by Luke Harding
In September Steele went back to Rome. There he met with an FBI team. It debriefed him. The FBI’s response was one of “shock and horror,” Steele said. After a few weeks, the bureau asked him to explain how he had compiled his reports and to give background on his sources. It asked him to send future copies.
Steele had hoped for a thorough and decisive FBI investigation. Instead, the bureau moved cautiously. It told him that it couldn’t intervene or go public with material involving a presidential candidate. Then it went silent. Steele’s frustrations grew. Simpson decided on an alternative course of action.
Later that month Steele had a series of off-the-record meetings with a small number of American journalists. They included The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo! News, The New Yorker, and CNN. In mid-October he visited New York and met with reporters again. Comey then announced he was reopening an investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server. At this point, Steele’s relationship with the FBI broke down. The excuse given by the bureau for saying nothing on Trump looked invalid. In late October, Steele spoke to Corn via Skype.
The story was of “huge significance, way above party politics,” Steele said. He believed Trump’s own Republicans “should be aware of this stuff as well.” Of his own reputation Steele said: “My track record as a professional is second to no one.” Steele acknowledged his memos were works in progress—and was genuinely worried about the implications of the allegations. “The story has to come out,” Steele told Corn.
Corn wrote about the dossier on October 31. It was the first time its existence was made public. At the same time, The New York Times published a story saying that the FBI hadn’t found any “conclusive or direct link” between Trump and Russian officials.
Steele was at this point anonymous, a ghost. But the ghost’s message was rapidly circulating on Capitol Hill and inside Washington’s spy agencies, as well as among certain journalists and think tanks.
Democratic senators now apprised of Steele’s work were growing exasperated. The FBI seemed unduly keen to trash Clinton’s reputation while sitting on explosive material concerning Trump.
One of those who was aware of the dossier’s broad allegations was Senate minority leader Harry Reid. In August Reid had written to Comey and asked for an inquiry into the “connections between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.” In October Reid wrote to Comey again. This time he framed his inquiry in scathing terms.
In what was a clear reference to Steele, Reid wrote: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government.…The public has a right to know this information.”
All this frantic activity came to naught. Just as Nixon was reelected during the early stages of Watergate, Trump won the presidential election, to general dismay, at a time when the Russia scandal was small but growing.
Steele had found prima facie evidence of a conspiracy, but by and large the U.S. public knew nothing about it. In November, the dossier began circulating in the top national security echelons of the Obama administration. But it was too late. The Democrats’ “election surprise,” as it were, had failed. It was a cruel defeat.
—
In Halifax, on Canada’s eastern seaboard, a light drizzle was falling. All sorts of precipitation rolled in from the Atlantic: rain, fog, snow, rain again. From the harbor front the gray sea shaded into a sky of endless white. Georges Island could be seen out in the water, with its lighthouse and eighteenth-century citadel.
It was here in Nova Scotia that millions of passengers from Europe once disembarked in search of a better life in the new world. Cruise ships still pulled up in front of pier 21. There was a railway station, an immigration museum, and a boxy rose-colored hotel next to a park. The hotel was historic—Queen Elizabeth II had stayed there—and had been through several owners. It was now the Westin Nova Scotian.
It was in Halifax that November that a group of international experts gathered. Their objective: to make sense of the world in the aftermath of Trump’s stunning victory. Most were appalled by this. The three-day event was organized by the Halifax International Security Forum. There were sessions on post-Brexit Britain, the “Middle East mess,” ISIS, and relations with Russia.
One of the delegates was Sir Andrew Wood. Wood was the UK’s ambassador to Russia from 1995 to 2000. He was taking part in a Ukraine panel. Its theme was the challenges facing the country after Putin’s cloaked invasion. (Canada has strong Ukraine ties: some 1.3 million citizens are of Ukrainian descent.) Another participant was Senator John McCain.
Wood was a friend of Steele’s and an Orbis associate. Before the election, Steele had gone to Wood and shown him the dossier. He wanted the ambassador’s advice. What should he do, or not do, with it? Of the dossier, Wood told me later: “I took it seriously.”
From London, Wood observed Russian affairs with a cool and critical eye. He wrote articles for Chatham House, the foreign affairs think tank, where he was a fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program. He spoke at conferences and seminars.
On the margins of the Halifax conference Wood briefed McCain about Steele’s dossier—its contents, if true, had profound and obvious implications for the incoming Trump administration, for the Republican Party, and for U.S. democracy.
McCain decided the implications were sufficiently alarming to dispatch a former senior U.S. official to meet with Steele and find out more.
The emissary was another delegate in Halifax, David Kramer, who had hosted Wood’s Ukraine discussion. Kramer was a senior director at the McCain Institute for International Leadership. He had previously worked for the Bush administration in 2008–2009 as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor. He later led Freedom House, the Washington-based pro-democracy think tank.
The dossier’s eventual journey to the Oval Office would take this unlikely route: Moscow to London to Halifax to D.C.
