by Luke Harding
That was the last time I spoke to President Trump.
—
The line for public seats went on and on. The first person arrived at 4:15 a.m. By 7:30 a.m., three hundred people were lined up inside the Senate Hart Building. The human chain snaked along a corridor overlooking an airy atrium. The focus of its attention was room 216. It was here that Comey was due to give evidence.
Washington was used to big set-piece political events. But this occasion was special—a moment destined to feature in future accounts of Trump’s doom-laden presidency. It had an elemental plot line: a wronged man, a renegade chief, a possibly illegal hint, cunningly delivered off-camera.
Twelve national networks were relaying Comey’s testimony live. Sports bars and cafés, from Bond Street in Brooklyn to Sutter Street in San Francisco—were showing the event to customers. A Washington tavern offered FBI-themed sandwiches. There was even an early-morning Comey yoga party in LA.
America had experienced scandals before—Watergate, the Teapot Dome affair that shook Warren Harding’s administration in the 1920s. But, as The Guardian’s Borger noted as he scrambled for a hearing room seat, these were domestic squabbles. They featured one group of American politicians trying to smear another.
This scandal involved a foreign adversary. If Comey’s statement was to be believed, it revolved around a president who was willing to abuse his power. In this case, that meant seeking to browbeat an investigator. The investigator—it appeared—was getting uncomfortably close to the truth. And so he was fired.
At 10:02 a.m. Comey entered. The buzz subsided to be replaced by what sounded like a waterfall: the multi-click of cameras. The former FBI director looked grim, waxen, baggy-eyed. He sat behind a desk. Photographers were arrayed around him in a semicircle. There were senators and staffers and rows of reporters. Seen from above, the tableau had the solemn sweep of a Renaissance picture.
It seemed likely Comey would criticize Trump. The extent of the former director’s fury became evident immediately after he was sworn in. In his opening statement Comey said he accepted that Trump might fire him for any reason or none. But the official explanation “didn’t make any sense to me,” he said, especially after he learned from TV that Trump had actually done so because of Moscow.
“I was fired, in some way, to change—or the endeavor was to change the way the Russian investigation was being conducted. That is a very big deal, and not just because it involves me,” he said.
The White House, he complained bitterly, chose “to defame me.” It said the FBI was in disarray, poorly led, and with a workforce that had lost confidence in its boss. “Those were lies, plain and simple,” Comey declared, “and I am so sorry that the FBI workforce had to hear them and I’m so sorry that the American people were told them.”
Contrary to Trump’s gloomy claims, the FBI was not in meltdown. Rather, Comey said, it was “honest” and “strong.” “The FBI is, and always will be, independent,” he stressed.
Trump had been expected to live-tweet the hearing to his 31.7 million followers. As the nation watched, gripped, the president was unusually silent. Comey said he had mistrusted Trump from the get-go. He told the committee he started making a record of their conversations because of the “nature of the person.”
Fundamentally, he believed the president to be unethical. Mendacious even. “I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our [January] meeting, and so I thought it really important to document,” he said.
There were other interesting details. The chairman of the committee, Richard Burr, asked if the FBI had been able to corroborate any of the “criminal allegations” contained in the Steele dossier. Comey passed on this, and remarked that he couldn’t answer the question in an “open setting.” The inference was clear. The FBI had managed to verify some of Steele’s material. How much was secret information.
Comey said he passed on his Trump memos to Bob Mueller. It was Mueller, he said, who would now have to decide whether the president’s comments on Michael Flynn amounted to obstruction of justice. Comey said he took them as “direction.” The episode had left him “stunned,” he said. He hadn’t told his agents, fearing a “chilling effect on their work.”
Throughout Comey remained calm—which, if anything, made what he said more lethal. As the Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson observed, there was a “welcome air of sobriety” about the session. The senators interrogating Comey had done so in a grown-up way. True, Democrats had gone after Trump and Republicans had sought to exonerate him, but all recognized what was at stake.
Comey’s resolute appearance also earned him some unlikely plaudits. The Daily Beast’s Lizzie Crocker praised his “seductive integrity” and wondered whether the fifty-six-year-old, fired FBI director was “hot”:
Sure, he has a somewhat peaked complexion and under-eye bags that look like half-inflated tubular balloons. But he’s handsome, and as with all sex symbols—both the unlikely ones and the obvious ones—he embodies certain qualities in society that we all lust after: integrity, emotional complexity, and quiet but certain confidence.
Hot or not, Comey’s best speech came when he tried to put what had befallen America in context:
We have this big, messy, wonderful country where we fight with each other all the time, but nobody tells us what to think, what to fight about, what to vote for, except other Americans, and that’s wonderful and often painful. But we’re talking about a foreign government that, using technical intrusion, lots of other methods, tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act. That is a big deal. And people need to recognize it.
What struck me—watching on TV, like much of America—was the question that had prompted Comey’s passionate words. The Democratic senator Joe Manchin wanted to know, did Trump “ever show any concern or interest or curiosity about what the Russians were doing?”
