The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy
Greg Miller
From Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Greg Miller comes an exclusive book uncovering the truth behind the Kremlin’s attempt to destroy Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump win the presidency, Trump’s steadfast allegiance to Vladimir Putin and Robert Mueller’s ensuing investigation of the president and his entourage.This exclusive book uncovers the truth behind the Kremlin’s interference in Donald Trump’s win and Trump’s steadfast allegiance to Vladimir Putin. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of people in Trump’s inner circle, the intelligence communities, foreign officials, and confidential documents. The Apprentice offers exclusive information about:• the hacking of the Democrats by Russian intelligence;• Russian hijacking of Facebook and Twitter;• National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s hidden communications with the Russians;• the attempt by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, to create a secret backchannel to Moscow using Russian diplomatic facilities;• Trump’s disclosure to Russian officials of highly classified information about Israeli intelligence operations;• Trump’s battles with the CIA and the FBI and fierce clashes within the West Wing;• Trump’s efforts to enlist the director of national intelligence and the director of the National Security Agency to push back against the FBI’s investigation of his campaign;• the mysterious Trump Tower meeting;• the firing of FBI Director James Comey;• the appointment of Mueller and the investigation that has followed;• the internal battles within Trump’s legal camp;• and Trump’s jaw-dropping behaviour in Helsinki.Deeply reported and masterfully told, The Apprentice is essential reading for anyone trying to understand Vladimir Putin’s secret operation, its catastrophic impact, and the nature of betrayal.
Copyright (#u31dfdad9-2908-5b10-96f6-955b3da1d413)
William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018
Copyright © 2018 by W P Company LLC
Cover design by Ploy Siripant; cover photographs © AFP/Getty Images (Trump); © by Phoelixde/Shutterstock (Russian skyline); © by Samiran Sarkar/Shutterstock (D.C. skyline); © Maxym/Shutterstock (texture)
Greg Miller asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008325756
Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008325763
Version: 2018-09-27
Dedication (#u31dfdad9-2908-5b10-96f6-955b3da1d413)
To Rebecca, Katie, Peter, and Cole
For Mom and Dad
Contents
Cover (#u2d187a17-3b04-5984-a2ab-ccea0234741a)
Title Page (#u4476ac34-7538-55a7-abb2-5a8fc3fbb577)
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
1. The Hack
2. Putin’s Trolls
3. Moths to the Flame
Part Two
4. “I Believe You Have Some Information for Us”
5. The Missing Emails
6. Crossfire Hurricane
7. Deep Inside the Kremlin
Part Three
8. Dezinformatsiya
9. The Russian Ambassador
10. Briefing the President
Part Four
11. You’re Fired
12. The Special Counsel Strikes
Part Five
13. “I Can’t Put on the Charm”
14. Helsinki
Epilogue
Plate Section
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Greg Miller (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#u31dfdad9-2908-5b10-96f6-955b3da1d413)
THE WARREN OF CUBICLES WAS SECURED BEHIND A METAL door. The name on the hallway placard had changed often over the years, most recently designating the space as part of the Mission Center for Europe and Eurasia. But internally, the office was known by its unofficial title: “Russia House.”
The unit had for decades been the center of gravity at the CIA, an agency within the agency, locked in battle with the KGB for the duration of the Cold War. The department’s prestige had waned after the September 11 attacks, and it was forced at one point to surrender space to counterterrorism operatives. But Russia House later reclaimed that real estate and began rebuilding, vaulting back to relevance as Moscow reasserted itself. Here, among a maze of desks, dozens of reports officers fielded encrypted cables from abroad, and “targeters” meticulously scoured data on Russian officials, agencies, businesses, and communications networks the CIA might exploit for intelligence.
Deeper inside was a conference room adorned with Stalin-era posters of heroically depicted Soviets, muscled soldiers and workers striding across fields or factories under the hammer and sickle. The room, swept routinely for listening devices, was the scene of increasingly tense meetings in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, as senior agency officials sought to make sense of a series of disconcerting reports. In late July, the agency had gained access to an extraordinary stream of information showing that Russian president Vladimir Putin was himself directing the “active measures” operation aimed at disrupting the U.S. presidential race. U.S. intelligence partners were also warning Russia House about worrisome contacts between Russian figures and campaign associates of the Republican nominee.
Donald Trump’s vigorous displays of admiration for the Russian leader only made things more bewildering. He routinely praised Putin and even seemed to enlist Moscow in an effort to hack his opponent’s email account. The question was, why? Taking a hard line against Russia was the politically winning move, and yet Trump seemed subservient.
Unlike any presidential candidate in memory, Trump had shielded his finances from public scrutiny. He refused to release his personal tax returns. His business empire was a labyrinth of separate companies registered under different names. Many of those he had done business with hid their identities behind corporate shells. Some of his most prominent developments were deep in debt, though how deep and to whom was nearly impossible to discern.
During the campaign, there was consolation in the idea that Trump’s unsettling behavior toward Moscow was a product of inexperience—a problem that would be contained when he was surrounded by smarter advisers or wouldn’t matter anymore once he lost. But those inside U.S. spy agencies were privy to alarming secrets that were not so easily shrugged off. Among them was that the Kremlin was actively seeking to help elect Trump.
Russia House was the point of origin for that assessment, which would later be embraced by the U.S. intelligence community and infuriate the 45th president. The Kremlin’s objectives began with sowing discord in American democracy, but broadened in mid-2016 to backing a specific candidate—who at this moment, his second day as leader of the free world, was making his way toward CIA headquarters.
President Trump had barely been in office twenty-four hours when his motorcade departed the White House grounds for the nine-mile trip to the CIA’s Northern Virginia campus. The clouds and cold that had dampened Inauguration Day lingered over a city littered with the debris of America’s post-election divide—pro-Trump memorabilia, inauguration programs and celebratory banners along the parade route; broken windows and burned vehicles on blocks where protesters had clashed with police in riot gear. Trump’s arrival in the White House had been followed by a women’s march that drew a crowd three times larger than the inaugural audience,
and now throngs of pink-clad activists watched the caravan accelerate through the D.C. streets. Their gestures toward the motorcade, countered by some salutes from Trump supporters wandering Washington, reflected in the thick tinted glass of the president’s passing car.
The street-side crowds dissipated as the line of vehicles left downtown, crossed into Virginia, and followed the Potomac River north, turning onto the main route through the suburb of McLean and then past the zigzagging barricades that guard the entrance to the CIA. The agency occupies a sprawling, leafy campus in Northern Virginia enclosed by miles of electrified fence. At the center of the property is a seven-story building with a row of glass doors opening onto an iconic marble lobby—with the CIA seal inlaid in the terrazzo floor—frequently depicted in movies.
The CIA welcome for Trump would be cordial, even warm, but it was by now well known that the agency was responsible for a series of highly classified reports that had helped trigger an FBI investigation of Russia’s interference and ties to associates of the president. And Trump had made no secret of his growing belief that the CIA and FBI were engaged in a coordinated effort to damage his presidency before it had even begun. His blistering attacks on intelligence agencies had only intensified as he prepared to take office. He disparaged their conclusions about Russia’s involvement in the election and accused them of deliberately sabotaging him by leaking a document that had come to be known as the “dossier.” That collection of memos, compiled by a former British intelligence officer, contained dozens of unproven but explosive allegations about then-candidate Trump’s ties with Russia. Among the most salacious was that he had consorted with prostitutes during a 2013 trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, paying women to defile a hotel room where President Barack Obama had once stayed.
The dossier’s contents had been in circulation in Washington newsrooms for months, disseminated not by spy agencies but the private opposition research firm that had commissioned the reports. Their unsubstantiated assertions had gone mostly unreported in the press until U.S. intelligence officials told Trump about the dossier two weeks before he was sworn in. When its contents were published on BuzzFeed, Trump lashed out on Twitter. “Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public,” he said. “One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”
The sting of that slur was acute. The CIA’s lineage traced to World War II and the creation of a spy service whose mission was to help Allied forces defeat the same Nazis that Trump now invoked. The agency’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services, was disbanded after the war, but a statue of its founding director, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, still stands in the agency lobby. Trump likely knew little of that history—or for that matter of the record of CIA abuses and corresponding reforms that had transpired during the intervening decades—and would never retract the insult. Many presidents had clashed with the CIA, but the relationship had never taken such an ugly turn before a commander in chief had even taken office.
No one knew what Trump would say when he addressed the crowd that awaited him, but one thing was certain: he would not be brought into Russia House.
THE TRIP TO LANGLEY HAD BEEN PLACED ON THE PRESIDENT’S CALENDAR weeks earlier by Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff. Priebus, a political operative grounded in the Republican Party establishment, had mapped out the new president’s first days down to the hour, a detailed schedule that was to set a breathtaking pace and serve as an example of the urgency and ambition of the new administration. The CIA was the first government agency on Trump’s itinerary, a decision designed in part to assure the GOP establishment that Trump would settle into office and be “presidential,” which for Republicans entailed being a staunch defender of the country’s national security institutions. More important, the Trump team hoped that the visit could avert an unnecessary rift with an agency whose unique aura and authority had proven seductive to previous presidents but was also capable of fierce bureaucratic combat—even against occupants of the Oval Office.
Trump stepped out of his armored car at 2:06 P.M. in an underground parking garage and was greeted by a CIA leadership team in flux. Now-former director John Brennan and his deputy had resigned once Trump took office, so Meroe Park, who had served for more than three years in the number three role, was officially in charge of the agency and its 20,000 employees. Park (the first woman to hold the reins as director, albeit in an acting capacity) held the job for just three days—long enough for Trump’s pick as CIA chief, Republican congressman Mike Pompeo, to be confirmed.
Park escorted the president into the Original Headquarters building, an H-shaped structure that opened when John F. Kennedy was president. Trump was then taken by golf cart—an accommodation he required even for short distances—to a futuristic command post that operatives of Kennedy’s era could hardly have imagined.
The CIA’s Predator operations floor is a dazzling theater of high-tech warfare. Concentric rows of computer terminals face a wall of high-definition video screens. The ambient lighting is darkened to allow analysts to focus on footage transmitted halfway around the world from aircraft (the early Predators now largely replaced with larger, more powerful Reapers) equipped with cameras and missiles but no cockpits. The number of CIA drone strikes had plunged since the early years of the Obama administration, the peak of the covert war against Al-Qaeda, but the use of unmanned aircraft was still significant. The viewing can be monotonous—countless hours of surveillance over dusty patches of remote terrain in places including Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria. But moments of engagement are dramatic.
The sight of missiles streaming toward a target is particularly adrenaline-inducing to the newly initiated, and the agency often brings those it most wants to impress to the Predator display, with highlights of successful strikes cued up. Trump appeared suitably enthused, though puzzled by what he regarded as undue restraint. When told that the CIA flew surveillance flights over Syria, but that only the military conducted strikes—an Obama policy meant to return the agency’s focus to its core espionage mission—Trump made clear he disagreed. When the agency’s head of drone operations explained how the CIA had developed special munitions to limit civilian casualties, the president seemed nonplussed. Shown a strike on a Taliban compound, Trump noticed that the militants had scattered seconds before the explosion. “Can they hear the bombs coming?” Trump said. “We should make the bombs silent so they can’t get away.”
Agency officials had been given just three days’ notice that Trump had planned to visit CIA and would deliver remarks; they had scrambled to make preparations that typically take weeks. An email to the workforce had offered tickets to the first four hundred employees to respond, a move that helped to ensure the new president would encounter a friendly crowd since the event was being held on a weekend. The agency readied a teleprompter, hoping the president would work from a prepared text. But the White House sent word at the last minute to scrap the screens—Trump would speak off the cuff.
THERE ARE NUMEROUS LOCATIONS AT CIA HEADQUARTERS SUITABLE for a speech, among them a cavernous hallway lined with past directors’ portraits and a semi-spherical auditorium known as the Bubble. But the risers for Trump’s visit were placed before the agency’s most hallowed backdrop: a marble wall on the north side of the main lobby marked by six rows of hand-carved stars, 117 in total at that time, each representing an agency officer killed in the line of duty. The number had grown by at least forty since the September 11 attacks, reflecting the toll of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The constellation had gained three new hand-chiseled stars just months before Trump’s visit, commemorating a trio of paramilitary officers killed in eastern Afghanistan in 2016. The names of many of the dead are entered in a grim ledger that rests beneath the field of stars, protected by an inch-thick plate of glass; the goatskin-bound volume also contains blank spaces for those whose identities and CIA missions remain classified.
The wall is, to the CIA, Arlington National Cemetery in miniature, a sacred space. In addition to somber memorial services when new stars are unveiled, the setting has been used for ceremonies marking momentous agency events, including the culmination of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. It has also been a backdrop for presidents. In 2009, Obama stood before the stars for a first visit that was also uncomfortable. As a presidential candidate, he had called the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation methods torture. Once in office, he ordered the agency’s secret prisons dismantled, and directed that the legal memos used to justify their operation be made public. Obama defended those decisions to a wary audience that he acknowledged viewed him with “understandable anxiety and concern.” But he also spoke of employees’ sacrifice and courage, describing the stars behind him—eighty-nine at the time—as “a testament to both the men and women of the CIA who gave their lives in service to their country.” Even those who considered Obama hostile to the agency (and there were many) respected his recognition of so many lives lost.
As the ceremony for Trump got under way, Park was first to the podium, telling the new president that “hundreds more” agency employees wished to attend but were turned away for lack of space. “It means a great deal that you chose to come to CIA on your first full day as president,” she said.
Vice President Mike Pence was next to speak, and hit all the politically expedient notes. It was “deeply humbling,” he said, to appear before “men and women of character who have sacrificed greatly and to stand before this hallowed wall, this memorial wall, where we remember 117 who paid the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.” He then set the table for Trump, saying he knew the new president was “going to make America safe again,” and that he had “never met anyone with a greater heart for those who every day, in diverse ways, protect the people of this nation through their character and their service and their sacrifice.”
Trump took the stage in a striped blue tie and, though indoors, a topcoat that fell below his knees. “There is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump,” he said as he stood facing the bronze gaze of Donovan’s statue. The agency would get so much support under his administration, he said, that “maybe you’re going to say, ‘Please don’t give us so much backing.’” He vowed to rid the world of terrorist groups and assured employees that their new director, Pompeo, was a “total star.”
The speech to that point seemed on track. Park and other agency officials appeared to exhale, gaining confidence that their fears—a confrontation, an attack on the Russia analysts, another Nazi slur—would not materialize. Then midway through his fifteen-minute appearance, without any pause or outward sign, Trump changed course. Abandoning discussion of anything relevant to the agency, he set off on a riff about how youthful he felt—“thirty, thirty-five, thirty-nine”—and described the size of his crowds during the final days of the campaign—“twenty-five thousand, thirty thousand people, fifteen thousand, nineteen thousand.” He falsely claimed to hold the record for Time magazine covers, and teased that he would help build a new room at CIA so that “your thousands of other people that have been trying to come in” would have the privilege of seeing him next time. Drifting into solipsism, Trump called members of the media “the most dishonest human beings on earth” for refusing to acknowledge the “million, million and a half people” he said had attended his inauguration the previous day—an erroneous claim off by a factor of four.
Hard-core Trump loyalists in the crowd stayed with him, standing throughout, cheering the taunts and boasts. But others began to shift uncomfortably, and CIA veterans who read his remarks or watched them online recoiled. There is no shortage of braggadocio at the CIA, an agency regarded by other U.S. intelligence services as permanently afflicted with a superiority complex. But in that setting, between the flags that frame the memorial wall, the display of rampant egotism felt offensive. A CIA veteran called Trump’s address “one of the more disconcerting speeches I’ve seen.” Another called it a “freewheeling narcissistic diatribe.” Brennan, whose career at the agency spanned twenty-five years, issued a statement later that day describing Trump’s appearance as a “despicable display of self-aggrandizement.” The president, Brennan said, “should be ashamed of himself.”
Members of Trump’s entourage had a different reaction: the applause and ovations persuaded his handlers, including Priebus, that the president had made headway in mending his rift with the CIA, and possibly had begun to win over the agency workforce. Pompeo, according to aides, saw the dynamic in reverse: that through ovation and flattery the workforce had begun to win over a president who craved adoration. Either way, Trump’s team considered his appearance at CIA a success.
During his speech, Trump directed applause to two of his closest aides, both sitting in the front row. “General Flynn is right over here. Put up your hand. What a good guy,” Trump said of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn. A retired Army general who had been one of Trump’s most vocal campaign supporters, Flynn was by then already under FBI investigation for omitting large foreign payments from his financial disclosure forms. Within days, he would also be questioned by FBI agents over his troubling post-election contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States. Next to get presidential praise was Priebus: “Reince. He’s like this political guy that turned out to be a superstar, right?” Trump said of his chief of staff, who was already struggling to tame the chaos of the Trump White House and was soon, like Flynn, banished.
Absorbed in self-adulation and grievances, Trump was blind to a stunning array of problems, some in plain view from the CIA stage: the failings of a national security adviser he’d insisted on hiring despite warnings; the existence of a larger agency workforce beyond this clapping, self-selected crowd that would be profoundly disturbed by his vainglorious performance; the fragments of intelligence being assembled in that very building that would help expose a web of connections between his campaign and Russia, and feed into investigations that would threaten his presidency.
Trump’s ability to see these perils was impaired by his own unfamiliarity with the norms of governance, his insecurity and narcissism. Other presidents had varying levels of these traits, but none had ever possessed such a concentrated combination. These qualities had been on display from the start of his campaign. But now, against a backdrop that symbolized the profound burden of presidential responsibility, his shortcomings seemed suddenly and gravely consequential.
In the reality show that had propelled him to great fame, Trump was depicted as a business titan with peerless instincts—a consummate negotiator, a fearless dealmaker, and an unflinching evaluator of talent who forgot nothing. Week after week, contestants competed for the chance to learn from a boardroom master—to be, as the show’s title put it, his apprentice.
