How the spies hid behind bitcoin

In early 2016, Russian intelligence officers obtained a new pool of the virtual currency Bitcoin. They quickly put the digital money to work.

The Russian spies used some of the Bitcoins to pay for the registration of a website, dcleaks.com, where they would later post emails that had been stolen from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. When the operatives needed a computer server to host the dcleaks site, they paid for that with Bitcoins as well.

The transactions were detailed in an indictment from the Justice Department. The indictment provided one of the clearest illustrations to date of the inner workings of the