South Dakotans who interacted with Maria Butina during her time in Sioux Falls are surprised to discover just how close they were to a now-accused Russian spy.
She was invited to family dinners of buffalo steaks, shot pheasants with local hunters and established a track record of speaking to American students about gun rights. It would eventually become the blueprint for her outreach efforts to Washington and the National Rifle Association, where the FBI says she established connections “based on common views and a system of conservative values.”
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Butina made Sioux Falls, the state’s largest city, her home base in the US for several stays in 2014 and 2015 before moving to Washington on a student visa. It was there that she got her first US cell phone, with a South Dakota area code, and wrote detailed observations of how American institutions worked, from local elections to college campuses. While the FBI has focused on “the groundwork that Butina and the Russian official laid to influence high-level politicians” in 2015, her time in South Dakota was mainly spent with average Americans.
That fits with what former intelligence officers told BuzzFeed News her likely purpose was — to gather information and develop access to influential US figures.
“When she was connecting on a very local level she was getting information on how our society works and building her back story,” said Alex Finley, a former CIA operations officer.
In that sense, Butina's time in the US was similar to that of Russians who traveled to several states in 2014 for the Internet Research Agency, a state-sponsored troll farm indicted for trying to meddle in the 2016 election — “she was figuring out how things work, what are the political divisions on the local level, what could you exploit,” Finley said.
Although her subsequent efforts to set up high-level meetings were often clumsy, and not always successful, her time in South Dakota seemed to prove that when it came to the issue of gun rights, Russians had found a valuable access point to US conservatives.
Full story: Accused Russian Agent's Journey To Washington Began In South Dakota (BuzzFeed News)