In the reality that commenced with his inauguration, Trump seemed incapable of basic executive aspects of the job. His White House was consumed by dysfunction, with warring factions waiting for direction—or at least a coherent decision-making process—from the president. His outbursts sent waves of panic through the West Wing, with aides scrambling to contain the president’s anger or divine some broader mandate from the latest 140-character blast. He made rash hiring decisions, installing cabinet officials who seemed unfamiliar with the functions of their agencies, let alone their ethical and administrative requirements. Decorated public servants were subjected to tirades in the Oval Office and humiliating dress-downs in public. White House documents were littered with typos and obvious mistakes. Senior aides showed up at meetings without the requisite security clearances—and sometimes stayed anyway. Trump refused to read intelligence reports, and he grew so visibly bored during briefings that analysts took to reducing the world’s complexities to a collection of bullet points.
The supposedly accomplished mogul was the opposite of how he’d been presented on prime-time television. Now he was the one who was inexperienced, utterly unprepared, in dire need of a steadying hand. Now he was the apprentice.
The word, of course, has another connotation, one acutely relevant when it came to Donald Trump: an aspect of servility. Trump’s admiration for the leader of Russia was inexplicable and unwavering. He praised Putin, congratulated him, defended him, pursued meetings with him, and even when talking tough, fought virtually any policy or punitive measure that might displease him.
Like any trained intelligence operative, Putin understood the manipulative power of playing to someone’s insecurities and ego. On cue, he reciprocated with frequent praise for the president he had sought to install in the White House. The CIA experts in Russia House saw through these ploys, but they now worked for a president who couldn’t be persuaded of anything by an agency he believed was engaged in a plot to discredit him.
It’s hard to imagine that even a master manipulator like Putin would have anticipated the full success of his operation. Not only had he sabotaged Hillary Clinton, but he had also helped install in the Oval Office someone who—by virtue of his fragile ego, disdain for democratic norms, and volatile leadership—compounded the impact of the Russian campaign. In the months that followed Trump’s visit to CIA headquarters, his administration would be tarred by scandals political and personal, a rate of White House dismissals unparalleled in history, and investigations into possibly illegal actions by the president, his family, and his team. Trump’s decisions sometimes seemed as if they were designed to erode American effectiveness or standing, be it in government or on the world stage. Again and again he would belittle America’s closest allies—Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and Australia—all the while praising Russia’s strongman.
In so doing, Trump was extolling an authoritarian with an abysmal record on human rights. A significant number of Putin’s critics have ended up dead, most prominently Boris Nemtsov, an opposition politician who was shot multiple times as he walked near the Kremlin in 2015. Others included Natalya Estemirova, the human rights activist who was kidnapped in Chechnya and found shot in the head; Anna Politkovskaya, the crusading journalist who was shot in her apartment building as she returned home; Sergei Yushenkov, the politician who was shot while investigating a possible government role in the bombing of an apartment building; and Alexander Litvinenko, the former security services officer who died an excruciating death in Britain when his tea was laced with polonium-210, a radioactive substance. Particularly among those who had spent decades in the shadows at secret war with the USSR and then Putin’s regime, Trump’s obsequious manner was horrifying—and mystifying.
After concluding his speech, Trump was whisked out of the building and back to his car for the return trip to Washington. The CIA crowd thinned as crews began stacking chairs and breaking down risers. That week, something occurred that officials had seen only in the aftermath of a CIA tragedy. Flowers began to accumulate at the foot of the Memorial Wall on Monday, as the agency returned to work. By week’s end there was a small mound of bouquets placed by employees who passed by the stars in silence.
PART (#u31dfdad9-2908-5b10-96f6-955b3da1d413)
ONE (#u31dfdad9-2908-5b10-96f6-955b3da1d413)
CHAPTER 1 (#u31dfdad9-2908-5b10-96f6-955b3da1d413)
THE HACK (#u31dfdad9-2908-5b10-96f6-955b3da1d413)
THE GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY OF THE NETHERLANDS— ALWAYS in the shadow of great powers—forced it to become quietly effective at espionage. And while the Dutch intelligence service, known as AIVD (which translates to General Intelligence and Security Service), cannot match the global reach of the CIA or MI6 (Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service), and its officers may never compete for screen time with Jason Bourne or James Bond, it kept its focus on Russia even as the United States was diverting intelligence resources to terrorism after the September 11 attacks.
With one of the largest and fastest internet hubs in the world, the Netherlands had become a pass-through point for cyber criminals, particularly from Eastern Europe. Dutch spies, as a result, became particularly adept at operating in cyberspace, relying on that capability to monitor online crime as well as the resurgent threat posed by Moscow. In 2014, AIVD accomplished a digital feat of David-and-Goliath proportions, the agency’s cyber unit penetrating a hacking syndicate linked to Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR. The Dutch gained access not only to the group’s computer systems but to the surveillance cameras mounted above the entrance to its lair, capturing clear images of the Russian hackers as they filed into what they’d always thought was a secure space in the heart of Moscow. Analysts used the images in some cases to identify individual hackers, gradually compiling a roster with their names, the handles they used online, and grainy photos.
The AIVD had achieved what cyber spies call “exquisite access.” It was in the process of carefully exploiting this penetration a year later that the Dutch began to see a suspicious new stream of data flowing into the SVR system. AIVD spies traced its origin to a Democratic National Committee server in Northern Virginia.
The DNC functions as the war chest and back office of the Democratic Party, raising money and helping to field and fund candidates across the country. In presidential races, it oversees the party’s primaries, its debates, its convention, and the process of selecting its nominee for president. The breach of its systems was at that stage almost imperceptible, intermittent signals between a pair of computers on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In reality each ping was a silent betrayal, an expression of obedience by a DNC server to a distant machine secretly working for the Kremlin.
The Russian hackers’ forays into the DNC network had easily eluded the organization’s security, but U.S. intelligence agencies also failed to see the breach, even though the hackers behind it were already well known, having pulled off a spree of attacks in previous months on high-profile targets including the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House—operations the Dutch had also detected and warned the Americans about. Certainly the DNC wasn’t as alarming a target as those repositories of U.S. government secrets, but the failure to detect the intrusion would mean that by the time it was first noticed by the DNC, Moscow was already tunneling toward troves of material, including internal DNC emails and research files, that it would use to sow chaos in the U.S. election.
The Dutch relayed what they had learned to the National Security Agency, the massive U.S. spy organization responsible for all forms of electronic espionage. The AIVD turned over images of the hackers, IP addresses (numeric codes that correspond to specific computers on the network), and other information that the NSA was able to corroborate.
From that moment in 2015, the scale of the Russian operation and its consequences for the United States would only expand. But at the time, U.S. officials saw the alert about the penetration of the DNC as falling into the category of conventional espionage, the sort of data gathering that Russia, China, and every other country with enough hacking capability—including the United States—pursues. Such probing of government, institutional, and corporate networks was so persistent and aggressive by state-level hacking enterprises that the adversaries involved acquired distinct reputations. The Russians were seen as the most sophisticated and—ironically, given how the year would play out—adept at hiding their tracks. China was “noisier,” less concerned with getting caught. While improving, Iran and North Korea were second-tier players. Attacks on think tanks and political organizations like the DNC were a problem, but defending against them was not necessarily the job of the U.S. government, which had enough on its hands fending off the equally frequent assaults on higher-stakes targets: classified networks, black budget programs, weapons designs.
Protecting those assets required constant vigilance. In November 2014, less than a year before the DNC attack, the White House experienced a Russian offensive so brazen that American officials saw it as a turning point in Kremlin tactics. The hackers gained entry with a common “spearphishing” ruse—sending bogus emails with disguised links or attachments that, once clicked, led to a malware-infested site set up to gather passwords and other sensitive information. The most striking aspect of the intrusion wasn’t that Russian hackers got into a White House network—in this case an unclassified email system that allowed White House staff to correspond when the issue at hand wasn’t sensitive, such as writing your husband that you’d be home late, or a congressional staffer that you’d received her letter. What was exceptional was how they reacted when confronted in that digital space by American cyber defenders. Rather than retreat and move on as the Americans patched holes, the Russian operatives stayed and fought. Every time the Americans severed the Russians’ connection to the malware they had installed—key to their survival inside the White House network—the intruders managed to repair the link or create a new one.
The NSA team had a remarkable penetration of its own: through secret “implants”—the software equivalent of a Trojan horse, bits of pre-positioned code—the Americans were able to monitor the Russians’ computers and see their adversaries’ every move in advance, as if watching them wheel new weapons into position before firing. The advantage proved decisive, but only after a protracted fight. At a 2017 security conference, Richard Ledgett, who was deputy director of the NSA at the time, described the battle as the online equivalent of “hand-to-hand” combat and a game changer unlike any the agency had ever waged.
The DNC penetration detected by the Dutch did not prompt such a daring showdown. The information was noted on internal NSA report logs and shared with other agencies, including the FBI. On August 6, 2015, an agent from the FBI’s Washington, D.C., field office called the DNC’s front desk and asked to speak with the “person in charge of technology.” Inevitably, he was transferred to the computer help desk and put in touch with an IT contractor, Yared Tamene.
FBI special agent Adrian Hawkins told Tamene that there were signs of compromise in the DNC system and provided some computer IP addresses that he said would help to locate the intrusion. But the address was the one the DNC used for its entire network—tied to more than a thousand laptops, servers, and phone lines. Tamene was a former college math instructor who had been an IT consultant at the DNC for four years but was no cybersecurity expert. He had heard plenty about how individuals were conned out of their passwords by hackers pretending to be from the government, a bank, or a credit card company, and was wary. He pressed Hawkins to provide proof of his position, but remained unswayed by the agent’s attempts to convince him.
The call lasted several minutes, as Hawkins outlined in somewhat cryptic terms the bureau’s concerns about the breach. He wanted to know whether the committee had detected the intrusion on its own and done anything about it. Tamene hesitantly acknowledged that the committee had endured some phishing attacks, but dodged detailed questions about the organization’s staff and systems. Hawkins then offered the first hint—although an indirect one—that the bureau suspected Russia. Check for malware associated with “the Dukes,” he said, an industry nickname for the hacking group with ties to Moscow. Tamene seemed unfamiliar with the moniker but agreed to have a look. After hanging up, he and a colleague did a quick internet search, read up on the group’s methods, and performed a cursory search of DNC log files. They found nothing and Tamene couldn’t help wondering whether he had fallen for a prank. Tamene informed his supervisor, Andrew Brown, the DNC’s chief technology officer, of the incident.
The disconnect persisted through subsequent interactions—that is, when both sides managed to connect at all. In October, two months after he first called the DNC, Hawkins left a series of voice mails for Tamene, who ignored them, later explaining he had nothing new to report. Behind the scenes, he appealed to Brown for help, telling him, “We need better tools or better people.” A month later, in November, the FBI agent finally got through, only to be told by Tamene that the DNC network appeared clean. Hawkins countered by again providing the DNC address, saying it was “calling home” to Russia. Tamene took this warning more seriously. He and his team began exploring whether there were gaps in the DNC’s defenses—bad search parameters, problems with the firewall—that were preventing the IT department from detecting the intrusion. But again, his follow-up checks yielded no evidence of compromise. It would later turn out that the FBI’s internal deliberations were so slow that by the time Hawkins had permission to pass along one IP address, the Russians had switched to another.
All of this back-and-forth had given Russia’s hackers another three months inside the DNC servers. In all that time, the FBI’s Hawkins had not seen fit to raise the matter with top officials at the DNC. Nor did they learn at this stage from their own staff: because of the tech team’s failure to find evidence of the hack, Brown evidently felt no need to sound internal alarms.
The bureau’s failure to contact a single official above Tamene would later be deemed by the DNC to be an unfathomable lapse. The FBI, for its part, felt it had tried repeatedly to warn the committee—in fact, Hawkins was so frustrated by the difficulty in getting through that in December 2015, he went to the low-slung DNC building on a quiet street two and a half blocks south of the Capitol. He asked the security guard in the lobby to be on the lookout for Tamene, and to stop him and have him call the bureau.
After months of frustration, the FBI pushed for a face-to-face meeting. In February 2016, Hawkins, Tamene, and two of his IT colleagues arrived at Joe’s Cafe, in Sterling, Virginia, thirty miles west of the DNC’s Washington office, but a ten-minute drive from the DNC’s data center in Loudoun County.
There in Joe’s Cafe, Tamene’s lingering uncertainty about Hawkins’s FBI credentials finally subsided when the agent produced his badge. More important, Hawkins also produced a set of computer logs from a day in December showing precise time stamps that enabled the DNC to narrow its search for suspicious activity. He listed penetrations of other targets by the Dukes and recommended a tool that could help detect intruders on DNC systems. In a February 18 email, Hawkins even provided IP addresses associated with the DNC intrusions—data that traced the attack back to its origin in Russia.
AFTER FINALLY CONVINCING THE DNC TECH TEAM THAT THE breach was real, Hawkins urged them not to block those Russian incursions. Take modest steps to protect sensitive data, he said, but don’t disrupt the correspondence between the two systems or make any moves that would let Russia know its operation had been discovered. Though counterintuitive, this would allow further monitoring and avoid sending the hackers into hiding or, in a worst-case scenario, wiping the system of data to cover their tracks—leaving a barren, broken network. But it also left more time for Russia to make off with more data.
Tamene and his team went back to search their firewall logs. Again, nothing. They continued to wonder whether it was all a hoax, mischievous hackers merely “spoofing” DNC addresses online and making the FBI think the committee’s defenses had been pierced. Nevertheless, for the next couple of months, the FBI continued to alert the DNC about possible intrusions. In March, one of Hawkins’s colleagues, FBI special agent Lafayette Garrett, emailed the DNC tech team twice, alerting them to phishing attempts aimed at committee staffers; thus prompted, the committee’s tech team was able to repel the forays. A month later, Hawkins asked Tamene for copies of computer logs that might help the FBI see which IP addresses were connecting to the DNC network. Tamene said he needed to ask the DNC’s lawyers.
On April 26, Hawkins was put in touch with Michael Sussmann, a former prosecutor who handles cyber cases at the DNC’s law firm in Washington, Perkins Coie. Sussmann urged DNC executives to approve the FBI’s request, saying that the logs would be part of a classified investigation and kept from the public. “They really are helping you,” he explained in an internal email. But by then it was already too late. Critical opportunities to contain the damage had been squandered—by FBI agents who took too long to get past the DNC help desk and by committee staff who failed to grasp the growing danger or get the attention of committee executives.
AS ALL OF THIS WAS GOING ON, HILLARY CLINTON WAS BEING PUMMELED by additional digital trauma.
Clinton’s use of a private email account while serving as the nation’s top diplomat between 2009 and 2013 had been a self-inflicted political wound that hobbled her candidacy from the outset. The practice had been unearthed by Republicans as part of an intensely partisan congressional inquiry into one of the most tragic events of Clinton’s State Department tenure—a 2012 attack on two American compounds in Benghazi, Libya, in which the U.S. ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans were killed.
Congress is equipped with an array of oversight committees to investigate such events, and a whopping seven of them did. They found security breakdowns and unheeded warnings but no evidence to substantiate incendiary claims that the Obama administration had blocked a viable rescue mission or engaged in a cover-up. The Republican leadership, however, created an additional panel—the House Select Committee on Benghazi—with a deep budget, broad authority, and cynical mission that was inadvertently revealed long afterward by one of its architects.
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” House majority leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, said in a Fox News interview in September 2015 as the presidential campaign was heating up.
“But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.”
The Benghazi committee was by no means the first to politicize a catastrophic event overseas, but the effectiveness with which it did so altered the dynamic in Washington. The name of the coastal Libyan city became a political shorthand—like Watergate or Whitewater—for a scandal that Clinton couldn’t shake. But it wasn’t any particular decision she had made about State Department personnel or facilities in Benghazi that proved most politically damaging. Instead it was the committee’s discovery as it assembled documents that Clinton had used a private email server while serving as secretary, and that the department had only a portion of her official correspondence.
Russia undoubtedly took note of this dynamic as it mounted its election interference campaign. And many of the partisan impulses that were sharpened by the Benghazi experience would resurface in 2016, impeding the United States’ ability to deliver a united response.
Clinton’s use of a nongovernment email server—@clinton email.com—had first been revealed in 2013 by a Romanian hacker who went by the name Guccifer. But the committee zealously dug further into the matter. Led by South Carolina Republican and former federal prosecutor Trey Gowdy, the panel noticed that messages to and from the secretary were being routed not through classified State Department systems but rather a server in the basement of the Clintons’ home in Chappaqua, New York.
Under congressional pressure, the State Department sent letters to Clinton and her predecessors asking them to produce any work emails still in their possession. (Former secretary of state Colin Powell had also used a private email account.) In December 2014, Clinton’s lawyers arrived at the department with twelve boxes filled with hard copies of more than thirty thousand messages. But she withheld another thirty-one thousand, insisting that while they were stored on her system they pertained to personal matters, including her daughter’s upcoming wedding and mother’s funeral, and were “not related in any way to my job as Secretary of State.” Having concluded this, she had then erased the emails she deemed personal.
It was a decision that played straight into decades-long depictions of Clinton as secretive and duplicitous when it came to concealing the family’s alleged misdeeds. The committee was, reasonably, outraged that she had deleted a massive stockpile of messages without allowing any outsider to review what was being destroyed.
The controversy remained under wraps until TheNew York Times broke the story several months later, on March 2, saying Clinton’s use of private email “may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained,” and reignited lingering concerns about the Clintons’ “lack of transparency and inclination toward secrecy.” Immediately, the Clinton campaign was on its heels.
