US catches Kremlin insider who may have secrets of 2016 hack

Bloomberg

In the days before Christmas, US officials in Boston unveiled insider trading charges against a Russian tech tycoon they had been pursuing for months. They accused Vladislav Klyushin, who’d been extradited from Switzerland on Dec. 18, of illegally making tens of millions of dollars trading on hacked corporate-earnings information.
Yet as authorities laid out their securities fraud case, a striking portrait of the detainee emerged: Klyushin was not only an accused insider trader, but a Kremlin insider. He ran an information technology company that works with the Russian government’s top echelons. Just 18 months earlier, Klyushin received a medal of honor from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The US had, in its custody, the highest-level Kremlin insider handed to US law enforcement in recent memory.
Klyushin’s cybersecurity work and Kremlin ties could make him a useful source of information for US officials, according to several people familiar with Russian intelligence matters. Most critically, these people said, if he chooses to cooperate, he could provide Americans with their closest view yet of 2016 election manipulation.
According to people in Moscow who are close to the Kremlin and security services, Russian intelligence has concluded that Klyushin, 41, has access to documents relating to a Russian campaign to hack Democratic Party servers during the 2016 US election. These documents, they say, establish the hacking was led by a team in Russia’s GRU military intelligence that US cybersecurity companies have dubbed “Fancy Bear” or APT28. Such a cache would provide the US for the first time with detailed documentary evidence of the alleged Russian efforts to influence the election, according to these people.
Klyushin’s path to the US — his flight from Moscow via private jet, his arrest in Switzerland, and his wait in jail as Russia and the US competed to win his extradition — is described in US, European and Swiss legal filings, as well as in accounts of more than a half-dozen people with knowledge of the matter who requested anonymity to speak about Moscow’s efforts and its causes for concern.
According to these accounts, Klyushin was approached by US and UK spy agencies in the two years before his exit from Russia and received heightened levels of security in Switzerland. He also missed a final chance to appeal his extradition, an omission that baffled many observers in Moscow. His transfer to the US represents a serious intelligence blow to the Kremlin, several of the people said, one that would deepen if Klyushin decides to seek leniency from US prosecutors by providing information about Moscow’s inner workings.
Three of the people added that they believe that Klyushin has access to secret records of other high-level GRU operations abroad. Russian military intelligence agents in recent years have been linked to a series of hacking attacks as well as the attempted chemical poisoning assassination of dissident ex-GRU colonel Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the UK in 2018. Russia has denied involvement.