by Luke Harding
His name was Michael T. Flynn. Flynn claimed to be the first American to be allowed inside the Kremlin’s most secret espionage facility. It was a rare honor. At this point he was the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the senior military intelligence officer in the Department of Defense. He was also a self-styled maverick, “an atypical square peg in a round hole,” as he put it.
President Obama had appointed Flynn in April 2012. By the time of his Moscow visit Flynn was disillusioned with the Obama administration. It had, he felt, succumbed to enfeebling political correctness. It failed to appreciate that the United States was losing in a world war, a war being waged by radical Islamists and “evil people.” The White House didn’t even recognize its principal enemy—the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The GRU staff officers who witnessed Flynn’s arrival must have experienced a moment of cognitive wonder. For decades, they had worked to undermine what the KGB referred to as the glavny protivnik—the main adversary, the chief enemy—the United States. The pause in the Cold War hadn’t changed this. Most of them had never seen an American spy. Now here was one made flesh, an object of intense professional interest.
Flynn had come to Moscow to deliver a lecture on leadership. “I was able to brief their entire staff. I talked a lot about the way the world’s unfolding,” he told The Washington Post. The GRU talk was “fully approved,” he said, adding: “It was a great trip.” As Flynn saw it, Moscow and Washington had a mutual interest in defeating ISIS and terrorism across the Middle East. They could work together.
What was less clear is why the GRU invited Flynn. Viktor Suvorov—a former GRU major who defected to the West—described Flynn’s visit to me as “very strange.” Suvorov was a friend of Litvinenko’s. I got to know him after Litvinenko’s death. Suvorov had lived in the United Kingdom since 1978 after defecting from the Soviet mission in Geneva, where he was a “third secretary” under diplomatic cover.
His real name was Vladimir Rezun. As Suvorov, a pseudonym, Rezun had written a thrilling novel, Aquarium, closely based on his GRU career, and books on the Soviet army and Soviet military espionage. The novel opens with a chilling scene: of a man, still alive and bound to a stretcher with metal wire, being fed into the Aquarium’s crematorium. The man had betrayed the motherland. When the GRU recruited Rezun/Suvorov, they showed him a black-and-white film of the man’s final moments.
The GRU was different from the KGB, Suvorov said, adding that the two organizations were often at each other’s throats. The GRU was lower-profile, “always in the shadows,” burning its own secret papers, a thin transparent smoke rising from its chimney. Suvorov said that when he heard news of Flynn’s Aquarium drop-in he was stunned. “Oh my God, I had to eat my tie,” he said.
Suvorov added: “There’s something fishy going on. Can you imagine a top Russian adviser being invited inside MI6 or to lecture at the CIA: ‘We don’t know about leadership. Please tell us?’” The GRU was checking Flynn out, Suvorov said. The invite could have been “some kind of gentle blackmail.” “Maybe the Russians have some kind of material on him, or have him under control,” he speculated.
Flynn’s host was GRU’s director, Igor Sergun. More than two years later Sergun died in mysterious circumstances in Lebanon, apparently while on a secret mission. While in Moscow Flynn met with Ambassador Kislyak, the first of many encounters. It was Kislyak who had invited him to Russia in the first place and coordinated his trip, Flynn said.
Was this merely a friendly overture to a senior U.S. general? Or—as Suvorov believes—was there something more calculating going on? The Steele dossier suggests that Kislyak’s wooing of Flynn was deliberate, and part of a strategic U.S.-facing operation. One of its aspects was to identify “sympathetic U.S. actors.” And, among other things, to bring them over to Moscow.
In February 2014 Flynn gave another lecture—this time in England. His host was the Cambridge intelligence seminar. This was a forum where scholars from Cambridge University, former spies, and the odd journalist got together to discuss espionage matters, past and present.
Several of the Russians who spoke there had subsequently died in mysterious ways. In January 2003 Boris Berezovsky—later found hanged in his ex-wife’s home—had been a guest. A young Cambridge student, Vladimir Kara-Murza, collected Berezovsky from London, together with Berezovsky’s friend Alexander Litvinenko.