A week later, in a tense press conference, Clinton said that in using her private email address she had “opted for convenience,” and acknowledged that “it would have been better if I’d simply used a second email account.” Republicans rushed forward with sinister interpretations, implying that she was hiding incriminating messages about Benghazi or other scandals. The panel issued a subpoena for all of her communications, hoping to stave off any further email destruction. At the same time, the State Department came under court order to start publicly releasing batches of Clinton emails after they had been internally reviewed. The result was a disaster for Clinton—monthly dumps for the media to sift through, generating a seemingly endless stream of stories on the very issue that Trump and Putin would come to see as one of her most acute vulnerabilities.
State Department investigators subsequently determined that “classified information may exist on at least one private server and thumb drive that are not in the government’s possession.” Because some of the sensitive information in the emails belonged not to State but to spy agencies, the inspector general for the entire intelligence community examined a sample of forty Clinton emails and found that at least four contained classified material. He then relayed that finding to the Justice Department. The fallout from that referral would be devastating to her chances of becoming president.
IN THE SPRING OF 2016, NEARLY A YEAR AFTER THE DUTCH HAD ALERTED Washington to the penetration of the DNC, a second wave of Russian hackers converged on Clinton-related targets. These new intruders were working not for Russia’s foreign intelligence service, but its military spy agency: the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, otherwise known as the “GRU.” Long seen as inferior to other Russian services, the GRU had invested heavily in cyber capabilities and had raised its standing in the Kremlin through one successful hacking operation in particular.
The head of the Russian military, General Valery Gerasimov, had delivered an address in 2013 that American spies studied closely.
Reprinted in a Russian publication called the Military-Industrial Courier, the speech spoke of a new era of hybrid warfare, one in which “the role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons.” The GRU had tested this theory in Ukraine in 2014, where it used a series of cyberattacks to shut down telecommunications systems, disable websites, and jam the cell phones of Ukrainian officials before Russian forces entered the Crimean peninsula.
After the Russian military had seized control of key Crimean facilities, GRU turned its information warfare troops loose to rally public support among Crimea’s largely ethnic Russian population to break with Ukraine and support annexation by Moscow. To do so, GRU psyops teams blitzed social media platforms, including Facebook and the Russian-language social network VKontakte, with fake personas and pro-Russian propaganda. In one week alone GRU cyber teams targeted dozens of Ukrainian activist groups, hubs of protesters on social media, and English-language publications, sowing confusion and creating the impression of a groundswell of support for Russian intervention.
Three years later, the GRU joined the Putin-ordered operation to damage or defeat Clinton. Working out of a building on Komsomolsky Prospekt in Moscow, a GRU cyber-operative named Aleksey Lukashev sent a spearphishing email to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta on March 19, 2016. Lukashev had used a popular online service for shortening website addresses to help mask his baited missive and make it look like a legitimate security notification from Google. The breach was enabled when one of Podesta’s aides saw a supposed security warning from Google and had asked a computer technician to evaluate it. “This is a legitimate email,” the technician wrote. “John needs to change his password immediately.” With the ensuing mouse click, Russia gained access to a trove of messages stored on Podesta’s account.
Within two days, Lukashev and his GRU unit had made off with more than 50,000 emails.
Lukashev was part of a GRU hacking group designated by its unit number, 26165. That same month, the hackers began probing the DNC network for gaps in defenses, seemingly oblivious to the fact that another Russian intelligence service was already rummaging through the files. U.S. spies said it was not uncommon for Putin to unleash separate agencies on the same target. In April, the Russian unit found an indirect route into the DNC system, stealing the computer credentials of an employee at a sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which occupied the same office and worked to help elect congressional candidates. Another spearphishing operation did the trick, luring the DCCC employee into clicking a link that effectively gave the GRU the keys into the network.
Once inside, Lukashev’s group installed a program known as X-Agent malware on at least ten DCCC machines, enabling them to steal passwords and data from other employees, and even monitor their keystrokes and take photos of their computer screens as they typed away unsuspectingly. The hackers tried to hide their tracks by transmitting the pilfered information to a server the GRU had leased in Arizona (paid for not with rubles or dollars but with bitcoin cryptocurrency). By April 18, the GRU used its access to the passwords and files of the DCCC—some of whom also had access to the DNC network—to sneak across a digital bridge into the main party organization’s network.
In April, GRU operatives registered a new internet domain—dcleaks.com—after discovering that the first address they wanted, “electionleaks.com” was already taken.
For all its advances, the GRU made a number of costly blunders that would help U.S. investigators reconstruct the incursion. The Russian hackers often used the same computers, email addresses, and phony online accounts for multiple transactions related to the operation—registering the dcleaks.com domain, accessing URL-shortening services, and facilitating bitcoin payments.
Those clues would be collected and revealed nearly two years later. But even at the time, the GRU arrived inside the DNC system with all the stealth of a cymbal crash. At long last, the committee’s overmatched security team finally encountered an intruder that its systems could detect.
The GRU’s hackers were “like a thunderstorm moving through the network,” recalled one investigator involved in the case. “They were actively compromising systems. They were remote accessing into systems in the middle of the night. They were deleting logs. They were opening up files on administrators’ desktops. They were archiving massive amounts of files.” At one point, the GRU crew began stashing pilfered material in a massive single file, presumably to make it easier to drag out when the raid was done. But they stuffed so much into the single container that it crashed the system they had set up to export their stolen data in the first place. Left behind, the copy of the busted file provided investigators a comprehensive inventory of the loot—but no firm sense of how much other material the GRU might have captured in other smash-and-grabs.
On April 29, little more than two months after the February Joe’s Cafe meeting between special agent Hawkins and three members of the DNC’s IT group, Tamene’s team of contractors saw strange activity on the network. He promptly notified his supervisors at the DNC and—after so many months deflecting calls from the FBI—dialed Hawkins to inform him of what he had found.
It had now been eight months since the FBI had first reached out to the DNC.
CHAPTER 2 (#u31dfdad9-2908-5b10-96f6-955b3da1d413)
PUTIN’S TROLLS (#u31dfdad9-2908-5b10-96f6-955b3da1d413)
VLADIMIR PUTIN, A NATIVE OF LENINGRAD, NOW ST. PETERSBURG, was born in 1952 in the lingering shadow of World War II. His father had been badly wounded in combat and his mother barely survived the 900-day siege of Leningrad when the Nazis tried to starve the city into surrender. The death toll in Leningrad was 640,000, including one of Putin’s brothers. Both parents got factory jobs after the war and Putin grew up in a walk-up communal apartment building where he recalled chasing rats in the stairwells. “There was no hot water, no bathtub,” Putin said many years later. “The toilet was horrendous. It ran smack up against a stair landing. And it was so cold—just awful—and the stairway had a freezing metal handrail.” A bright boy, Putin attended a school for the city’s best students. He also studied judo, earning a black belt, a skill that invested the diminutive young man with a quiet confidence.
After earning a law degree at Leningrad State University, Putin joined the KGB in 1975. “I was driven by high motives,” he said of his choice of profession. “I thought I would be able to use my skills to the best of society.” He had an undistinguished career, however, making it only to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He served in counterintelligence, monitoring foreigners in Leningrad, and then as an officer in Dresden, a backwater assignment, where he almost certainly attempted to recruit Westerners who came to East Germany. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Putin returned to his native city and attached himself to the administration of the reformist mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, one of his old law professors. A fluent German speaker, Putin established a reputation as a competent but colorless bureaucrat who worked well with foreigners. His real skill was his ability to vault upward, almost unnoticed, on the coattails of powerful patrons.
In 1996, after Sobchak lost his reelection bid, Putin moved to Moscow, holding a series of positions in the administration of President Boris Yeltsin, until he was appointed director of the FSB, the intelligence and security agency that was rebuilding its power following the dismantling of the KGB. In August 1999, Putin was appointed prime minister in the chaotic Yeltsin administration, marked by the increasing decrepitude and alcoholism of the president. When Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999, Putin—looking very much like a nervous, pale junior staffer—became acting president. He won election to the post three months later with 53 percent of the vote.
The rich and powerful around Yeltsin had backed Putin’s rise because they believed he was malleable, but Putin, as ruthless as he was cunning, viewed them as a threat to his rule. He gradually used the powers of the state and the court system to bring the oligarchs under control, imprisoning those who crossed him and seizing their property. The man who’d once seemed destined for the background became the new tsar, and the country’s media, also brought to heel, portrayed the vigorous Putin as the embodiment of Russia’s revival, a state that he had returned to its proper place as a global power able to rival the United States—“the main enemy,” in the parlance of the KGB.
Seen from Moscow, the operation to sway the U.S. election had a long prologue. It was carried out by a regime that has fine-tuned the politics of grievance into a sophisticated propaganda weapon. Putin believes the United States engineered the breakup of the Soviet Union, eagerly plundered the fallen empire’s spoils, and has been using its influence ever since to keep Russia weak. His innovation has been to sharpen and magnify those charges into his raison d’état—and to point to them to show why responding to U.S. aggression was not only justified but a necessity.
His resentments, nurtured over many years of perceived slights and betrayals, had found a particular focus in his animus for Hillary Clinton. As Russians voted in the parliamentary election on December 4, 2011, videos documenting widespread fraud at the ballot box rocketed around the internet. The next day, Clinton offered her view on the sidelines of a conference in Bonn, Germany. “Russian voters deserve a full investigation of all credible reports of electoral fraud and manipulation,” she told reporters. “The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and votes counted.”
As she spoke, activists in Moscow were readying a protest of the election results in the city center. They had registered an expected five hundred attendees with the police; five thousand showed up, the biggest anti-government demonstration of the Putin era. The frustrations of an urban middle class that increasingly yearned for not just material well-being but also for political freedom burst into the open. It would take months for the protests, which soon drew some hundred thousand participants, to subside.
Putin was furious. To him, the fact that the first protests erupted just hours after Clinton’s remarks was far from a coincidence. His German biographer Hubert Seipel described Putin’s anger that day as a seminal moment in shaping his disdain for Clinton and his conviction that the United States sought regime change in Russia.
“I saw the first reaction of our American partners,” Putin told supporters a few days later. “The first thing the secretary of state did was to characterize and evaluate the elections and say that they were dishonest and unfair, even though she had not yet received the materials from the [election] observers. She set the tone for certain actors [in] this country—she gave them a signal. They heard that signal and, with the support of the U.S. State Department, began their active work.”
Putin would survive the challenge and eagerly start pushing back—with the same tools he accused the West of using against him.
FEBRUARY 2016 BROUGHT ST. PETERSBURG SNOW FLURRIES AND ICE fog, a curtain of crystals in the frigid air. The districts that hug the northern bank of the Neva River had for decades been dotted with factories that rose during the nineteenth century. The area had seen its fortunes fade with the Soviet Union’s collapse. But its tree-lined streets, historic apartment buildings, and green spaces had maintained their charm, and the closed factories gradually gave way to office buildings beckoning a digital-friendly generation of Russians and internet start-ups.
The shuttered factories had been well situated alongside the ancient waterways that braided Russia’s intersection with Europe. But now, with steamships replaced by fiber optics, those with enough know-how, funding, and cleverness could access different sorts of currents. The firm that leased the four-story building at 55 Savushkina Street seemed to be among this new breed of Russians who in their own modern ways were following in St. Petersburg’s mercantile tradition.
The name of the company, the Internet Research Agency, sounded vaguely impressive if uninspired. A street sign in front of the building warned cars to slow down for children crossing on the next block. A short stroll away, on a verdant island in the Neva, were tennis courts, a museum, and a palace overlooking the water that served as a summer retreat for Tsar Alexander I. Not that the tech-savvy employees of the Internet Research Agency had time for such diversions. Each morning they filed in for cubicle-bound jobs that combined two of their generation’s consuming pastimes: crafting posts for social media and clicking refresh to see whether their creations had gone viral.
On February 10, 2016, as the fog outside thickened, employees received new instructions for an important project. An internal memo directed the company’s “specialists” to devote their social media skills to a single target—the U.S. presidential election. The aims were explicit: “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump—we support them).”
The Internet Research Agency memo represented a distillation of a remarkable effort only alluded to in the company’s name. Since its founding, the agency had devoted inordinate attention to studying the political climate in the United States, with special focus on issues that seemed to strike deep emotional chords with Americans—guns, Islamist terrorism, and race. By April 2014, the firm had set up a special department for what was referred to internally as the “Translator Project,” an effort to infiltrate America’s dominant social media platforms—YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And unlike the costly stratagems of the Cold War—planting sleeper agents, recruiting and running Western turncoats, launching satellites and spy planes, underwriting proxy wars—the disruptive potential of the internet was vast and unbelievably cheap.
The project required an immersive understanding not only of the way Americans interacted online but also the fault lines of the country’s political landscape. In June 2014, two of the company’s employees boarded flights for the United States. Aleksandra Krylova and Anna Bogacheva spent the next three weeks crisscrossing America, making stops in at least nine states, including California, Texas, Michigan, Louisiana, and New York. Posing as tourists, the travelers studied the contours of the country’s charged political atmosphere. The report they compiled upon their return was valuable enough that the agency sent another employee on a subsequent excursion, in November, to Atlanta, for a more focused, four-day mission whose purpose remains murky.
Even by tech start-up standards, the Internet Research Agency had an unusual business model. There were normal-seeming departments—graphics, data analysis, search-engine optimization—but no evident source of revenue. Nor were there any meetings with clients; the agency’s “research” was all consumed in-house. And yet it had kept adding employees, hundreds of them, with an annual budget in the millions of dollars.
The firm’s founder had no apparent background or expertise in online ventures. The incomplete accounts of his life indicate that Yevgeny Prigozhin was born in St. Petersburg in 1961 and appeared headed for athletic glory as a cross-country skier before being imprisoned in 1981 for crimes including robbery. After his release amid the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, Prigozhin opened a hot dog stand, but the move that truly altered his fortunes in Russia came seven years later, with his purchase of a rickety vessel that he turned into a floating food establishment. New Island Restaurant, as it was called, attracted a different category of clientele—most notably another St. Petersburg native, Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin endeared himself to the future Russian president with an attention to detail and a willingness even as proprietor to engage in the more quotidian aspects of running a restaurant. Putin “saw how I built my business starting from a kiosk,” Prigozhin said in an interview with a St. Petersburg magazine. “He saw how I was not above serving a plate.”
The connection ultimately helped position Prigozhin for a series of lucrative catering contracts, supplying food to schools in St. Petersburg and the Russian military. (His bond with the increasingly powerful politician paid off in other ways, too: in 2002, Putin brought world leaders, including President George W. Bush, aboard the New Island for meals taken while drifting along the city’s waterways.) Those deals led to even greater riches as Prigozhin branched out, earning billions from contracts that came to include providing soldiers for hire to guard oil wells in Syria. Prigozhin family social media accounts offered glimpses of sprawling estates, private airplanes, and Yevgeny’s adult children cavorting on a luxury yacht. As he ascended into the ranks of the Russian oligarchs, the entrepreneur who so impressed Putin by personally busing dishes acquired the nickname “Putin’s cook” and was soon handling other kinds of dirty work.
According to a top-secret NSA report issued more than a year after the U.S. election, the Internet Research Agency conducted information warfare along several fronts. One was referred to internally as “govnostrana”—which the NSA translated as “crap country”—and referred to attacks meant to damage a nation’s reputation and sap its citizens’ confidence. This effort involved the creation of two types of trolls (the term for online provocateurs), one focused on influencing public opinion by amassing loyal followings, and another that used teams of four or five people to churn out a mass volume of posts to overwhelm any competition from those posting contrary opinions.
In a February 2018, interview with The Washington Post, Marat Mindiyarov, a teacher by training, explained that he began working at the agency in late 2014 because it was close to home and he needed to make money during a stretch of unemployment. “I immediately felt like a character in the book 1984,” he recalled. The agency, he said, was “a place where you have to write that white is black and black is white. Your first feeling, when you ended up there, was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line.” Others hired at the Internet Research Agency described their assignments and the atmosphere there as similarly Orwellian. Lyudmila Savchuk, an activist and journalist who infiltrated the Internet Research Agency in 2015 as part of an investigation of the outfit, said, “Their top specialty was to slip political ideas inside a wrapping that was as human as possible.”
Like many employees at the agency, Mindiyarov’s main tasks involved producing pro-Putin propaganda for Russian-speaking audiences, particularly to drum up support for Russia actions in Ukraine. A former Soviet republic, Ukraine had since the fall of communism struggled to balance its close cultural and economic ties to Moscow against a desire to build a more independent and Western identity, developing democratic institutions and pursuing closer ties to Europe. That struggle had first taken on a frightening new dimension in 2004. During that year’s presidential campaign, reform candidate Viktor Yushchenko had become badly disfigured after ingesting what authorities later determined was a near-lethal dose of the same dioxin used in Agent Orange, a poisoning that few seemed to doubt had been carried out by the Kremlin. Yushchenko survived only to lose the race to a rival politician, Viktor Yanukovych, who was seen as a puppet of Moscow.
Amid evidence of widespread electoral fraud, Ukraine had been convulsed by prodemocratic protests that came to be known as the Orange Revolution. It was one in a series of popular uprisings inside and outside Russia that unnerved Putin, who came to suspect clandestine interference by the United States. A revote ordered by the country’s supreme court reversed the disputed outcome, handing the election to Yushchenko. Putin looked to the Russian military and intelligence services to undermine the democratically elected leader, and some of the strategies that did just that would be models for his later intervention in the American presidential contest.
Yushchenko was unable to fully stabilize the country, and after five years the pro-Moscow Yanukovych regained power. Drawing upon (and paying heavily for) the advice of an American consultant, Yanukovych lasted four years before an uprising removed him from office. Moscow responded to the disintegration of the government it backed by sending in Russian forces—the insignias stripped from their green uniforms—to begin dismembering the country. Russia annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and sent arms and “volunteers” from the ranks of its own military to bolster pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine. Putin claimed that Russian speakers in Ukraine needed to be protected in the wake of a nationalist revolution, but much of the world saw the Russian invasion as a violation of international law and Ukraine’s sovereignty.
