Also, this kind of operation is designed for deniability, with the overall mandate endorsed by the government but probably not the day-to-day operations.

“People do not go ask permission from Putin: ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, can we go hack the servers of the Democratic Party?’ It’s not like that,” said Anton Merkurov, an internet analyst. “Putin never really uses the internet, so he doesn’t understand how it works.”

Those named in the indictment have proved difficult for reporters to reach, with their cellphones often shut off and no response to messages left for them on social media.

The overall aim of the Russian government — be it through trolling, hacking or disinformation — was to spread confusion and unease about government institutions in the West and to shore up popular support at home. The actual techniques were unlikely to be laid out in a paper trail, Mr. Merkurov noted.

The fact that the efforts of the troll farm described in the indictment — the fake campaign protests in Florida or New York; the myriad accounts mimicking Americans set up on Twitter and Facebook; the trips to the United States to organize it all — were so easy to trace back to the Internet Research Agency that it probably underscores that the intelligence services were not involved in running the organization.

The government and its proxies had been using bots and trolls for so long against its internal critics that it probably did not consider that shifting the operations overseas demanded a significantly different approach, said Vladimir Frolov, a foreign affairs analyst.

“It was very ad hoc, very amateurish,” he said. “They did not consider this to be a sensitive operation. They used easily traceable methods.”