Even for a spy thriller, the plot is borderline fantastical.

Two top FSB cyber crime fighters hunt down a group of hackers behind the personal data leaks of some of the Kremlin’s most powerful and mighty.

Rather than arrest them, they take over the organization and put it to their own use. Several months on, the chief cyber detective is outed by his own colleagues at an FSB meeting and escorted out of the room with a bag over his head.

Since the nationalist Tsargrad outlet first broke the story on Jan. 25, more murky details have emerged every day.

Citing anonymous leaks from within the security apparatus, the Russian press reports the officials and two others have been accused of colluding with American intelligence services to expose Russian hacking there. The trail leads from Lubyanka to Bangkok and the United States, and stars characters with names like the Mad Hatter and Humpty Dumpty.

Real information is scant, but one thing is sure: the four accused are being held at Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison. Both FSB officials refused to talk to Kogershin Sagiyeva, a member of the independent prison watchdog ONK. But she got a glimpse of them.

“I was amazed by how young they looked,” she told The Moscow Times, “not what you'd expect from high-ranking law enforcement officials.”

Whether or not the men are double agents or victims of an internal power struggle, a purge is under-way and it is expanding like an oil spill.

The Art of Black PR

The story begins in 1990s St. Petersburg, where Vladimir Anikeyev started his career in journalism, according to the Rosbalt news agency. A mediocre writer, Anikeyev nonetheless excelled at “getting the required information.”

Soon, Anikeyev shifted to doing “black PR.” He cozied up to secretaries and insiders to collect incriminating evidence on officials and businessmen, known in Russia as kompromat. He would then either extort money from his victims or sell the information to rivals or media outlets, the report claims.

Joining forces with a number of hackers, he used phishing emails and set up fake Wi-Fi networks at venues he knew were popular with high-placed Kremlin officials, such as the GUM department store on Red Square. After gaining access to the victims’ gadgets, the stolen content was stored on servers in Estonia, Thailand and Ukraine.

Anikeyev and his team took up aliases inspired by British author Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Anikeyev became Lewis, his right hand was Alice and the group’s press representatives went by Shaltai and Boltai (Russian for Humpty and Dumpty).

“That world of inside-out logic best describes Russian politics,” Shaltai told the Apparat.ru news website during an encrypted chat interview several years ago, explaining their name choice.

The group organized anonymous bitcoin cyptocurrency auctions on their own website, offering leaked content to the highest bidder. One source who claimed to have participated in the auctions told The Moscow Times that an average lot would sell for up to $30,000. Some hacks, however, attracted bids as high as $200,000, the source added.

