What, then, might it mean to have “repeated contact” with Russian intelligence? I put this and other questions to the Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov, who along with Irina Borogan has written several books on Russian intelligence. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript of our conversation, conducted by phone and email.

Kathy Gilsinan: What is the range of things it could mean to have “repeated contacts with Russian intelligence,” to use The New York Times’s words? What, if anything, can we learn from reports that American intelligence agencies are investigating contacts between Trump campaign aides and Russian intelligence?

Andrei Soldatov: We do not know actually what that does mean. The problem is that you have [intelligence agents] almost everywhere—you have them in the administration of the president, in the parliament, in the ministries, and in big corporations. They are FSB [formerly KGB] and other secret services agents, some of them former, some acting. Sometimes these people are sent openly and officially, and sometimes they are sent undercover.

That was a special thing for [Russian President] Vladimir Putin in the beginning of his very first term: Fill key positions [with] these people, because he believes he can trust only these people, and he gave them this big status. And the problem is that they say to you that they are all former [intelligence officials], but to draw a line between a former and acting officer is impossible in many cases. The Russian secret services have the practice of “attaching” officers under cover—meaning that you have [an intelligence officer] placed in some position, on top of a particular company, or particular bank, or particular ministry, to oversee what’s going on there—and the cover could be the retirement. It’s a state secret to know the actual status.

Gilsinan: Is there even any conception of how big, say, the FSB is? Do we know how many people work for the FSB?

Soldatov: No, it’s also a state secret. Why it’s so different from the U.S. intelligence is because [Russia has] a central apparatus—people based in Moscow—but also we have a huge regional [intelligence] empire. Every region has a so-called regional department of the FSB. And the regional departments have the right to do exactly the same thing. They can send people undercover, they can attach people to local businesses, and it’s a very murky area. There is no way to say how many people they have. So some people say that maybe in the central apparatus it’s about maybe 6,000 people. But [counting the regional departments] it might be about 70,000 people. [And] we are talking only about the FSB, but [Russia has] lots of security services—we can also talk about SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service. We can talk about the SBP, which is a presidential security service. We can talk about some other people.