by Craig Unger
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Meanwhile, relations between Russia and Western officials were approaching a Cold War–level chill. Putin’s bête noire was the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. In fact, Clinton had made her feelings about Putin clear in 2008, when, as a senator, she had joked about George W. Bush’s famous assessment of Putin. “I looked the man in the eye,” the former president had said, “I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”
Hillary, of course, saw things quite differently. Because Putin was a KGB agent, she said, “by definition he doesn’t have a soul.”14
Three years later, in 2011, when mass protests against Putin accused him of having rigged recent elections, Putin blamed then–secretary of state Clinton for giving aid and comfort to the demonstrators with statements of support. Even though she had gone along with and implemented Obama’s reset policy to improve Russian-American relations, Putin knew that Clinton had a much tougher line toward Moscow than others in Obama’s cabinet. And when Hillary joined the protesters and said the elections were “dishonest and unfair,”15 Putin saw her assessment as a deliberate attempt to undermine his power. “We need to safeguard ourselves from this interference in our internal affairs,” Putin said.16
Ultimately, he feared, she was such a strong supporter of “regime change” policies that, if elected in 2016, she might pose a serious threat to his survival. “[Putin] was very upset [with Clinton] and continued to be for the rest of the time that I was in government,” Michael McFaul, who served as the US ambassador to Moscow until 2014, told Politico. “One could speculate that this is his moment for payback.”
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If Putin’s hired guns went after Hillary, it would not be the first time. Starting in 2011, Paul Manafort, operating on behalf of Ukrainian president Yanukovych, placed articles critical of Hillary Clinton in the Wall Street Journal and on various websites, according to the Guardian, as part of a “black ops” operation against her.17
But Putin’s calculus involved far more than Ukraine and Hillary Clinton, and when he intervened in the Middle East on behalf of Syria, it was because he had stumbled upon a diabolical and grandiose plan that would drive a dagger deep into the heart of the Western Alliance.
It began in September 2015, when Putin announced that he would join Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in the fight against ISIS. In addition to striking at ISIS, however, Russian air attacks hit countless civilians, so many that in 2016 Amnesty International accused the Russians of joining Assad forces in deliberately targeting hospitals. Before long, Russia, intentionally or not, was creating a massive flow of refugees into Europe. “Russia is extensively involved in the Syrian conflict but has done virtually nothing to help the 11 million people who have lost their homes and livelihoods as a result,” said Bill Frelick, refugee rights program director at Human Rights Watch.18
According to Senate testimony in 2016 by General Philip Breedlove, the supreme allied commander of NATO, Russia’s inaction, far from being an oversight, was part of a deliberate and cunning policy to use the influx of millions of refugees as a political weapon that would destabilize Western Europe. “Together Russia and the Assad regime are deliberately ‘weaponizing’ migration in an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve,” Breedlove said.19
In other words, now that Russia had, inadvertently perhaps, helped spark an immigration crisis that overwhelmed the entire continent, it began a stealth campaign that aided right-wing, anti-immigrant, populist movements and politicians in Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Austria, and more.
The more Russia inflamed the crisis in Syria, it found, the more refugees it created, and the more Russia was able to weaken the European Union. The migration emergency served as the perfect catalyst for further action. As Great Britain prepared to vote on whether or not to exit the European Union (aka Brexit), for instance, Russia jumped into the fray. Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right UK Independence Party, fanned anti-EU sentiment while criticizing sanctions against Russia and issuing complimentary appraisals of President Putin. Hundreds of millions of dollars from dubious Russian sources were laundered in British banks.20 Then, as the vote for Brexit approached in June of 2016, Russian cyberwarfare began. According to research conducted jointly by experts from the University of California at Berkeley and Swansea University in Wales, no fewer than 150,000 Twitter accounts linked to Russia began to tweet inflammatory and divisive messages about Brexit, Muslims, and immigrants.21
Quietly, almost unseen, Putin also attacked NATO’s Eastern flank, through Poland—and again Mogilevich played a key role in an operation that, according to Polish investigative reporter Tomasz Piatek, succeeded in compromising NATO. The author of the bestselling Macierewicz and His Secrets, Piatek describes a series of convoluted scams, starting in the late eighties with David Bogatin—the same David Bogatin who laundered money through Trump Tower in 1984 and pioneered the Red Daisy gas tax scam—who moved to Poland and, according to Piatek, “robbed a lot of Poles through his creation of the infamous First Commercial Bank in Lublin,” one of the first commercial banks in post-communist Poland.22
According to Piatek, operatives tied to Mogilevich and the Solntsevskaya crime gang were principals in a 2014 wiretapping scandal where top Polish politicians were secretly recorded at their favorite restaurants—all of which helped the pro-Russia Law and Justice Party to win the elections.23 “The scandal was similar to the wiretapping scandal that led to the fall of Hungarian prime minister [Ferenc] Gyurcsány’s government and helped Viktor Orbán [Putin’s Hungarian ally] win subsequent elections,” Piatek said.24
