The Restless Wave

by John McCain

  So, I’ve been to crazy town before, and I’ve seen how impervious to reason, facts, and common sense these delusions can be. Most are still the work of nuts and frauds, but they proliferate like never before and persist forever on the world wide web. I noted the traffic of absurd conspiracies in the 2016 campaign, and we know now that many of them were conceived and disseminated by Russia, which makes their embrace by politicians too gullible to dismiss them or too shameless to resist exploiting them all the more disconcerting. But those kinds of politicians were around before the advent of the Internet, too. From Joe McCarthy acolytes to moon landing deniers to 9/11 Truthers and Obama Birthers, there has always been a market for “the paranoid style in American politics,” as historian Richard Hofstadter termed it. There were members of Congress who believed or took advantage of the improbable tales about our missing-in-action in Vietnam. Rand Paul believed the unsubstantiated charge that I had met with representatives of ISIS during my brief visit to Syria, and he said so publicly.

  So, it shouldn’t have surprised me that I’ve become a featured player in the fevered speculation about the dossier. Conspiracy theories have grown around what I did and why. I’m an agent of the “deep state.” I’m a double agent for Russia. I acted out of jealousy that Donald Trump was elected President and I wasn’t. I’m faking my illness to avoid investigators. I had to wear an orthopedic boot when I tore my Achilles tendon this fall, a side effect of my cancer treatment. It healed, but I tore my other Achilles as well, and had to transfer the boot to the other leg. That seemed to trigger a crowd of paranoids, who manned their smartphones and laptops to expose my perfidy on the Internet. It is more amusing than annoying, I suppose. Although the fact that ravings like these are communicated in the same social media used by the sane and the skeptical means that while their proponents might not have increased as a percentage of the population, their audience, involuntary though it may be, has widened.

  I have the same answer to inquiries from the paranoid and from the skeptical. I did exactly what I’ve explained here, no more and no less. I did my duty, as I’ve sworn an oath to do. I had an obligation to bring to the attention of appropriate officials unproven accusations I could not assess myself, and which, were any of them true, would create a vulnerability to the designs of a hostile foreign power. I discharged that obligation, and I would do it again. Anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell. I trust the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, an experienced, skilled prosecutor, and a man of exceptional probity and character, to separate fact from fiction, and get to the bottom of the so-called dossier. If it is the product of slander or groundless fears, he’ll say so. If any of it is true, he’ll say so. It will be up to Congress and the judiciary to evaluate his conclusions and act on them if necessary, to do our duty, whatever it proves to be, as diligently, fairly, and nonpolitically as Mueller will have done his.

  Why had I been given the dossier? That’s the first accusatory question in every budding conspiracy theory about my minor role in the controversy. The answer is too obvious for the paranoid to credit. I am known internationally to be a persistent critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime, and I have been for a long while. Wood and Steele likely assumed that my animosity toward Putin, which I unapologetically acknowledge, ensured that I would take their concerns seriously. They assumed correctly. Most Americans and Europeans believe that Putin changed around 2007, when he went from being a modernizing Russian leader the West could work with to a risk-taking autocrat and Russian nationalist who resented the West, especially the U.S. I think that’s a fallacy. At the risk of sounding self-congratulatory, I’ve been a realist about Russia and its corrupt strongman for over two decades. Putin and I have history, you could say, each of us having regularly made known our low opinion of the other. Yet we have never actually met.

  I was as excited as everyone else when the Soviet empire collapsed in the last decade of the twentieth century, and captive nations from Central Asia to the Baltic Sea claimed their independence, and Russia itself, haltingly and chaotically, tried to find a democratic future for a society that had never been governed by consent. But I soon had doubts that it would succeed.

  I traveled to Russia in December 1993, as part of an international group monitoring elections to the Duma, Russia’s legislature. The voting took place in the shadow of a confrontation in September between the previous legislature and President Boris Yeltsin that had turned violent and resulted in the military dissolving the Duma, and Yeltsin’s call for new elections. The new election laws were confusing, and Russians had little experience casting votes that actually mattered. Nevertheless, for the first time Russia had held a mostly transparent, free, and legitimate national election. That was encouraging, but the results were judged to be victories for ultranationalist parties and the Communist Party, and defeats for those parties associated with Yeltsin. More political uncertainty and government dysfunction were sure to follow, which bred pessimism on the part of well-wishing observers like me.

