House of Trump, House of Putin2

by Craig Unger

  Afterward, in 2005, with Klebnikov’s murder still unsolved, Putin visited New York and invited Klebnikov’s family to meet with him at the Waldorf Astoria, where he told them that journalists in Russia should be able to work without fear of violence. Without missing a beat, Behar said, Paul’s widow, Musa, asked Putin if he would say that publicly. There was a long pause. Finally, Putin said he would “take that under consideration.”18

  In 2005, Richard Behar launched Project Klebnikov to develop new information on the Klebnikov murder and to pursue Paul’s investigative work. Not long afterward, he met with Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist and human rights activist best known for her work with Novaya Gazeta, hoping she could gather together investigative reporters in Russia who would work hand in hand with Project Klebnikov.19

  In her book Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy, Politkovskaya accused Putin and the FSB of crushing civil liberties in order to establish a Soviet-style dictatorship. “The KGB respects only the strong,” she wrote. “The weak it devours. We of all people ought to know that.”20

  “We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss,” she added, “into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the Internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it’s total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial—whatever our special services, Putin’s guard dogs, see fit.”

  * * *

  —

  Journalists were not Putin’s only targets. There were media censorship, a crackdown on the Internet, harassment of human rights activists, and more. By 2007, Putin had revived the old Soviet practice of locking up dissidents in mental hospitals. “We’re returning to this Soviet scenario when psychiatric institutions are used as punitive instruments,” Yuri Savenko, president of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia, told the Chicago Tribune.21 “I call this not even punitive psychiatry but police psychiatry, when the main aim is to protect the state rather than to treat sick people.”

  As Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky found out, even oligarchs were at risk. In August 2000, after Berezovsky’s TV station, ORT, criticized Putin’s handling of the Kursk submarine disaster, which killed more than one hundred sailors, Putin was said to have told Berezovsky, “The show is over.”22 Berezovsky fled to London, where he was granted refugee status in 2003 and became part of a London circle of Russian exiles who hoped to bring down Putin. He died under mysterious circumstances in 2013.

  As for Gusinsky, in 2001 Russian officials raided his Media Most and NTV and attempted to arrest him, but he escaped by fleeing to Israel.23 The state broadcaster, RTR (now Russia 1), was already under Putin’s control. Now he also controlled ORT (now First Channel) and NTV.24

  Putin kept such tight control of the media that television coverage of him was almost celebratory. “Imagine you have two dozen TV channels and it is all Fox News,” Vladimir Milov, a former deputy energy minister under Putin and now a critic, told the New Yorker.25

  In February 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then believed to be the richest man in Russia, with a fortune of $16 billion, appeared on a television show in which he argued with Putin about widespread corruption in the Kremlin. In October, he was arrested and charged with fraud, tax evasion, and other economic crimes.26 The message was clear: Even oligarchs had to play by Putin’s rules.

  Meanwhile, one of Putin’s fiercest critics was FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who had already confronted Putin with regard to the Berezovsky assassination plot. In October 2000, Litvinenko and his family fled Moscow and applied for asylum at the US embassy in Ankara, Turkey.27 His application was denied, but he was soon granted asylum in the UK and settled in London, reporting to MI6.28

  In 2002, Litvinenko published The Gang from Lubyanka, alleging that Putin and the FSB had been in league with the Russian Mafia, specifically the Tambov-Malyshev gang, dating back to when Putin was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. The book also charged that Putin had direct financial ties to gang leader Vladimir Kumarin.29 Litvinenko, with coauthor Yuri Felshtinsky, also published Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror, which brought renewed interest in the KGB apartment bombings of 1999 and other fabricated “false flag” cover operations, or, as the Russians called them, “active measures.” Both books were banned in Russia and in 2003 lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin said he had been told that everyone associated with Blowing Up Russia would be destroyed.30

  In the meantime, Litvinenko became friends with Anna Politkovskaya, who visited him in London. His friend Alex Goldfarb, who was also a friend of Anna’s, said the two were “very close” and that they shared “a natural kinship as converts,” Litvinenko having been a KGB officer while Politkovskaya was the daughter of a well-placed Russian diplomat.31

  Litvinenko had begun working with MI6 as a consultant on organized crime. At the same time, he reported his findings on Mogilevich’s relationship with Putin to Mario Scaramella, an investigator affiliated with the Mitrokhin Commission, an Italian panel investigating the links between the Russian secret services and organized crime.

