by Luke Harding
The New York Times’ public editor, Liz Spayd, recounted how the paper’s reporters had spent much of early autumn 2016 trying to chase down the Trump rumors. They were aware the FBI was investigating a covert server channel with Moscow. They met with Steele. They even drafted a story. According to Spayd, senior sources inside the FBI persuaded the Times not to publish. After heated internal discussion, and a casting intervention by executive editor Dean Baquet, it didn’t do so.
Spayd’s conclusion: the paper had been too timid. “I don’t believe anyone suppressed information for ignoble reasons.…But the idea that you only publish once every piece of information is in and fully vetted is a false construct,” she wrote.
There was a paradox at work. On the one hand Trump made it clear that he loathed the mainstream media. Not only were they purveyors of fake news; they were also “enemies of the American people,” according to another of his tweets. The enemies included the “failing” New York Times, NBC News, ABC, and CNN. On the campaign trail Trump called reporters “dishonest,” “disgusting,” and “the lowest form of humanity.” Reporters were, he suggested, amoebas with legs and arms, “human garbage.”
Mark Singer, the author of a riotously amusing Trump profile in The New Yorker, wrote that the press deserved some of this: “Much of the Fourth Estate, first by not taking Trump seriously and then by taking him seriously, assumed roles as his witless enablers. For months, Trump played them like suckers at a sideshow. The more airtime and ink they gave him, the more he vilified them.”
No matter how much invective Trump chucked at the media, “the cameras kept running,” Singer observed correctly. He admitted that he, too, was a sucker. “On the distant sideline (specifically my living room sofa), my shaming secret was that I couldn’t look away.”
Trump’s anti-press tone may have been hysterical but his claims post-election were not without a certain logic. The Democratic Party was weak and beaten. Trump’s main adversary—if not that of Americans per se—was the liberal media, and in particular the investigative teams now busy pursuing his connections with Russia. The Fourth Estate now occupied an elevated role in the nation’s shambling real-life version of the TV drama House of Cards. They were not merely observers but protagonists. They were, from Trump’s perspective, villains, plotters, enemies, and wreckers.
On the other hand, the forty-fifth president of the United States had a remarkable and beneficial impact on the news media. Previously, morale had been low or, at best, mixed. The advertising model that supported once-great U.S. titles—The Baltimore Sun, The Philadelphia Inquirer—was bust. The early part of the twenty-first century had been characterized by newsroom layoffs, a diminution in foreign bureaus, and a decline in print sales.
Now new digital subscribers were piling in. Journalists found themselves reinvigorated by what was undoubtedly the biggest story of their professional lives. “It’s the most upbeat newsroom I have seen in my entire career,” Marty Baron, the executive editor of The Washington Post, told me. The insults, the dehumanizing language, and the fact that the Post together with other major titles were barred from Trump’s campaign rallies, well…this made his staff work harder, Baron said.
For the first time in a while, The Washington Post was in profit. Trump’s election had been a boon: the paper that uncovered the Watergate scandal was now hiring sixty reporters and eight investigative journalists. The president had a healthy impact on fact-checking. Trump told so many lies that the fact-checking desk had doubled in size, from one to two people. The paper even got itself a jaunty new slogan: Democracy Dies in Darkness.
As Baron correctly noted, Trump loved the “enemies of the people.” Every morning he pored over his press clippings, delivered to him the old-fashioned way: on paper. His preferred interface with reality was TV—in particular Fox News, which presented Trump back to himself in absurdly flattering terms.
At this point he was the most media-accessible president ever. He gave more than twenty hours of interviews to Post reporters, who produced an engrossing biography of the candidate, Trump Revealed. (Mitt Romney, by contrast, offered forty-five minutes and declined to be interviewed for a similar candidate profile book.)
From the Oval Office, Trump even called individual reporters on their cell phones. He called The Washington Post’s Robert Acosta, an old-time confidant. The identity of the number was blocked, so Acosta thought the caller was a nutty reader with a complaint. “Hello, Bob,” Trump began. You never quite knew when Trump would call. Reporters would be away from their desks—in Starbucks, in the corridor, at the kitchen table—when the Great Man wanted to speak.