Berezovsky was the speaker. Standing at one end of a long table, Litvinenko talked briefly in Russian about Putin, with Kara-Murza translating. In 2006 Litvinenko was poisoned. After graduating Kara-Murza went home to Russia and joined the democratic opposition. There he was himself poisoned, not once but twice. A team of Moscow doctors saved his life. (Tests suggested Kara-Murza suffered binary poisoning—from two unknown toxins introduced separately.)
The person who invited Flynn to Cambridge was Professor Christopher Andrew, now an emeritus fellow and the official historian of MI5. Andrew convened the seminar with Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of Britain’s secret intelligence service, MI6. Dearlove was Chris Steele’s former boss.
The venue for Flynn’s (and Berezovsky’s) talk was Corpus Christi College. Dating back to the fourteenth century, the college is a place of tranquil charm: a front quad done in Perpendicular Gothic style; a silver collection that survived the English Civil War; and a painting that hangs next to the senior common room, attributed (wrongly?) to Poussin. Portraits of former college masters look out on a lofty dining hall.
Cambridge had numerous links with the world of spying. One of Corpus’s sixteenth-century undergraduates was Christopher Marlowe, the poet and playwright, who went on secret missions for the Elizabethan government and was stabbed to death in a pub in London in 1593, possibly during a brawl over the “reckoning,” or bill.
But it was in the twentieth century that Cambridge became synonymous with spying and defined Cold War politics. In the 1930s the Soviets recruited a group of communist-leaning students and one tutor—the Magnificent Five. Three of them—Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean—defected to Moscow. At the moment when he vanished from Beirut, Philby was writing for The Observer, the future sister paper of my employer, The Guardian.
There was traffic in the other direction, too. In 1974 Corpus’s master Sir Duncan Wilson took in the Soviet cellist Mstislav Rostropovich when he fled the USSR. A decade later the KGB spy and British double agent Oleg Gordievsky escaped Russia. Andrew became Gordievsky’s friend; they wrote books together. During Christmas 1989 the pair sat on Andrew’s sofa and watched the collapse of the Soviet bloc on TV. Six years after that Andrew collaborated with another defector and former KGB archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin. SIS exfiltrated Mitrokhin from Russia. He brought with him six large cases of top-secret material, an exhaustive record of the KGB’s worldwide operations.
Flynn’s Cambridge lecture was an obvious draw, in a term card that featured a talk on George Blake, another British KGB spy who fled to Moscow. The audience included academics, students, and retired intelligence professionals. Flynn brought his own Defense Intelligence Agency entourage. Afterward there was a dinner at Pembroke College, where Dearlove had been master.
Writing in the London Sunday Times in 2017, Andrew recalled the evening. He said that Flynn got into a conversation with a talented Russian-British postgraduate. The woman, born in Moscow, showed Flynn some of her recent discoveries in Russian archives. Flynn was so struck with her that he invited her to accompany him on a forthcoming visit to Moscow, as his official interpreter.
The trip didn’t come off: soon afterward Putin annexed Crimea. According to Andrew, Flynn and the postgraduate student subsequently conducted an “unclassified correspondence” via email. Their discussions were on Soviet history. The woman had written her dissertation on the Cheka. She was researching the role played by GRU spies in infiltrating the fledgling U.S. nuclear program for a future book.
The woman, Svetlana Lokhova, is understood to dispute some aspects of Andrew’s acc
ount. There is no suggestion she is linked to Russian intelligence. Flynn would normally have been expected to report any meeting with a foreign national to the DIA. He didn’t.
In his emails, Flynn signed off in an unusual way for a U.S. spy. He called himself “General Misha.”
Misha is the Russian equivalent of Michael.
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Flynn’s tenure as DIA chief was controversial. Within the agency, and inside the Obama administration, there were growing concerns about his erratic behavior. One source, citing DIA sources, spoke of Flynn’s obsession with Iran and his incapacity for “linear thought.” He had a tendency to “jump around. People thought Flynn was crazy,” the source said.
