by Luke Harding
Whatever Kislyak’s private misgivings, he carried out his duties energetically. When Trump gave a foreign policy speech in April 2016 in Washington, Kislyak sat in the front row. He met the candidate.
The ambassador also attended the Republican Party convention in Cleveland, which happened soon after Page came back from Moscow. Senior Trump aides who talked with Kislyak there instantly forgot the encounter, as if they had stumbled into a magical fog. One of them was Page. Page’s account of their meeting was a tortured exercise in denial—first it didn’t happen, then the talks were “confidential,” then there was little more than a handshake.
Page’s multiple interactions with senior Russians were a matter of growing concern to U.S. intelligence. In the coming months, the FBI seemed to grow suspicious that Page might be a Russian agent. That summer the bureau decided it was going to bug Page’s phone calls. This was no easy matter. To do this lawfully, federal agents had to obtain a warrant. Any application of this kind was voluminous—as Director Comey put it, these were often thicker than his wrists.
The application included Page’s earlier testimony to the FBI. In June 2013 the counterintelligence agent Gregory Monaghan interviewed Page in connection with the Podobnyy-SVR spy ring. Page said he’d done nothing wrong. Since then, Page had held further meetings with Russian operatives that had not been publicly disclosed, the application said.
The FBI presented its evidence before a secret tribunal—the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, or FISA, court, which handles sensitive national security cases. The bureau argued that there were strong grounds to believe that Page was acting as a Russian agent. The judge agreed. From this point on, the FBI was able to access Page’s electronic communications. An initial ninety-day warrant was later renewed.
Meanwhile, Page’s career as a Trump adviser was entering its terminal phase. His speech in Moscow had provoked comment, much of it adverse. The campaign’s ties with Russia were becoming a source of controversy. According to The Washington Post, quoting a campaign manager, Page wrote policy memos and attended three dinners in Washington for Trump’s foreign advisory team. He sat in on meetings with Trump. Apparently, his attempts to meet Trump individually failed.
In the classified briefing to congressional leaders in late August Page’s name figured prominently. The CIA and FBI were sifting through a mound of intercept material featuring Page, much of it “Russians talking to Russians,” according to one former National Security Council member. When Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote to Comey in early fall, he cited “disturbing” contacts between a Trump adviser and “high-ranking sanctioned individuals.” That was Page. And Sechin.
These embarrassing details surfaced in a report by Yahoo! News. Within hours, the Trump campaign had disavowed Page—casting him out as a nobody who had exaggerated his links to Trump. Page exited the campaign in late September. It was an inglorious end, and his troubles were just beginning.
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Steele’s Rosneft source was right. In early December—less than a month after Trump won the White House—Rosneft announced it was selling 19.5 percent of its stock. This was one of the biggest privatizations since the 1990s and, on the face of it, a vote of confidence in the Russian economy.
This, at least, is how Putin presented the sale on December 7, during a televised meeting with Sechin. The president hailed the privatization as a sign of international confidence in Russia, despite U.S. and EU sanctions, and the year’s biggest acquisition in the oil and gas sector. Certainly the money raised—€10.2 billion—would help Russia’s budget.
There was an enigma, though. It wasn’t clear who had actually bought the stake. Rosneft said the buyers were Qatar and the Swiss oil trading firm Glencore. They had purchased 50/50, it said. In fact, Glencore had pumped only €300 million into the deal. The Qataris had put in more—€2.5 billion. An Italian bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, had provided another €5.2 billion. According to Reuters, the source of funding for almost a quarter of the purchase price was unknown.
So who was behind it? The state bank VTB had underwritten the purchase. Shortly before the privatization it had sold bonds to Russia’s central bank. It appeared that state money from the Russian budget was driving the deal.
The sale had also been structured in such a way as to make answering the question of ownership tricky. One of the partners in the deal was a firm in the Cayman Islands. The beneficiary wasn’t named. Almost certainly, the “owner” wouldn’t be an individual. Probably the Cayman firm would lead to another offshore entity, and another, in an infinite chain.
Steele’s mole had known about the plan months before Rosneft’s management board was informed. The board only discovered the deal on December 7, hours after Sechin had already recorded his TV meeting with Putin revealing it. Even the Russian cabinet had been kept in the dark. “Sechin did it all on his own—the government did not take part in this,” one source told Reuters.
In the weeks to come, U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies would examine this deal closely. Where did the money go? Russian journalists were skeptical that it had ended up with Trump; it was more probable, they reasoned, that it would have traveled to Putin and Sechin. There was no proof of this, and neither the Kremlin nor other parties would offer comment.
A day after the Rosneft deal was unveiled, Page flew back to Moscow. During his previous July visit he’d been feted. Since then, however, Page had become a liability to the Trump campaign—and therefore to Russia, too. This time Page was an unperson, a toxic figure, at least officially. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman, said government leaders had no plans to meet with him.
Page’s own explanation for his visit was vague. He had come to see “business leaders and thought leaders,” he told RIA Novosti, the Russian state news agency. He would be in Moscow for six days, he said.
