Ep.

70: An Unlikely Teacher: What Wagner Group learned from ISIS

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Ryan is 15 years old, a sophomore in high school, and he lives in
Northern California. And we’re only using his first name for reasons that will become clear
in a moment. Sometimes, late at night, strange music comes from behind his bedroom
door.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Ryan is a bit of a musician. He plays the violin and one night as he was
scrolling through YouTube videos, he heard this strange variation on a classical song he
knew.

RYAN: I said, this is, I know exactly where this is from, this is just a verbatim copy from
somebody else’s music.

[MUSIC]

RYAN: The first few measures of the song, like the main theme of the song, is stolen from
Karl Jenkins who wrote Palladio, which is where it was stolen from.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: It had been transformed from a classical song to a head banging heavy
metal one by an organization Ryan had recently become obsessed with: The Wagner Group.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: They’d lifted the song, it seems, without permission, which drove young
Ryan crazy.

RYAN: I don't really see anybody mentioning that the person who wrote the song about
Wagner is meant, is like violating copyright.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Which seems almost beside the point because copyright infringement is
probably the least of people’s concern when it comes to the Wagner Group, they’re the
private Russian army that may now be best known for committing war crimes in Ukraine.
The group has been working behind the scenes for years to help Vladimir Putin extend his

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reach around the world. They’re protecting local government officials in Mali, mining blood
diamonds in the Central African Republic, and most recently were front and center when
the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut finally fell to Russian forces. And the more Ryan looked into
Wagner after he heard that song, the more fascinated he became by them.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Ryan says his obsession with studying Wagner probably got its start a few
years ago, yeah, that would be when he was 12. He became intrigued by how much he could
discover about the world just by piecing together disparate clues online. And at first he did
simple things like identify pictures on the web and find exactly where they were taken on a
map. And then he tried more complicated things.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And what was the first sort of thing that you discovered that you thought
was really cool?

RYAN: Through geolocation I was able to figure out where a drone attack occurred in
Odessa. I actually felt like I had accomplished something.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Odessa, the major seaport in Ukraine. And then, as Ryan was learning just
how much he can discover about the world just sitting in front of his computer, Russia
invaded Ukraine. At which point he started to focus his sleuthing on the war.

RYAN: There were so many, there are so many videos and images and information coming
out of this event every day that you can really go in and analyze what's happening just
based on open source information online.

TEMPLE-RASTON: What he was doing is a thing known as open source intelligence. He

started trying to figure out who exactly was fighting. What kind of Russians were supporting
the war and why? And these roads kept leading him back to one place: The Wagner Group.
They’re hard to miss, even if you’re just studying the war from afar like Ryan. Their online
presence is massive, and everywhere.

RYAN: There's songs about Wagner that are playing on the radio in Donetsk and Luhansk
and they're releasing rap videos. And they've actually made, like, propaganda films about
Wagner, there’s films about Wagner's training.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Among other things, he discovered their crazy GoPro battle videos.

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[SOUND OF WAGNER GOPRO BATTLE VIDEOS]

TEMPLE-RASTON: This was a multimedia extravaganza aimed at convincing young recruits

to come join the fight. What Ryan didn’t know at the time was that those tactics weren’t
something Wagner dreamed up, like that song that first caught his attention, Wagner
swiped all those techniques from another group, one that managed to lure tens of
thousands of people to fight in Syria, and that group was the Islamic State, or ISIS.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: I’m Dina Temple-Raston, and this is Click Here, a podcast about all things
cyber and intelligence. Today, we look at the Wagner Group’s unusual recruiting efforts,
strategies they appear to have taken straight from ISIS. What's ironic is that the Wagner
Group was largely created some 10 years ago essentially for the purpose of fighting ISIS in
Syria. The tricks of the recruiting trade Wagner learned back then are advancing their new
effort in Ukraine and it appears to be incredibly effective.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Stay with us.

[BREAK]

TEMPLE-RASTON: So are you just sort of scrolling through these Telegram channels while
you’re in class?

