On Friday, July 13, the Justice Department charged 12 Russian military intelligence officials with hacking Democratic National Committee (DNC) email servers as well as leaking stolen documents to outlets such as WikiLeaks, in an effort to influence the 2016 presidential election. Among those least surprised by the charges was former British spy Matt Tait.

I first met Tait in the fall of 2017, when he was in Washington, D.C., to be interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The cheerful, lanky 29-year-old does not look or act like someone who is being carefully watched by both U.S. and Russian intelligence communities, nor like someone who has traveled the world as a consultant for technology companies and spent four years working at the U.K.'s top digital intelligence agency.

Despite his modest demeanor, Tait was a key player in deciphering Russian election interference. On June 15, 2016, when the first trove of stolen documents from the DNC was leaked online under the pseudonym Guccifer 2.0; before the FBI launched an investigation into election interference; and before the U.S. intelligence community attributed the cyberattacks to the Russian government, Tait used publicly available information to compile incriminating evidence of metadata and technical slip-ups against the Russian intelligence agency GRU, concluding that the attack bore the hallmarks of a classic Russian influence campaign.