The answer: no. Comey said Trump had asked a few questions during the January 6 briefing. Then nothing.
Trump, then, seemed profoundly unconcerned about Russia’s attack on American democracy. As candidate, and even as president, he had stubbornly denied that Putin was involved. At the same time Trump insisted—to Comey, and to anybody who would listen—that he had nothing to do with Moscow.
This, too, was untrue. Trump’s relationship with Russia went back a long way—to a trip almost certainly arranged by the KGB.
8
Collusion
1984–2017
Moscow–New York
A major effort is required in order to improve performance in the recruitment of Americans.
—KGB ANNUAL REVIEW, 1984
It was 1984 and General Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov had a problem. The general occupied one of the KGB’s most exalted posts. He was head of the First Chief Directorate, the prestigious KGB arm responsible for foreign intelligence gathering.
Kryuchkov was one of the USSR’s success stories. His background was proletarian: father a worker, mother a housewife, his first job in a factory. In the evenings he took correspondence classes. This led to a job in a provincial procurator’s office and then to a place at the Soviet foreign ministry’s elite training school.
From there his rise was swift. He spent five years at the Soviet mission in Budapest under Ambassador Yuri Andropov at a time when Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956. In 1967 Andropov became KGB chairman. Kryuchkov went to Moscow, took up a number of sensitive posts, and established a reputation as a devoted and hardworking officer.
By 1984, Kryuchkov’s directorate was bigger than ever before—twelve thousand officers, up from about three thousand in the 1960s. His headquarters at Yasenevo, on the wooded southern outskirts of Moscow, was expanding: workmen were busy constructing a twenty-two-story annex and a new eleven-story building.
In politics, change was in the air. Soon a new man would arrive in the Kremlin, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s policy of detente with the West—a refreshing contrast to the global co
nfrontation of previous general secretaries—meant the directorate’s work abroad was more important than ever.
Kryuchkov faced several challenges. First, a hawkish president, Ronald Reagan, was in power in Washington. The KGB regarded his two predecessors, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, as weak. By contrast Reagan was seen as a potent adversary. The directorate was increasingly preoccupied with what it believed—wrongly—was an American plot to conduct a preemptive nuclear strike against the USSR.
The general’s other difficulty had to do with intelligence gathering. The results from KGB officers abroad had been disappointing. Too often they would pretend to have obtained information from secret sources. In reality, they had recycled material from newspapers or picked up gossip over lunch with a journalist. Too many residencies had “paper agents” on their books: targets for recruitment who had nothing to do with real intelligence.
Kryuchkov sent out a series of classified memos to KGB heads of station. Oleg Gordievsky—formerly based in Denmark and then in Great Britain—copied them and passed them to British intelligence. He later copublished them with the historian Christopher Andrew under the title Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations 1975–1985. (I read it in the British Library. It was fascinating. I bought my own copy.)
In January 1984 Kryuchkov addressed the problem during a biannual review held in Moscow, and at a special conference six months later. The urgent subject: how to improve agent recruitment. The general urged his officers to be more “creative.” Previously they had relied on identifying candidates who showed ideological sympathy toward the USSR: leftists, trade unionists, and so on. By the mid-1980s these were not so many. So KGB officers should “make bolder use of material incentives”: money. And use flattery, an important tool.
The Center, according to Andrew and Gordievsky, was especially concerned about its lack of success in recruiting Americans. The PR Line—that is, the Political Intelligence Department stationed in KGB residencies abroad—was given explicit instructions to find “U.S. targets to cultivate or, at the very least, official contacts.” “The main effort must be concentrated on acquiring valuable agents,” Kryuchkov said.
The memo—dated February 1, 1984—was to be destroyed as soon as its contents had been read. It said that despite improvements in “information gathering,” the KGB “has not had great success in operation against the main adversary [America].”
One solution was to make wider use of “the facilities of friendly intelligence services”—for example, Czechoslovakian or East German spy networks.
And:
“Further improvement in operational work with agents calls for fuller and wider utilisation of confidential and special unofficial contacts. These should be acquired chiefly among prominent figures in politics and society, and important representatives of business and science.” These should not only “supply valuable information” but also “actively influence” a country’s foreign policy “in a direction of advantage to the USSR.”
There were, of course, different stages of recruitment. Typically, a case officer would invite a target to lunch. The target would be classified as an “official contact.” If the target appeared responsive, he (it was rarely she) would be promoted to a “subject of deep study,” an obyekt razrabotki. The officer would build up a file, supplemented by official and covert material. That might include readouts from conversations obtained through bugging by the KGB’s technical team.
The KGB also distributed a secret personality questionnaire, advising case officers what to look for in a successful recruitment operation. In April 1985 this was updated for “prominent figures in the West.” The directorate’s aim was to draw the target “into some form of collaboration with us.” This could be “as an agent, or confidential or special or unofficial contact.”
The form demanded basic details—name, profession, family situation, and material circumstances. There were other questions, too: what was the likelihood that the “subject could come to power (occupy the post of president or prime minister)”? And an assessment of personality. For example: “Are pride, arrogance, egoism, ambition or vanity among subject’s natural characteristics?”