The upshot was that in November 2015, when the Law and Justice Party won an absolute majority in Poland for the first time, it appointed Antoni Macierewicz as minister of defense. At one time or another in his career, Piatek reported, Macierewicz had given access to classified documents to a company controlled by the Russian Mafia in Poland. Among other failings, he had given a radio interview about Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fraudulent pamphlet that purports to be a Jewish plan for world domination, about which he said, “Experience shows that there are such groups in Jewish circles.”25
Once he became minister of defense, Piatek says, Macierewicz began recruiting pro-Kremlin, neo-Nazi youngsters as soldiers to fight in his new Territorial Defense Force, which reported directly to him—that is, not to the General Command of the Polish army, with which it was in direct competition—and began transferring officers and resources from the army to the TDF. As a result, Piatek says, “Macierewicz has been accused of destroying the Polish army and its relationship with its Western Allies.”26
And so it went—not just in the UK, Poland, or Hungary, but all over Europe. As a 2018 minority staff report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee put it, since 2004, Putin had launched a relentless asymmetric assault on democracy in Russia, Europe, and the United States using an “arsenal that includes military invasions, cyberattacks, disinformation, support for fringe political groups, and the weaponization of energy resources, organized crime, and corruption. The Kremlin has refined the use of these tools over time and these attacks have intensified in scale and complexity across Europe.”
In Eastern Europe, Russia attacked Ukraine, Georgia, Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Hungary. In the Baltic, it attacked Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. In Scandinavia, it went after Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. And it went after the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy as well. Ultimately, Putin’s goal, the Senate report said, was “to attack the democracies of Europe and the United States and undermine the transatlantic alliance upon which Europe’s peace and prosperity have depended for over 70 years.”27
Needless to say, the Russian Mafia was not the only weapon in Putin’s arsenal of “active measures,” a Russian term for political and
economic warfare by its security services. Both domestically and with foreign adversaries, Russia hacked its foes, as it did when it captured emails from Hillary Clinton and her allies, so it could release them and damage her presidential campaign.
Both domestically and abroad, Putin asserted ironclad control over the Russian narrative through disinformation and propaganda. Only a strong leader like Putin could remind a wronged and humiliated Russia of past glories and rebuild his country into a great superpower again. Only Putin could have annexed Crimea and pushed back against the West.
As for the opposition, by this time, dozens of journalists and dissidents had been killed, including Boris Nemtsov, the former deputy prime minister under Yeltsin, who was one of Putin’s most prominent critics until February 2015, when he was shot from behind near Moscow’s Red Square. To that same end, Putin also had the power to destroy media oligarchs who did not serve his agenda—as Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky found out when they were forced into exile.28
Outside Russia, where Putin didn’t control the media, the Russians resorted to more sophisticated tactics. They hijacked social media and exploited algorithms to make highly provocative “fake news” go viral. They harnessed the power of social media to amplify the rabid fanaticism of the so-called alt-right, in the process turning Facebook into one of the most powerful publishers of phony news stories and propaganda from Russia and the alt-right in the world. They used third parties, such as Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, to make it seem as if leaks had emanated from heroic whistleblowers, rather than being obtained by Russian intelligence, and they deliberately used not only “alternative facts” and fake news but bogus websites that pretended to correct fake news, and, in the process, upended the very notion of truth, of reality itself, of what is real. In all, according to the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, “the Russian government has used cyberattacks, disinformation, and financial influence campaigns to meddle in the internal affairs of at least 27 European and North American countries since 2004.”29
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Within that context, the Russian Mafia played the central role in nurturing an exceptionally pliant asset who initially seemed to be more of a person of influence than a man with real political clout. It had been nearly thirty years since Trump welcomed David Bogatin to Trump Tower and facilitated the sale of five apartments to help launder Russian Mafia money for the first time. Since then, he had accepted many millions of dollars—perhaps billions—for his condos. Vyacheslav Ivankov had lived at Trump Tower and run operations for Mogilevich. Bayrock had been there from 2002 to 2008, and helped Trump rise out of the ashes of Atlantic City and become a billionaire yet again—potentially leaving him deeply, deeply indebted to the Russian Mafia.
And yet at 11:05 a.m. on June 16, 2015, Donald Trump stepped on the descending escalator in the pink-marbled six-story atrium at Trump Tower and began a journey into history by announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States.30
Trump’s decision to run had been in the works for some time. In January, Emin Agalarov and Rob Goldstone, Emin’s publicist, had visited Trump in Trump Tower. Having seen Emin perform at the Miss Universe pageant, and having appeared in one of Emin’s music videos, Trump had told him, “Maybe next time, you’ll be performing at the White House?”31
At about the same time, Trump had hired Corey Lewandowski as his campaign manager. In March, he had formed a presidential exploratory committee. And now, three months later, Trump was proclaiming that we had become a nation of “losers” and that America needed someone “really rich”—namely, him—to restore its lost economic primacy.32
Starting off by saying he would build a “great, great wall” to stop illegal immigration, and have Mexico foot the bill, he added, “Nobody builds walls better than me—believe me—and I build them very inexpensively,” he said.
