The latest indictment produced by the special counsel Robert Mueller is a brisk read. “You can see, in detail, how the Russian spies operated,” The New Yorker’s Adam Entous told me on Friday, a few hours after the document was made public. “You learn a ton.” The indictment accuses twelve Russian military-intelligence officers of interfering in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election by hacking the computers of people working for the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party, releasing material stolen from those computers to the public, and then trying to cover their tracks. It details how the Russians used various means, including the hacker persona Guccifer 2.0, to communicate with journalists and other people in the U.S. And, in one notable paragraph, the document says that the Russians tried to hack e-mail accounts used by Clinton’s personal office on July 27, 2016—the same day that Donald Trump, at a rally, publicly asked Russia to try to find Clinton’s “missing” e-mails.

But in other ways the indictment is a limited document. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who announced the charges at a press conference on Friday afternoon, went out of his way to say that, while the document describes various interactions the Russian officers had with people in the U.S., it does not accuse any Americans of committing any crimes. And though, as Entous says, the indictment offers a “damning” amount of detail about the methods the Russian officers used—computer programs, cryptocurrencies, aliases, and so on—it is completely silent on who ordered the Russian operation. The name Vladimir Putin does not appear in its pages. “It may not go there because that information is so highly classified,” Entous said. “The information the government has tying this to Putin is extremely sensitive. They would be reluctant to publicly reveal in detail how we know what we know because doing so could potentially damage our intelligence community’s ability to collect information about Putin in the future. He is an exceptionally hard target.”

The indictment does raise new questions about whether the F.B.I. could have done more to prevent Moscow’s interference. According to the document, the Russian conspirators used the fictitious name “Alice Donovan” to create a Facebook page to distribute some of the e-mails they stole. This should have set off alarm bells at the F.B.I., Entous said. The Alice Donovan persona had been used in earlier suspected Russian propaganda operations in the U.S. and Canada, and was known to the F.B.I., as detailed in an article Entous co-wrote last year for the Washington Post. “That arm of the F.B.I. was clearly in counterintelligence mode,” Entous said. “The agents were watching ‘Alice Donovan’ and other personas, trying to better understand how Russian spy agencies spread their propaganda inside the United States using social media, and online news and opinion Web sites. My question is, What, if anything, was the Bureau doing during the 2016 campaign to prevent the Russians from using those personas to spread their propaganda?’ ”