RYAN: I wouldn’t say in class, doesn’t sound great for me, but whenever I have some time.

TEMPLE-RASTON: In other words, instead of playing Minecraft or hanging out with friends,
Ryan started coming home from school everyday to look for everything he could find about
the Wagner Group. Then he started this blog, Nordsint. His dad helped him set it up, and AI
came up with the name. And people actually start following it. Professional researchers
actually started tracking Ryan’s work, commenting on it, adding to it. And the thing they all
seemed to want to know was this: what compels people to join Wagner? And Ryan, in that
way only a 15-year-old can, just decided to ask them. Of course he couldn’t say, I’m an open
source researcher in high school, they’d never respond. So instead he started creating
personas, people he thought might get Wagner’s attention.

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RYAN: I would just directly contact them and say, Hey, I am interested in joining Wagner.
Here is my information.

TEMPLE-RASTON: He used ChatGPT to translate his messages into Russian.

RYAN: I was posing as a 22 year olds recruit at the time. My father died and my mother
doesn't want me to go to Ukraine. That was the character I was using.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And the first time you did that, how long before they got back to you? Was
it right away?

RYAN: It was like a few hours. Yeah.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Apparently their HR department is very responsive. One of the group’s

recruiters in Russia began corresponding with him directly. He began asking Ryan questions
about himself. Where did he live? What kind of fighting experience did he have? What were
his long-term goals? You know, the standard job screening questions.

RYAN: I mean typically you message them, you know, saying that you're interested in joining
Wagner and then they will ask you to provide, you know, your documents. Maybe they ask
you, have you served in the military? What city do you live in?

TEMPLE-RASTON: And just to be clear: his parents gave us permission to talk to him about
his research. And in return we promised not to use his last name to keep them safe.

RYAN: The first time I did it I was thinking like, you know, there is no way that this is actually
happening.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Some 9,000 of Wagner’s troops are thought to have died in Ukraine
already. So Wagner continuously needs more recruits, just warm bodies really, not the best
or the brightest, not the most ideologically aligned, just bodies.

This, not so coincidentally, is exactly the position ISIS found itself in 2013 and 2014 when it
took over huge sections of Syria and Iraq. To hang onto that land, ISIS needed fighters, so it

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built a flashy recruitment campaign complete with battle field movies, catchy rap videos,
and entire YouTube channels.

By 2015 some 30,000 fighters from at least 85 different countries had joined the group,
most of them came from the Arab world. But ISIS’s ability to recruit foreign fighters from
Europe and the U.S. became a global phenomenon. If it sounds familiar, it should, this is
what Wagner is trying to do.

Its leader is a man named Yevgeny Prigozhin. He led Wagner’s battle against ISIS in Syria.
What’s become clear now is that while he was fighting them, he was taking notes on how
they recruited.

[AUDIO OF YEVGENY PRIGOZHIN]

RYAN: Yevgeny Prigozhin is trying to promote Wagner as a brand.

TEMPLE-RASTON: More recently Ryan has seen signs of Wagner moving their efforts into the
real world, with an aggressive advertising campaign. They even had a contest.

RYAN: If you took a picture with the billboard in the background showing you, you could
claim Wagner Group merchandise at a recruiting center, which they have, which they
opened a bunch in gyms in March.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Gyms, you mean like, like where you work out?

RYAN: Yeah, they opened recruitment centers in gyms and it's just a table with one or two
people sitting there with a Wagner flag on the desk saying, you know, we are recruiting for
Wagner. You can come join us.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Post your picture in front of the Wagner billboard, come meet up with us
at our recruiting booth at your local gym and get a t-shirt or a thermos and maybe a hard
sell to come join the group.

And all of this marketing effort seems to be paying off. The United Kingdom’s Ministry of
Defense and DOD in the U.S. estimate that Wagner has as many as 50,000 fighters in
Ukraine. And a lot of what Ryan has been trying to understand in his research was why?

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RYAN: So what entices so many people to join Wagner? Is it the money or is it something
else?

