Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

by Harding, Luke

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  Behind the scenes the FBI was establishing that much of the Steele dossier was true. At several key moments it was uncannily accurate. It laid out a dynamic relationship between the Trump campaign and the Russians—with politically helpful material offered by Moscow, and something given in return. There was, Steele wrote, a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation.”

  What exactly might the Americans offer?

  One key area of U.S.-Russian tension was Ukraine. According to Steele’s sources, the Trump team agreed to sideline Russia’s intervention in Ukraine during the campaign. Instead, and in order to “deflect attention,” Trump would raise U.S.-NATO defense commitments in the Baltics and Eastern Europe. This would help Putin, “who needed to cauterize the subject.”

  So there was a deal. In return for Kremlin assistance, Trump would soften the GOP’s stance on Ukraine and turn his fire on the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. These NATO countries on Russia’s doorstep had fraught relations with Moscow. They also had a significant minority ethnic Russian population. These people got much of their information from Russian state TV. The Baltic nations were therefore uniquely vulnerable: from external aggression and from subversion within.

  Trump’s apparent task was to change the subject—away from Putin’s illegal land grabs and military incursions, toward the undeniable fact that few European states were meeting their minimum NATO spending commitments, pegged at 2 percent of GDP. The policy reflected Trump’s own isolationist agenda. It also served the Kremlin’s interests.

  Steele was right. On July 18, Republican Party leaders and delegates arrived in Cleveland, Ohio. Their official task: to nominate Trump as the party’s presidential candidate. Those who attended included Mike Pence, the Indiana governor and Trump’s new running mate; former senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole; and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Plus campaign chief Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s previous campaign manager, now covering the convention as a CNN pundit. And Sergey Kislyak.

  The week before Trump’s coronation, delegates met to agree on a new national security platform. One of the delegates was Diana Denman, a Texan platform committee member who had supported Ted Cruz. Denman was a veteran party stalwart and avid Reaganite. She proposed a platform amendment that previously would have caused little controversy.

  It said a future Republican administration should maintain or increase sanctions on Russia, boost aid to Ukraine’s pro-Western government, and hand “lethal defensive weapons” to the embattled Ukrainian army. “Today, the post–Cold War ideal of a ‘Europe whole and free’ is being severely tested by Russia’s ongoing military aggression in Ukraine,” Denman wrote, adding that Ukrainians were deserving of “our admiration and support.”

  After this, something peculiar happened.

  Members of Trump’s team working with Trump-supporting delegates got the amendment rewritten. A Trump campaign official, J. D. Gordon, told Denman he had to “clear” her language “with New York.” According to USA Today, Gordon spoke with Kislyak on the sidelines of the convention. New York made alterations. Out was lethal hardware for Ukraine. In was something vaguer, meaningless even: “appropriate assistance.”

  Denman told The Washington Post she had tried to salvage her original language, telling Trump staffers: “What’s your problem with a country that wants to remain free?” Her efforts were in vain. The new watered-down statement was adopted as policy. Denman argued that this meant an abandonment of the Reaganite idea of peace through strength—supporting struggling democracies around the world, especially those facing down Russian or (as Reagan did in the 1980s) Soviet aggression.

  It was unclear who was responsible for the alteration. It was one of a few significant changes to the party’s platform. Trump later claimed he knew nothing about it. There had been further clues that spoke of collusion. Trump had earlier described NATO as “obsolete” and “disproportionately too expensive (and unfair) for the U.S.” Now Trump—or those around him—was sending encouraging signals to Moscow.

  The next week Trump made his notorious appeal to Putin at a press conference in Florida: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand [Clinton] emails that are missing.” A day later he returned to the theme of flaky Europeans stiffing the United States. He told a rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania: “I want to keep NATO, but I want them to pay.” Trump also floated the possibility that the United States might legally recognize Russia’s occupation of Crimea.