  One of the polling sites we visited was in an industrial area on the outskirts of Moscow. The people running the site were all women, and most of the Russians voting there were women. I asked through an interpreter, “Where are the men?” and one of the women in charge replied indifferently, “They’re all drunk.” Political analysis by anecdote is as unreliable as it is irresistible, but I didn’t take that observation as a positive sign of Russians’ civic-mindedness, at least on the part of the male portion of eligible Russian voters. Another anecdote from that trip made an even grimmer impression on me. Cindy and I had dinner late on election night with the American ambassador, the widely respected Tom Pickering, whom I’d known for years. It was lightly snowing and strangely quiet in Moscow after the polls had closed. We left the restaurant, which had been mostly empty, around eleven o’clock, and found the streets deserted as well. Pickering had left in an embassy car, and Cindy and I rode in a white van with a Russian driver. Moscow looks its best in the winter in a fresh snowfall, and we were looking out the windows admiring the wide avenues, empty and blanketed in white. All of a sudden what looked like a human tumbleweed rolled across the street in a flash right in front of us, forcing our driver to slam his brakes. It took a split second before my mind registered what we were actually seeing. Three men were beating another as he scrambled on his hands and knees trying to escape. They all carried automatic rifles, and they were clubbing the unfortunate soul with them. No one was trying to stop them. There were no cops on the scene, no Good Samaritans, no curious passersby, even. Just us. Our driver was pulling away, and I yelled at him to stop. “Nyet, nyet,” he shouted back as he accelerated. Moscow is a city of nearly twelve million people. And that night, the night following the first successful free election in the city’s modern history, it felt vacant and lawless, a dangerous place, the nighttime realm of criminals and drunks. That’s unfair, obviously, and too censorious a judgment to draw from witnessing one violent encounter. But it gave me a sense of foreboding that has never entirely left me.

  I felt that same apprehension on a trip in the mid-1990s to some former Soviet republics in what the Kremlin refers to as Russia’s “near abroad.” We went to the Crimean Peninsula and to the Russians’ main Black Sea base at Sevastopol. I thought then, still the Yeltsin era, and a time of cooperative, mostly productive relations between former Cold War superpower foes, that in Moscow’s view Ukrainian independence must always yield to the interests and power of its former imperial master. The Russians made it very clear their Sevastopol base would remain in their control without even the pretense of deference to the sovereign nation in whose territory it was located.

  Later that same trip, we visited a Baltic Sea naval base in Estonia that the Soviets were in the process of vacating. More accurately, they were scuttling it. Sinking patrol boats at the pier. Razing buildings. Ripping cable from the ground. Taking with them everything of value they could, and destroying everything they couldn’t take. I met with the admiral in com
mand, in a dreary office on the top floor of a nondescript building overlooking the disassembled base. He sat at a metal desk beneath a large portrait of Lenin. We spoke through an interpreter, but his curt replies gave me the sense that he wasn’t exactly pleased to see me. I think, more to the point, he wasn’t pleased that I, an enemy, was seeing him and his command in such a reduced state. There was resentment evident in his demeanor, no hint of a smile, no insincere courtesy, no averting unpleasantness. He was unhappy they were surrendering the base. He made that clear, and gave the impression that were it up to him, these Estonians, with their independence and their Scandinavian dialect, could try to take it from him, and from the quarter of Estonia’s population who were Russian and Russian-speaking. There was humiliation in his attitude, too, though he would never have acknowledged it.

  Resentment and humiliation spread in Russia in the chaos, dislocation, and corruption of the erratic Yeltsin years, and eased the way for that striving, resentful KGB colonel, who seems to feel those emotions sharply and, to borrow an observation from Game of Thrones, used chaos as a ladder.

  I have been an equal-opportunity skeptic of four administrations’ policies toward Russia. While I might sometimes have been harsher in my judgments than I should have been, I was not wrong about the big picture. I’ve gotten plenty of things wrong in a long political career. Putin isn’t one of them. I made a speech on the Senate floor in 1996, after I had returned from my trip alarmed by Russian attitudes, and warned of “Russia’s nostalgia for empire.” I urged an early and rapid expansion of NATO to include the former Baltic republics and Warsaw bloc countries who prudently feared an imperial restoration. I, too, feared what was coming, and my pessimism was out of step with the optimism that colored most expectations for the post–Cold War U.S.-Russian relationship. But that optimism was premised on a short view of Russian history, a view limited to Russia’s seventy-three years of Communist Party rule. Resentment and insecurity had been powerful drivers of Russian history for centuries. An ideological component was added for three-quarters of the twentieth century, a mere blip. When the ideology failed, it was abandoned. The other pathologies are more deeply rooted.