  Litvinenko and his wife, Marina, were only too happy to provide copious amounts of material, much of it about Semion Mogilevich. Marina Litvinenko characterized Mogilevich as “one of Russia’s most notorious [organized crime group] leaders . . . It is said he is responsible for contract killings and smuggling weapons.”

  For his part, Alexander Litvinenko described Mogilevich as “a well-known criminal terrorist” who was “in a good relationship with Russian President Putin and most senior officials of the Russian Federation.” He said that Mogilevich and Putin had “a common cause, in [Litvinenko’s] understanding a criminal cause,” and that he knew “beyond doubt that Mogilevich is FSB’s long-standing agent and that all his actions including the contacts with Al-Qaeda are controlled by the FSB . . . For this very reason the FSB is hiding Mogilevich from the FBI.”32

  Litvinenko was concerned enough about his testimony that when he returned to London, on November 23, 2005, he made a short audiotape, in broken English, about Mogilevich and Putin. “Mogilevich have good relationship with Putin since 1994 or 1993,” he says on the tape, which was published ten years later by the Telegraph of London.33 “Semion Mogilevich has contact with Al Qaeda. Semion Mogilevich sell weapons, sell weapons to Al Qaeda. Before I gave a lot of information about Mogilevich to Mario Scaramella.”

  Litvinenko was also in touch with Oleg Kalugin, the ex-KGB general who had been in the US since 1995. Kalugin felt the real reason Litvinenko was getting under Putin’s skin was because he had come forward with outrageous accusations about Putin and charged that the Russian leader was a pedophile.

  Kalugin warned Litvinenko to keep his mouth shut. “I told him, ‘Don’t say that! You’ll be in trouble.’ Putin could not tolerate that,” Kalugin told me.34

  Nonetheless, in July 2006, Litvinenko submitted a highly provocative article to the Chechenpress website in which he referred to a video on the Internet that showed Putin kissing the stomach of a young boy, aged four or five. In the video, Putin’s embrace of the young boy may be nothing more than harmless horsing around, but Litvinenko wrote, “Nobody can understand why the Russian president did such a strange thing as kissing the stomach of an unfamiliar small boy.”35

  Then Litvinenko explained the unusual gesture by saying that when Putin was given a very junior position in the KGB it was because “his bosses learned that Putin was a pedophile . . . The Institute officials feared to report this to their own superiors, which would cause an unpleasant investigation.”

  When Putin became FSB director, Litvinenko wrote, he found and destroyed videos “which showed him making sex with some underage boys.”36

  At the same time, as if he were not courting enough danger, Litvinenko remained friends with Anna Politkovskaya and collaborated with her on a project exposing the FSB. Deeply concerned about the risks she fac
ed investigating corruption, he suggested she take various precautions for her personal security and urged her to take advantage of her American citizenship and “go write [her] articles in America.” But she stayed in Russia.

  In New York, Richard Behar had a box on his desk in which he kept sundry memorabilia, including a business card on which Anna had written her email address. When they had met in New York, he told her that Project Klebnikov hoped to find investigative reporters in Russia who would help solve Paul’s murder. She warned Behar she could “probably count on one hand the number of Russian investigative reporters who aren’t corrupt.”37 But she had vowed to help anyway.

  Then, on October 7, 2006, Anna was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment complex in central Moscow. It happened to be Vladimir Putin’s birthday.