  This was too much for Carl Bildt, Sweden’s former foreign minister. He summed up the mood of Europe’s horrified foreign policy establishment. Watching Trump’s speech in Scranton, Bildt tweeted: “I never thought a serious candidate for US President could be a serious threat against the security of the West. But that’s where we are.”

  In real time, via speeches and tweets, Trump was refashioning U.S. foreign policy and blatantly undermining NATO, the bedrock of U.S. postwar relations with Europe, and an organization Putin had reviled since his days as a junior KGB spy. In this context, Trump’s hacking appeal to Russia made sense.

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  In the weeks following BuzzFeed’s publication, Steele vanished. He no longer visited his office in London. He disappeared from his home in Surrey, where he lived with his second wife, children, and stepchildren, now staked out by the paparazzi. Tabloid newspapers in Britain speculated that he had “fled,” fearing for his life. The Daily Mail reported that Steele may have gone abroad. Or was holed up in an “MI6 safe-house.” They quoted neighbors saying he’d left in a hurry and had asked them to look after his three cats.

  In fact, Steele hadn’t fled anywhere. “He’s fine. He’s lying low,” one person close to Steele told me that January. He wasn’t on the run from a Kremlin hit squad, the friend added, and was merely trying to avoid the press photographers camped out on his drive. With no new images, picture editors improvised. They found a blurry shot of Steele taken from a 2015 Cambridge Union debate event. It was indeed Steele, wearing a tuxedo.

  Clearly this public clamor was unwelcome. In the community of spies and former spies people were not supposed to see what you were doing. Becoming the story—the trigger for a global political scandal—was acutely embarrassing. “If there is one professional standard for people from the intelligence world, it’s that you shouldn’t be seen. Nothing should be visible,” the friend said. Steele hadn’t wanted his dossier to be published. BuzzFeed were “tossers,” his friend added.

  There was a UK political dimension, too. In the wake of Brexit, some considered it imperative that Prime Minister Theresa May strike up a good relationship with Trump in the hope that this might lead to an early UK-U.S. trade deal. As the Steele dossier went online, Downing Street was seeking to arrange a Trump-May meeting soon after the inauguration. It was even ready to offer Trump a full state visit, complete with red carpet and dinner with the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

  It was understandable, then, that May stressed that her government had nothing to do with Steele. “It’s absolutely clear that the individual who produced this dossier has not worked for the UK government for years,” May said.

  Within Steele’s old service there was disquiet at May’s approach. Some believed that Trump was a temporary aberration. By sucking up to him, the government risked damaging its key intelligence-sharing partnership, they felt. One former officer told me the Trump administration was an “existential threat” to Western intelligence.

  Meanwhile, Conservative pro-Brexit newspapers were eager to tarnish Steele and his track record. The former spy was a “confirmed socialist”; his claims were “unsubstantiated” and “far-fetched.” London’s Financial Times offered a more sophisticated view. It said that the Steele affair demonstrated one of the laws of the crepuscular world of private business intelligence. “It might be called the Frankenstein principle: once you dig up information, it can gain a life of its own,” the paper said.
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  Whitehall was evidently terrified that the Trump administration would blame it for the dossier—and think British intelligence was behind it, pulling the strings. The Russian embassy in London saw it that way. For the FSB, there was no distinction between the CIA, MI6, and Steele: they were a single hostile entity. The dossier, in the embassy’s view, was a useful way of driving a wedge between London and the nascent administration in Washington.

  In a tweet adorned with enigmatic black question marks, the Russian embassy said:

  Christopher Steele story: MI6 officers are never ex: briefing both ways against Russia and US President.

  Steele, meanwhile, believed there was little point in talking to journalists. Inevitably they would want to ask him about three things: his sources, his clients, and his methods. He couldn’t discuss any of these. There were also legal worries. Steele wasn’t responsible for the dossier’s publication—that was BuzzFeed—but Orbis might now face litigation from third parties.

  Already, a Russian venture capitalist, Aleksej Gubarev, was taking legal action. Gubarev was the owner of a global computer technology company, XBT, and a Dallas-based subsidiary, Webzilla. He vehemently denied any involvement in the hacking operation, as set out in Steele’s December memo.