Kramer was troubled sufficiently to get on a transatlantic flight to London. Steele agreed to meet him at Heathrow Airport. The date was November 28. The rendezvous involved some old-fashioned spycraft. Kramer didn’t know what Steele looked like: at this point there were no public photos of him. He was told to watch out for a man with a copy of the Financial Times. After picking up Kramer, Steele drove him to his home in Farnham, Surrey, in London’s suburban commuter belt. They talked through the dossier: how Steele compiled it, what it said.
Less than twenty-four hours later, Kramer returned to Washington. Next, Simpson shared a copy of the dossier confidentially with McCain.
It also went to the British government.
Steele gave a copy of a final memo he had written in December to the top UK government official in charge of national security, a former colleague from his days at SIS. The memo offered fresh details of the hacking operation. An encrypted copy was sent to Fusion, with instructions to pass it to McCain and Kramer.
McCain believed it was impossible to verify Steele’s claims without a proper investigation. He made a call and arranged a meeting with Comey. Their encounter on December 8 lasted five minutes. The venue, according to one source, was the FBI’s headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington. Not much was said. McCain gave Comey the dossier. According to the same source, Comey didn’t let on to McCain that the agency had already begun an investigation into Trump’s associates, at this point more than four months old.
McCain’s intervention now made some kind of bureaucratic response inevitable. This was no longer just an FBI affair; it required coordination across the top levels of U.S. intelligence.
A highly classified two-page summary of Steele’s dossier was compiled. It was attached to a longer restricted briefing note on Russian cyber interference in the 2016 election. The United States’ most senior intelligence chiefs mulled what to do.
Their next task was an unenviable one. As former CIA director Michael Hayden put it to me, the situation was “off the map in terms of what intelligence is asked to do.” “I didn’t envy them,” Hayden said. Of the dossier Hayden said: “My gestalt idea when I saw it was that this looks like our stuff.”
A day after Steele met with us in the Shakespeare pub in London, the dossier—or at least its most damning accusation—was on its way to the desk of someone who was still—for a short while—the world’s most powerful person, President Barack Obama.
It was also going to his successor, the next guy in the Oval Office. Comey had the thankless job of briefing President-elect Trump. Trump, it was clear, would dismiss the dossier as a piece of trash. This strategy was problematic for various reasons and would look increasingly ridiculous in the months ahead.
For example, Trump’s team had indeed met with Russians in the run-up to the vote, as Steele’s sources had alleged and GCHQ and others had detected.
One of Trump’s advisers had even conducted an enthusiastic correspondence with a Russian spy. And given him documents. Not in Moscow but in Manhattan.
2
I Think He’s an Idiot
2013–2017
New York–Moscow
You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself.
—VICTOR PODOBNYY,
April 2013, speaking in New York
When Victor Podobnyy became a spy, he had expected his career to be glamorous. He quickly realized that real espionage didn’t involve flying helicopters. It wasn’t—as he put it—“like in the Bond movies.” He had thought his superiors in Moscow would at least give him a false identity and a passport.
Instead, Podobnyy had been sent to New York under his real name. His official job was attaché to Russia’s delegation to the United Nations. In reality, he worked for Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR. Yes, he was a spy under diplomatic cover. His actual task, though, was pretty mundane: gathering economic intelligence.
It was April 2013. In a conversation secretly recorded by the FBI, Podobnyy moaned about his lot. He was sitting in the SVR’s New York office. His interlocutor was Igor Sporyshev, an SVR colleague. Sporyshev was working covertly in the United States, too, disguised as a trade representative.
PODOBNYY: The fact that I’m sitting with a cookie right now at the chief enemy spot. Fuck! Not one point of what I thought then, not even close.
SPORYSHEV: I also thought I would at least go abroad with a different passport.
True, the Russians had reason to complain. In summer 2010 the SVR suffered a devastating blow when ten of its long-term sleeper agents in the United States were exposed, including Anna Chapman. Federal agents had rolled up the SVR’s network of “illegals,” the term used for spies sent abroad under nondiplomatic cover.
Meanwhile, Podobnyy and Sporyshev were left with the tricky job of collecting secret information. One of their tasks was to liaise with another SVR officer, Evgeny Buryakov, who was working under nonofficial cover at the branch of a Russian bank in Manhattan, VEB. The bank was, in part, an SVR front. Buryakov didn’t have diplomatic immunity so had to report to Moscow via his colleagues.
As FBI wiretaps showed, the techniques for meeting with Buryakov were distinctly old-school. Typically, Sporyshev would ring Buryakov and tell him he had to give him “something”—a ticket, a book, a hat, an umbrella. The two would meet outdoors. This sometimes happened outside Buryakov’s bank office on Third Avenue—an inconspicuous brown tower with a 1960s abstract sculpture at street level opposite the foyer. They would exchange documents.
Sporyshev’s biggest headache was recruiting Americans as intelligence sources. This was tough. He had approached two young women working in financial consultancy who had recently graduated from a New York university. Sporyshev told Podobnyy he was skeptical anything would come of it. Or as he put it in chauvinist terms: “In order to be close you need to either fuck them or use other levers to execute my requests.”