  In London, Marina Litvinenko gave Sasha the news, and later said “he was just broken down because for him it was absolutely devastating news.” He also worried that “he could be next.”38

  On October 19, Sasha went to a meeting at the Frontline Club in London, a restaurant/gathering place for journalists, photographers, and other like-minded people, at which he made a short speech publicly accusing Putin of being responsible for Anna Politkovskaya’s murder.39

  Even after Anna’s murder, however, Litvinenko didn’t seem to take the threat to his own well-being too seriously. She had been in Russia, after all, but he had safely defected to the West. He took enormous pride in his newly won citizenship and seemed to regard it as an extra layer of protective covering. “Now they won’t dare to touch me,” he told a friend.40 “No one would try to kill a British citizen.” And if something did happen, he wrote in a statement to British officials, at least he would be a proud British citizen. “Possibly I may die,” he wrote, “but I will die, as a free person, and my son and my wife are free people. And Britain is a great country.”41

  On November 1, 2006, Litvinenko had lunch with Mario Scaramella at a Japanese restaurant and Scaramella warned Litvinenko that he had received intelligence about a Russian plot to kill those involved with the Mitrokhin Commission. Later that day, after he and Scaramella finished, Litvinenko had tea at the Pine Bar in the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair at about four p.m.42 with Andre Lugovoy and Dmitri Kovtun, two former KGB officers who had gone into private security.43 According to The Litvinenko Inquiry, an official report issued by the House of Commons about the death of Alexander Litvinenko, “the forensic and other evidence strongly indicates that it was during this meeting that Mr. Litvinenko drank green tea poisoned with radioactive polonium.”44

  According to Norman Dombey, a British physics and astronomy emeritus professor at the University of Sussex, the radioactive isotope in Litvinenko’s tea was made at the Avangard facility in Sarov, Russia. “One of the isotope-producing reactors at the Mayak facility in Ozersk, Russia, was used for the initial irradiation of bismuth,” said Dombey.45 “In my opinion, the Russian state or its agents were responsible for the poisoning.”

  From his hospital deathbed, Litvinenko told British authorities investigating his poisoning, “I have no doubt whatsoever that this was done by the Russian Secret Services. Having knowledge of the system, I know that the order about such a killing of a citizen of another country on its own territory, especially if it is something to do with Great Britain, could only have been given by one person. That person is the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin.”46

  A more than three-hundred-page report by Sir Robert Owen, chairman of the Litvinenko Inquiry, concluded that Litvinenko was given a fatal dose of polonium during his meeting with Lugovoy* 47 and Kovtun, who were identified as prime suspects. Russia has refused to extradite either of the two men.48

  In his report, Sir Robert concluded, “the FSB operation to kill Litvinenko was probably approved by [then–FSB chief Nikolai] Mr Patrushev and also by President Putin.”49

  In a reference to the pedophilia charges, Sir Robert added, “It hardly needs saying that the allegations made by Mr. Litvinenko against President Putin in this article were of the most serious nature. Could they have had any connection with his death?”50

  But the report also noted that Litvinenko’s testimony before the Mitrokhin Commission and the intelligence he furnished Mario Scaramella, the Mitrokhin Commission attorney, was “particularly sensitive” in describing Mogilevich as someone in “a good relationship” with President Putin, a relationship that included Mogilevich’s sale of weapons to al-Qaeda and acting as “the FSB’s long standing agent.”51

  In addition, there was the fact that Litvinenko had played a role in the transcription and publicizing of the so-called Kuchma Tapes (aka the Melnychenko tapes), including making a statement before the Mitrokhin Commission that Mogilevich “is in a very close relationship with Russian president Putin . . . At the present, Putin is Mogilevich’s krysha [protection in criminal jargon]. This is Putin who protects Mogilevich.”52

  That provocative revelation could also have been a motive for murder. In the end, many questions remain unanswered, but a few things are certain. On November 23, 2006, Litvinenko died of polonium-210 poisoning. Anna Politkovskaya had been dead for two months. And Putin’s Russia had become a Mafia state in which compliant loyalists became billionaires and telling the truth could get you killed.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  BLOOD MONEY

  Even though Litvinenko was dead, the issues he had been investigating were more alive than ever. That was especially true in Ukraine, where Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin partisan, advanced to the runoff election for president in 2004 amidst widespread allegations of fraud. Yanukovych’s dubious tactics triggered the Orange Revolution of 2004 and 2005, and a Ukrainian Supreme Court ruling that nullified his victory.

