In this thicket, Manafort became well acquainted with Akhmetov’s friend, Dmytro Firtash. That tie brought him into the orbit of former FBI Director William Session’s aforementioned Russian mafia client, Semion Mogilevich. A chain-smoking, five-foot-six-inch, three-hundred-pound fireplug of a man, Mogilevich is a regular on the FBI’s list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.22 “Weapons trafficking, contract murders, extortion, drug trafficking, and prostitution on an international scale”: you name it, he’s into it, according to the FBI. The tentacles of Mogilevich’s money-laundering network are said to extend to twenty-seven countries, including the United States. In Philadelphia, he is alleged to have bilked investors out of $150 million, a scheme that resulted in the Justice Department’s filing of a massive racketeering, securities-fraud, and money-laundering indictment.23 He’ll never face trial, however: Though known to trot between Kiev, Budapest, and Jerusalem, home for Mogilevich is Moscow. He is said to have cordial relations with Putin. The indictment against him was filed seventeen years ago, so the Kremlin recommends you don’t hold your breath waiting for Mogilevich’s extradition.24
Firtash, a Ukrainian, rose from service in the Soviet-era military forces to become an energy-sector billionaire, heading up RUE (Ros-UkrEnergo AG)—the Russia–Ukraine energy conglomerate. How does such a miracle take place? Well, in 2008, Firtash admitted to William Taylor, then America’s ambassador to Ukraine, that “he needed Mogilevich’s approval to get into business in the first place.”25 It was a highly profitable blessing. Conveniently, RUE is half-owned by the Russian government through Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled natural gas giant. Putin’s regime thus saw fit to award RUE a monopoly on all gas trades between Russia and Ukraine. The transactions, beginning in 2003, netted billions of dollars. Firtash diverted some of the lavish proceeds to Highrock Holdings, a company based in Cyprus. Stringent privacy laws make Cyprus a favorite haven of corrupt government officials, foreign agents, money launderers, and other mobsters. You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to learn that Highrock’s major shareholders included Mogilevich’s wife.26
Like Mogilevich, Firtash is a fugitive from American justice. He is holed up in Austria, fighting extradition on an indictment by a Chicago federal grand jury. He allegedly schemed to pay Indian officials millions of dollars in bribes to approve mining rights for titanium desperately needed by the aerospace behemoth Boeing, Firtash’s (unindicted) partner in an aircraft construction project.27 As we go to press on this book, the Justice Department is still seeking Firtash’s extradition, having represented to a federal judge that he is an “upper-echelon” associate of Russian organized crime.
Interesting thing about that. Firtash, along with his Ukrainian oligarch and Russian mobster associates, was long the focus of the FBI’s Eurasian Organized Crime unit—the same one that handled the Bureau’s relationship with Christopher Steele … who was an official FBI informant before he started working on his anti-Trump dossier. Among the Justice Department prosecutors most involved in the investigation of Firtash—friend of both consultant Manafort and crime boss Mogilevich—were Lisa Page and Andrew Weissmann. In the Trump–Russia investigation, Page was a key participant (as counselor to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and confidant—to put it delicately—of FBI Agent Peter Strzok). Weissmann, of course, was the top prosecutor on the Mueller special counsel staff.28
Yup, Manafort played in a tough crowd. What ultimately put him in a special prosecutor’s sights, though, was his involvement in the Trump campaign. And when that happened, it didn’t help him that some of the top Obama Justice Department officials investigating Trump–Russia collusion were the same officials who, for years, had been trying to nail Mogilevich and Firtash. Like Glenn Simpson, the FBI and the Justice Department were laying the foundations for a narrative of collusion between rogues tied to Moscow and Washington. It wasn’t that hard to tweak the script from suspicion of fraud schemes to suspicion of espionage.
Birth of a Manafort-Kremlin Narrative
In the Ukrainian presidential campaign of 2004, Akhmetov and Firtash ardently backed Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s prime minister and the Party of Regions’s political leader. Of half-Russian stock, Yanukovych had a hardscrabble upbringing: orphaned young and convicted for violent robberies. Eventually, however, he was admitted to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and later became a regional transport executive in eastern Ukraine. He developed friendships with Akhmetov and Firtash. Their friend, the Regions pro-Russian leader, President Leonid Kuchma, appointed Yanukovych prime minister in 2002.