“I don’t need anybody’s money. It’s nice,” he said.33 “I’m not using donors. I don’t care. I’m really rich . . . I’m proud of my net worth. I’ve done an amazing job.”34
At the time, Trump was still treated largely as a novelty. “Clown Runs for Prez,” read the cover headline of the New York Daily News.35 A 4 percent showing in a Washington Post/ABC News poll put him in a tie for ninth place among Republican candidates. Worse, the same poll showed him to have a 16 percent favorable and 71 percent unfavorable rating.36 It was later revealed by the Hollywood Reporter that Trump even had to resort to paying $50 each to background actors—like extras in movies—to pretend they were Trump supporters cheering him on at the Trump Tower atrium.37
To the most seasoned political observers, Trump was an incredible long shot, and they didn’t have a clue about his ties to the Russian mob. On the other hand, Putin now had a candidate of his own choosing representing one of America’s two major political parties as the 2016 elections were about to get under way.
By this time, Mogilevich had done his job. He had targeted, ensnared, and compromised a powerful and influential American businessman. But now that Trump had real political prospects, Putin went ahead full bore and pulled out other weapons in his arsenal. The Kremlin’s “active measures” were about to go fully operational. The battle had been joined.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
BACK CHANNELS
Just two days after announcing his candidacy, on June 18, 2015, Trump appeared on the Sean Hannity show on Fox News, where he was asked if he had had any contact with Vladimir Putin, and how he might deal with him if he were elected.
“Yes,” Trump said. “So I was there two years ago. We had a tremendous success with the Miss Universe contest in—I own Miss Universe, Miss USA, all of that, and it does great. It’s on NBC, but that’s OK. But it does fantastically well. And two years ago, we had it in Moscow, and it was a tremendous success. And I got to meet everybody. I got to meet all . . .”
“Did you talk to him?” Hannity asked.
“I don’t want to say. But I got to meet all of the leaders. I got to meet all—I mean, everybody was there. It was a massive event. And let me tell you, it was tremendous.”
For an opening, it was a bit tentative and coy, especially for the bombastic Trump. Nevertheless, he had just uttered his first words as a candidate about Putin. “We can get along,” Trump said.1 It was official. The Trump-Putin connection had gone public.
A few weeks later, in July, at FreedomFest, a self-styled “festival of free minds,” in Las Vegas, Trump announced he would probably reverse President Obama’s policies and roll back sanctions against Russia. “I know Putin and I’ll tell you what, we get along with Putin,” Trump said.2 “I don’t think you’d need the sanctions. I think we would get along very, very well.”
As it happened, Trump’s statement was an answer to a question posed by Maria Butina, a Russian operative who was a protégé of Putin ally Alexander Torshin. No sanctions? It was everything Putin and the oligarchs wanted.
As if in response, Putin offered Trump praise in return. “He says that he wants to move to another, closer level of relations,” Putin told reporters. “Can we really not welcome that? Of course, we welcome that.” He added that Trump was a “colorful and talented” person, a compliment Trump said afterward he regarded as an “honor.”3
Meanwhile, the Russian cyberwarfare campaign against the United States was already under way. According to a January 2017 report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Security Agency concluded with “high confidence” that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for Pre
sident-elect Trump.”4
To gather ammunition for that influence campaign, on an undetermined date in July 2015, a bit more than forty-three years after five burglars broke into Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, the DNC offices were broken into again—not by burglars, but by Russian hackers.
The Democrats first found out about it in the most indirect way imaginable. In September, an agent from the FBI’s Washington field office left a phone message at the DNC office for an outsourced low-level computer technician who did not bother to return the call. “They left a phone message at the help desk of the DNC,” John Podesta, then Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, told CNN.5 “They didn’t treat it with the kind of seriousness, I think, that it deserved.”
According to the DNC, the FBI repeatedly called its help desk but never reached out to DNC leaders. As a result, according to a complaint filed by the Democratic National Committee against the Russian Federation and the Trump campaign, “Russian intelligence gained access to Democratic National Committee (DNC) networks and maintained that access until at least June 2016.” Consequently, the complaint said, the GRU—Russian military intelligence—was able to “exfiltrate” large volumes of data from the DNC and leading Democratic officials.6
The ODNI report also noted that Putin publicly said it was important the DNC data was exposed to WikiLeaks. “We assess with high confidence that the GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks,” the report said. “Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity.”7