The most revealing section concerned kompromat. The document asked for: “Compromising information about subject, including illegal acts in financial and commercial affairs, intrigues, speculation, bribes, graft…and exploitation of his position to enrich himself.” Plus “any other information” that would compromise the subject before “the country’s authorities and the general public.” Naturally the KGB could exploit this by threatening “disclosure.”
Finally, “his attitude towards women is also of interest.” The document wanted to know: “Is he in the habit of having affairs with women on the side?”
—
When did the KGB open a file on Donald Trump? We don’t know, but Eastern Bloc security service records suggest this may have been as early as 1977. That was the year when Trump married Ivana Zelnickova, a twenty-eight-year-old model from Czechoslovakia. Zelnickova was a citizen of a communist country. She was therefore of interest both to the Czech intelligence service, the StB, and to the FBI and CIA.
During the Cold War, Czech spies were known for their professionalism. Czech and Hungarian officers were typically used in espionage actions abroad, especially in the United States and Latin America. They were less obvious than Soviet operatives sent by Moscow.
Zelnickova was born in Zlin, an aircraft manufacturing town in Moravia. Her first marriage was to an Austrian real estate agent. In the early 1970s she moved to Canada, first to Toronto and then to Montreal, to be with a ski instructor boyfriend. Exiting Czechoslovakia during this period was, the files said, “incredibly difficult.” Zelnickova moved to New York. In April 1977 she married Trump.
According to files in Prague, declassified in 2016, Czech spies kept a close eye on the couple in Manhattan. (The agents who undertook this task were code-named Al Jarza and Lubos.) They opened letters sent home by Ivana to her father, Milos, an engineer. Milos was never an agent or asset. But he had a functional relationship with the Czech secret police, who would ask him how his daughter was doing abroad and in return permit her visits home. There was periodic surveillance of the Trump family in the United States. And when Ivana and Donald Trump, Jr., visited Milos in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, further spying, or “cover.”
Like with other Eastern Bloc agencies, the Czechs would have shared their intelligence product with their counterparts in Moscow, the KGB. Trump may have been of interest for several reasons. One, his wife came from Eastern Europe. Two—at a time after 1984 when the Kremlin was experimenting with perestroika—Trump had a prominent profile as a real estate developer and tycoon. According to the Czech files, Ivana mentioned her husband’s growing interest in politics. Might Trump at some stage consider a political career?
The KGB wouldn’t invite someone to Moscow out of altruism. Dignitaries flown to the USSR on expenses-paid trips were typically left-leaning writers or cultural figures. The state would expend hard currency; the visitor would say some nice things about Soviet life; the press would report these remarks, seeing in them a stamp of approval.
Despite Gorbachev’s policy of engagement, he was still a Soviet leader. The KGB continued to view the West with deep suspicion. It carried on with efforts to subvert Western institutions and acquire secret sources, with NATO its number one strategic intelligence target. Nor did the KGB foresee imminent political upheaval; its officers assumed the USSR would go on for a long time. Meanwhile, the Soviet war in Afghanistan ground on.
At this point it is unclear how the KGB regarded Trump. To become a full KGB agent, a foreigner had to agree to two things. (An “agent” in a Russian or British context was a secret intelligence source.) One was “conspiratorial collaboration.” The other was willingness to take KGB instruction.
According to Andrew and Gordievsky’s book Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions, ta
rgets who failed to meet these criteria were classified as “confidential contacts.” The Russian word was doveritelnaya svyaz. The aspiration was to turn trusted contacts into full-blown agents, an upper rung of the ladder.
As Kryuchkov explained, KGB residents were urged to abandon “stereotyped methods” of recruitment and use more flexible strategies—if necessary getting their wives or other family members to help.
As Trump tells it, the idea for his first trip to Moscow came after he found himself seated next to the Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin. This was in autumn 1986; the event was a luncheon held by Leonard Lauder, the businessman son of Estée Lauder. Dubinin’s daughter Natalia “had read about Trump Tower and knew all about it,” Trump said in his 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal.
Trump continued: “One thing led to another, and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.”
Trump’s chatty version of events is incomplete. According to Natalia Dubinina, the actual story involved a more determined effort by the Soviet government to seek out Trump. In February 1985 Kryuchkov complained again about “the lack of appreciable results of recruitment against the Americans in most Residencies.” The ambassador arrived in New York in March 1986. His original job was Soviet ambassador to the UN; Dubinina was already living in the city with her family, and she was part of the Soviet UN delegation.
Dubinin wouldn’t have answered to the KGB. And his role wasn’t formally an intelligence one. But he would have had close contacts with the power apparatus in Moscow. He enjoyed greater trust than other, lesser ambassadors.
Dubinina said she picked up her father at the airport. It was his first time in New York City. She took him on a tour. The first building they saw was Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, she told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. Dubinin was so excited he decided to go inside to meet the building’s owner. They got into the elevator. At the top, Dubinina said, they met Trump.