The 2004 election was a disaster for Regions. Yanukovych, advised by hard-edged Russians averse to the democratic process, was opposed by Viktor Yushchenko, who portrayed himself as the candidate seeking to move Kiev away from its shackled Soviet past and into a liberated European future. During the bitter contest, Yushchenko was poisoned by TCDD, the dioxin in Agent Orange. It had almost certainly been secreted in food he was served. Shortly before he fell ill, Yushchenko had dinner with the head of the Ukrainian security service, a man named Ihor Smeshko. Not long after the meal, Smeshko relocated to Moscow and was given Russian citizenship, insulating him from extradition. Yushchenko survived the assassination attempt, barely, but his handsome face was disfigured by lesions and blisters. “Every politician in this country and neighboring countries who turns toward the West is facing that kind of danger,” he later reflected. “My poisoning took place because I had started taking steps toward the European Union. We have a neighbor who does not want this to happen.”29
Yanukovych’s subsequent election victory was so manifestly tainted by fraud that it sparked the Orange Revolution protests. In the eventual do-over, Yushchenko won decisively. Yanukovych was swept out of the prime minister’s office, replaced by the woman who had become his mortal political enemy, Yulia Tymoshenko, the often—but, we shall see, not always—pro-European leftist. For a time, Manafort’s pal Akhmetov left Ukraine, worried that, in the backlash against Regions, he might be detained by the new government.
In this darkest hour, Akhmetov implored Manafort to take Yanukovych on as a client and launch Regions’s comeback. Manafort was reluctant, believing Yanukovych too flawed a politician and too damaged by the 2004 mischief. But Akhmetov prevailed, and the consultant proceeded to rebuild Yanukovych’s image from the ground up. He also replaced the bull-in-china-shop strategies of Yanukovych’s Russian advisors with Western-style politics—polling, micro-targeting, get-out-the-vote efforts, and the like. The metamorphosis was striking, and effective. Regions won the parliamentary elections in 2006. Unfathomably, Yanukovych was restored to the prime minister’s chair.30
Though we are still a decade before the 2016 U.S. election, before the emergence of Donald Trump as a political figure, this is a critical juncture. It is where we begin to see the basic incoherence of the “collusion with Russia” narrative. Banking on your unfamiliarity with the nuances of Ukrainian politics, collusion peddlers would have you believe that Paul Manafort went to work for the Kremlin’s guys and kept working for them while he chaired Donald Trump’s campaign. Collusion with Russia, Q.E.D.
But what did Manafort actually do in Ukraine? His tutelage nudged Yanukovych in a more Euro-friendly direction, away from Putin’s clutches. He pushed Yanukovych to study English. Yes, Manafort had his client play the political game—well known in American politics—of being different things to different people: speaking Ukrainian to pro-Western elements in Kiev, and sticking with Russian language and themes in the East (where Regions was especially strong). Yanukovych, however, also sounded western themes that cannot have been music to the Kremlin’s ears. Manafort had him saying he wanted Ukrainian integration into Europe, including its culture of thriving, competitive democracy. Yanukovych still expressed a desire for friendship with Russia, but did so in the geopolitical context of a country that has no choice but to court cordial relations with its stronger neighbor next door—the neighbor who is a bully, but with whom much of Ukraine shares ties of l
anguage and culture. Yanukovych would not seek to join NATO, which Russia would find provocative and which several NATO countries—not anxious to give Ukraine a joint defense pledge—mutedly opposed. But neither would Yanukovych seek a defense alliance with Russia: “We do not want to join any military bloc,” he explained.31
This is life in Ukraine. Progress is a high-wire act, inching toward Western norms without angering the bear, appeasing the bear when he gets cranky. The tycoons try to maintain their wealth and autonomy—a little Western philanthropy here, a little kickback to Moscow there. A Ukrainian politician is not acting as a clandestine Kremlin agent when he placates Russia, which Ukraine half loves, half dreads, and fully relies on for some basic needs. The Ukrainian politician is navigating a minefield of power centers, amid rampant corruption and organized crime.