When Russia’s currency began tumbling under crippling sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union, Mindiyarov was enlisted in a campaign to post glowing comments on Russian news sites and online magazines. “I was writing that everything was the opposite: how wonderful our life was, how wonderful it is that the ruble was strengthening … that sanctions were going to make us stronger and so on and so forth,” he recalled.
Days at the agency were divided into two twelve-hour shifts, Mindiyarov said, with quotas requiring employees to deliver 135 website comments per shift, 200 characters apiece. “You come in and spend all day in a room with the blinds closed and twenty computers,” he said, adding that he was paid 40,000 rubles, or about $800, a month after Russia’s currency crashed in late 2014. It was decent money at a time when Russia’s economy had been crumpled by Western sanctions.
Mindiyarov said he wasn’t involved in the “Translator Project,” but knew there were other sections of the company aimed at an audience in the United States. An unnamed troll told an independent television station in Russia that Internet Research Agency employees were told to engage with Americans online and “get into an argument in order to inflame it, and rock the boat.” The troll said their orders by 2016 were to specifically attack Clinton. “The main message is: aren’t you tired, brother Americans, of the Clintons, how long have they been around?” the station quoted the troll as saying. To ensure that their use of English was seamless enough for online political debate, employees in St. Petersburg watched the Netflix drama House of Cards, a show about a corrupt American pol who rises to become president.
As an English speaker, Mindiyarov had been approached to apply for the “Facebook department,” where pay was twice as high. (The employees who emerged from that section for smoke breaks were younger, hipper, with newer phones and better haircuts.) But Mindiyarov was tripped up by the entrance test: his English wasn’t strong enough to pass as native in the rapid-fire encounters of social media, where you had to be fluent even in American idioms. In response to the essay question “What do you think of Hillary Clinton?” he wrote that she seemed to have a strong chance to be the next U.S. president. It was unclear, he reflected later, whether the answer itself was disqualifying or merely the caliber of the English he used to articulate it.
THE WEEKEND OF THE WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS’ ASSOCIATION Dinner at the start of May was supposed to bring a momentary respite from the pressure of the presidential campaign. Many Washington insiders, including senior officials at the DNC, would be donning gowns or tuxedoes for the annual bash near Dupont Circle. The so-called nerd prom always attracts an influential if eclectic crowd—cabinet secretaries, cable news anchors, and a smattering of Hollywood stars. Five years earlier, with Trump in attendance, Obama had mercilessly taken full advantage of the chance to return fire on the reality TV star who had used his fame to fan a baseless conspiracy about the president’s place of birth. The jokes mocked Trump’s ego and boorishness, and as the audience roared, Obama’s target was visibly annoyed, so much so that some would later wonder whether that moment of humiliation had motivated him to mount his own serious run for the White House.
Saturday night’s event, Obama’s last as president, was expected to have a more valedictory tone for the Democrats, but the prospect of another Democrat in the Oval Office come 2016 also provided reason to celebrate. Preparation for the pre-event parties was already under way on Friday when DNC executive director Amy Dacey learned for the first time around four P.M that the committee’s network had been penetrated. Immediately she picked up the phone and dialed Michael Sussmann at Perkins Coie.
“We’ve had an intrusion,” she told him. The contract IT team first thought they could contain the damage and keep the committee’s systems up and running, she explained, but it seemed obvious they were overmatched, especially if the bureau’s suspicions proved correct and the hackers were Russian. Finally Tamene and his team were getting it: the DNC was in big trouble. “They were mature enough to know that they couldn’t fight the Red Army,” Dacey said.
While still on the phone with Dacey, Sussmann fired off a text to Shawn Henry, a former top cyber official at the FBI who had left the bureau to take a top job with a Silicon Valley cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike. With his shaved head and dark suits, Henry would never be mistaken for a member of the hacker crowd, but he had been on the front lines of previous election-cycle cyberattacks. In 2008, he was in charge of the FBI cyber division when Chinese officials hacked the computers of the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Barack Obama, looking to steal intelligence that would give them insight into how each man would steer U.S. foreign policy regarding China.
As the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and a weekend of follow-up events got under way in Washington, Sussmann formally moved to enlist CrowdStrike to protect the DNC. The intrusion and the plan to counter it were to be kept secret from most DNC staff. “You can’t let the attackers know you know they’re there,” Sussmann instructed Dacey. “You only have one chance to raise the drawbridge.” If the hackers were tipped off, they could destroy logs and wipe their tracks or worse—steal piles of data while making a scorched-earth retreat. Most Democrats would party in blissful ignorance of the potential nightmare going on back at their national committee headquarters.
For the DNC, the timing was terrible. Half a dozen primaries had just ended, with Clinton taking a commanding lead, but the coming weeks formed a brutal final sprint, with potentially decisive contests in ten states, including Oregon, Indiana, and California. The Democratic National Convention, the committee’s showcase event, was twelve weeks away. The party had picked Philadelphia for the 2016 event, and 50,000 people were expected to attend, including about 5,000 delegates, with millions more watching on television.
The DNC’s staff was working around the clock planning for the general election. It was also an intense period of political maneuvering. Supporters of Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, were already suspicious that a party apparatus held tightly in the Clinton family grip had sought to deny them the nomination, and the internal debates about candidates, strategies, fundraising, and campaigning were detailed in thousands of internal DNC emails, spreadsheets, and other files—all residing on a computer system that might have been thoroughly compromised by Russia.
“You had staff running full tilt, gathering research on the Republican front-runner, Donald Trump,” Dacey recalled. “You had an intruder inside the system who was interested in that opposition research, and a convention to plan for. It was the perfect storm.”
By Friday, May 6, CrowdStrike had worked with Tamene’s team to install stronger threat detection system software. Immediately it turned up troubling evidence of two Russian hacking teams—the newly discovered, “noisier” intruder as well as the quieter one that the FBI had long warned the DNC was already inside.
U.S. intelligence agencies had for years been reluctant to publicly identify hacking groups by country out of concern that doing so would jeopardize sources as well as run the risk of complicating diplomatic relations. When they wanted to signal publicly that a nation-state was behind a cyber campaign, they adopted the euphemism “advanced persistent threat,” or APT. The term had been coined in 2006 by an Air Force intelligence officer looking for a way to pass information to defense contractors getting hammered by a specific set of foreign hackers, without revealing the classified detail that the country behind the assault was China. It had then spread to cyber firms in the private sector and now was used throughout the industry. A Chinese cell known as People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398 had carried off a string of thefts of intellectual property and commercial secrets from American and European defense contractors, and engaged in espionage against countries including the United States, Canada, India, and Israel as well as against the United Nations. They were so prolific and brazen that like graffiti artists, they sometimes left telltale signs of who they were, lines of computer code that sometimes included nicknames such as “Ugly Gorilla.” Unit 61398 became known as APT1.
The teams rummaging through the DNC machines were known from previous intrusions on other targets and already had their designated monikers: APT 28 and APT 29. CrowdStrike had its own branding conventions using animals to represent various countries. Chinese groups were pandas, while the label for the Russian teams was based on a symbol associated with that country for centuries: the DNC hackers were dubbed Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear.
CrowdStrike was confident that Fancy Bear—the later arrival at the DNC—was an extension of the GRU. Cozy Bear’s affiliation was less clear. CrowdStrike suspected that it was tied to Russia’s domestic intelligence service, the FSB. But U.S. intelligence agencies had for years been certain that whatever the name—Cozy Bear, APT 29, or the Dukes—the team was an extension of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR.
The original Cozy Bear DNC hack had taken place so long ago that log files were difficult to come by, but with what they could find, CrowdStrike investigators began to reconstruct the intruders’ actions. The Cozy Bear crew had been disciplined and patient. They had compromised the DNC’s email, chat, and internet phone systems. They had set up an automated mechanism so that every time a DNC employee got an email, a copy was forwarded to Cozy Bear. The unit stole passwords and log-ins for system administrators, but behaved cautiously with these keys, never gorging themselves on data they could access, always minimizing the chances of getting caught. The April newcomer, however, had no such manners—it foraged without restraint.
Investigators saw no indication the two teams were working together or were even aware of one another’s presence, though they did seem to target separate areas of the network: Fancy Bear went after research files, at one point making off with a trove of opposition material on Trump, while Cozy Bear focused on emails and chats. The bottom line was clear: the committee and many of its internal secrets had been utterly exposed. Yet in calculating the damage, DNC leaders and investigators relied on an assumption that seemed reasonable: that while whatever information the Russians had taken might be mined by Kremlin analysts, it wouldn’t be exposed publicly. Cozy Bear, after all, had attacked other nongovernmental organizations and defense contractors as well as foreign governments and political organizations. “This is a sophisticated foreign intelligence service with a lot of time, a lot of resources,” Henry concluded. “There’s no doubt this is a nation-state targeting a United States political system. What are candidates thinking about? What are they developing? What are their strategies? It’s classic espionage.” And classic espionage meant not revealing to the world what had been stolen, if for no other reason than it would jeopardize subsequent efforts.
Having taken measure of the breach, the experts began drafting a plan to kick the hackers out. Doing so would require rebuilding entire systems, resetting passwords, and picking a time to shut the network down. On an aggressive timeline, the operation could be carried out starting around May 20. But DNC leaders were reluctant to disrupt the network at a time when the party’s nomination had not yet been secured, so a date was set for the three-day Memorial Day weekend, when it would be easier to take the system offline without cutting into work time or raising suspicions. Yet while Clinton’s lead was commanding, Bernie Sanders was still in the race and drawing energetic crowds. The DNC leadership decided it was better to wait even longer and ensure that the contest was clinched. CrowdStrike held off, scheduling the work for mid-June.
During that stretch, the Russians amassed more emails that appeared to show DNC bias in favor of Clinton—not only old correspondence, but new messages written during the stretch when the DNC could have been in cleanup mode. And because the hacking was still being kept secret, nobody outside the inner circle had any sense that they should be more cautious than usual when sending emails and documents. On May 21, Mark Paustenbach, a committee communications official, wrote to a colleague, “Wondering if there’s a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess.” Other damaging emails had been written before CrowdStrike had even had enough time to conclude the attack was being carried out by Russians. For example, on May 5, a committee staffer emailed Paustenbach and Dacey suggesting a way to call voters’ attention to Sanders’s faith. “It might make no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God,” wrote Brad Marshall, the DNC’s chief financial officer, who had lived and worked for years in Kentucky. “He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist … My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.” This was way beyond the official DNC position, which was that the organization was there to help all Democratic candidates without favor toward any in particular. Marshall added in a second email that it came down to the “Jesus thing.” Dacey replied: “AMEN.” Dacey later insisted that she had meant her remark not as affirmation of the plan but to express understanding of the venting by her staff. Regardless of intention, it was a comment that would later add fuel to a fire.
On Monday, June 6, Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination, making history as the first woman in the United States ever to be selected to represent one of the two major parties in a presidential contest. Breathing easier that their secret had held for five weeks, the DNC leadership finally turned to the task of getting rid of the intruders. But as plans took shape for what the cyber team called “Remediation Weekend,” officials knew that word of Russian penetration of a major party was unlikely to hold. Sussmann, the lawyer, recommended preempting this possibility by contacting a reporter at The Washington Post.
ON WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8, ELLEN NAKASHIMA WALKED A FEW BLOCKS from The Washington Post’s building on 13th and K Streets to Sussmann’s office at Perkins Coie. In a sixth-floor conference room, she met Dacey for the first time. Henry was there, too, along with Sussmann. The three of them proceeded to tell her about the dramatic events of the preceding month. Dacey was no expert in cyberattacks, but she was intent on making sure that people knew what happened and understood the stakes.
On the evening of Friday, June 10, after the DNC staff had gone home, a crew of about ten committee technology workers, including Tamene, as well as a separate team of CrowdStrike investigators, arrived at committee headquarters for Remediation Weekend.
The crew worked Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, pausing for only brief stretches of sleep. The entire DNC network was shut down. To keep the mission secret, the committee had told employees the unusual arrangement was required for a system upgrade. The process was tedious and repetitive. The committee had collected hundreds of laptops from staffers—some of whom fretted that this meant their jobs were at risk because Clinton was taking over the party leadership. The remediation team piled the devices in stacks, side by side, on a large rectangular table in a first-floor conference room. Each laptop had to be reimaged, a manual process consisting of wiping the hard drives clean, reinstalling the operating system, and clicking through a series of tiresome fields to select the correct language, time zone, etc. Meanwhile, a parallel team backed up terabytes of committee data to a clean collection of servers. Every laptop, once reimaged, had to have its data restored.
By Sunday night, the project was finished, and Dacey, who came into the office to check on the work, breathed a sigh of relief. In appreciation of the magnitude of the operation, one of CrowdStrike’s founders, Dmitri Alperovitch, a Russian-born expert with degrees from Georgia Tech, showed up to take his exhausted team to dinner at a Brazilian steakhouse. Monday morning, the network was back online, the laptops, with new software running to detect any return of the Russians, redistributed.
DNC officials had shared their account with Nakashima on the condition that it not be published until the committee’s networks had been secured. She began composing a draft of the article and made plans with editors to put the story online on Monday, June 13. But on Sunday the twelfth, as the DNC team was completing its scrub, devastating news broke in Florida: Omar Mateen, a twenty-nine-year-old security guard, had opened fire in the packed Pulse nightclub in Orlando, killing forty-nine people and wounding fifty-three others—then the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history.
The Post put the hacking story off for an extra day. At 11:30 A.M. on Tuesday it appeared atop the paper’s website, opening, “Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.”
The article emphasized that the hackers had been expelled from the DNC’s systems over the preceding weekend and quoted a range of officials and experts casting the intrusion as a classic case of cyber espionage. Moscow, it was agreed, was far more likely to hoard the stolen material and mine it for insights that could provide critical leverage in global affairs. The prospect that Russia would wage an unprecedented campaign of information warfare—sowing doubt about the democratic process, damaging the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and ultimately seeking to help elect Donald Trump—was beyond imagining at that moment. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov quickly denied any Russian involvement.
On June 15, within twenty-four hours of the Post’s story, the website The Smoking Gun posted a story saying it had been contacted by an “online vandal” using the name Guccifer 2.0. Elaborating on a blog site, he claimed to be flattered by accounts depicting the operation as “sophisticated,” insisting that “in fact, it was easy, very easy.” He insisted he was not Russian, but a Romanian who had chosen his moniker partly to honor his hacking predecessor Guccifer but also because he loved the Gucci brand. “I’m a hacker, manager, philosopher, woman lover,” he proclaimed. But in online correspondence with journalists, his persona seemed to crack. Posed questions in Romanian by the journalist Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, writing for the online tech publication Motherboard, Guccifer 2.0’s responses came back in fractured syntax that seemed to betray a reliance on Google Translate. In subsequent exchanges, his online personality seemed to shift, suggesting more than one hand was operating the Guccifer 2.0 persona.
To establish his credentials, he passed along a collection of pilfered DNC documents. The files included internal memos and a list of donors that catalogued six-figure contributions to the party from, among others, movie star Morgan Freeman, director Steven Spielberg, and Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg. Guccifer 2.0 referred those interested to the DCLeaks website that GRU hackers had set up in April and where even more DNC material was now placed. The document that got the most attention was a 237-page collection of DNC opposition research.
Marked confidential, “Donald Trump Report” was a sprawling catalogue of Trump’s perceived political vulnerabilities, recounting his privileged upbringing, his lawsuits and bankruptcies, affairs and broken marriages, vacillating party affiliations, crass comments about women, fierce verbal attacks on Muslims, penchant for falsehoods, and alleged racism. “One thing is clear about Donald Trump,” read the file’s first sentence. “There is only one person he has ever looked out for and that’s himself.”
To Democrats, all of this added up to a portrait of an ideal opponent, someone who by any conventional standard had to be considered unelectable. But damning as it was, the material laid out in the document was, for the most part, already widely known. If Democrats were hoarding any bombshells, they weren’t listed in the pages of its “Donald Trump Report.”
Guccifer 2.0’s message labored to divert suspicion from Russia. “Hi. This is Guccifer 2.0 and this is me who hacked Democratic National Committee,” it said. The writer offered a brief account of his or her exploit, explaining that it involved breaching “mail boxes of a number of Democrats” and then exploiting the information to get “into committee servers.” The hacker claimed to have been inside the DNC network for more than a year and stolen “thousands of files and mails.”
In reality, Guccifer 2.0 was a GRU creation, an online persona operated by the same hackers who had rampaged through the DNC and DCCC networks. On June 22, one week after Guccifer 2.0’s debut, the Russian hackers behind this online puppet got a message from an eager ally in their unfolding operation against Clinton: WikiLeaks. The organization, determined not to watch from the sidelines, urged Guccifer 2.0 to send “any new material here for us to review and it will have a much higher impact than what you are doing.” Weeks later, WikiLeaks was pleading again for access to the trove, saying, “if you have anything Hillary related we want it,” noting that the Democratic convention was rapidly approaching and unless the digital saboteurs intervened “she will solidify Bernie supporters behind her.”
THE UNITED STATES AND WIKILEAKS HAD BEEN IN A STATE OF OPEN hostility since the group in 2010 published half a million military records from Afghanistan and Iraq and approximately 250,000 diplomatic cables. That release triggered a criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and indirectly led its Australian founder, Julian Assange, to seek asylum in Ecuador’s embassy in London. Assange had been accused of sexual assault in Sweden and said he feared that if he was extradited there to face charges, he would be ultimately transferred to the United States, regardless of the outcome of any court proceeding in Sweden.