  When the Berlin Wall was destroyed, Putin left his KGB post in East Germany and went home to Saint Petersburg. He was given a position in the mayor’s office, the head of the committee responsible for licensing new business ventures, and attracting foreign investment. He was investigated for corruption his first year in the job. But then as now, such suspicions weren’t much of an obstacle to his upward mobility. Putin had a spy’s instinct for knowing when to stay behind the scenes. He never stole the spotlight from his patrons, and appeared at all times loyal to them. Those traits, combined with his ruthless competence, helped make him a formidable overachiever. He was regularly assigned bigger responsibilities and ran the local branch of a political party founded by Russia’s prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin. When his mentor lost his reelection as Saint Petersburg’s mayor in 1996, Putin was recruited to Moscow. By the next year, he was deputy chief of Yeltsin’s staff. The year after that, Yeltsin appointed him head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB. In August 1999, he was appointed prime minister by the Duma, and was Yeltsin’s chosen successor. When Yeltsin resigned at the end of the year, Putin became acting president, and won election to the office in his own right in March 2000. Quite a rapid ascent up the greasy pole.

  In Putin’s first weeks as prime minister, bomb explosions destroyed apartment buildings in three Russian cities, including Moscow. Putin used the incident as grounds for starting a second Chechen war, and ordered the bombing of Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. The inhumanity of the Russian assault was stunning. No caution, no discrimination, no trials, brutal and merciless, just kill people, fighters and civilians, and don’t worry about the difference. As part of an international public relations campaign to obscure Russian brutality in Chechnya, Putin had an op-ed published in the New York Times, defending his actions as comparable to American responses to terrorist attacks. That disgusted me. FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko would later allege that the FSB had planted the bombs to improve Putin’s prospects for succeeding to the presidency. The violent attack was an opportunity to show Putin in command, acting the strong leader, raining hell on Russia’s enemies. Some Western journalists reiterated the allegation, while others disputed it. I’ve no idea if it’s true. But I wouldn’t be shocked if it were. Litvinenko would pay a terrible price for this and other accusations. He was poisoned in November 2006 in London with an extremely toxic chemical, polonium, by Russian agents acting on orders, a British investigation concluded, from the Russian government.

  In the summer of 1999, after a seventy-eight-day NATO air campaign against Serbia, the government of Slobodan Milosevic agreed to withdraw its forces from Kosovo and accept a NATO peacekeeping force there. Russians were angered by NATO’s bombing of their fellow Slavs, which complicated efforts to secure the Kremlin’s agreement with a peacekeeping plan for Kosovo. Putin was head of the FSB at the time, and a central figure in negotiations over the question. When U.S. diplomats heard rumors that Russia would send its own peacekeeping force without coordinating its deployment with NATO, Putin assured them that nothing of the kind was planned. That same day an armored column carrying more than two hundred Russian paratroopers arrived at the airport in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. A British peacekeeping force arrived the next day, and the ensuing standoff resulted in public divisions between NATO allies when the British force commander refused an order from NATO’s American commander, General Wes Clark, to block the runways to prevent Russian reinforcement. The matter was eventually resolved, but the small show of force by Russia had pleased the Russian public, and no doubt their soon-to-be President, who had learned something about NATO politics and the West’s resolve, and how to weaken it by promoting divisions within it.

  From these and other warning signs, I was starting to learn a thing or two about Putin. At a South Carolina primary debate during my 2000 run for president, I commented that Putin was “the kind of guy who makes the trains run on time.” Russians ought to be warier of him, I implied, and so should the West.

  As an advocate of NATO expansion, I traveled in 2001 to some of the Balkan aspirants and paid another visit to the three Baltic states. Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic had joined NATO in 1999. In 2000, ten other aspirants, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania formed the Vilnius Group to lobby for NATO membership. Seven of them would be invited in 2002 to begin negotiations to join, and were admitted in 2004—all of the Vilnius Group except Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia. Moscow was incensed by the inclusion of the Baltics. In meetings on that 2001 trip, Bulgarian and Romanian leaders had impressed me as very anxious to join NATO. Officials in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania appeared almost desperate. All feared Russian economic and diplomatic coercion, and meddling in their internal politics, no country more so than Estonia, with its large Russian population. But I was more surprised by how seriously they all took the threat of Russian military intervention, the Baltics especially.