Other colleagues noted Flynn’s preference for conspiracy theories. This proclivity developed into what became known as “Flynn facts”—alternative explanations for actual events with little basis in reality. At times it seemed he was deliberately sabotaging White House policy.
Another person who worked with him told me Flynn had always enjoyed “keepers” during his military career. One was General Stanley McChrystal, chief of Joint Special Operations Command. It was at JSOC that Flynn revolutionized the way military intelligence was collected in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan. Real-time data from captured mobile phones, scraps of papers, anything, was fed back to analysts and used as the basis of immediate raids. McChrystal kept in check Flynn’s more obnoxious tendencies, the person said.
When Flynn became DIA boss, he no longer had a mentor or supervisor, the person said. He was on his own. His qualities—impetuosity, self-absorption, a conviction he was always right—became a liability. “Flynn frankly was raised above his level of competence,” I was told.
Then there was the general’s chaotic management style. According to a leaked email written by former secretary of state Colin Powell, Flynn was “abusive with staff” and “didn’t listen.” In a presentation Flynn even advised female DIA employees how to dress, telling them to avoid the “Plain Jane” look: “Makeup helps women look attractive.”
In August 2014 Flynn exited government and the army. He went a year early. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, told him his time was up. Flynn blamed his dismissal bitterly on Obama and said he’d been fired because the president didn’t like his uncompromising warnings about ISIS. Two months later the DIA wrote Flynn a letter. It set out the ethics restrictions that would apply to him in retirement. If he earned money from a foreign power, he had to declare it.
Flynn’s next moves were typical for an ex-general. He joined a speakers’ agency, went on the lecture circuit, and became a TV pundit. He set up a consulting firm, the Flynn Intel Group. And he wrote a book—a rambling, darkly alarming neoconservative manifesto, cowritten with the right-wing scholar Michael Ledeen. Its title borrowed from Homer’s Iliad: The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies.
The book gives vent to Flynn’s frustration with Obama—one of the “two worst presidents ever elected.” (The other one was Jimmy Carter.) Flynn offers one idea. It’s a single morbid obsession: that the West is losing the international fight against evil Islamists. What the United States needed was a new leader, an un-Obama, someone tough-minded, patriotic, and decisive.
There are interesting passages where Flynn recalls his late parents—his father, Charlie, who spent twenty years in the military, fighting in World War II and Korea; and his “brilliant, courageous” mother, Helen. Flynn recalls how as a teenager he got arrested for “unlawful activity.”
“I was one of those nasty tough kids, hell-bent on breaking rules and hardwired just enough not to care about the consequences,” he writes, a “sort of irreverent rascal.” The army saved him, he adds. As an officer he continued to identify with those who defied the system—with “the misfits, rebels, and troublemakers” from Apple’s famous slogan.
Much of Flynn’s book, though, is the literary equivalent of an angry man ranting in a bar. Flynn criticizes Obama’s Russia policy—too soft! He writes that the two countries might work together to beat radical Islam.
Flynn’s anti-establishment views and singlemindedness about the Muslim world meant that he had much in common with Trump. In August 2015—a few weeks after Trump announced his candidacy—the two men reportedly met for the first time in New York. The ninety-minute meeting went well. Flynn began to function as an informal foreign policy adviser.
Meanwhile, Flynn hadn’t fallen off Moscow’s radar. Rather the reverse. In December 2015 Flynn returned to Russia. The Kremlin invited him to a special event: a tenth-anniversary gala to celebrate the launch of the television channel RT.
The Kremlin’s favorite personalities were there. Julian Assange—stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy in London—appeared by satellite. The RT anchor Sophie Shevardnadze interviewed Flynn onstage, in front of around a hundred guests. There were a few Putin-friendly questions. Flynn sat against a backdrop of the channel’s green logo.
There was one other well-known American in town: the Green Party candidate Jill Stein. At the gala dinner Flynn and Stein were seated at the top table.
The organizers found a special place for Flynn. Right next to him was Vladimir Putin.