Yet while WikiLeaks professed to be concerned only with demolishing the wall of secrecy maintained by the powerful, its publication of confidential information—couched as a moral imperative—has been consistently amoral, with no concern for how such revelations might damage those whose names turned up in the material. Without notable regret they have publicly released a wealth of personal data belonging to people who have little to do with their larger political causes, including credit card numbers, medical records, and Social Security numbers.
Assange, who has hosted a talk show on RT, the Kremlin’s propaganda channel, has made no effort to hide his own disdain for the United States or his relish at the prospect of its downfall. With “a faint smile,” he told The New Yorker in 2017 that the American empire might finally be collapsing. Although Assange denied that Russia was his source for the DNC emails, he has never much cared how he obtains what he publishes. “If it’s true information, we don’t care where it comes from,” he once said. “Let people fight with the truth, and when the bodies are cleared there will be bullets of truth everywhere.”
That disregard for sources was matched by an increasing affection for authoritarian leadership (including his own of WikiLeaks) that would eventually place him firmly in the pro-Trump camp.
After a series of failed attempts to transfer the stolen documents to WikiLeaks, Guccifer 2.0 sent the organization an email with an attachment—“wk dnc link1.txt.gpg.” It arrived on July 14 with instructions on how to unzip the trove. Four days later, WikiLeaks responded that it had accessed “the 1 Gb or so archive” and would begin publishing “this week.”
CHAPTER 3 (#u31dfdad9-2908-5b10-96f6-955b3da1d413)
MOTHS TO THE FLAME (#u31dfdad9-2908-5b10-96f6-955b3da1d413)
AVOIDING THE MAIN LOBBY AS A SECURITY PRECAUTION, DONALD Trump was escorted through a loading dock, into a freight elevator, and up to The Washington Post publisher’s suite on the ninth floor. As he made his way into a March 2016 meeting with the paper’s editorial board, the Republican candidate walked past historic plates of the Post’s front pages lining the walls. On them were headlines that marked Hitler’s rise to power, America’s plunge into World War II, and the U.S. blockade of Cuba as the Soviet Union sought to install nuclear weapons a hundred miles off the coast of the United States.
Trump had from the beginning faced profound doubts about his qualifications to handle such harrowing events. Even within his own party, there was concern that his disposition and ideas—backing torture, praising Putin, criticizing European allies—were themselves threats to international stability. As Trump took a seat in the Post conference room, overlooking Franklin Square Park in downtown Washington, he had two objectives: to quiet these doubts and introduce a credible foreign policy team.
The paper’s opinion writers had been told in advance by the campaign that if asked about foreign policy advisers, Trump would make news. When the question came at the outset of the interview, Trump feigned ignorance about this bit of stagecraft.
“Well, I hadn’t thought of doing it, but if you want I can give you some of the names,” he said, turning to a piece of paper for this purpose. He proceeded to read a list that raised not a glimmer of recognition among the writers, some of whom had covered foreign policy for decades. Several participants would say later that Trump himself seemed unfamiliar with the individuals he introduced.
Of the five names that Trump listed, only one would actually end up working in his administration: retired lieutenant general Keith Kellogg, who had commanded the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division and held a senior job with the Coalition Provisional Authority in postwar Iraq, would end up chief of staff on the National Security Council. Two others had fleeting associations with the campaign and résumés that raised eyebrows: Walid Phares had ties dating to the 1980s to militant Christian groups in Lebanon and anti-Islamic views; Joseph Schmitz had resigned as inspector general at the Pentagon amid allegations of obstructing investigations of political appointees.
The final names on Trump’s list were virtual unknowns.
“Carter Page, PhD,” Trump said, glancing at his list. “George Papadopoulos, he’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy.”
In fact, Page was a familiar figure to only one corner of the national security establishment in Washington: the FBI agents in charge of investigating Russian espionage.
THAT TRUMP FELT COMPELLED TO PRESENT THIS ROSTER WAS A reflection of the pressure brought by his surging candidacy but also the extraordinary isolation of his campaign. By March, Trump could no longer be dismissed as a long shot or a joke. He had stockpiled delegates with convincing victories in a string of primaries, and vanquished all but two opponents in the Republican field: U.S. senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas.
Both senators seemed incredulous to find themselves losing to a reality television star. “I will do whatever it takes, I will campaign as hard as it takes, I will stay in this race as long as it takes,” Rubio told a crowd of seven thousand supporters in Atlanta on February 27, 2016. “A con artist will never get control of this party.” Two weeks later, after Trump claimed a massive haul of delegates on Super Tuesday and captured Rubio’s home state of Florida, the chastened senator was done. Cruz soon bowed in defeat as well.
Yet many in Washington were not so ready to acquiesce. Candidates with momentum like Trump’s ordinarily exert a gravitational pull on the powerful in their parties, attracting donors and would-be advisers eager to position themselves for influence with, or jobs in, a new administration. With Trump, however, the inverse was happening: the closer he got to securing the nomination, the more determined many of the most experienced and respected policymakers affiliated with his party were to reject him.
On March 2, as the dust from Super Tuesday was still settling, a collection of 122 self-described GOP national security leaders published a letter online vowing “to prevent the election of someone so utterly unfitted to the office.” The missive was signed by a roster of Republican loyalists, some of whom had held senior positions in government, others regarded as influential advisers and columnists. The petition was drafted by Eliot Cohen, who had served as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the George W. Bush administration. Other signatories included Michael Chertoff, former head of Homeland Security, and Dov Zakheim, who had held senior positions at the Pentagon.
The letter excoriated Trump, saying that his views were so “unmoored” that he veered from “isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence.” His support for resuming the use of torture on terror suspects was “inexcusable,” and his “hateful, anti-Muslim rhetoric” needlessly inflamed tensions across the world. The letter noted that his “admiration for foreign dictators such as Vladimir Putin is unacceptable for the leader of the world’s greatest democracy.” It concluded with a stab at his supposed business acumen. “Not all lethal conflicts can be resolved as a real estate deal might,” the letter said. “There is no recourse to bankruptcy court in international affairs.”
The next day, Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, gave a scathing speech opposing Trump’s candidacy, declaring that his foreign policy was “alarming allies and fueling the enmity of our enemies.” Trump, Romney said, was a “phony, a fraud,” a candidate “playing the American people for suckers.” Two weeks later, party insiders gathered at the Army and Navy Club in downtown Washington to devise plans to block Trump’s nomination and potentially launch a third-party bid. The “never Trump” movement would intensify in the coming months, ultimately to no avail.
Trump’s decision to announce his team of foreign policy advisers on March 21 at the Post was meant to arrest the intraparty revolt. But the anonymity of those included on his roster only reinforced the impression of a campaign bereft of experience or expertise. The résumés of Page and Papadopoulos were laughably thin.
Public records showed that Papadopoulos had graduated from DePaul University in Chicago in 2009, lived in London for a stretch, and then worked as a research assistant for the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. His few writings, including several op-eds for Israeli news sites, focused on Greece, Cyprus, and Israeli natural gas holdings in the eastern Mediterranean. On his personal LinkedIn page, he highlighted his role as a representative to the 2012 Geneva International Model United Nations, a mock exercise in global diplomacy for high school and college students. It was the sort of credential one might include on an application for an internship, not present as a qualification to advise a potential president. (The UN claim may also have been dishonest—others at the Geneva event that year have no record or recollection of him attending.)
Page had more seemingly legitimate experience. A 1993 U.S. Naval Academy graduate, he had worked at Merrill Lynch before starting his own company, Global Energy Capital, in Manhattan. He claimed affiliations with respected think tanks including the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York–based organization that counted a dozen former secretaries of state among its members.
Hidden at the time, apparently even to Trump, were more disconcerting aspects of his background. Just days before the candidate’s meeting with the Post’s editorial board, Page had been questioned by the FBI—not for the first time—about his ties to Russian intelligence. In fact, by that point the bureau had been tracking Page, intermittently, for at least three years in connection with an FBI probe of a Russian spy ring in New York.
Page was aware of the bureau’s interest. Back in June 2013, he had met with FBI agents at New York’s Plaza hotel (once owned by Donald Trump until indebtedness forced him to sell), insisting that his contacts with Russians were related to “my research on international political economy” and that any documents he had provided related to the energy business. He made it clear that he was doing the FBI a favor by assisting them voluntarily because, he said helpfully, “it seemed to me that the resources of the U.S. government might be better allocated toward addressing real national security threats, particularly given the recent Boston Marathon bombing.”
As part of their surveillance, the bureau had lengthy transcripts of Kremlin agents describing their efforts to recruit and manipulate Page. Portions of those transcripts appeared in a 2015 complaint filed in the Southern District of New York—referring to Page anonymously as “Male-1.” The Russians’ conversation had been captured by a listening device the FBI had planted on a binder the Kremlin operatives had unwittingly carried into a conference room. They spoke of Page with undisguised scorn, frustrated and amused by his seemingly clueless behavior.
In his encounters with Page, Victor Podobnyy had cast himself as someone who could help the American pursue energy-related business deals in Russia. In reality, Podobnyy was an SVR agent posing as an attaché at the Russian mission to the United Nations. He marveled at Page’s affection for Russia and said of his American mark: “I think he is an idiot and forgot who I am. Plus he writes to me in Russian [to] practice the language. He flies to Moscow more often than I do.”
Page later told the FBI that he had met Podobnyy in January 2013 at an energy industry conference in New York. The Russians regarded Page’s interest in oil riches as a vulnerability. Page “got hooked on Gazprom [the largely state-owned oil and gas company] thinking that if they have a project he could be rise up,” Podobnyy explained in the exchanges intercepted by the FBI, referring to the Russian energy giant. “It’s obvious that he wants to earn lots of money,” he concluded with a laugh.
On another recording, a different Kremlin operative, Igor Sporyshev, who was working undercover as a trade representative of the Russian Federation in New York, complained that the charade they were running would eventually mean that he would have to get involved with the bumbling American. Podobnyy brushed him off, saying that he would continue to “feed him empty promises” and eventually cut Page loose. “You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself.”
Page did provide documents to the Russians, though he later claimed to reporters that he had shared only “basic immaterial information and publicly available research.” He added that he furnished “nothing more than a few samples from the far more detailed lectures I was preparing at the time for the students in my Spring 2013 semester, ‘Energy and the World: Politics, Markets, and Technology’ course which I taught on Saturdays at New York University.” (Page, an adjunct professor at NYU, had twice failed to defend his PhD thesis at the University of London before finally earning his doctorate.)
In the end, the FBI probe had limited results. The two Russians caught speaking about Page were protected from prosecution in the United States by diplomatic immunity. A third, however, was under what intelligence agencies call “non-official cover”—that is, using phony private sector credentials rather than working out of an embassy or consulate. Evgeny Buryakov, who posed as an executive at Vnesheconombank, a Russian development bank, was arrested and convicted of espionage as part of a broader case in which Page was only a small player. Buryakov served a thirty-month sentence before he was released in 2017 and deported to Russia. Page was never accused of wrongdoing, in part because the bureau was never sure that he knew he was interacting with Russian spies.
His brush with the FBI did nothing to diminish his enthusiasm for Russia. In the ensuing years Page continued to travel to Moscow, pursue business deals there, and publish articles and blog posts that read like Kremlin talking points. In one remarkable 2014 piece for Global Policy—a scholarly publication of Durham University in England—Page praised a particularly controversial Putin ally. Igor Sechin was Russia’s former deputy prime minister and chairman of the Rosneft energy conglomerate. He was also one of the oligarchs sanctioned by the United States to punish Russia for its intervention in Ukraine. Page wrote of Sechin with reverence, saying that he had “done more to advance U.S.-Russian relations than any individual in or out of government from either side of the Atlantic over the past decade.” A year later, Page likened the rationale behind the American sanctions to one of the nation’s darkest legacies, equating the effort to dissuade Moscow from meddling in other countries to an 1850 guide on how to produce “the ideal slave.”
In December 2015, Page sought a volunteer position with the Trump campaign by reaching out to Ed Cox, the son-in-law of former president Richard Nixon and the chairman of the New York State Republican Party. Cox, who was directing would-be volunteers to many of the GOP candidates, helped Page get an appointment with Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. When Page arrived at Trump Tower, he encountered an overwhelmed political operative who interrupted their conversation repeatedly to answer calls on a pair of incessantly ringing cell phones. Lewandowski took Page next door to the office of Sam Clovis, a conservative talk radio host from Iowa serving as the Trump campaign cochairman.
After a cursory background check that involved little more than a Google search, Clovis added Page’s name on the list of advisers that Trump carried into his meeting with the Post.
Former colleagues, business associates, and teachers struggled to make sense of Page’s new profile. His adviser at the Naval Academy recalled a student who was a striver, opportunistic but eccentric. “I always found him a little out of place,” said Stephen E. Frantzich,
a political science and history professor who supervised Page’s work on a research paper. Page was a “geeky kid, a good writer and hard worker” who displayed no particular interest in Russia. Yet Page claimed in an interview decades later that he was specifically drawn to the academy after seeing two officers in naval uniforms standing in the background on television coverage of U.S.-Russia arms negotiations in the 1980s. Page, then a teenager in Poughkeepsie, New York, said, “I came in off the street on my skateboard and I watched the summit meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev.” The naval uniforms made him think “that’s interesting, maybe that’s some kind of way of getting involved and helping out.”
After five years in the Navy, which included an assignment as an intelligence officer for a UN peacekeeping mission in Morocco, Page devoted himself to chasing riches. In 2004, he moved to Moscow for the position with Merrill Lynch. The title he was given, vice president, sounded more glamorous than the tasks it entailed—planning meetings and drafting papers for the firm’s principals. But Page later depicted himself as a heavy hitter, setting up transactions involving billions of dollars and serving as an adviser to Gazprom. Sergey Aleksashenko, chairman of Merrill Lynch Russia at the time, described Page’s claims as outlandish and said that he reacted to hearing Trump had named him an adviser by “laughing, because he [Page] was never ready to discuss foreign policy.”
Page left Moscow in 2007 and made his way to New York, where he continued to embellish his Moscow business record and social life, even claiming to have had a long-term romance with a Bolshoi ballerina. His company, Global Energy Capital, had a website decorated with stock photos of oil derricks and the Manhattan skyline, but listed no employees or clients. In interviews, Page spoke of working in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper that shared an atrium with Trump Tower. In reality, the office he occupied was a windowless room rented by the hour in a corporate coworking space.
For Page, the stars suddenly aligned when a billionaire businessman declared he was pursuing the nation’s highest office with no standing entourage of advisers. Trump’s views of foreign policy were at best a work in progress, but on one subject he spoke with a clarity that Page found intoxicating: Trump was more overtly enamored of Russia than any candidate to compete for one of the major American political party nominations in a century.
“I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin,” Trump said in July 2015, shortly after announcing his run. He was speaking at a forum in Las Vegas when a Russian graduate student in the audience—a woman named Maria Butina, who would be charged two years later as an unregistered Russian agent who had infiltrated conservative circles—asked how he would alter the U.S. relationship with Moscow. “I don’t think you’d need the sanctions,” Trump said. “I think we would get along very, very well.”
AS THE ELECTION APPROACHED, THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN ATTRACTED figures who were more recognizable to party veterans, though regarded as damaged or discarded by the establishment. Veteran campaign strategist Paul J. Manafort and retired three-star U.S. Army general Michael Flynn were both from middle-class New England backgrounds—Manafort’s family had started a construction company in Connecticut and Flynn was one of nine children, the son of a retired Army sergeant and a schoolteacher, on the shore of Rhode Island. Each had ascended the ranks of core American institutions, Manafort the Republican Party and Flynn the U.S. military. But neither had ended those associations entirely on his terms. Manafort had drifted to the margins of Republican politics after the 1990s and focused on chasing riches overseas. Flynn had been forced to resign the last position of his military career, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, over concerns with his leadership failings. The Trump campaign offered an unexpected shot at redemption, a chance to restore their reputations and position themselves either for a return to power or profit in the private sector.
Manafort and Flynn had one other thing in common: a charitable view of Russia’s role in the world and a willingness to take money from sources close to the Kremlin.
This approach had already made Manafort rich. After decades at the center of American politics—serving as a senior adviser to the presidential campaigns of Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Robert Dole—he had turned his attentions to a surging demand for lobbying firepower among despotic regimes overseas. His qualms were minimal and his qualifications substantial: his decades in Republican back rooms had given him a deeply embedded network of government contacts. His experience running campaigns and his intricate knowledge of modern polling and messaging positioned him as the go-to consultant for autocrats willing to pay huge sums for skills that would help them fend off any rivals but also apply a veneer of American-style democracy in otherwise rigged contests.
The foreign clients Manafort represented had risen or clung to power through corruption and bloodshed. Among them were Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos and Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi. Manafort’s firm took so much money from sources in those countries and others, including Nigeria and Kenya, that he was referenced repeatedly in a scathing 1992 report called “The Torturer’s Lobby” by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative organization.
Manafort moved into an even more lucrative echelon through his work in Ukraine on behalf of a candidate and party with extensive ties to Putin. After the revote that put Yushchenko into office, his Moscow-backed opponent, Yanukovych, spent the next six years plotting to claim the presidency he’d narrowly lost with the help of a new ally: Manafort. The price tag was staggering and largely hidden from public view. For his services recasting Yanukovych and his Party of Regions (deceivingly) as pro-Europe reformers, Manafort and his company collected millions, much of it laundered through a web of overseas accounts. Manafort would later disclose in one filing that his firm had pocketed more than $17 million in a single two-year stretch, but that was only a part of the payout—The New York Times in 2017 obtained secret ledgers kept by the Party of Regions showing an additional $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments to Manafort’s company from 2007 to 2012, meaning that from this one client Manafort had brought in nearly $30 million.