Over a decade after Manafort started working for Yanukovych and Regions, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted him for failing to register as a foreign agent. But notice this, so obvious it’s been easy to miss: the accusation is that Manafort is an agent of Ukraine, not of Russia. Through two years of investigation and two extensive indictments focused on sinister international transactions, even the collusion crusaders cannot bring themselves to claim that Manafort, a foundational building block of the Trump–Russia collusion narrative, was a Russian spy. To be clear, the consultant’s body of work in Kiev was not admirable. Manafort took with both his grubby hands, earning megabucks shilling for awful people. But he was not a Russian operative—not when he was in Ukraine, and not when he was in the Trump campaign. He was working, at great profit to himself, to make his clients politically viable in a Ukraine that was (and is) turbulent, deeply divided, and constantly threatened. And he wanted Ukraine to be part of the West, a notion that is anathema to Putin.
Interestingly, while Regions’s comeback was strong, Yanukovych’s hold on the premiership was short lived. In 2007, he was displaced by his bitter rival, Yulia Tymoshenko. Her career is worth a quick glance. Like her Party of Regions rival Dmytro Firtash, she made her fortune in the gas sector. Tymoshenko cut a deal in the 1990s that enabled her to resell gas through an arrangement with Kremlin-controlled Gazprom.32 She became something of a national hero and Western celebrity during the Orange Revolution protests against Yanukovych. When she was in power, however, she was the emblematic Ukrainian chameleon.
And what was the main rap against Tymoshenko during her 2007–10 tenure as prime minister? Collusion with Russia. For all her European integration rhetoric, she worked to prevent Ukraine from taking steps to enter NATO, refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Georgia, undermined an effort to impede Russian naval vessels (making it easier for Moscow to attack Georgian forces), and, most consequentially, made a gas contract with Putin that induced Ukraine to pay higher prices than any country in Europe.33 The deal was designed to squeeze Manafort’s friend Firtash out of his sweetheart middle-man role of brokering Ukraine–Russia gas deals. It enabled Putin to punish President Yushchenko (whom he didn’t like any better after the poisoning plot failed) for opposing Russian aggression against Georgia and for seeking NATO membership. Simultaneously, Tymoshenko undercut her Regions rivals and courted Putin’s support (which is critical in eastern Ukraine) for the 2010 presidential run she was planning.34 Nowadays, in their latest political metamorphoses, Tymoshenko talks tough about Putin, while Putin announces sanctions against Tymoshenko. But it wasn’t long ago that they were joined at the hip and he publicly sang her praises.35
So how come we hear only about Putin’s dalliances with Manafort’s Regions clients, but never about those with their nemesis, Yulia Tymoshenko? Well, not only is she a progressive in reasonably good standing (derided a bit these days for clothing her socialism in populism).36 When she decided to seek an American political consultant, Tymoshenko had the good sense to choose Barack Obama’s top campaign strategists, who cashed in when their man won the 2008 election by forming AKPD Media.
Oh—you thought only gnarly Republicans play this game? Think again. While Regions hired the Republicans’ consultants, Tymoshenko’s organization retained the Obama consultants, and Yushchenko’s party brought in the Clinton consultants.37 This isn’t about collusion. American political consultants go to Ukraine for the same reason Willie Sutton went to the bank: that’s where the money is. Millions of dollars in fees for hard work in a dangerous place.
The Russian ‘Intelligence Agent’
The pretense was that the dangerous place wasn’t such a dangerous place anymore. After the Soviet Union fell, the illusion was that this was the glory of democratic transformation. The consultants did not lead the way. They followed. Political consultants don’t make money unless there is first politics. The progressive vision entails diving into authoritarian badlands, finding the bad guys who want to go legit (or at least say they do), and building democratic institutions, which—during however many decades it takes to develop actual democracy—bring the bad-guy “reformers” together with the political consultants in lucrative ventures.
