was gunned down on Bolshoi Moskvoretsky bridge near St. Basil Cathedral on February 28, 2015, in central Moscow.

Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images

Another favorite of Russias special services is the suspicious suicide, like the December 2007 death of banker Oleg Zhukovsky, who had opposed the Kremlins efforts to take over his financial institution. According to authorities, Zhukovsky killed himself after pinning a suicide note to his chest, tying himself to a chair, placing a bag over his head, and throwing himself into his swimming pool.

More recently, it hasnt escaped the notice of investigators and intelligence services that there have been a number of suspicious deaths tied to the 2016 election operation, including a one-time KGB official who appears to have been a source for the infamous Christopher Steele dossier assembled about alleged Trump ties to Russia. Follow the trail of dead Russians, Watts told the US Senate this spring during a hearing about Russias interference in the election. There havebeen more dead Russians in the past three months that are tied to this investigation. They are dropping dead, even in Western countries.

Russian wet business doesnt always involve humans: US diplomats were aghast when, as part of an escalating harassment campaign against American officials in Moscow in the years since Putin retook office in 2012, Russian intelligence broke into the home of the US Embassys defense attach and killed his dog.

Kompromat

While intelligence agencies the world over routinely blackmail and exploit emotional pressure points, Russia has long excelled in the use of kompromat , compromising material of a financial, sexual, or health-related nature that can coerce covert cooperationor silence critics.

The history of Russian politics is dotted by the release of compromising sex tapesone of which, authentic or not, helped lead to the firing of a prosecutor investigating Boris Yeltsins government. In August 2009, an American diplomat named Kyle Hatcher was caught up in a scandal over what the US Embassy declared was a faked sex tape that mixed video of Hatcher with scenes of another couple having sex. Clearly the video we saw was a montage of lots of different clips, some of which are clearly fabricated, ambassador John Beyrle told ABC News at the time, pointing to the fact that Hatcher worked on outreach to human rights groups as one reason he was likely targeted. There may be some people here who dont like that job description and would like to discredit him in the eyes of his contacts.

Visiting journalists, diplomats, and influential figures are warned to beware of honeypots, people trying to seduce them or strangers offering deals that are seemingly too good to be true. Donnelly says hes seen all too many people fall victim to such ploys, nearly all of which play out in similarly damaging wayslike when a senior manager at a US bank branch in Moscow was targeted for blackmail and eventually had to be pulled out of the country. That gets him out of Russia, but it doesnt solve the problem, Donnelly says. Now you have someone the Russians can blackmail operating in London, who can be pressured to do things.

Espionage

Russia takes special advantage of the openness of Western democracies to conduct advanced spying operations, leaning heavily on its UN consulate staff in New York to cloak intelligence officers under diplomatic cover. But Russia has also excelled over the years at hiding nonofficial cover agents, so-called NOCs, inside US society.

In 2010, after a years-long investigation known as Operation Ghost Stories, the FBI arrested 10 sleeper SVR agents who had been living under deep cover for years, working in seemingly apolitical jobs along the East Coast. That case, which inspired the FX series The Americans , captured the public imagination in part because the arrests included Anna Chapman, a striking redhead who became front-page tabloid fodder.

In early 2015, the FBI arrested another NOC, Evgeny Buryakov, who had been working in the New York office of the Russian investment bank VEB. Buryakov was expelled from the country earlier this year after spending more than a year in federal lockupthe first Russian intelligence officer to be imprisoned in the US in four decades.

In this courtroom sketch, Evgeny Buryakov, center, and his attorneys Daniel Levin, left, and Scott Hershman attend a federal court hearing on Friday, March 11, 2016, in New York City. Buryakov pleaded guilty to conspiracy and agreed to a 2 1/2-year prison sentence.

Elizabeth Williams/AP

Others cases have demonstrated the depth and breadth of Russian intelligence operations within the US. In 2012, the FBI arrested 11 people in Texas on charges of participating in what it called a Russian military procurement network, smuggling high tech tools out of the US. In 2015, one of those involved, businessman Alexander Fishenko, pleaded guilty to a 10-year effort helping smuggle more than $50 million in illegal technology to Russia through his Houston business, Arc Electronics. Arc would receive shopping lists from Russian entities, and they would go about acquiring the parts on the shopping lists, FBI agent Crosby Houpt testified.

Not all spies are caught or expelled, thoughmany operate under close surveillance by the FBI, which is responsible for domestic counterintelligence efforts. The FBI maintains surveillance posts that watch the entrances and exits at Russian missions across the country. Neighbors have long joked about suspiciously empty houses next door to the embassy in Washington, DC, and outside the massive apartment complex in the Bronx that houses most of Russias UN staffseemingly vacant houses with drawn blinds and where the newspapers and mail are unfailingly collected.