Over a decade, Manafort and his subordinates hid vast sums from U.S. authorities through a dizzying array of front companies, avoiding taxes by routing payments from secret accounts in Cyprus—essentially wiring money to pay bills in the United States without ever reporting the income. From 2008 to 2014, according to a Justice Department indictment, Manafort channeled $12 million from overseas accounts into the United States through a titanic shopping spree: $520,440 to a Beverly Hills clothing store, $163,705 for Range Rovers, $623,910 for antiques, $934,350 for rugs. And those were just the incidentals: Manafort shifted millions more from Cyprus to assorted trusts and limited liability corporations to buy homes in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Washington, D.C., suburbs.
Manafort used his Ukraine connections to pursue lucrative deals with oligarchs. Among them was the $18 million sale of Ukraine’s cable television assets to a partnership assembled by Manafort and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to Putin, around 2008. Manafort denied taking illicit payments and depicted his consulting work in Ukraine as part of an honest effort to democratize the country and elevate its prospects of joining the European Union. Yet after Yanukovych prevailed in his 2010 bid to be Ukraine’s new president, the evidence of his brutal rule and lavish lifestyle at the expense of ordinary Ukrainians was hard to conceal. If Manafort was uncomfortable working for a leader who had little love for democracy or human rights and a visible affection for Putin, it did not show.
Three years after taking office, Yanukovych—under intense pressure from the Kremlin—rejected an agreement that would have moved Ukraine closer to membership in the EU, which many in the country wanted. Instead, he agreed to take a cash infusion from Russia and edge away from Europe in favor of lashing Ukraine’s political and economic fortunes to Moscow. The nation erupted in a new wave of unrest: protests in the capital city of Kiev spread across other parts of the country and degenerated into riots, clashes with police left dozens of people dead, and government authority teetered on collapse. Fearing for his life, Yanukovych fled the country in February 2014 for the safety he could find only in his true base of support: Russia.
The crisis in Ukraine, such a distant consideration for most Americans, was in hindsight intricately connected to what happened in 2016 in the United States.
For all his projections of strength and security, Putin is deeply insecure about his hold on power, and particularly anxious that a revolt like that in Ukraine could bring his own end. A senior U.S. official who served in Moscow during the Obama and Trump administrations and had contacts in the Kremlin said that Putin’s anxiety is profound and macabre. After the deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was dragged from a culvert in 2011 by an angry mob, sodomized with a bayonet, and shot, Putin watched footage of the gruesome incident repeatedly. It was a graphic demonstration of the outcome he most feared, and one that he was convinced had been set in motion by the U.S. intervention in Libya and could occur, if he were not vigilant, in Moscow.
The 2014 unrest in Ukraine intensified Putin’s paranoia, and he again suspected manipulation by Washington, particularly after seeing the State Department’s top official on Russia, Victoria Nuland, handing out sandwiches to protesters.
Russia retaliated by releasing an intercepted phone call between Nuland and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in which she expressed irritation with Europe’s slow response to the unfolding crisis. “Fuck the EU!” she said. The release caused minor diplomatic embarrassment but had a greater significance. Spy agencies steal such signals routinely but usually guard them jealously to ensure that the victim doesn’t discover the breach. In this case, the Kremlin had taken a piece of intelligence and “weaponized” it—something it would undertake on a far grander scale two years later.
The ignominious departure of Yanukovych and the collapse of his political party cut off a massive flow of cash to Manafort. That was only the beginning of his problems. The FBI had begun probing payments surrounding his work in Ukraine, and agents interviewed him twice, first in 2013 and again a year later. The scrutiny made it risky for Manafort, his revenue plummeting, to reach for the money he’d stashed overseas.
Manafort’s dealings with Russians also began to catch up to him. Deripaska, the oligarch he’d worked with on the $18 million cable television transaction, became convinced that he’d been cheated by Manafort and began a years-long campaign in courts to get his investment back. Deripaska sought entry into the United States but, fortunately for Manafort, was denied a visa because of his alleged links to organized crime.
Despite hemorrhaging funds, Manafort was unable or unwilling to stanch spending on a lifestyle that by now included homes from the Hamptons to Palm Beach, vacations in the South of France, a horse farm in Florida, and projects for his filmmaker daughter. Instead, he turned to even more legally dubious financial maneuvers, taking out multimillion-dollar loans on properties he’d acquired with money he’d never reported as income. A later criminal indictment accused him of submitting doctored financial statements, diverting loan proceeds, and lying about credit card bills as part of a sprawling scheme to dupe banks.
His personal life was also spiraling out of control. In late 2014, he was caught cheating on his wife of thirty-six years, according to a trove of text messages exchanged by his daughters that was stolen by hackers (possibly Ukrainians seeking revenge on Manafort) and posted online. In the messages his daughters—Andrea, who was then twenty-nine, and Jessica, then thirty-three—spoke of their father with a mix of sympathy and revulsion. Andrea hinted at the financial crunch her father was facing, complaining that he was “suddenly extremely cheap” in conversations about her wedding budget and strapped by a “tight cash flow.” They expressed admiration for his accomplishments but described him as manipulative and cravenly dishonest. In the most damning passage, Andrea bluntly acknowledged the moral stain of the Manafort fortune. “Don’t fool yourself,” she wrote to her sister. “The money we have is blood money.”
The affair appeared to add to the financial strain. According to the texts, he had rented a $9,000-a-month apartment as well as a home on Long Island for his new girlfriend, a woman thirty years younger than him. When the affair was exposed, Manafort agreed to couples counseling. After that failed, he checked into a therapy facility in Arizona, where he often sobbed during daily ten-minute phone calls home.
These were the circumstances of the man Trump would turn to in 2016 to lead his campaign.
EARLY THAT YEAR, MANAFORT SAT DOWN AT A COMPUTER AND began typing a memo to pitch his services. “I am not looking for a paid job,” he wrote, aware of Trump’s miserly impulses and volatile tendencies toward paid subordinates. The two-page missive, which he delivered through a mutual acquaintance, recited his experience running conventions and wrangling GOP delegates presenting himself as someone who could head off the threat of a convention coup. He also cast himself, remarkably, as a Washington outsider, an exile of the swamp Trump had vowed to drain. Finally he noted that he lived in Trump Tower—unit 43G—and claimed that he had once helped Trump quiet the skies over his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida by lobbying the Federal Aviation Administration.
Former colleagues, mindful of the problematic sources of Manafort’s riches, warned him of the scrutiny that would accompany a return to the political spotlight. But Manafort was unswayed—Trump was his kind of guy. On March 29, eight days after Trump’s meeting with the Post editorial board, Manafort was brought on board.
MANAFORT JOINED AN OPERATION SO BEREFT OF FOREIGN POLICY expertise that one campaign official summarized the search criteria in stark terms: “Anyone who came to us with a pulse, a résumé, and seemed legit would be welcomed.”
Only one early Trump backer exceeded those expectations, bringing with him the kind of credentials that would ordinarily have been welcomed by any campaign. Michael Flynn’s patriotism, sacrifice, and distinguished service were beyond dispute. In the fifteen years since the September 11 attacks, he had spent almost as much time deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq as he had spent with his family in the United States. The Army traditionally favors officers who rise up by leading combat units, but Flynn had climbed the service’s intelligence ranks. His ascent to three-star general was a reflection of his effectiveness as an officer, but also the realities of a new era of conflict. Against amorphous terror and insurgent networks, the ability to process streams of data from drones, captured militants, and their laptops and cell phones was often more important than overwhelming force.
Flynn helped design a lethally effective combination of these ingredients. In concert with General Stanley A. McChrystal in both Iraq and Afghanistan, he worked to compress a nightly cycle of raids by commando units followed by rapid exploitation of information gathered at the scene. The data was used to generate targets for the next round of raids, often within hours, a tempo that proved devastating to insurgents. The approach helped pull the war effort out of a tailspin at a time when Al-Qaeda’s franchise in Iraq had driven the country into a sectarian bloodbath. In 2006, forces under McChrystal and Flynn decapitated the Al-Qaeda network, tracking its leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to a village north of Baghdad and ending his insurgent career under a pair of 500-pound bombs.
When McChrystal was given command of the war in Afghanistan in 2009, he again turned to Flynn as his top intelligence officer. While deployed, Flynn co-authored a twenty-six-page article that delivered a blistering critique of America’s cluelessness about the cultural and religious complexities of the conflict. Titled “Fixing Intel,” it was published by the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank. Flynn’s report was seen by some as self-serving but it burnished his reputation as an unconventional thinker.
When McChrystal’s career was derailed over a troubling profile in Rolling Stone magazine, Flynn returned to Washington to take what many regard as the top job in his specialized field, running the Defense Intelligence Agency, a spy service that caters to the needs of the military from a base across the Potomac River from Reagan National Airport.
Then it was Flynn’s turn to implode.
He’d arrived at DIA with ambitious plans to reorganize the agency around geographically focused centers and to upgrade its overseas collection capabilities to more closely resemble those of the CIA—in effect, to raise DIA above its reputation as a backwater among U.S. intelligence agencies.
He warned any who resisted his agenda that he would “move them or fire them.”
But Flynn, who had helped devise the formula for subduing insurgent organizations, seemed overwhelmed by the complexity of the organization he now led. From the outset, the hallway murmurs were that he was struggling to adapt outside the supportive structure of McChrystal’s combat apparatus, where orders were executed with the snap of a salute and the mission was both clear and all-consuming. The DIA, by contrast, was a sprawling agency of 17,000 employees, half of them civilians. Its mission was diffuse, its structure bureaucratic, and its rhythms nothing like the raid-exploit-raid repetition Flynn knew on the front lines. Subordinates left meetings confused by his instructions; members of Congress were alarmed by his inability to answer basic questions about the agency’s budget. Flynn made so many unfounded pronouncements—about the Islamic State, North Korea, and other subjects—that aides coined a term for his puzzling assertions: “Flynn facts.” Senior aides began warning the director of national intelligence, James Clapper Jr., a gruff Air Force general who had spent half a century around U.S. spy agencies and was now in charge of all of them, as well as the Pentagon’s top intelligence official, Michael Vickers, that Flynn’s disruptive approach was damaging morale.
As the months passed, Flynn’s views about Islam appeared to harden, and he became fixated on Iran. He pushed analysts to scour intelligence streams for hidden evidence of Iran’s ties to Al-Qaeda, connections that most experts considered minimal, and search for proof of Iranian involvement in a variety of events where there seemed to be none, including the 2012 attacks on U.S. compounds in Benghazi, Libya. No matter the evidence, Flynn kept pressing, always seemingly convinced of connections to the country he considered America’s greatest enemy.
The DIA chief had an inexplicable admiration for another American adversary, however. In June 2013, Flynn traveled to Moscow for meetings with General Igor Sergun, his counterpart at the GRU, the military intelligence agency that three years later would help disrupt the U.S. election. Prior DIA chiefs had made similar visits, but Flynn was convinced that he had been accorded special treatment and developed a rapport with the Russians that might enable a cooperative breakthrough.
Flynn “was brought into the inner sanctum,” recalled U.S. Army brigadier general Peter Zwack, who was the U.S. defense attaché in Moscow and accompanied Flynn throughout his three-day visit. Flynn was allowed to lay a wreath at Russia’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He was taken to the GRU’s gleaming modern headquarters on the outskirts of Moscow, where—in a remarkable gesture—he was invited to deliver an hour-long address on U.S. counterterrorism methods to a collection of majors and colonels who, Zwack surmised, “had never before encountered an American intelligence general.”
That evening Flynn hosted a dinner for Sergun at Zwack’s residence at the U.S. embassy, decorated with a LeRoy Neiman painting of Red Square. The assembled officers began raising glasses of vodka, culminating in a final toast to making “the airlocks fit,” a reference to the 1975 joining of the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft. Sergun returned the gesture the next night by hosting a dinner for Flynn at the historic Sovietsky Hotel, providing the American general a personal tour of the room where Stalin’s son had lived.
Flynn saw such promise in the encounter that he returned to DIA and began planning a reciprocal visit that would bring Sergun and his GRU entourage to the United States. He continued to pursue the idea even after U.S.-Russia relations went into a protracted skid over Moscow’s military incursions into Ukraine. Eventually Flynn had to be told by his bosses to abandon the plan—an intervention that only added to their growing vexation with him.
DIA directors are expected to serve terms of at least three years. But by early 2014, Clapper and Vickers had had enough, and told Flynn that his troubled tenure would run out after two. Flynn, only fifty-five, was forced to retire.
Flynn’s wife, Lori, wore a festive floral dress with a lei around her neck to his farewell ceremony on August 7, 2014, as if anticipating the coming freedom that she and her husband, an avid surfer, were soon to enjoy. And Flynn, in an Army dress uniform draped with the many medals he’d won during his career, ended his remarks to the five hundred in attendance at DIA headquarters with an expression more associated with sailors than soldiers, a wish for “fair winds and following seas.”
Beneath the surface, he seethed.
FLYNN’S REMOVAL HAD BEEN DELAYED BY MONTHS TO ALLOW HIM to make one final move up in rank and secure his third star. Despite that accommodation, Flynn became increasingly bitter toward those he blamed for his ouster. He began claiming that he was pushed out not because of any leadership deficiencies, but because Obama and his top aides “did not want to hear the truth” that Flynn was speaking about militant Islam. He started a company, Flynn Intel Group, a consulting and lobbying firm that pursued international clients willing to shell out six-figure sums for his overseas expertise and access in Washington. He also began working on a book—half memoir, half call to arms against Islamists—with the neoconservative author Michael Ledeen. Flynn joined a speakers’ bureau and began making appearances on Fox News, NBC, CNN, and other cable news channels. The outlet that seemed most eager to provide a platform for the forced-out former general was RT, an international English-language television channel funded by the Russian government.
“There is a saying I love: truth fears no questions,” Flynn said in one of his RT interviews. He may have loved the saying, but, as it would turn out, didn’t always adhere to its message.
PAGE, PAPADOPOULOS, MANAFORT, AND FLYNN CAME TO THE CAMPAIGN from different directions, but each saw their association with Trump as a way to reach or recover influence. At the time there seemed little downside. If Trump won, a job at the White House or elsewhere in his administration wasn’t out of the question. If he lost—as seemed almost inevitable—the contacts they made and attention they got could only enhance their post-election fortunes.
Moths to Trump’s flame, all four would end up burned, whatever futures they envisioned eventually reduced to a single imperative: staying out of jail.
AS TRUMP GAINED MOMENTUM IN THE REPUBLICAN RACE, HE BEGAN facing pointed questions about how he could continue heaping praise on Putin when so many of the Russian leader’s adversaries ended up disfigured or dead. Trump’s defiant responses were unlike anything ever uttered by a major party candidate. “I think our country does plenty of killing also,” he said in mid-December 2015 on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program. Putin is “running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country.” Two days later, on ABC, Trump said that murdering journalists would be “horrible. But, in all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that. I don’t know that he has … I haven’t seen any evidence that he killed anybody.”
The consistency of his deference to Putin seemed out of character: whether on social media or standing before a packed arena, Trump seemed incapable of stringing together more than a few sentences without insulting or demeaning a rival, a demographic, or an entire country. Unscripted and unapologetic, Trump often seemed to offend even when he didn’t intend to. Yet, with Putin, Trump was disciplined and on-message, never even inadvertently critical.
The pattern was perplexing to Trump’s political adversaries as well as national security officials in Washington. Some saw his early statements about Putin as the uninformed comments of a political neophyte, someone who had only a cursory understanding of world affairs. It was Trump being Trump—staking out a provocative position that he might abandon when it became politically advantageous to do so, or better-informed advisers got through to him.
As Manafort, Page, Papadopoulos, and Flynn came on board, the Trump campaign’s entanglements with Russia—and questions about their purpose—intensified. The search for answers would eventually occupy U.S. intelligence agencies, committees in Congress, and a team of FBI agents and prosecutors led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Before those organizations were fully engaged, however, there was a far smaller, independent inquiry under way.
CHRISTOPHER STEELE HAD PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH THE ruthless side of the Kremlin that Trump could not bring himself to see, stationed in Moscow in the early 1990s under diplomatic cover for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.
Steele and Putin were nearly espionage contemporaries, Steele in Moscow, after the Soviet Union collapsed, while the future Russian leader was based in East Germany for the KGB when the Eastern Bloc began to unravel. Putin was permanently scarred by what had happened when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Crowds stormed the Dresden offices of the East German secret police and then turned their attention to the nearby headquarters of the KGB. Putin, by his own account, radioed a Red Army tank unit to ask for protection. “We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow,” came the reply. “And Moscow is silent.” Putin, sickened by the fecklessness of his government, returned to Russia and had begun pursuing a career in St. Petersburg politics when Steele arrived in Moscow. Their paths would intersect several times in the ensuing decades.
THE SOVIET UNION WAS IN ITS DEATH THROES AT THE START OF Steele’s Moscow assignment, and he would witness the hammer-and-sickle flag lowered for the last time, opening a chaotic new era for Russia and the former Soviet republics. Steele had joined MI6 after graduation from the University of Cambridge, where his success as a student allowed him to transcend his family’s working-class roots. His father worked for the United Kingdom’s weather service; a Welsh grandfather had mined coal. Steele excelled at Cambridge and became president of the prestigious debating society, the Cambridge Union. His path to espionage began when he saw a newspaper ad seeking applicants interested in overseas adventure. Only when he responded did Steele learn the ad had been posted by MI6.
Steele had seemed poised for a series of foreign assignments when his undercover career was derailed. During a four-year posting in Paris in the late 1990s, he was one of dozens of British spies whose true identities were published online by a disgruntled former MI6 agent.
Steele came back to MI6 headquarters in London and rose up the intelligence service’s ranks until, in 2006, he was placed in charge of its Russia desk.