TEMPLE-RASTON: The answer, in part, is that in their own way, Wagner targets a particular
cohort just like ISIS did. Young men down on their luck, isolated from society. ISIS preyed on
young Muslim men. Wagner recruits in rural areas of Russia. It looks for people who have no
jobs or no money or people fresh out of prison, people like this guy.

MARAT GABIDULLIN: My name is Marat Gabidullin. I am former Wagner Group.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And we’ll meet him. This is Click Here. Stay with us.

[MUSIC]

[BREAK]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Marat Gabidullin joined Wagner in 2015 about a year after Russia illegally
annexed Crimea.

TEMPLE-RASTON: How did they recruit you?

GABIDULLIN: That was actually me who found them, I found out about them and they
specified the address and I went there.

TEMPLE-RASTON: We’re speaking to him with the help of an interpreter. Marat fought under
the Wagner banner in the Donbas region of Ukraine, one of those so-called little green men
that fought in Crimea. He was part of the Wagner contingent that went toe to toe with ISIS
in Syria.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Before joining Wagner he had a legitimate military career. He started as a

Russian paratrooper back in 1993 and eventually rose to the rank of commander and he
was in charge of a Russian Air Force reconnaissance unit. But then he ran into some trouble.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: He said an administrative error led to his separating from the military.
And when he got out, he said he got tangled up with a crime boss in Moscow.

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GABIDULLIN: I ended up shooting him and as a result I was sentenced to prison time and I
was in prison. It was a difficult period of time for me. I was under a lot of stress and I didn't
know if I would succeed anywhere else and I thought that this would be a good place to
start.

TEMPLE-RASTON: He wasn’t sure if anyone would hire him after his time in prison. Until he
started talking with the Wagner Group.

GABIDULLIN: And to join the Wagner group, it did not matter whether you have criminal
history or not.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The recruiter was completely unphased by the murder charge against
him. In fact, Wagner recruits heavily in his exact demographic, people with rap sheets.
Probably because they know people like him are desperate for work. So they were like, yeah
yeah, prison that’s fine, we just want to know if you know how to fight. And then they sent
him to a kind of boot camp to see if he really did.

GABIDULLIN: I arrived to the station that they specified, it was like a military tent with the
command personnel in there. So I went in, I showed my documents, they put me on the list
of candidates and then they started testing. And testing included, you know, my knowledge
of the military, my physical condition, my medical condition, then there was an interview
including the polygraph.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Were you there for hours?

GABIDULLIN: Two days.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: He was essentially interviewing for a job as a private soldier which they
wanted to make clear had all the downsides of being a government soldier.

GABIDULLIN: During the first conversation, they tell you right away that the purpose while
you are there is to participate in the war. And everything can happen. You can die. You can
get killed. You know, you can become disabled. So you have to make up your mind now and
decide if you want it or not.

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TEMPLE-RASTON: Marat worked and fought for Wagner for four years. He said his last job
was being a kind of aide-de-camp to Wagner’s leader Prigozhin and he just got sick of it.

GABIDULLIN: He started appointing commanders to different units and groups, not based
on their like military background, but trust was based on how close they were to him. They
could do whatever they wanted. They were like little kings or czars.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So he left.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: The thing about the Wagner group is that while it has been around for
nearly a decade, until recently it didn’t officially exist. For years, Russian law prohibited the
very existence of mercenaries and private military security contractors. But the Russian
parliament recently allowed an exception to that so Wagner could operate more openly.

CATRINA DOXSEE: Wagner is increasingly treated openly as a tool of the Russian state.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Catrina Doxsee is a researcher at the Center for Strategic and

International Studies in Washington, D.C. and she tracks terrorist groups and she says
people tend to see Wagner as a private military contractor but actually it’s so much more
than that. Soldiers-for-hire is just a small part of what they do. They are a full service
paramilitary operation.

DOXSEE: Commercial entities, financial intermediaries, shell companies, basically this web
of different entities that is as opaque as possible, by design. That's to make it more difficult
to track their activities, to hold them accountable.