Suspected Russian intelligence officers at the embassy in DC are assigned to two-agent FBI teams out of the Washington field office, who are responsible both for monitoring the officers activities as well as potentially laying the groundwork for possible recruitment as a spy or double-agent.

Sometimes that surveillance turns up intriguing and troubling intelligence operations: This spring, Politicos Ali Watkins reported that US officials were concerned that an abnormally large number of domestic trips by Russian diplomats were a ruse to map the nations fiber-optic internet cables. As a source told Watkins, They find these guys driving around in circles in Kansas. Its a pretty aggressive effort.

Diplomacy

Through old-fashioned diplomacy, glad-handing, and a liberal dose of money, Putins government has amassed a varied set of Western political allies, from UK nationalist leader Nigel Farage to Michael Flynn, Trumps former national security adviser. While much of the attention has focused on the Kremlin's boosting of far-right nationalist movements in Europe, Russia is just as likely to embrace a far-left politician, as it did with 2016 Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who sat at a table with Flynn and Vladimir Putin during a December 2015 gala dinner in Russia. (Flynn was paid upward of $40,000 for his presence.) Its not that important what youre for, its about what youre against. If youre against Europe, against globalization, they dont care whether youre a communist or a fascist, the European official explained.

Their goals are essentially to rebuild the Soviet Unions territory, and to do that youve got to get rid of two things: the NATO alliance and the European Union, Watts says. The way theyre going to go about doing that is by trying to develop audiences and then elected officials in each of these countries that want the same objective on a foreign policy level.

In this photo taken on December 10, 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin, center right, is seated with retired US Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, center left, and the Green Party's US presidential candidate Jill Stein, right.

Mikhail Klimentyev/AP

The co-chair of the US-Russia Economic Relations Caucus in Congress was at one point Michael Grimm, a former FBI agent known as Mikey Suits, who as a congressman was charged with 20 counts of fraud, wire fraud, and tax evasion. He pleaded guilty to a single felony, resigned from Congress, and was sentenced to eight months in federal prison.

The movie star Steven Seagal has cultivated a close relationship with Putin, based in part on their shared love of martial arts, and just before last years election the Russian government announced it was awarding him Russian citizenship . The embassy and the Russian government have also engaged in strange relationships with fringe secessionist movements in Texas and California and courted conservative groups like the Family Research Council.

To win over more friends, Russia annually flies American influencers on all-expenses-paid trips to its Valdai Discussion Club, a Putin-era invention set on the banks of Lake Valdai, outside St. Petersburg. The annual conference is Russias attempt to create a competitor to the West-centric Davos World Economic Forum and culminates in a large-group meeting with Putin himself. But its nascent prestige has foundered since the Crimea invasion, and today the Discussion Club has been largely populated by Putin sycophants and apologists.

THE TRADECRAFT

Part of what makes the active-measures playbook effective, according to Western intelligence, is that the tactics are guided not just by Putins grand strategic goals but by uniquely Russian tradecraft which differs in key respects from Western efforts. The illegals operation was typical of Russian efforts: Run by the SVRs Directorate S, the branch responsible for nontraditional or illegal espionage, it was the kind of long-term play US intelligence agenciesbuffeted by ever-shifting political appointeesrarely attempt.

And whereas the technological prowess of American and European intelligence has led to those agencies sometimes overrelying on signals intelligence intercepted calls and emailsRussian intelligence has tended to prize human sources and well-placed spies. That mindset stems in part from the fact that Russians, coming from a traditionally closed society where the media operates as an extension of the state and where misleading propaganda abounds, distrust the open source news and information of Western society.

As part of the Buryakov case, the FBI used an undercover agent to plant bugged binders inside the SVRs rezidentura in New York that yielded hours and hours of recorded conversations in the heart of Russias US intelligence base. The surveillance provided a rare peek into the realities of Russian tradecraft. Even the FBI special agent who oversaw the operationMaria Ricci, a Columbia University English major-turned-spyhunter who has spent the past 15 years chasing Russian spies in the USwas disturbed by the ruthlessness documented in the surveillance. [They] were brutal in the way they used people. They squeezed them like a lemon and then discarded the rind, Ricci told me last summer. This isnt about just stealing classified information. This is about stealing you. Its about having you in a Rolodex down the road when they need it.

Ricci, who was central to both the illegals operation and the Buryakov case, told me that the FBI often sees Americans become unwitting agents, passing along useful tips to Russian officers without realizing who theyre dealing with. When the Russians come to you, they dont say, Hey, Im an intelligence officer, she says. They say, Hey, friend, itd be useful to have this information.

But recorded conversations made clear that the friendships were, to the Russian intelligence officers, nothing more than business transactions. As one of the SVR officers said on the tapes, How else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself. But not to upset you, I will take you to a restaurant and give you an expensive gift. You just need to sign for it. This is ideal working method.

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A Guide to Russia's High Tech Tool Box for Subverting US Democracy - WIRED