In July, 2015, Patrick Byrne, the founder of the online discount retailer Overstock, delivered a twenty-minute talk at FreedomFest, the annual libertarian conference in Las Vegas. After the talk, a line of people waited by the stage to speak to Byrne. Standing a little apart from them was a young woman with thick red hair, a pale, wide face, and a Russian accent. Introducing herself as Maria Butina, she said that she was the president of a Russian gun-rights group. Judd Bagley, a former Overstock executive who accompanied Byrne to the conference, recalled that, after the exchange, Byrne had “a little sparkle in his eye.”
For a decade, Byrne, who is a prominent figure in libertarian circles, was the chair of an educational foundation launched by the free-market economists Milton and Rose Friedman. On his second day at FreedomFest, after he spoke on a panel, Maria Butina approached him again. This time, she said that she was a special assistant to the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank, Alexander Torshin. According to Byrne, she told him, “We know about you, we know about your relationship with Milton Friedman, we watch your videos on YouTube about liberalism.” She asked if she could meet with him privately, and Byrne invited her to have lunch in his suite.
Byrne told me that he immediately wondered if Butina was a “red sparrow”—a reference to the 2013 novel that was turned into a film starring Jennifer Lawrence, in which a former ballerina becomes a spy for the Russian government, seducing and killing her targets. Before their lunch, Byrne said, he crafted sharp weapons from two coat hangers, which he stashed under the bed and under the sofa, and made a mental note to keep a close watch over his food and drink.
He was surprised to discover that Butina was an intellectual. They spent an hour and a half talking about Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, John Locke, and the Austrian school of economics. Butina said that she had been born in Siberia and placed in an élite educational program. She claimed to be close to several oligarchs, a few of whom were powerful politicians who believed that she could become President someday. She invited Byrne to speak about cryptocurrency and liberalism at an event in Russia, and, before she left, she proposed that they stay in touch as he planned his visit.