TEMPLE-RASTON: They may keep their operations opaque, but their leader Prigozhin puts
himself out there all the time.

[AUDIO OF YEVGENY PRIGOZHIN]

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is a video he released to declare that Wagner had seized the
contested Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. The video is really rudimentary. The wind is blowing,
Prigozhin is wearing a helmet and a flak jacket and he’s trying to hold a Russian flag in
front of him but the wind keeps whipping it around. A bunch of Wagner mercenaries are

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standing behind him. And while he says they were now in control of the city, if you listen
closely you can still hear a barrage of artillery fire so the fight was still going on.

[SOUND OF BOMB]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Since Putin gave them his seal of approval, Wagner has just become more
public and the marketing blitz that kid Ryan in California saw has only been ramping up.
There are new songs.

[WAGNER RAP SONG]

TEMPLE-RASTON: “Boring month in civilian life, chicks, cash, vanity,” the lyrics say.
“I want to blow up tanks, I want to blow up the enemy.” New videos with fast cuts of war, a
flash of tanks, explosions, guys in camo, all to the beat of the music.

[PORNHUB AD]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Wagner also started buying ads on Pornhub, an internet pornography

website. In this one, a woman’s voice says in Russian: “We’re the most fucking badass
private army in the world. We recruit from all Russia’s regions. Don’t jerk off, go to work for
PMC Wagner.”

Apparently that kind of logic works on someone. Murat, the Wagner soldier who left the
group in 2019, said he’s seen the latest Wagner media blitz.

GABIDULLIN: Yes. I watched two movies. And that was it. I mean, I couldn't watch anymore.

[MOVIE CLIP]

TEMPLE-RASTON: He couldn’t watch because of the way they twist things or make events
up.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So what upsets you about the movies is not emotional, something that
reminds you of the fight. What upsets you is the lies?

GABIDULLIN: Oh yes. And everything is very untrue.

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TEMPLE-RASTON: The fight Wagner has put on the screen shows its soldiers as heroes,
being welcomed by local crowds, which Marat said is not at all what he saw when he fought
with them. That’s part of why he got out in 2019. Since then, he settled in France and wrote
a book about his experience. But since the war shows no sign of slowing down, the Wagner
Group doesn’t either. Their appetite for recruits is just getting more voracious.

GABIDULLIN: At this point, they need to hire as many people as possible to fill their ranks.
And for that reason they're trying to hire anyone who is able to hold a gun.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Or, it turns out, anyone who can hold a keyboard. Catrina Doxsee says
Wagner has started advertising not just for people willing to hold a gun but also for people
with technical expertise as well.

DOXSEE: Now hey! Are you a tech guy? Are you into coding? Do you want to think about an
application of those skills where you can further our mission?

TEMPLE-RASTON: Ryan, that amateur sleuth in California, says they’re also starting a kind
of community outreach program to lure coders into the Wagner fold. It’s still on a small
scale but Ryan has seen invites to events Wagner is hosting. Get togethers with people of
Ryan’s age. Come hang out at the Wagner Center, they say, play Counterstrike, go on a field
trip with us to a museum or learn how to hack a drone or crack into a network. In fact, Ryan
spotted just such an announcement in the Wagner Telegram channel. And in that case they
were sponsoring a hackathon and a competition with hot technology right now.

RYAN: An AI generated art competition, you know, with different themes like Russian
soldiers or something like that and what I see is that this is a way to kind of target younger
people who have the skills and that they want.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Or that they'll need in the future.

RYAN: Yes. Yeah, definitely.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Catrina Doxsee says Wagner adding cyber to the portfolio makes perfect
sense. It’ll be another tool Prigozhin’s army-for-hire can offer “clients” as they move from
grinding ground wars to battles in cyberspace, too.

DOXSEE: If indeed Wagner is trying to expand its cyber capabilities, I think it's perfectly
reasonable to assume that this is, in part, based on just the realities of modern warfare and

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perhaps an expectation that Wagner will increasingly be involved in these more complex
multi-domain operations.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: As effective as Wagner’s efforts have been, not everyone is being taken in.