  Despite these challenges, Steele was in good spirits, according to friends. He wasn’t downcast. The lurid and inaccurate reporting didn’t greatly bother him. One said: “He doesn’t have to rebuild his credibility. There’s plenty of stuff in the public domain which is negative. His relationship with the people he’s bothered about is still okay. He cares about a very small number of people. He doesn’t care about public opinion.”

  This group included Steele’s clients and his professional peers—intelligence officers on both sides of the Atlantic, including those in the FBI now pursuing Steele’s Trump-Russia threads. Orbis’s email box filled up with messages. Most were supportive. Well-to-do friends found somewhere for him to live. Steele made only one concession to his fugitive status, as claimed by the tabloids: he grew a beard.

  Steele understood perfectly how the FSB operated. He therefore knew that he probably wasn’t in any imminent physical danger. Russia’s secret services didn’t generally kill foreign spies. They might harass, disrupt, and entrap them; bug and surveil them; send “swallows” to seduce them; expel them from the country, as in Cold War times, or humiliate them on state television. But not murder. Murder was reserved for Russians. For those deemed traitors.

  The people at risk were Steele’s anonymous sources. Whoever they were, they were now in great danger.

  4

  Hack

  2016–2017

  FSB headquarters, Lubyanka Square, Moscow

  We do not do that at the national level. Besides, does it really matter who hacked Mrs. Clinton’s election campaign team database?

  —VLADIMIR PUTIN, September 2016

  The conference room had a funereal feel about it. Heavy brown curtains, beige walls, and at the front a somber stage. There was a podium and a large screen. And an emblem: the two-headed eagle of the Russian Federation, gold against a vivid scarlet background framed by a sword and a shield. Written on the silver shield were three words in Cyrillic: Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti. This was the FSB.

  The FSB’s mission—to protect the state and smite its enemies—hadn’t changed much since the days of Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution, nearly a century earlier. Lenin’s friend Felix Dzerzhinsky had run the original counterrevolutionary secret police division, the Cheka. When Putin became FSB chief in 1998, he kept a statuette of Dzerzhinsky on his desk. At least this is what the oligarch Boris Berezovsky—once Putin’s friend and later his bitter émigré opponent—claimed.

  The auditorium was part of the Lubyanka in the center of Moscow. The neoclassical building had been the home of the KGB, and of Stalin’s NKVD before that. Outside was artificial Chekist grandeur; inside it was dismal and boring, one visitor said. During communist times the spy HQ peered over a statue of “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, the secret policeman’s secret policeman. The Lubyanka overlooked Dzerzhinsky Square.

  Dzerzhinsky had masterminded one of the greatest espionage operations ever. His agents persuaded wealthy white Russians to donate to an anti-Bolshevik “trust,” ostensibly set up to resist communism. Its apparent goal: to bring back the monarchy. In fact the Cheka ran the organization. Dzerzhinsky got exiles to finance their own downfall. “It was an absolutely brilliant operation. A work of complete genius,” one admiring person with U.S. intelligence connections told me.

  In 1991, Dzerzhinsky’s statue was toppled and dragged away from its plinth. Periodically, a debate erupted in newspapers as to whether the statue might be brought back. After all, Chekists—current and former career intelligence officers like Putin—were Russia’s undisputed masters. In Soviet times, the KGB was subordinate to the party and the Politburo. Now Russia’s secret services were subordinate to nobody. Nikolai Patrushev—who succeeded Putin as FSB chief—summed up this change in a speech to his subordinates. The FSB, Patrushev said, had become “our new nobility.”

  In December 2016, FSB officers gathered in the Lubyanka’s auditorium. They sat in comfortable red chairs. One of them was a figure in his thirties or early forties, still boyish looking and with thinning black hair. His name was Colonel Sergei Mikhailov. Mikhailov was the deputy head of the FSB’s Information Security Center, the main cyber unit of the service, known in Russian by the initials TsIB. A senior spy working on the electronic front line.