The Russian spies, however, had one promising lead. This was a guy—an energy consultant based in New York City. Unlike the women, he was eager to help. And, it appeared, keen to make money in Moscow. There was a drawback: the source—whom the FBI called “Male-1”—was something of a dimwit.
PODOBNYY: [Male-1] wrote that he is sorry, he went to Moscow and forgot to check his inbox, but he wants to meet when he gets back. 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. He got hooked on Gazprom, thinking that if they have a project, he could rise up. Maybe he can. I don’t know, but it’s obvious he wants to earn loads of money.
SPORYSHEV: Without a doubt.
Podobnyy explained he intended to string Male-1 along. That meant feeding him “empty promises.” Podobnyy would play up his connections to Russia’s trade delegation, to Sporyshev, and pretend his SVR colleague might “push contracts” the American’s way.
PODOBNYY: This is intelligence method to cheat! How else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and go tell him to fuck himself. But not to upset you I will take you to a restaurant and give you an expensive gift. You just need to sign for it. That is ideal working method.
These tactics may have been crude. In this instance they worked. Podobnyy approached the consultant at an energy symposium in New York. According to FBI court documents, the two swapped contacts. They emailed for several months. Male-1 cooperated, although he says he did not know the Russian was a spy. He even handed him documents about the energy world.
This was a strange business—Kremlin officers careening around Manhattan, spycraft involving fake umbrellas, and an American intelligence source who spent more time in Moscow than his Russian handlers. Plus espionage professionals who turned out to be suffering from ennui.
The American willing to provide information to Putin’s foreign intelligence officers rented a working space at 590 Madison Avenue. The building is linked by a glass atrium to a well-known New York landmark, Trump Tower. The atrium has a pleasant courtyard, with bamboo trees, where you can sit and drink coffee. Next door is a franchise of Niketown.
From the atrium you can take the elevator up to the Trump Tower public garden on the fourth floor, with its sparrows and maple trees. The din from East 57th Street means the garden isn’t exactly tranquil. Or you can line up with Japanese and German tourists at the Trump Tower basement restaurant and salad bar. Failing that, there is a Starbucks on the first floor.
Male-1 had a name. Few had heard of him. He was Carter Page.
—
Page is a balding figure in his midforties, with buzz-cut hair and the super-lean physique of a cyclist or fitness fanatic. When not on his Cannondale mountain bike, he is typically dressed in a suit and tie. When he is nervous, he grins. One person who met him around this period described the encounter as “excruciating.” Page was “awkward” and “uncomfortable” and “broke into a sweat.”
Page’s résumé was curious, too. He spent five years in the navy and served as a Marine intelligence officer in the western Sahara. During his navy days, he spent lavishly and drove a black Mercedes, according to a friend from his academy class, Richard Guerin.
He was smart enough to get academic qualifications: fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, master’s from Georgetown University, a degree from New York University’s business school. And a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
His apparent Russian sympathies were evident from the beginning. In 1998 Page spent three months working for the Eurasia Group, a strategy consulting firm. Its founder, Ian Bremmer, later described Page as his “most wackadoodle alumnus.” Page’s vehemently pro-Kremlin views meant that “he wasn’t a good fit,” Bremmer said.
In 2004 Page moved to Moscow, where he became an energy consultant with Merrill Lynch. As Page tells it, it was whi
le working as an investment banker that he struck up a relationship with Gazprom. He advised Gazprom on transactions, including a deal to buy a stake in an oil and gas field near Sakhalin, the desolate island on Russia’s Pacific coast. He bought Gazprom shares.
According to Politico, few people in Moscow’s foreign business community knew of him. Those who did were underwhelmed. “He wasn’t great and he wasn’t terrible,” his former boss, Sergei Aleksashenko, told the magazine, adding that Page was “without any special talents or accomplishments,” “in no way exceptional,” and “a gray spot.”
Three years later, Page returned to New York and to his new office next to Trump Tower. From there he set up a private equity business, Global Energy Capital LLC. His partner was Russian—a former Gazprom manager named Sergei Yatsenko. Did Yatsenko know Podobnyy and Sporyshev? Or indeed other members of Russia’s underground espionage community?
In the worsening dispute between Putin and the Obama administration, Page sided with Moscow. He was against U.S. sanctions imposed by Obama on Russia in the wake of its annexation of Crimea. In a blog post for Global Policy, an online journal, he wrote that Putin wasn’t to blame for the 2014 Ukraine conflict. The White House’s superior “smack-down” approach had “started the crisis in the first place,” he wrote.
Page’s rampant pro-Moscow views were at odds with the U.S. State Department under Clinton and with almost all American scholars of Russia. After all, it was Putin who had smuggled tanks across the border into eastern Ukraine. Not that Page’s opinions counted for much. Global Policy had a small circulation. It was edited out of Durham University in the north of England.