WASHINGTON - Imagine checking the mobile phone for Twitter or Facebook news feed updates while having that first coffee or tea in the morning, and you find someone called @wokeluisa retweeted by one of the many people you follow.

She is venting about the disenfranchisement of African-American voters.

You check @wokeluisa and her name is Luisa Haynes. Sounds OK. She Tweets interesting stuff about social issues, so you follow her.

It was - or perhaps still is - that easy for operatives of Russia's Operation Lakhta to work themselves into thousands of lives and populate news feeds.

Luisa Haynes, or Bertha Malone of New York City, or Helen Christopherson of Charleston, North Carolina, were really fronts for Russian operatives working to destroy America from within.

Conspiracy theory? Actually, no.

The details are laid out in a 38-page Criminal Complaint by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) dated Sept 28, in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, against a Russian woman named Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, a resident of Saint Petersburg, Russia's ancient city of the czars on the Baltic Sea.

An arrest warrant was issued. The next step, if a grand jury agrees, is an indictment.

Meanwhile though, the plot has thickened, with a video posted online on Oct 22 purportedly of Ms Khusyaynova, in which she sits at a desk and, speaking in Russian, says she is just an "ordinary Russian woman" who knows accounting.

She mocks the FBI complaint, sarcastically saying she should be proud of her influence in the US.

"Presumably Khusyaynova is somewhere sufficiently shielded from the law enforcement agencies of the United States or cooperating nations that she feels comfortable mocking the criminal charges against her," Ms Quinta Jurecic, managing editor of the journal Lawfare, wrote on its blog.

"Of course, it's possible that the woman in the video is not in fact the woman described in the complaint, but there's no other sign that Khusyaynova is in custody, and by now there surely would be if that were the case," Ms Jurecic wrote.

Regardless, the details of Operation Lakhta, as alleged in the FBI complaint, offer a penetrating look at an information war operation.

The online environment, and specifically the social media ecosystem, was a ripe petri dish for the multimillion-dollar Operation Lakhta.

Details include the devastatingly easy way it spread disinformation through social media, targeting existing fault lines in American society to exacerbate them into toxic divisions, in effect pouring fuel on smouldering fires.

Ms Khusyaynova ran accounts, making budget requests and moving tens of thousands of dollars on a regular basis among dozens of entities, the FBI complaint states. The Bureau appears to have a significant portion of Ms Khusyaynova's correspondence on these financial matters, and the complaint cites some.

It alleges that funding for Operation Lakhta came from Concord Management and Consulting, and Concord Catering - companies reportedly controlled by Mr Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch close to Russian President Vladmir Putin.

Earlier this year, on Feb 16, Mr Prigozhin was named in an indictment by a grand jury. The indictment also named 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies, including the now notorious Internet Research Agency, which was the centre of the information war effort, and Mr Prigozhin's company Concord.

Concord subsequently argued in July that what it did came under free speech, and moreover, said that when it came to political speech, one was free to "pretend to be whomever he or she wants to be and to say whatever he or she wants to say".

The FBI's complaint against Ms Khusyaynova, alleges that the strategic goal of the conspiracy was to "sow division and discord in the US political system, including by creating social and political polarisation, undermining faith in democratic institutions, and influencing US elections, including the upcoming midterm election".

"Members of the conspiracy, posing as US persons, operated fictitious social media personas, pages, and groups to attract US audiences and address divisive political and social issues," it says.

"These persons, groups, and pages falsely claimed to be controlled by US activists when, in fact, they were controlled by members of the conspiracy."

The conspiracy ran like a transnational corporation, complete with design and graphics (producing memes and gifs), analysis, IT and finance departments.

Starting at least in or around 2015, it bought advertisements in online media to promote events and social media groups it controlled. Between around January 2018 and June 2018, its budget for advertisements on Facebook was over US$60,000 (S$82,890).

One of the operation's Twitter accounts, @KaniJackson, amassed 33,000 followers, the FBI complaint says.

A Facebook account in the name of "Bertha Malone" created a page called "Stop A.I." which meant "Stop All Invaders". It put out over 400 posts with inflammatory political and social content focused mostly on immigration and Islam - hot button issues in the US. In a few months, it had accumulated close to 200,000 "likes".

Operatives were directed to create "political intensity through supporting radical groups, users dissatisfied with (the) social and economic situation and oppositional social movements... (and) effectively aggravate conflict between minorities and the rest of the population".

They were, for instance, instructed to attack Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference, including this very conspiracy, and possible collusion by the Trump campaign - as a "puppet of the establishment".

They were instructed to play up right wing talk of election fraud, and call those who opposed Mr Donald Trump - including Republicans - "traitors".

The FBI complaint specifies that Operation Lakhta does not only target the US; it also targeted "members of the European Union, and Ukraine". This case should be a wake up call to democracies, analysts say.

"It's asymmetric warfare that the Russians are doing around the western world to undermine the idea of democracy," says Dr Keith E. Noble, a former senior officer with the Central Intelligence Agency and a Senior Fellow at the Jack G. Gordon Institute for Public Policy at Florida International University.

"If you get to a point where citizens can't agree on facts and institutions lose legitimacy, then people can start to question the government, and if it weakens from within, that helps countries like Russia and others vis a vis their own foreign policy around the world."

"One of the greatest of our values is openness but that makes us vulnerable," Dr Noble said. "Americans are now Balkanised. If you self describe as Republican on the right, you can now only watch Fox News or listen to the Republican echo chamber and that's your facts, and the same is true on the far left as well."

"So not everyone is getting the same facts. And once you can say the facts aren't factual, then you can question everything. So what the Russians have done... is exploit the social fissures, call people to question the whole system."