[VLADIMIR OSECHKIN TAKES A CALL]

VLADIMIR OSECHKIN: It's just, please, one minute. It's one of our hero call to me. One, just,
just one minute.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Vladimir Osechkin is the founder of Gulag.net and he helps Russian

dissidents escape from Russia. Some of his clients are former members of the Wagner
group. He’s taking a call from one of them now.

OSECHKIN: Sorry for this, uh, its ex-soldier of Wagner Group. Uh, now he's at home and I
sent to him some message that after one hour I will call you.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Is he okay?

OSECHKIN: Yes, he's okay. He's okay now. He's free. It's, it's okay. Not, not, now problem.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Vladimir lives in Paris where he says he’s been taking a lot of calls from
people desperate to get out of Russia, including members of the Wagner Group, who’ve
grown tired and afraid of the atrocities they’re being asked to participate in, which happens
to be another thing they have in common with ISIS.

OSECHKIN: When I contacted ex-members of the Wagner group. It's the same. It's the same.
They created the fear to, they created the scare of the tortures to be killed. It's terroristic
organization. Wagner Group and ISIS, a lot of things together. It’s very horrible to the world.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Even so, Wagner’s recruiting doesn’t seem to be missing a beat. As long
as there are young men desperate for adventure, the Wagner Group is likely to keep finding
them and reeling them in. This is Click Here.

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______________________

TEMPLE-RASTON: Here are some of the top cyber and intelligence stories of the past week.

Russia’s telecom giant Ros-telecom may provide government officials with mobile phones
running on the Aurora operating system, a domestic alternative to Western software. The
Russian government is in talks with the company over the potential acquisition of up to 2
million mobile devices over the next three years, according to company officials. The
company made the plans public the same day Russia's Federal Security Service or FSB
accused U.S. intelligence of hacking “thousands of Apple phones” to spy on Russian
diplomats. According to reports from Russian media, Vladimir Putin instructed government
employees to exchange their iPhones for smartphones of other brands back in March. The
Kremlin also reportedly announced at the time that it would purchase new secure phones
for its employees to ease the transition away from American technology.

___

The U.S. government issued sanctions last week against an Iranian cloud technology
provider saying it helped facilitate Tehran’s internet censorship during the Mahsa Amini
protests at the end of last year and into the Spring of 2023. The Treasury Department’s
Office of Foreign Assets Control said ArvanCloud helped leaders in Tehran to set up a
parallel intranet within the country that allows the government to more easily control
access to online information. After the death of Amini while in custody of police, protests
swelled across Iran and the government restricted access to the internet and social media.
The OFAC statement said Arvan Cloud has a close relationship with Iran’s intelligence
services, including the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), and the company’s
executives have extensive ties to senior Iranian government officials and throttled the
internet at their behest.

___

And finally, city services in Dallas are getting back to normal after a ransomware attack
took down the networks of several key city agencies on May 3. Dallas Municipal Courts were
shuttered for almost a month. The offices reopened last Tuesday, but the city said trials and
jury duty are still on hold. The Texas city has slowly restored much of its network since the
Royal ransomware gang claimed responsibility for the attack that caused significant
damage to systems used by police, the fire department, courts, critical infrastructure and
more. Police officers have been forced to take handwritten notes, while firefighters said they

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are walking into dangerous situations blind without the typical information dispatchers
usually relay.

______________________

TEMPLE-RASTON: Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News. I’m Dina

Temple-Raston, the host and executive producer of the show. Our senior producer and
marketing director is Sean Powers, Will Jarvis is our producer and Sarah Wyman is our
writer/reporter. Karen Duffin and Lu Olkowski are our editors. Darren Ankrom is our fact
checker. Ben Levingston composes all the original music you hear in the episode and our
other music is from Blue Dot Sessions.

And we want to hear from you. Please leave us a review and rating wherever you get your
podcasts, and connect with us by email: Click Here at Recorded Future dot com or on our
website at ClickHereshow dot com. I’m Dina Temple-Raston. We’ll be back on Tuesday.

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