In the months to come, Page would vehemently deny the allegations against him. He portrayed himself as a “peace-seeker.” He even expressed sympathy for Podobnyy, the spy—whom he described as a “junior Russian diplomat.” In an email to The Guardian, Page complained that Obama had persecuted Podobnyy, Sporyshev, and him “in accordance with Cold War traditions.”
He wrote: “The time has come to break out of this Cold War mentality and start focusing on real threats, rather than obsolete and imagined bogeymen in Russia.”
Page’s loyalty to the SVR was breathtaking. Podobnyy wasn’t an “imagined bogeymen” but a career operative working against the interests of the United States. And, moreover, one who had badmouthed Page behind his back.
Whatever Page’s motives were for helping Russian intelligence—greed, naiveté, stupidity—his woes were about to get worse.
The secret dossier in which he played a starring role was secret no more. Someone was going to publish it.
3
Publish and Be Damned
January 2017
BuzzFeed offices, New York
I know the press only too well. Almost all editors hide away in spider-dens…plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen.
—SINCLAIR LEWIS, It Can’t Happen Here
By early 2017 the allegations concerning Donald Trump and Russia were the worst-kept secret in politics and the media. Practically every senior editor and columnist was aware of the claims, if not the colorful detail. The Guardian’s Julian Borger, The New York Times, Politico, and others had seen copies of the dossier. I knew it existed but hadn’t yet read it.
The dossier had been passed around in the same manner as samizdat, the Soviet term for works—Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn—forbidden by the Kremlin authorities and read at home in the dead of night. Once finished, these typed manuscripts were passed on in secret.
Steele wasn’t leaking his own research. But Glenn Simpson—convinced of the need to find an audience and mindful that an FBI probe might take years—was behind this campaign of unattributable briefing.
For months, reporters on the national security beat and Moscow correspondents had been working feverishly to substantiate the allegations. There were emails, clandestine editorial meetings, encrypted Signal phone calls, scrambled messages sent using PGP, or pretty good privacy. There were trips to Prague, the alleged possible location, or near-location, of a rendezvous between Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, and Russian operatives. And to Moscow.
In October an email written by a person in the Clinton camp reached my inbox. It set out some of the unproven allegations against Trump, including sex with prostitutes in Moscow. The email said the claims came from a source inside the FSB. This was not Steele’s work, but some of it echoed the dossier. The email, it struck me, was like an errant copy of a Shakespeare play hastily written down afterward by an audience member from memory. It was intriguing. But how well would it stand up?
Of this hectic investigative activity, the U.S. public knew little. There was Corn’s article in Mother Jones and a piece by Franklin Foer in Slate. It concerned an email server allegedly used for secret communications between the Russian bank Alfa and the Trump team. Fascinating—if true—but what might it mean? Beyond these tantalizing public scraps, not much was published. The media, and intelligence services in the United States and Europe, plus elected representatives, were nursing a gigantic secret.
The dilemma for editors in chief here was clear.
The Steele dossier seemed plausible. But unless its key assertions could be verified—that Trump had actively connived with Russians, in particular over the release of stolen emails—it was difficult to see how it might be published. There was no public interest in promulgating wrong information—you ran the risk of looking like an idiot. Plus there was a possibility of legal action. Probably Putin wouldn’t sue. The KGB had other methods. The same couldn’t be said for Trump, a serial litigant whose default mode was attack in the courts, to wrestle the other guy to the ground, à la WWE.
What changed the editorial dynamics was McCain’s fateful intervention. On the brink of Trump assuming the presidency, it tipped the balance toward publication. If U.S. intelligence agencies believed Steele to be credible, and were themselves seeking to verify his claims, then surely this was—a story? The fact that the FBI had sought a FISA court warrant to investigate further was certainly reportable.
CNN broke the first news, ten days before Trump’s inauguration. It reported that U.S. intelligence agency chiefs had presented classified documents to Obama and to the incoming president. They included allegations “that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.” CNN sourced its information to “multiple U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the briefings.”
The pared-down version of the dossier also went to the Gang of Eight—the top four Republican and Democratic party leaders in the House and Senate, plus the chairman and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, CNN said. The two-page synopsis was highly sensitive and therefore wasn’t included with a classified report on Russian hacking shared more widely within government.
CNN said it couldn’t prove the dossier’s more lurid claims. Therefore it wouldn’t report them. The agency heads had taken “the extraordinary step” of giving the synopsis to Trump because they wanted him to be aware that the allegations about him were now widely disseminated—at least inside the intelligence community and Congress.
CNN’s decision to broadcast the story in general terms was bold. And, surely, the right one. For months, insiders had known about this stuff while the public was kept ignorant.
The decision would earn the channel much grief. One of the contributors who explained the dossier’s origins on TV was Carl Bernstein, the original Watergate reporter, now a distinguished-looking white-haired figure of seventy-three. (His erstwhile collaborator, Bob Woodward, still working at The Washington Post, was unimpressed with Steele’s work. Woodward called it an affront to Trump and a “garbage document.”)