He was soon greeted with a brutal demonstration of the Russian intelligence service’s resurgence under Putin, then in his sixth year as president. That November, Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer and Putin critic who had defected to Britain, was taken to a hospital with a mysterious ailment. British authorities concluded that he had been poisoned by a cup of tea laced with radioactive polonium. Three weeks later he was dead. Putin issued a statement of mock remorse, saying, “Mr. Litvinenko is, unfortunately, not Lazarus.”
Steele was put in charge of the MI6 investigation. His findings contributed to a broader official UK inquiry that took nearly a decade to finish and release to the public. It concluded that Litvinenko’s murder had “probably” been ordered by Putin. To Steele, there was never any doubt.
For all of his expertise and accomplishments, Steele had his detractors, and his departure from MI6 in 2009 was interpreted by some as a sign that he had realized that he was not likely to rise any higher in the spy agency. He also faced a personal crisis: his wife, with whom Steele had three children, was gravely ill—British press reports said she had cirrhosis of the liver—and died later that year.
After his retirement, Steele launched a London-based consulting firm, Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., an increasingly common path for ex-spies whose contacts and inside knowledge of foreign governments and markets were in demand among corporate clients. One of Steele’s first contracts had him working for the English Football Association on an investigation into corruption at FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. U.S. investigators were also involved, eventually filing corruption charges against fourteen soccer executives. As a result of this partnership, Steele found himself working closely with FBI agents and sharing his research with the Justice Department—developing relationships that he would turn to again as troubling Russia connections began to surface in an American presidential election.
Steele’s involvement with that election began with a June 2016 call from Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who had founded his own private research company in Washington, Fusion GPS. Steele and Simpson had met years earlier when Simpson was an investigative reporter for the Journal based in Brussels and pursuing stories about Russian organized crime and its spread into Europe. One of Fusion’s business lines was opposition research, a euphemism for digging up dirt on political candidates.
Fusion had initially been hired in late 2015 to investigate Trump’s business record—including any ties to Russia—by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative paper. It was an unusual move for a news organization: media outlets generally don’t pay for stories, let alone hire private investigative firms to root around in politicians’ or celebrities’ lives. But the Beacon in this case was doing the bidding of one of its prominent funders, Paul Singer, a wealthy New York investor and major GOP donor who at the time was determined to stop Trump from winning the party’s nomination.
The money for Fusion dried up as Trump racked up wins in major primaries and establishment candidates including Jeb Bush and Rubio were forced from the race, but Simpson found a new source of support: Perkins Coie, the law firm representing the DNC as well as the Clinton campaign. With Trump’s praise of Putin already an issue, Perkins Coie was intrigued by Fusion’s tantalizing early reports and eager to pick up the tab, via DNC funds, to see what else the company could find on the Republican candidate and the Kremlin.
The new funding stream enabled Fusion to expand its probe. The firm’s research typically involves scouring public records, court filings, and media reports to produce a comprehensive profile of a subject—much the way Simpson had worked as an investigative journalist. To scrutinize Trump’s ties to Russia, public records searches wouldn’t be enough. Simpson needed sourcing that could get him closer to the Kremlin, and turned to the ex-British spy he had met in Brussels.
Steele signed on with Fusion in early June 2016. “I didn’t hire him for a long-term engagement,’’ Simpson later testified before Congress. “I said take thirty days, twenty or thirty days, and we’ll pay you a set amount of money, and see if you can figure out what Trump’s been up to over there, because he’s gone over a bunch of times, he said some weird things about Putin, but doesn’t seem to have gotten any business deals.” Steele was told the client was a law firm but not which one or its connection to the DNC. The ex-spy, his biography undoubtedly known to Russian intelligence, never entered Russia himself as part of the investigation. Instead, he worked through a collection of cutouts— intermediaries used to relay communications without raising suspicion. Among them were native Russians both in and out of the country who were already on contract with Orbis and in position to make contact with their own sources, some of them close to influential oligarchs or the Kremlin.
Steele and Simpson expected to turn up information tying Trump to shady business operatives, accessing unsavory sources of money, or otherwise entangled in Moscow’s ubiquitous corruption. But from the start, the information that flowed back to Orbis from Steele’s network of sources was more fundamentally unnerving, alleging that the Kremlin had spent years cultivating Trump, not necessarily as a future presidential candidate but an influential American sympathetic to Moscow; that Russia was providing helpful information to the Trump campaign; and that Russian intelligence possessed compromising information on Trump and episodes of sexual perversion during his 2013 Miss Universe trip to Moscow.
Verifying some of the most salacious leads would prove elusive for legions of reporters and investigators for the next two years. But in some ways the most alarming report from Steele’s sources proved accurate and prescient: in one of the first entries of what became known as the “Steele dossier,” he warned that Russia was waging a covert influence campaign aimed at disrupting the 2016 election and defeating Clinton.
He also almost immediately came across disturbing information about Carter Page.
ONCE ON THE TRUMP TEAM, PAGE BEGAN GRANTING INTERVIEWS in which he presented himself as the campaign’s “Russia adviser.” He played up his business ties to Moscow and urged campaign officials to have Trump make contact with the Kremlin. His status with Trump earned him a speech invitation from the New Economic School in Moscow, a prestigious institution where Obama had once given a talk. In May, Page emailed others on the campaign to propose that Trump go in his stead “if he’d like to take my place and raise the temperature a little bit.”
In June, Page used his credentials as a member of the Trump campaign to attend an event at Blair House, a historic residence just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House where foreign guests of the president often stay. At a gathering for Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, Page startled the assembled foreign policy experts and academics by praising Putin as a stronger leader than Obama, and vowing U.S.-Russia relations would recover when Trump was in office.
In the ensuing weeks, Page had a flurry of interactions with campaign officials about his pending trip to the Russian capital. He sent emails submitting drafts of his speech and asking for feedback from campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, spokeswoman Hope Hicks, and J. D. Gordon, a former naval officer serving as a foreign policy adviser.
At a dinner for members of Trump’s national security team at the Capitol Hill Club, a watering hole for Republicans, Page greeted Alabama senator Jeff Sessions and told him he was heading to Russia in a matter of days. The campaign maintained that he was going to Russia on his own, and not as a Trump representative. But organizers of the New Economic School event made clear that they were not necessarily interested in the independent opinions of Page.
“Carter was pretty explicit that he was just coming as a private citizen, but the interest in him was that he was Trump’s Russia guy,” said Yuval Weber, a Harvard professor who said he was with Page for much of his time in Moscow, and whose father, Shlomo Weber, was the rector at the New Economic School and had extended Page the invitation.
Page’s July 7 remarks in Moscow were astonishing. “Washington and other Western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change,” he said. He cited the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Bernie Madoff scandal, and the collapse of Enron as evidence of irreparable cracks in the American system. Putin, by Page’s account, was a force for global enlightenment, fostering a system of international relations “focused on mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit and tolerance, and access to resources.”
Page kept the same campaign advisers apprised of developments on his trip in a series of emails. Relaying an apparent interaction with Russian deputy prime minister Arkady Dvorkovich—chairman of the board of the New Economic School—Page said Dvorkovich “expressed strong support for Mr. Trump and a desire to work together.” In a July 8 email to Gordon and another campaign adviser, Tera Dahl, Page said he would “send you guys a readout soon regarding some incredible insights and outreach I’ve received from a few Russian legislatures and senior members of the presidential administration.”
Manafort, meanwhile, moved to exploit his new position. Two weeks after being brought on as campaign adviser, he emailed his most trusted employee in Kiev, Konstantin Kilimnik, who, according to U.S. officials, also had long-standing ties to Russian intelligence. Citing his new connection with Trump, Manafort asked, “How do we use to get whole?”
The messages between Manafort and Kilimnik were written in deliberately cryptic fashion, but references to “OVD” made clear that one of Manafort’s top priorities was to find a way to settle accounts with Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska, the Russian billionaire who had accused Manafort in a Cayman Islands court proceeding of taking money intended for the cable television properties in Ukraine as well as other investments, then failing to account for the funds. (In the messages Manafort and Kilimnik appeared to use the Russian delicacy “black caviar” as code for sums of cash.) A Manafort spokesman would later claim that the emails reflected an “innocuous” effort to collect debts owed by assorted Eastern European business associates. If so, Manafort seemed to go to significant lengths to obscure that legitimate purpose.
Deripaska has been among the Russian leader’s closest allies for years. Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables described Deripaska in 2006 as “among the 2–3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis” and a “more-or-less permanent fixture on Putin’s trips abroad.” His ties to Manafort went back almost as far. In 2005, Manafort sent a memo to Deripaska pitching the aluminum magnate on a plan to engage in lobbying and other activities to advance Russia’s interests in the former Soviet republics, according to an Associated Press investigation. As part of this effort, Manafort offered to lobby the U.S. and other Western governments to help oligarchs in Ukraine hold on to assets looted from the state, to extend his consulting work into Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Georgia, and to help pro-Russian entities develop “long-term relationships” with Western journalists. Deripaska denied that he ever enlisted Manafort for such work, but acknowledged in a 2017 defamation lawsuit against AP that the two had business arrangements dating back to the mid-2000s.
On July 7, while Page was in Moscow and Trump was on the verge of securing the GOP nomination, Manafort sent another email to Kilimnik, asking him to relay a message to Deripaska offering secret updates from inside the campaign. “If he needs private briefings,” Manafort wrote, “we can accommodate.”
Despite his flimsy résumé, Papadopoulos was in some ways the most resourceful in cultivating contacts with the Kremlin. More than the others, he appeared to be doing so at the direct bidding of the Trump campaign.
Ten days after Trump introduced Papadopoulos as an “excellent guy,” the newcomer took part in a disjointed meeting of the Trump foreign policy brain trust at the still-under-renovation Trump Hotel in Washington. The session—the only known gathering of the group that Trump attended—was convened by Gordon, the campaign adviser, and presided over by the future president.
Photos of the meeting show Trump seated at the head of a table in a disheveled room with stacked dishes and poster-size photos of the Trump Hotel interior positioned on easels, presumably for those overseeing the final phases of construction. Trump was surrounded by at least ten advisers, including Sessions at the far end of the table. Page was not present. Papadopoulos, sporting a fresh haircut and a blue suit, was shown leaning forward attentively, his elbow resting on the black tablecloth. There is no record or transcript of the conversation that transpired. But witnesses said that Papadopoulos astonished those assembled by announcing, upon introducing himself, that he could arrange a meeting between Trump and Putin. It was a staggering assertion for someone who never worked in government, had apparently never been in Russia, and had no recognizable diplomatic or foreign policy credentials. The assembled advisers seemed unsure how to respond, and neither endorsed the idea nor shot it down.
AFTER A BRIEF STINT AS A FOREIGN POLICY ADVISER FOR GOP CANDIDATE Ben Carson, who had also been desperate to fill his roster, Papadopoulos found his way aboard the Trump campaign after an interview with Clovis, who had also brought in Page. The campaign cochairman saw an eager volunteer and gave him a fateful bit of advice on how to ingratiate himself with the candidate. Clovis told his latest recruit on March 6 that one of the campaign’s central foreign policy goals was to improve relations with Russia. Papadopoulos had made significant if indirect contact with the Kremlin in a matter of weeks.
While traveling in Italy on March 14, Trump’s “excellent guy” met Joseph Mifsud, an academic from Malta with mysterious ties to senior officials in Russia. Mifsud took little interest in the lowly think tank researcher until he noticed Papadopoulos’s name in press coverage of Trump’s Washington Post meeting. Mifsud quickly set up a meeting in London, where he introduced the fledgling Trump aide to a woman from St. Petersburg, Olga Polonskaya, who he falsely claimed was Putin’s niece.
Papadopoulos reported to Clovis that he had made rapid progress on arranging “a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss U.S.-Russia ties under President Trump.” “Great work,” Clovis replied, though he noted that the idea would have to be discussed more widely among senior officials in the campaign.
Papadopoulos and Mifsud remained in touch frequently over the next month by email and Skype. On April 18, Mifsud connected the young Trump aide to Ivan Timofeev, the program director of the Russian International Affairs Council, a government-backed think tank. Timofeev had substantial ties to the Kremlin, serving as program director of the Valdai Club, an annual foreign policy conference in Russia attended by Putin. According to U.S. prosecutors, Timofeev also served as an undeclared proxy for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
A few days later, on April 26, Mifsud relayed tantalizing information to Papadopoulos. Having just returned from the Valdai event, Mifsud said that he had learned that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, in the form of thousands of emails. It was three months before the first batch of DNC files would be dumped online.
FLYNN HAD MET TRUMP FOR THE FIRST TIME BACK IN AUGUST 2015, a year after his DIA ouster. The retired general said he had received a call from Trump’s team and agreed to a meeting at Trump Tower. The conversation was scheduled for thirty minutes but went for ninety.
“I was very impressed. Very serious guy. Good listener,” Flynn recalled. “I got the impression this was not a guy who was worried about Donald Trump, but a guy worried about the country.” Trump’s positions on a range of issues—support for the use of torture, suspicion of European allies—were in complete opposition to Flynn’s previous statements on those subjects. But the men shared hard-line views of Islam, an unusual affinity for Russia, and a deep resentment of the current president, both feeling he had disrespected them.
“I found him to be in line with what I believed,” Flynn said.
Flynn had interactions with several GOP candidates, and for a time served as an informal adviser to Carly Fiorina. But as he moved more visibly into the Trump camp, Flynn got a remarkable offer from RT: an invitation to a gala in Moscow celebrating the network’s tenth anniversary. Flynn would be paid $45,000—money he would later fail to disclose on federal forms—and would be seated at a VIP table next to Putin, though he would later say he didn’t know about that arrangement in advance.
Before the trip, Flynn had stopped by his former agency, the DIA, for a courtesy classified briefing on Russia. Agency officials said Flynn did not disclose the nature and purpose of his Moscow visit, and that when photos surfaced of Flynn wearing a black tie and seated next to Putin, his successor at DIA, Lieutenant General Vincent Stewart, was so furious that he imposed new restrictions on sharing information with former agency executives. On the morning of the December 10 event, Flynn sat for an extended interview with Sophie Shevardnadze, a prominent correspondent for RT and the granddaughter of the former Soviet foreign minister. Flynn seemed uncomfortable in that setting, onstage before a Russian audience, asking at one point, “Why am I here? I’m sort of in the lair.”
In many of his media appearances, Flynn had a tendency to fault U.S. leaders for lacking an adequate understanding of global problems without being able to articulate a coherent position or prescription himself. Even so, his words to Shevardnadze must have sounded encouraging to the Kremlin. “The U.S. can’t sit there and say, ‘Russia, you’re bad,’” Flynn declared. The two countries need to “stop being like two bullies in a playground. Quit acting immature with each other.” Later, he added, “My wish is that we figure out a way strategically to work together.”
While in Moscow, Flynn also sought meetings with U.S. officials, including the CIA’s station chief, the highest-ranking intelligence officer in the country. Out of courtesy, the station chief agreed, only to find himself being lectured by Flynn on how the United States was mishandling its relationship with Russia and needed to “ease back,” according to a U.S. official briefed on the exchange. When Flynn pressed for a follow-up meeting the next day, the CIA officer became concerned that Flynn had met with Russian officials and had more unwanted advice to impart or, worse, information he wanted to collect. The station chief said no.
THOUGH THE CAMPAIGN WAS GAINING A PRO-RUSSIA ELEMENT, NO one seemed more enamored of Moscow than the candidate himself. At a Trump rally in San Jose on June 2, 2016, he bristled at mounting criticism of his affection for Russia, mocking those, including many in his own party, who had begun calling on him to disavow his praise for Putin.
“Then Putin said, ‘Donald Trump is a genius, he’s going to be the next great leader of the United States,’” Trump said. (Putin, when asked about Trump in December, had actually called him “colorful” and “talented” while saying “it’s not our affair to determine his worthiness.”) “No, no, think of it,” Trump continued. “They wanted me to disavow what he said. How dare you call me a genius. How dare you call me a genius, Vladimir. Wouldn’t it be nice if we actually got along with Russia? Wouldn’t that be good?”
One day after Trump’s San Jose appearance, his son Donald Trump Jr. received an email offering “some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” The message came from Rob Goldstone, a music publicist with ties to the Trump family as well as to a Russian pop star, Emin Agalarov, whose father, Aras, had made billions in construction contracts under Putin. The elder Agalarov had partnered with Trump to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013.
Goldstone’s email had some garbled information. He claimed that the older Agalarov had gotten the information on Clinton after meeting “the crown prosecutor of Russia,” although there is no such position in Russia. He added that “this is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Trump Jr. neither tripped over the odd reference to the crown prosecutor nor the remarkably explicit offer of campaign assistance from the Kremlin. “Thanks Rob I appreciate that,” he replied. “I am on the road at the moment but perhaps I just speak to Emin first.”
America’s main adversary for nearly a century was offering damaging information, almost certainly obtained through illicit means, to subvert the U.S. process for selecting a president. There are many ways that Trump Jr. might have responded. He could have ignored the email, directed it to the campaign’s lawyers, or placed a call to the FBI. But he did none of those things. Instead, he wrote back with unambiguous enthusiasm. “If it’s what you say I love it,” he said, “especially later in the summer.”
Part (#ulink_208941cf-c25d-5c33-9a31-e7dac8de2cd2)
Two (#u31dfdad9-2908-5b10-96f6-955b3da1d413)
CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_f71718e4-398e-57e1-8219-979eb74b6031)
“I BELIEVE YOU HAVE SOME INFORMATION FOR US” (#ulink_f71718e4-398e-57e1-8219-979eb74b6031)
CANDIDATES ALWAYS SEEK SYMBOLIC BACKDROPS AT MOMENTS of political embarkation. Ted Cruz chose a Christian college in Virginia for his announcement that he was entering the 2016 race. Jeb Bush wore shirt-sleeves at a state college in Miami. Bernie Sanders declared his candidacy on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol. Clinton released a two-minute video that devoted more screen time to images of everyday Americans taking on new challenges than to the prohibitive favorite to be the next president.