Also present were Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman; Sergei Ivanov, the president’s chief of staff; and Ivanov’s number two, Alexander Gromov. Plus RT’s editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, and an assortment of oligarchs and Russian celebrities. A few Europeans had flown in: the German politician Willy Wimmer and the Bosnian film director Emir Kusturica. (Kusturica was a big fan of RT. If he were Russian he would vote for Putin, he told the channel.)
Why had the Russians invited Flynn? The answer to this one was easy, said Mike McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow. It was because of Flynn’s proximity to candidate Trump.
Speaking to The Washington Post’s Dana Priest, Flynn said he had nothing to do with the seating arrangement. He hadn’t asked to sit next to Putin. Flynn said they were introduced but didn’t chat. He did learn that Russia’s president had a dim view of Obama and that Putin had “no respect for the United States leadership.”
Flynn’s exchanges with Priest over RT are revealing. He seems oblivious to the fact that it’s a propaganda channel.
PRIEST: Have you appeared on RT regularly?
FLYNN: I appear on Al Jazeera, Sky News Arabia, RT. I don’t get paid a dime. I have no media contracts…[I am interviewed] in CNN, Fox…
PRIEST: Why would you go on RT, they’re state run?
FLYNN: Well, what’s CNN?
PRIEST: Well, it’s not run by the state. You’re rolling your eyes.
FLYNN: Well, what’s MSNBC? I mean, come on…what’s Al Jazeera? What’s Sky News Arabia? I have been asked by multiple organizations to be a [paid] contributor but I don’t want to be.
PRIEST: Because you don’t want to be hamstrung?
FLYNN: That’s right. I want to be able to speak freely about what I believe.
Flynn declined to say how much he was earning from RT. The answer, it later transpired, was $33,750. The money was compensation from a foreign government. Flynn should have requested permission in advance from the Department of Defense to accept this money, but once again he didn’t. He made two further fee-paying speeches in Washington on behalf of Russian interests.
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By spring 2016 Flynn was a vocal supporter of Donald Trump and foreign policy adviser to his campaign. On Twitter he became increasingly strident in his criticism of Hillary Clinton—a crooked, dishonest, terrible woman. He spread conspiracy theories cooked up by others—Obama was a money-laundering “jihadi”—and tweeted “fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.” There was talk that Flynn might be nominated as Trump’s vice president.
This didn’t happen, but Flynn was rewarded with a prime slot at the RNC’s Cleveland convention. His speech was a piece of hubris that would haunt Flynn in the months to come—an invitation, practically, to the gods to strike him down for h
is folly, self-ignorance, and foolish pride. Not to mention criminal hypocrisy.
The mood inside the hall was frenzied. “We do not need a reckless president who believes she is above the law,” Flynn told delegates. They broke into chants of: “Lock…Her…Up!”
Flynn looked stern, nodded, and said:
“Lock her up, that’s right!” Clinton’s use of a private email server meant she was a threat to the “nation’s security,” Flynn told the crowd, to further cries of “Lock her up!”
He went on:
“Damn right, exactly right, there’s nothing wrong with that.…And you know why we’re saying that? We’re saying that because, if I, a guy who knows this business, if I did a tenth, a tenth, of what she did, I would be in jail today.
“So crooked Hillary Clinton, leave this race now!”
Even by the standards of the 2016 contest, this was a defining low—an inglorious and squalid attack from a man who, unbeknownst to Republican supporters and the American voters, was actually on Moscow’s payroll. The Kremlin was the only party that knew the detail. It followed events in Cleveland closely; Kislyak was there.
In the aftermath of Cleveland, Steele sent two memos to Fusion GPS. These were based on conversations with what he called “well-placed and established Kremlin sources.”
The two sources spoke of “divisions and backlash” in Moscow and laid out an argument between Ivanov and Peskov, both of whom had sat at Flynn’s RT gala table. Ivanov was widely seen as the most powerful member of Putin’s inner circle after Sechin. The memo claimed Ivanov was “angry at the recent turn of events”—the hacking and release of DNC emails, blamed on Russia. He believed the Kremlin team led by Peskov had overreached itself, “gone too far.” The “only sensible course of action now for the Russian leadership was to ‘sit tight and deny everything,’ ” Ivanov reportedly said.