  I had dinner late one evening in Catherine the Great’s palace on the Baltic Sea with Estonia’s president, Lennart Meri, a writer, filmmaker, and a revered leader of Estonia’s independence movement. I had just given a speech in Tallinn, calling for the Baltics’ inclusion in NATO, and proclaiming, “No more Yaltas, no more spheres of influence.” Meri spoke fluent English, as well as several other languages. We talked at length that night about what it had been like to have been a victim of great power politics, and of the bargains made for the sake of balance rather than justice. He assessed the Russian threat calmly, describing how Moscow intimidated its neighbors. He didn’t fear an imminent invasion or any very risky action to restrict the independence of the Baltic states. Putin hadn’t consolidated enough power yet. But he made it clear that without the protection afforded by NATO membership the day would com
e when the Kremlin would use all necessary means to restore to Russia the once-captive nations on the Baltic Sea.

  I spent an entire afternoon on that same trip with Václav Havel, sitting alone with him in the tower of Prague Castle as the day ebbed to twilight. His health was very poor, and he was soon to leave office. He was in an expansive, philosophical mood. He talked about how to live with purpose. I told him he had a place in history and would never be forgotten. We talked about the Russians, too, but more of history than current events. We talked about what the West meant to oppressed peoples, and what it ought to continue to mean in this new and temporary period of American primacy. Humility was important and hard for us to sustain, he said, but he worried more that our faith in our ideals would erode when the world presented new trials for our leadership, and the temptation to cut deals, to divide into spheres, to balance one thing off another would reassert itself. And it soon would. This was the summer of 2001, and a fateful September lay ahead. It is as important to the souls of nations as it is to individuals to stand up for your ideals, Havel argued. We had both spent time in prison, he for his ideals, and me for my country’s interests. The sentiment resonated with us both.

  I traveled to Georgia on that trip as well, and met with President Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister, veteran of Kremlin politics, and architect with U.S. secretary of state Jim Baker of an understanding between the disintegrating Soviet Union and the West that allowed the reunification of Germany, the liberation of the Warsaw Pact, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union to proceed peacefully.

  Shevardnadze had returned to his homeland in 1992, following a coup that had triggered a civil war. He was elected president in 1995. Georgia was crawling out of the pit in 2001, still suffering widespread chaos and dislocation, its politics marred by corruption, regional chieftains asserting autonomy from Tbilisi, and violent Russian separatist movements in two semiautonomous regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Shevardnadze governed as an authoritarian, but despite his deals with oligarchs, election rigging, and occasional ruthlessness, he was committed to Georgia’s independence from Russia. And he was a fascinating man, who had seen a lot of history made and unmade. I enjoyed talking with him, but he struck me as a man who was starting to feel overtaken by events. He would be overthrown two years later in the Rose Revolution by reformers in his own party, led by Mikheil Saakashvili, whom I would come to know well. But in our discussions, Shevardnadze’s principal worry was Putin. Russians were still occupying Soviet military bases in Georgia that they had committed to leaving years before. The Russian separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia had nearly severed the regions from Georgia. A quarter million Georgians had fled Abkhazia in 1993, and about a tenth that number had to leave South Ossetia in the same period. Territory in both regions was effectively ruled by Russia. The Putin cult of personality, that bare-chested, give-the-finger-to-the-West machismo he advertises to Russians living in Russia and abroad, that the West sneered at for years, was evident early on in those breakaway Georgian regions. On a congressional delegation trip to Georgia a few years after that first visit, when Saakashvili was president but before Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, we entered South Ossetia without our Georgian hosts, who were forbidden to enter. Although it was sovereign Georgian territory, it had a border crossing and border guards and a gregarious Russian puppet running the place, who handed each of us huge floral arrangements. We were taken to a nearby farmhouse where we met with a bunch of Russian colonels. The first sight that greeted us after our bus “crossed the border” was an immense billboard with a smiling Vladimir Putin looking down on us, and written in Russian above him “Our President.”