Hours later the online media outfit BuzzFeed made one of the biggest calls in U.S. editorial publishing history.
The company is based in New York, in offices on East 18th Street in Manhattan. Nearby is Union Square Park, a pleasant green spot with a Barnes & Noble bookshop and artisanal coffee bars. BuzzFeed’s staff are young: twenty- and thirty-year-olds, most of whom have never worked on anything as quaint or historical as an inky print newspaper. Founded in 2006, BuzzFeed still did listicles—cute lists of anything from cake pictures to cheap hair products. But in 2011 Ben Smith was appointed editor in chief, and BuzzFeed expanded into serious journalism. It had a network of foreign correspondents. It broke stories. It ran investigations.
In the wake of CNN’s reporting. BuzzFeed did what no one else was willing to do: it placed the full dossier online. Ironically enough, Simpson had judiciously briefed details around D.C. but hadn’t given it to Smith. BuzzFeed obtained a copy from a different source.
Steele’s thirty-five-page report was now available for everybody to read—from Phoenix, Arizona, to Russia’s remote Kamchatka Peninsula on the Pacific. BuzzFeed made a few redactions. Some descriptions where it was possible to identify a source from his or her job title were blacked out. One “company comment” was deleted. But the information that practically everybody in the elite already knew was now pumped into the democratic bloodstream.
In an accompanying article BuzzFeed said it had published this document “so that Americans can make up their own minds.” The allegations, it said, had “circulated at the highest levels of the U.S. government.” It noted the report was unverified and had some errors.
The reaction from the president-elect was thunderous. It was delivered via his usual route, above the heads of the detested liberal media, and direct to the fervent millions who had voted for him.
At 1:19 a.m. on January 11 Trump tweeted:
FAKE NEWS—A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!
The fake news claim would swell and be repeated. Trump would go on to dismiss Steele as a peddler of “phony allegations” and a “failed spy afraid of being sued.” The people who commissioned him were “sleazebag political operatives, both Democrats and Republicans. FAKE NEWS! Russia says nothing exists.”
As for BuzzFeed…well, it was a “failing pile of garbage” and “a left-wing blog.”
This was an angry fugue that would play throughout Trump’s presidency as his relations with much of the media descended into open, embittered conflict. In the meantime, Trump’s aides repeated their boss’s absolutist assertions that there was no substance to any of it.
Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, sounded almost sorrowful. This was an ugly and fantastical plot, he told Mic. “It’s so ridiculous on so many levels,” Cohen said. “Clearly, the person who created this did so from their imagination or did so hoping the liberal media would run with this fake story for whatever rationale they might have.”
This pushback must have been expected. Team Trump’s position was unequivocal: the dossier was fake, a confection, a hit job, baloney, partisan, an ugly liberal smear. Or—to use the slang of Steele’s London—complete bollocks.
Smith, BuzzFeed’s editor, said he had no regrets. He pointed to the fact that America’s own spy chiefs took the material seriously. Otherwise why bother to brief the president? Smith argued that the dossier was already affecting the way elected politicians behaved, prompting Reid and others to raise serious public questions for the FBI. “Sunlight is a disinfectant,” he observed.
There was plenty of material to debate here for a newspaper ethics class and for future historians from the late twenty-first century and beyond. No doubt aspiring journalism students will eternally ponder whether BuzzFeed was correct in its decision to relay unverified material or had taken reporting to new and shabby lows.
The identity of the dossier’s author was, briefly, a mystery. Rumor had it that he was a former British spy. In London, Nick Hopkins and I wondered if that might be Steele. Hopkins sent
Steele a text. There was no answer.
On the evening of January 11, I was on a panel on U.S.-Russian relations and cyber espionage. The venue—the Frontline Club—was where Litvinenko had in 2006 denounced Putin after the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the critical opposition journalist. (Litvinenko was poisoned three weeks later.) Another Frontline panelist was Nigel Inkster, a former deputy director of SIS.
Halfway through our discussion, we saw that The Wall Street Journal outed Steele as the author.
Among established media organizations there was resentment at BuzzFeed’s decision to publish. Rivals said they had the dossier but had chosen not to reveal it. Columnists bashed BuzzFeed. Margaret Sullivan, of The Washington Post, wrote that there was never a case for spreading rumor and innuendo. Smith had plunged down “a slippery ethical slope from which there is no return.” Ditto John Podhoretz, of the New York Post. Podhoretz said that journalists should be skeptical of all sources, especially “intelligence” ones.
This theme was shared by critics from the left, including Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist who collaborated with Edward Snowden and published in 2013 Snowden’s revelations of NSA mass surveillance. It was, they said, intelligence sources who had confidently asserted ahead of the benighted 2003 Iraq War that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They had lied. Why believe them now? Trump tweeted to the same effect.
Still, there were interesting admissions that the media had failed in its prime duty: to inform the public. Newspapers had run the easy story—the underwhelming scandal of Hillary’s emails!—and ducked the hard one—Trump, Russia, sex, and the murky premise that Russia had sought to tip the scale during a presidential election.