There were other consequences. The Trump-Russia story was so multifarious and so complex that it made sense to cooperate. It was bigger than any individual scoop.
At The Guardian we were pursuing leads from both sides of the Atlantic. Among them, how UK spy agencies had first picked up suspicious interactions between the Russians and the Trump campaign and the role played by Deutsche Bank, Trump’s principal lender. We made an investigative pod—Harding, Hopkins, Borger, and Stephanie Kirchgaessner, a talented former Washington correspondent, now based in Rome. We built up a portfolio of sources.
There was healthy competition still, but reporters on different titles began working together on some stories. There were formal press consortiums and ad hoc conversations between onetime rivals. I talked to The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Financial Times in London, Reuters, Mother Jones, The Daily Beast, CNN, and others. Such conversations took place in New York, Washington, London, Munich, and Sarajevo. Some happened in glossy conference rooms, others in the corners of pubs over warm ale.
Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, argued that the “gravity of the matter” called for a change in the press’s behavior. Trump meant a new era. And new post-tribal thinking.
Abramson wrote: “Reputable news organizations that have committed resources to original reporting on the Russia story should not compete with one another, they should cooperate and pool information.”
Trump’s Republican colleagues showed little interest in investigating whether the dossier’s allegations were true. So it was left to the media to carry out this civic function. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria noted that in the era of Trump journalism had a renewed elemental purpose. “Our task is simply to keep alive the spirit of U.S. democracy,” he said.
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Reporters may have fancied themselves as foot soldiers of the Enlightenment, but they had one other important role. They would become the recipients of leaks from what would turn out to be the leakiest White House since Nixon’s second administration. The more Trump decried leakers and leaking, like a petulant child unable to get his own way, the more his enemies leaked against him.
Steele had intended his work to be read by a small, discerning audience of intelligence pros. People like him, in fact, whom he respected. Now everybody had it. For reporters, the dossier was rocket fuel—enough to blast them off on a renewed investigative mission whose final destination (impeachment? a scandal that fizzled out through lack of evidence?) was unknown. It wasn’t clear how long the journey might last. Months certainly, and years possibly. Here there were plenty of leads and not so many hard facts.
Meanwhile, over in Moscow the language used by the Kremlin echoed that of Trump. It was left to Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman, to denounce the contents of the report. Peskov played a role in the affair himself. According to Steele, he controlled the “dossier of compromising material on Hillary Clinton” collated by Russia’s intelligence services over many years. This, Steele wrote, was done “directly on Putin’s orders.”
First, Peskov denied the Trump allegations. “This information does not correspond to reality and is no more than fiction,” he said. Then he insisted that the Kremlin “does not engage in collecting compromising material.” Political motives were behind the release—to halt an improvement in the U.S.-Russian relationship, which wa
s currently “degraded,” Peskov said. Adopting Trump’s own phrase, Peskov called the dossier “a complete fake.” It wasn’t “worth the paper it was written on.”
Anyone familiar with Russian espionage could only crack a wry smile at Peskov’s solemn denials. True, nobody outside the FSB could know if the spy agency did indeed have a Trump video. But there was a rich history of the FSB, and its KGB predecessor, collecting compromising material. And on many occasions filming targets when they engaged in sexual activity, even if this was with a wife or husband.
As I myself knew.
During my time in Russia as a correspondent, the FSB broke into our family apartment as part of a low-level campaign of harassment. Typically, as with the KGB in Steele’s day, they left demonstrative clues. The British embassy in Moscow gave us advice. It said U.S. and UK diplomats, plus their Russian embassy support staff, suffered from similar “house intrusions.” These psychological games dated from KGB times. Probably they featured in Putin’s training manual from the 1970s when he went to spy school. Our apartment was now bugged, British diplomats said.