Naturally, what was happening in Ukraine was also happening in Russia. Long before Paul Manafort and Oleg Deripaska found each other, there was John McCain’s baby, the International Republican Institute, setting up shop in Moscow, helping shape the new politics. Of course, the Communist regime’s operatives had run every sector of society. Should Washington’s democracy crusaders be colluding with people tied to Soviet/Russian intelligence, military, governmental, and business sectors? Well, with whom else were they going to work? Thanks to such powerful patrons as Senator McCain, IRI is lavishly funded. You might agree with me that we could find better ways to spend tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars annually than “democracy promotion” in hotbeds of gangster capitalism or sharia supremacism. But we’re spending it. If you’re promoting democracy in post-Soviet Russia, it’s going to involve Russians.
So, to help run its democracy-promotion initiatives in the mid-nineties, IRI retained a talented linguist: a diminutive twenty-five-year-old who was born in Soviet-era Ukraine and schooled at a military language academy—trained, as was common for such students at the time, to work in support of the GRU, the military intelligence service of the Soviet Union (and now, of Russia). His name was Konstantin Kilimnik. While Kilimnik does not appear to have been a fan of the Soviet Union, he was not shy about brandishing his GRU background, which was helpful for the kind of networking he did.
As was their wont, Mueller probe investigators strained to spin Kilimnik’s twenty-year-old Russian intelligence tie into suspicion that he is a current GRU operative, noting that one former associate says he was fired by IRI “because his links to Russian intelligence were too strong.”38 If that’s true, one wonders why IRI kept him on for at least eight years, during which he helped run the institute’s Moscow office. No one much cared that he had served as a translator in the Russian army and for a Russian arms exporter. Mueller concedes in passing that not all witnesses agree that Kilimnik’s termination from IRI had anything to do with Russian intelligence. It appears that the institute was unhappy when Paul Manafort hired Kilimnik in 2005. Manafort, of course, was pursuing a different, financially self-interested, Party of Regions–centric agenda. But whatever the reasons for Kilimnik’s parting of ways with IRI, the State Department certainly didn’t see him as a problem. He became a valuable resource for the political staff at the U.S. embassy, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Merkel told The New York Times, because he did not try to sugarcoat the financial motivations of the oligarchs who funded Regions and other parties.39
Kilimnik became Manafort’s right-hand man, though, so there was plenty of dodgy dealing. Manafort does not speak Russian or Ukrainian. Kilimnik became his adjutant for dealing with Deripaska, as well as the Ukrainians. Manafort’s previously described memo to Deripaska clearly related to potential political burnishing for the benefit of the Kremlin. Nevertheless, there has been controversy over the extent to which their business relationship entailed
politics. Manafort has previously denied a political relationship, but he appeared to acknowledge it in a 2014 FBI interview; the litigious Deripaska has unsuccessfully sued the Associated Press for libel over reports that he hired Manafort for pro-Russia political work and to influence both political decisions and news coverage.40
In any event, Deripaska clearly did back Manafort’s creation of a private equity fund, based in the Cayman Islands, a haven for tax evasion and related shenanigans. The consultant managed the fund with the help of his partner, Rick Gates, who would later become his deputy chairman on the Trump campaign (and still later, Mueller’s main accomplice witness in financial fraud cases against Manafort). Deripaska’s millions were used to purchase, among other things, Chorne More (Black Sea), a Ukrainian cable and internet company. The deal was a disaster. Deripaska ultimately sued Manafort in various jurisdictions for $26 million. (Note to self: $26 million in the hole to Putin’s favorite oligarch is not a place you want to be.) There was also a $1.5 billion deal that Manafort tried to put together with Firtash (believed to be fronting for Mogilevich) for a lavish Park Avenue skyscraper, but it fell through.41
There was more success on the political front. Manafort engineered the Party of Regions’s return to power. Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and immediately announced that “integration with the EU remains our strategic aim.”42 But the triumph for the American consultant was short-lived. While Yanukovych rhapsodized about rising to western standards, he ran his administration in the eastern authoritarian style, enriching his allies and imprisoning his rivals, particularly Tymoshenko. She was prosecuted over the gas deal with Putin she had entered into as prime minister. Russia bitterly criticized her prosecution, and when she was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, the Kremlin blasted Yanukovych’s government for pursuing her “exclusively for political motives.”43
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