On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump had entered the presidential race on a gilded escalator. Without taking a step, he descended into a crowd of cheering supporters in the baroque lobby of Trump Tower.
A monument to excess, Trump Tower was an unlikely setting for the launch of a populist campaign. But it was inconceivable that Trump would begin anywhere else. The center of his self-created universe, with his palatial residence and his business offices on the skyscraper’s upper floors, the building is a fifty-eight-story manifestation of the image he spent his entire life cultivating: that of a dealmaker and business titan who transformed a family empire of unglamorous apartment complexes into a global brand synonymous with success and opulence.
The tower also served as a symbol of the vaunted boardroom savvy that Trump promised to bring to Washington. Certainly the breadth of his properties and the ubiquity of his brand were evidence of undeniable business talent—for seizing opportunity, sizing up people, and of course, selling himself. But like the tower’s marble and metallic veneer, the Trump aura has always masked a less regal reality. Behind the glittering name were repeated bankruptcies, racial discrimination claims, unpaid contractors, class action lawsuits, and financial entanglements with the criminal and corrupt. Beneath the tale of spun gold were opinions and a pattern of behavior that without the offsetting charms of wealth and fawning media attention would have led to ostracism. Discrepancies about the building’s true dimensions (he claims it has sixty-eight stories, ten more than actually exist) speak to a life premised on falsehood.
From childhood, Trump had been perceived as egotistical and a bully. As an adult, his views of women and minorities, as well as his vision of the American dream, seemed stuck in a bygone era, unaltered by the social movements that otherwise defined the majority of his generation and the politics of his hometown. Like anyone in high-end real estate, Trump was prone to exaggeration and self-aggrandizement. But he seemed to take these traits to extremes, habitually overstating—and outright lying—about the size of his fortune, the measure of his charity, even the ratings of his reality show. When he wasn’t making such claims directly, he would impersonate imaginary characters in phone calls to journalists, describing “Donald Trump” with a cascade of superlatives and fabrications.
These tendencies were on display from the outset of Trump’s campaign. As he stepped onto a stage draped with American flags, he dispensed with the clichés of announcing one’s candidacy—the faint praise of political rivals, the lofty rhetoric about hope, unity, and higher purpose. Instead, he delivered a diatribe that depicted America as a global laughingstock and presented himself as its only viable savior, a role he said he was willing to suspend his luxurious life to accept.
Many voters would be repulsed by the fact that Trump made no effort to subdue the coarse aspects of his personality or refine his message to avoid insulting entire demographic categories. But to others, it made him appealingly unscripted. In a field of candidates whose positions and even personalities were shaped by polls and focus groups, Trump stood out as strikingly authentic no matter the factual inauthenticity of many of his claims.
Trump’s opening speech was actually more honest than most to the extent that it was a remarkably accurate reflection of who he was as a person and what he would be like as president. He opened with a stream of falsehoods. He claimed a turnout of “thousands” to see his announcement, though reporters counted hundreds—some of them movie extras hired for the occasion; he said that America’s gross domestic product had plunged “below zero,” when it was well into the trillions and even its growth still registered positive; he accused the U.S. government of having spent $5 billion on the troubled website used by citizens to enroll in the subsidized health insurance program known as Obamacare, for which he offered no evidence.
His spurious depictions of the country’s finances were matched by extraordinary exaggerations of his own. He touted a personal net worth exceeding $9 billion, and brandished a supposed balance sheet verifying this total drawn up by a “big accounting firm” that he declined to name. In fact, he had overstated his net worth by at least a factor of two, according to the most reliable estimates,
and had opened his bid for the presidency with a version of the falsehood he had probably told most frequently in his public life.
Trump had long been utterly obsessed with his standing among America’s richest people, and often had gone to extraordinary lengths to cheat his way up such rankings. In 1984, smarting over Forbes’s decision a year earlier to value his holdings at $200 million—a fifth of what he claimed in interviews with the magazine—Trump waged a campaign to influence the next round of tabulations. He courted one of the main reporters on the project, twenty-five-year-old Jonathan Greenberg, with invitations to his office and company parties. He threw fistfuls of fictitious data at Forbes, claiming the Trump family owned more than 23,000 apartments worth $40,000 apiece. (Greenberg’s scrutiny found only 8,000, perhaps worth an average of $9,000.)
At one point, Greenberg took a call from a supposed Trump subordinate named “John Barron,” who sought to persuade the journalist that he failed to fully grasp the scale of Trump’s empire. Barron told Greenberg that Trump had taken possession of the majority of his father’s assets—a falsehood revealed later by family legal filings—and that because of the consolidated holdings Trump should be considered a billionaire. Greenberg made recordings of the odd conversations with Barron, and they made clear Barron was just Trump trying to alter the cadence of his voice.
Forbes saw through the ruse, at least in part, assigning Trump a net worth of $400 million. More rigorous scrutiny showed that even $400 million vastly overstated Trump’s wealth, so while the magazine had rejected the outrageous figures pushed by Trump and his phony alter ego, it still had moved him up. “This was a model Trump would use for the rest of his career, telling a lie so cosmic that people believed that some kernel of it had to be real,” Greenberg later wrote. It “led to future accolades, press coverage, and deals. It eventually paved a path toward the presidency.”
The most poignant moment in Trump’s opening speech came when he spoke of his father. Fred Trump was the son of Friedrich Trump, a German immigrant who had been a barber and then a hotel manager and moved the family to a house on Jamaica Avenue in Queens and began accumulating money and properties in the burgeoning borough. Friedrich died during a flu epidemic when Fred was only twelve, leaving his family with the seeds of their future fortune. His widow, Elizabeth, managed the budding real estate business she renamed E. Trump & Son. Fred grew up to take the reins of the company, and as New York’s population and economy boomed, he turned its focus toward building sprawling apartment complexes. In the 1920s, vast tracts of Brooklyn and Queens were undeveloped. It was an auspicious and lucrative moment, and Fred Trump made the most of it.
“I started off in a small office with my father in Brooklyn and Queens,” Trump said during his announcement speech. “I learned so much just sitting at his feet playing with blocks listening to him negotiate with subcontractors.”
That father was a stern figure with streaks of his own vanity—neighbors recalled marveling at the Cadillacs in the family driveway with FCT license plates. The cars were the least of it: Donald grew up in a faux southern plantation twenty-three-room mansion in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens, surrounded by the trappings of wealth, including a chauffeur and a cook.
Trump attended the nearby private Kew-Forest School, though poor grades and surly behavior later prompted his father to send the teenager to an upstate New York military academy.
The combination of Trump’s privileged upbringing and extraordinary ambition facilitated his future success, but it possibly stunted his development in other ways. Little about his background, for example, was conducive to racial sensitivity or an ability to empathize with the less fortunate. Class pictures from his childhood are even more lacking in diversity than the overwhelmingly white male cabinet he assembled as president. And while Fred Trump may have been a professional inspiration for his son, his views on race appear to have been less than enlightened. In 1973, the family firm was sued by the Justice Department for “refusing to rent and negotiate rentals with blacks.” (The Trump organization marked applications with a c for colored.)
Donald had stepped into the family business after earning a degree at the University of Pennsylvania, with ambition beyond his father’s low-rent apartment empire. That made fighting back the Justice Department not just a matter of the moment but his future, and he enlisted attorney Roy Cohn, infamous for his role as a top lawyer to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s anticommunist purges in Washington (which came much closer to an actual witch hunt). With the no-holds-barred Cohn steering them through the crisis, the Trumps fought back, filing a countersuit alleging false and misleading claims. The dueling suits ultimately ended in a settlement requiring the Trumps to refrain from further discrimination and place ads in newspapers assuring renters of all races they would be welcome. Cohn’s scorched-earth approach had a lasting influence on the twenty-seven-year-old Trump. Among the lessons was that truth could be drowned out by counterclaims and legal threats, and that the Justice Department wasn’t to be treated as an enforcer of enlightened laws or stalwart of American democracy. Sometimes it was the enemy, and you fought it.
EVIDENCE OF RACIAL ANIMOSITY WOULD CONTINUE TO FLARE UP throughout Trump’s career, and he would establish himself as the most xenophobic mainstream presidential candidate in recent history. The United States, he said, had become “a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.” He directed a stream of vitriol at America’s southern neighbor. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” That Trump’s buildings existed largely because of the labors of thousands of immigrants seemed irrelevant to him.
“He used to say, ‘Donald, don’t go into Manhattan. That’s the big leagues,’” Trump said of his father in his announcement speech. “I said, ‘I gotta go into Manhattan. I gotta build those big buildings.’” With his father’s financial backing, Trump was able to take that leap. In 1975, he embarked on his first big deal, reaching an agreement with the Hyatt chain to acquire a tired 1919 hotel, the Commodore, in midtown Manhattan near Grand Central Terminal, and transform it into a gleaming Grand Hyatt. It was a springboard to all the deals that followed.
In the ensuing decades, the deals got bigger and Trump got richer, but six times his companies entered bankruptcy, including after his misguided acquisitions of Atlantic City casinos, a luxury airline, and the legendary Plaza hotel. Debts and real estate reversals cost him access to conventional capital, as leading financial institutions increasingly refused to lend to him. In the late 1990s Trump was forced to turn to less discriminating sources of funds, most prominently Deutsche Bank. The German firm—Europe’s largest investment bank—had embarked on a major expansion into real estate lending and faced mounting suspicion that it was allowing itself to serve as a conduit of illicit cash for Russian oligarchs. Trump’s financial disclosures during the election showed he owed $360 million to Deutsche Bank, which by then was under multiple investigations for money-laundering schemes and massive mortgage-related fraud. Three days before Trump was sworn in as president, Deutsche Bank reached a $7.2 billion settlement with the Justice Department.
Trump had always borrowed heavily in building his empire, calling himself the “King of Debt.” It was a common strategy in real estate development, using others’ money to reduce risk and multiply buying power, launching more and larger projects in the hope of collecting commensurate rewards. “He always used other people’s money, not cash,” said Barbara Res, who was a senior executive for Trump in the 1980s. “He always got somebody to put up funds for him. To put up the money. And he put up the brilliance.”
Then in the mid-2000s, he abruptly changed course. The Trump Organization went from being a builder of high-end real estate, one that acquired properties and oversaw construction, to a licensing operation that took hefty fees from other developers for permission to affix the Trump logo on their hotels and condos. The king of debt also went on an inexplicable cash-spending binge, buying instead of building. In the nine years before running for president, he spent more than $400 million in cash on an assortment of properties, including a $12.6 million estate in Scotland, several homes in Beverly Hills, and $79.7 million for golf courses in Scotland and Ireland.
He then plowed more millions into renovating and maintaining these properties, often, curiously, at a substantial loss.
A private company, the Trump Organization provided no explanation for how it had emerged from such financial peril in position to spend such sums. Trump “had incredible cash flow and built incredible wealth,” his son Eric said. “He didn’t need to think about borrowing for every transaction … It’s a very nice luxury to have.”
The shift toward licensing revenue was propelled by an unexpected break. In 2002, Trump was approached by the producer of the Survivor series on CBS to take part in a new reality show dubbed The Apprentice. Trump saw the tremendous promotional potential. (“My jet’s going to be in every episode,” he said.
) Trump began slapping his brand on a motley array of products, including menswear, steaks, vodka, and get-rich-quick classes at Trump University that would end in yet another class action lawsuit.
Even as his business evolved, Trump still saw himself as a real estate tycoon. His search for partners willing to pay millions merely for the use of the Trump brand—while shielding the American mogul from virtually all the financial risk—led him far from Manhattan into murky overseas terrain. Trump-branded projects in Azerbaijan, the Republic of Georgia, Brazil, and Indonesia put the future president in business with multiple individuals and companies suspected of money laundering, political corruption, and other categories of fraud.
Russia had drawn Trump’s attention for decades. He pursued numerous deals to build a skyscraper in Moscow, starting in 1987 when he traveled to Russia to survey potential sites as part of a proposed partnership with the Soviet government.
He tried again in 1996, announcing plans for a $250 million “Trump International” complex, and several times more in the ensuing decade.
None of those projects materialized. But while Trump could never gain a foothold in Moscow, Russian money began flowing out of the country and finding him. Endemic corruption under Putin had created an entire class of kleptocrats, loyalists enriched by the diversion of money extracted from the country’s oil and mineral wealth as well as other formerly state-owned assets. Many sought to move their mounds of currency overseas in case the Kremlin sought to grab them back, and money began surging into Trump’s portfolio.
In the United States, Trump-branded properties were increasingly sustained by an influx of cash from questionable foreign sources. His children Donald Jr. and Ivanka came under investigation for their promotional claims and the financing surrounding a forty-six-story condo hotel in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood built with substantial backing from investors from the former Soviet Union. Hundreds of condos at Trump-branded beachfront towers in South Florida were purchased by limited liability corporations—entities that mask the true owners’ identities, a perfectly legal arrangement but one that can conveniently be used to hide the conversion of illicit cash into Western assets. Among the buyers who did disclose their identities, at least five dozen had Russian addresses or passports. All told, they spent a combined $98.4 million on sixty-three condos.
In 2008, the future president sold a Palm Beach estate to a Russian oligarch for $95 million, just four years after buying it for $41 million. His son Donald Trump Jr. said that same year that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets.”
These dim corners of Trump’s empire mostly escaped the attention of a public captivated by the blinding glare of his brand. His rambling announcement speech was widely ridiculed by political experts as proof that his campaign was just another vanity project, that Trump wasn’t even making any pretense to be a serious candidate. But away from Manhattan and the Beltway, voters saw a Midas who might be able to transform a troubled American landscape. With their budding adulation, Trump began planning to take possession of a more prestigious piece of real estate: the White House.
Trump made only passing reference to Russia in his 2015 announcement speech, though months later he was secretly pursuing yet another potential deal to build “Trump Tower Moscow.” The project was spearheaded by Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, and a Russian-born associate, Felix Sater, who had an office in Trump Tower and carried Trump-branded business cards. (Sater had spent time in prison for stabbing a man and had separately been convicted of fraud. Aiming to reduce his sentence, he became an FBI informant.)
“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote to Cohen in an email touting the project.
ALMOST EXACTLY A YEAR LATER, TRUMP TOWER WAS THE SETTING for a far smaller gathering kept secret from the public.
On June 6, 2016, music promoter Rob Goldstone circled back to Trump Jr. by email, asking when he might be free to speak with Emin Agalarov, whose father had helped bankroll the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, “about this Hillary info.” Trump Jr. then engaged in a flurry of messages and calls with both Goldstone and Agalarov. Phone records obtained by congressional investigators show two calls between Trump Jr. and Agalarov, one at 4:04 P.M. and another at 4:38 P.M., though it was unclear whether they spoke or exchanged voice mails.
Within that thirty-four-minute time frame, Trump Jr. made or received another call, though with whom remains a mystery. (Phone records showed the number as “blocked.”) Democrats in Congress would wonder whether Trump Jr. had conferred with his father—whose Trump Tower residence had a blocked number—over how to proceed. In testimony before congressional committees, Trump Jr. professed not to remember whom he’d spoken with.
Trump Jr. and Agalarov—whose developer father was sometimes referred to as the “Trump of Russia”—connected by phone again on June 7. That afternoon, Trump Jr. spoke with both Manafort and his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, another scion of a wealthy real estate family who had married into the Trump clan and become part of the candidate’s inner circle. Trump Jr. wanted Manafort and Kushner to attend the meeting. He then emailed Goldstone to set a time and place: “How about three at our offices?”
In later testimony, Trump Jr. would claim that he did not know the names or backgrounds of those being ushered into a suite of offices on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower on June 9. The event was marked on his calendar only as “Meeting: Don Jr./Jared Kushner.” Trump Jr. said Kushner and Manafort knew even less about the guests or their purpose, and had been asked merely to “drop in.” But the fact that Trump Jr. coordinated schedules with them and insisted on their attendance suggests that he saw the meeting as important enough to convene his father’s top aides.
The meeting occurred as planned on June 9, though the time was bumped to four P.M. Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort found themselves sitting across a large conference table from Goldstone and four Russian-speaking associates. Among them was a lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, with ties to senior officials in the Kremlin; Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist; Ike Kaveladze, a U.S.-based executive in the Agalarov company; and an interpreter.
Veselnitskaya’s ties to the Kremlin are unquestioned if hard to accurately assess. She had earned a law degree in Moscow, worked in the office of a Russian prosecutor, and represented a roster of influential oligarchs—including a railway magnate who faced money-laundering charges in New York. “I am a lawyer and I am an informant,” she would later say in a television interview.
But Veselnitskaya was best known in the United States for her campaign to overturn a set of banking and travel restrictions imposed on senior Russian officials suspected of human rights abuses. The sanctions were imposed as part of a congressional act named for a Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison in 2009. Magnitsky was incarcerated by the Russian government while working for a U.S.-born businessman, William Browder, who claimed that he had been cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars in an elaborate Russian tax fraud.
After Magnitsky’s death, Browder led a years-long crusade that culminated in the 2012 sanctions. Veselnitskaya became the point person in a Kremlin-orchestrated counter-campaign that involved lobbying members of Congress and orchestrating efforts to damage the reputations of Browder and Magnitsky. (Putin also retaliated by banning American adoptions of Russian children, a move that underscored how few levers are available to Moscow in sanctions showdowns.)
“I believe you have some information for us,” Trump Jr. said, getting straight to the point.
Veselnitskaya launched into a meandering discussion about “individuals connected to Russia supporting or funding Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton,” Trump Jr. testified later. “It was quite difficult for me to understand what she was saying or why.” It eventually became clear that she was referring to a trio of male heirs to the Ziff Davis publishing empire and one of their companies, a firm that had invested with Browder in Russia and come under investigation by Russian authorities.
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