Returning from a holiday in Berlin, I discovered the FSB had visited us again. During this, their latest break-in, they had left a book by the side of the marital bed. It was in Russian. Its title: “Love, freedom, aloneness.”
It was a sex and relationships manual.
Putin’s guys had helpfully inserted a bookmark on page 110. I turned the pages curiously. The page offered guidance on orgasms. This was a surreal moment: dark, awful, and ridiculous. The FSB’s present was—contemplated after a couple of glasses of vodka—almost hilarious. Was there a technical problem? Or a frequency issue with our lovemaking?
Either way, the FSB’s message was clear: we are watching you.
Putin was well aware of what his spy service did in the bedroom. Especially when it came to filming targets in the company of what the Russian press calls “girls of easy behavior.”
Back in 1999, Russia’s prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov, fell out with Boris Yeltsin. Skuratov’s corruption investigations were going down badly with influential people inside the Kremlin, including the oligarch Boris Berezovsky. (At this point Berezovsky was at the zenith of his powers, a fixer and backroom player who was deputy head of Yeltsin’s security council.) A government-controlled TV channel released a video of Skuratov in bed with two prostitutes. The video isn’t flattering: it shows a flabby, middle-aged man reclining on a sofa with two blondes. The time stamp shows that it’s 2:04 a.m.
The episode ended Skuratov’s career. He resigned on health grounds soon afterward. One senior official played a prominent role in the prosecutor’s demise and national humiliation. The official—then head of the FSB—testified that he believed the video to be genuine. This was Putin. Putin came up with a memorable quote that stuck with the Russian public.
The figure in the film was “a person similar [in appearance] to the Prosecutor General,” Putin said dryly.
Once Putin became president, the FSB continued to film targets in their intimate moments. Covert surveillance was so widespread that UK diplomats arriving to take up a posting in Moscow were briefed about the dangers of honey traps.
In the past even illustrious officials had succumbed to them. In 1968 Britain’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, Sir Geoffrey Harrison, had an affair with a maid working at the embassy. The maid, Galya Ivanova, was a KGB employee, as Sir Geoffrey might have known. The KGB sent him the photos; Harrison told London and was immediately recalled. “I let my defenses drop,” the ambassador admitted.
The attractive young women used to entice Western diplomats had a name—“swallows.” In Soviet times the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate sent them.
In 2009 James Hudson—the UK’s deputy consul in Yekaterinburg, the principal city in the Urals—was filmed in a local massage parlor. Like Skuratov, Hudson cut a louche figure on the tape and was wearing a dressing gown. There is a kiss, champagne, explicit bedroom moments with two women. The FSB leaked the video to the tabloid newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, which published it under the playful headline “The Adventures of Mr. Hudson in Russia.” Hudson quietly quit Russia and the UK foreign office.
A month later the FSB caught another apparent victim, this time an American. The same news outlet released video that it said showed the U.S. diplomat Kyle Hatcher calling up a prostitute. The production values are distinctly amateurish. There is cheesy saxophone music. Hatcher allegedly asks Inna, Sonya, and Veronica in U.S.-accented Russian: “Will you be free in an hour?” Veronica replies: “In an hour and a half.”
The Russian paper claimed Hatcher was a CIA officer. His official job was to liaise with Russia’s religious communities, including Christians and Muslims, it said, justifying publication on the grounds that Hatcher was something of a hypocrite. The U.S. ambassador John Beyrle said the footage was fake. Beyrle filed a complaint with the Russian foreign ministry.
The FSB’s sex stings hadn’t changed much since earlier Cold War times. They were carried out for classic secret service reasons: to entrap, recruit, embarrass, and blackmail.
Its operatives were able to carry out such operations with relative ease. Hidden cameras were a lot smaller than in the KGB’s heyday. The picture quality was better, too—good enough to broadcast on state TV, if you wanted.