  From the Kremlin’s point of view, Yanukovych’s reversal created a serious problem. He had been a highly reliable pawn for Putin. The Firtash-Mogilevich money pipeline that siphoned off billions from Ukraine’s energy trade was a paradigm of how Putin was able to transform control over Russia’s natural resources into political power. And to keep this arrangement in place, Putin needed a reliable surrogate in charge in Ukraine.

  It began with Gazprom, Russia’s largely state-owned energy giant, selling enormous amounts of natural gas to RosUkrEnergo (RUE), Mogilevich’s and Firtash’s intermediary, at bargain-basement prices, thereby putting RUE in a position to resell it to European nations at a huge markup. Firtash became a billionaire. Putin allegedly took a sizeable share as well. The oligarchs in turn then funded Yanukovych’s pro-Russian Party of Regions to keep Ukraine securely in Putin’s camp and to make sure these highly profitable deals remained in place. In a diplomatic cable, then–US ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst referred to the Party of Regions as “a haven for Donetsk-based mobsters and oligarchs.”1

  All of which was ideal, except for one thing: Yanukovych was a lousy candidate, and if he was to remain the leader of the Party of Regions, he desperately needed a makeover to wipe out the image he had as a thuggish Kremlin stooge.2

  His résumé was not much help. In his youth, Yanukovych had been twice convicted of assault.3 In 2004, his rival Viktor Yushchenko barely survived an assassination attempt by dioxin poisoning during the campaign,4 and blamed the poisoning on unnamed “government officials” who feared he would beat Yanukovych.5

  Even if Yanukovych’s camp had nothing to do with the dioxin, there were widespread allegations of massive vote rigging, which were echoed by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who cited “credible reports of fraud and abuse.”6 In the end, there was enough evidence that the supreme court of Ukraine annulled the election after Yanukovych was initially declared the winner. In the revote, Yushchenko won.7

  When it came to oligarchs such as Dmitry Firtash and aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska, Yanukovych had known how to be wonderfully compliant, but now that wasn’t enough. With a fortune of $12 billion, he had become a symbol of unbridled greed that was embodied by Mezhyhirya, his insanely extravagant est
ate, which was known as Ukraine’s Versailles, with its private zoo with kangaroos and a herd of ostrich, a yacht club, a galleon in its pond, marble floors, $100,000 chandeliers, a collection of seventy rare cars, a helicopter pad, and more.8 So Yanukovych was damaged goods. The Party of Regions needed a new face—or a dramatic makeover.

  Enter Paul Manafort, formerly of the GOP consulting firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly and now with his new firm, Davis, Manafort and Freedman.9 Brilliantly skewered in a memorable 1992 Spy magazine piece by Art Levine,10 Paul Manafort and Roger Stone’s firm, in all its various incarnations over the years, came to occupy a hallowed place in the dark, amoral domain of Washington lobbying. “Name a corrupt despot, and Black, Manafort will name the account: Ferdinand Marcos, $900,000 a year; the now deposed Somalian dictatorship, $450,000; the drug-linked Bahamian government, $800,000,” Spy reported, before going on to rate various firms in terms of how dodgy their clients were. Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly won out as the sleaziest of them all.11

  Boyhood friends who learned their craft at the feet of Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn,12 Manafort and Stone had put together the hottest lobbying shop in Washington. Their firm had played a vital role in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. Their first client after Reagan’s election had been Donald Trump, who retained them to help with federal issues such as getting permits to dredge the channel to the Atlantic City marina to make room for Trump’s yacht, the Trump Princess.13

  Of the two men, Stone was the showboat, buff from the gym, sporting bleached blond hair, the proud owner of five Jaguars, a hundred silver wedding ties, and countless designer suits, and the subject of fashion stories in Penthouse and GQ, such a dandy that he even coined aphorisms—Stone’s Rules—about cuff links: “Large hub-cap types are for mafia dons from Jersey and Las Vegas lounge singers. Cufflinks should be small, understated, and tasteful.”14