  What happened next was astonishing. At least according to a version put out by the FSB.

  Someone went up to Mikhailov and placed a bag over his head. He was led away, out of the chamber and through a brown wooden door. He disappeared.

  Mikhailov had been arrested. The dramatic manner of Mikhailov’s detention before senior colleagues and fellow spies had a chilling meaning. It was evident to all who witnessed. Namely, that any further traitors might expect the same fate.

  There were no cameras to record the event: reporters were rarely allowed inside the Lubyanka. (When they were permitted entry for Putin’s annual address to his old service, they had to give up all electronics.) But FSB officers leaked the account to Tsargrad, Moscow’s Russian Orthodox television channel, founded by Konstantin Malofeev, a conservative businessman and prominent Putin supporter.

  Other FSB sources confirmed the story to Novaya Gazeta, the liberal paper read by Moscow’s anti-government intelligentsia. The message—this is what befalls traitors—was deliberately spread in all directions.

  Mikhailov’s arrest, on December 4 or 5, 2016, wasn’t a one-off. His deputy, Major Dmitry Dokuchaev—a former criminal hacker hired by the FSB—was reportedly detained at the same time. So was a third suspect, Ruslan Stoyanov. Stoyanov was an executive at Kaspersky Lab, Russia’s leading cyber security firm. He had previously worked at Russia’s interior ministry, in Department K, its cyber crime unit. Those who knew Stoyanov described him as a patriot, stocky and with a goatee, whose previous company, Indrik, was named after a bull-like beast from Russian folklore. Stoyanov was arrested in the airport on his way to China. An unnamed fourth defendant was also seized.

  These arrests of two senior Russian intelligence officers, together with civilians, looked like the Kremlin covering its tracks. They took place after the Obama administration had accused Putin in October 2016 of hacking the U.S. election. Mikhailov was detained days before we met Steele in the pub. By this point Steele’s dossier had been widely spread among journalists and in Washington. Almost certainly, the Kremlin had got it, too.

  Any foreign government confronted with an assessment like that would try to work out who was behind it. For American agencies, the questions might be: who are the sources, do they have access to this kind of information, and what’s their track record? For the FSB, the questions were: Who are the traitors and how should we punish them? Its counterintelligence people would examine the information revealed and try
to match it to known officers.

  According to Tsargrad, the FSB was already busy. It was carrying out zachistka—a military term that denotes clearing an area of enemy forces. Interfax, the Moscow news agency, gave the charges. It said Mikhailov and Dokuchaev were accused of “betraying their oath and working with the CIA.” They had—it was claimed—passed secret information to U.S. intelligence. If convicted, they’d get twenty years in jail. Their trial, everything about it, was a state secret.

  It wasn’t clear how these arrests related to Russia’s intrusion operation and the 2015–2016 hacking of Democratic Party emails. Stoyanov had good contacts with the security services—and the West, including U.S., German, UK, and Dutch law enforcement. Mikhailov’s department specialized in cyber espionage. Did Mikhailov give details of this operation to Washington, either directly or via intermediaries? Was he in touch with Steele? Or, as was most likely, was he merely an accidental victim of a turf war inside Russian intelligence?

  —

  There was a further dimension to these apparent purges. It involved Russia’s most notorious band of criminal hackers. The group was called Shaltai-Boltai, or Humpty Dumpty. For three years it ran a spectacularly successful guerrilla publishing operation, blending hacking, leaking, and old-fashioned blackmail: pay us or you’re screwed! Unlike WikiLeaks—a one-man band run by the high-profile Julian Assange—the Shaltai-Boltai leakers preferred to stay invisible.

  To begin with, the group’s mission was semi-idealistic. From late 2013 it leaked official correspondence, including emails, that revealed Moscow’s role in kick-starting unrest in eastern Ukraine. Its victims included Russia’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, whose Twitter feed was hijacked. As one of the hackers, Alexander, told The Guardian: “I thought it would be good to troll the Kremlin, and to try to change something in the country.”