Mostly, victims of sex stings were Russians. In April 2016 the Russian opposition leader Mikhail Kasyanov was filmed from a concealed camera sitting on a dressing table. Kasyanov had been Putin’s prime minister for four years, until he got fired in 2004. He then joined the opposition. Now he was seen stripping off with an aide from his Republican Party of Russia–People’s Freedom Party, Natalia Pelevine. The NTV channel—used for a series of hit jobs on Putin’s critics—screened the footage taken from inside a private Moscow apartment.
It even used the same stiff phrasing that Putin had employed with Skuratov eighteen years earlier. The voiceover intoned: “A person similar in appearance to Mikhail Kasyanov.”
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From Moscow, Putin’s reaction to the Trump dossier was a master class in how to send several messages at once. Why, he asked, would Trump arrive in Russia and immediately take up with the city’s prostitutes? Trump was a “grown man” and moreover one used to spending time with beautiful women at pageants and competitions all over the world. Trump was, Putin implied, proofed against temptation.
Putin continued: “You know it’s hard for me to imagine that he went to a hotel to meet with women with a low level of social responsibility, although without a doubt they [Russian prostitutes] are the best in the world, without a doubt. But I doubt that Trump would have got hooked on that.”
At face value, this looked like Putin defending Trump, the soon-to-be leader of a mighty superpower. In fact, Putin was signaling that Russian prostitutes were irresistible (“the best in the world”). There was also a note of equivocation: (“I doubt that”). And an uncomfortable image in which Trump—the fish—was suckered into taking the bait (“hooked,” by hookers, in fact).
With his trademark sardonic humor, Putin may have been delivering a second message, darkly visible beneath the choppy translucent waters of the first. It said: we’ve got the tape, Donald! If this was Putin’s submerged meaning, the president-elect would surely have noticed it.
Moving from light to dark, Russia’s president said prostitution wasn’t the fault of the young women who engaged in it. They had few options. They were merely trying to earn an income, he said. The real prostitutes were those who had ordered up “hoaxes” against Trump. They were “worse than prostitutes.” They had “no moral limitations,” Putin added. He meant Steele. And Western spies generally.
It was an effective little speech. One felt sorry for the visiting president of Moldova, Igor Dodon, who had flown in to Moscow for talks with Putin. They had emerged for a joint press conference. Dodon had newly won his country’s election on a pro-Russian platform, and here he was, overshadowed by surreal internationa
l events. He tapped the side of his lectern nervously. He stared at his microphone. He rearranged his pen.
Putin and Trump were united in their repudiation of Steele’s work. They were using the same phrases, the same angry rhetoric, the same nyet—as if a baton were being passed from New York to Moscow and back again to New York.
In his tweets the president-elect cited the fact that Russia had dismissed the dossier:
Russia just said the unverified report paid for by political opponents is A COMPLETE AND TOTAL FABRICATION, UTTER NONSENSE. Very unfair!
And:
Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA—NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!
And:
Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to “leak” into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?
Trump’s strategy of flat denial was problematic for two reasons. One, favorably quoting Putin merely reinforced the idea that the two leaders were working in tandem. Two, the Kremlin’s track record in telling the truth about anything was extremely poor. Putin lied about big things (undercover Russian troops in Crimea in 2014; the Kremlin plot to murder Litvinenko) and small things. Putin was a “specialist in lying,” according to the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, murdered in Moscow in 2015; his habit of deceit was “pathological.”
Western politicians told lies sometimes, too, of course. But deceit and falsification had a long history in Russia, stretching back to tsarist times and the Potemkin villages erected for Catherine the Great. In literature surreal mendacity was rife, notably in Gogol’s The Government Inspector and Dead Souls. And according to Lenin, the truth was subordinate to the class struggle.
For Putin, lying was an operational KGB tactic. Russia’s twenty-first-century postmodern media strategy borrowed something from Lenin’s relativist ideas. The actual truth was unimportant. What was important was the Kremlin’s “sovereign” version of it. This was energetically disseminated inside Russia and increasingly abroad via Russia Today (later, RT) and other state news platforms.