by Luke Harding
Dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister, shared Ivanov’s apparent disquiet. Medvedev wanted good relations with whoever was in power in the United States, “not least so as to be able to travel there in the future, either officially or privately.” There was speculation inside the Kremlin that Trump might be forced to withdraw from the presidential race, “ostensibly on grounds of his psychological state and unsuitability for high office.”
Steele’s second memo—dated August 10—gives further detail. It cites Ivanov “speaking in confidence to a close colleague in early August.” Ivanov, a former KGB officer, defense minister, and first deputy prime minister, was now upbeat. He felt that even if Clinton won, she would be “bogged down” in healing America’s divisions and less able to focus on “foreign policy which would damage Russia’s interests.” According to Ivanov, Putin was “generally satisfied with the progress of the anti-Clinton operation to date.”
The memo said:
This had involved the Kremlin supporting various US political figures, including funding indirectly their recent visits to Moscow. S/he named a delegation from Lyndon LAROUCHE; presidential candidate Jill STEIN of the Green Party; TRUMP foreign policy adviser Carter PAGE; and former DIA director Michael Flynn, in this regard and as successful in terms of perceived outcomes.
The Kremlin, then, was happy with its Flynn investment. The money was spent well.
Two days after the memo Putin unexpectedly fired Ivanov from his presidential team. The Russian press said nothing about the probable cause: an argument over the wisdom of hacking America. State TV showed footage of Putin accepting Ivanov’s resignation “at his own wishes.” Ivanov smiled. He was trying his best to accept this fate with dignity. Still, Ivanov looked pained.
—
By late summer Flynn had become Trump’s fervent advocate. He was a staple at TV studios and on talk shows. He was also receiving classified intelligence. On August 17 he joined Trump at Trump Tower for a secret briefing given separately to both candidates. U.S. officials told NBC News that Flynn repeatedly interrupted the briefers, prompting New Jersey governor Chris Christie to tell him to calm down. Not true, said Flynn.
At the same time, Flynn was earning money for his lobbying activities, this time from the Turkish government. In July President Recep Tayyip Erdogan survived a coup attempt. Amid mass arrests and firings, Erdogan blamed the uprising on supporters of Fethullah Gülen, an exiled cleric living in Pennsylvania. In Cleveland, Flynn welcomed the attempted coup, stating that Erdogan was “close to President Obama.”
In the two months before the U.S. election, Flynn began calling for Gülen’s extradition. He even described the preacher as Turkey’s Osama bin Laden. What changed? The answer: Flynn’s consulting company signed a new and lucrative contract. Officially, it was with a Dutch company, Inovo BV. In reality, the firm was linked to the Turkish government. The contract was for $600,000.
There were suspicions—unproven ones—that Russia may have arranged this. Putin and Erdogan fell out bitterly in November 2015 after Turkey shot down a Russian jet on its border with Syria. By summer, however, they had made up, amid what critics called the Putinization of Turkey. The Flynn contract was agreed the same day that Putin and Erdogan held talks in St. Petersburg.
Once more, Flynn failed to register as a foreign agent. The day after polling day Erdogan called Trump to offer congratulations.
From inside the outgoing administration, and the U.S. intelligence community generally, there were fears that Flynn was now heading for a senior security post. The concerns stemmed from the general’s behavior. Flynn’s multiple contacts with Russia, his acceptance of money from murky foreign sources, his inappropriate conduct, his habit of deceit—all raised doubts about his suitability for high office.
Obama said as much during his meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, the day after Trump’s stunning election victory. According to three former officials, speaking to NBC, Obama told Trump explicitly: don’t hire this guy. Trump ignored Obama’s warning. Three days later he announced that Flynn would be his new national security adviser. This was a staff job of great power. It meant Flynn would spend more time with Trump than any other member of his national security team.
During the transition period, Flynn continued to interact with Sergey Kislyak. In early December he met the ambassador in Trump Tower together with Jared Kushner. There were no photos: seemingly the envoy crept in via a back entrance.
When Russia’s ambassador to Turkey was shot dead—a gunman executed him at an Ankara art gallery—Flynn called Kislyak again to offer condolences. This was in mid-December. On Christmas Day Flynn texted the envoy with holiday greetings. Another phone call took place on December 28. The talk was of a Trump-Putin phone call and of forthcoming peace talks on Syria, to be hosted by Moscow in Kazakhstan.
The following day Flynn called Kislyak numerous times, according to former White House officials. It was twenty-four hours since Obama ejected Russian diplomats in protest at Kremlin hacking. These calls were to prove fateful. They would lead to Flynn’s downfall shortly afterward—and to the question first asked during the Watergate hearings in 1973 by the Republican senator Howard Baker:
What did the president know and when did he know it?
—
Flynn entered the U.S. Army in the early 1980s. He might have been expected to join the infantry. Instead he became part of a new and emerging field. He trained as an intelligence officer specializing in signals intelligence and electronic warfare. His mission was to eavesdrop on the enemy.
Flynn was deployed to Panama, Honduras, and other parts of Central America, where the Reagan administration was fighting proxy wars against what it viewed as Soviet-backed insurgents. Flynn—a platoon leader with the 313th Military Intelligence Battalion—took part in the U.S. invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. It was 1983.
In The Field of Fight, Flynn recalls how he was sent in to defeat a rebel far-left militia that had just deposed and executed the prime minister, Maurice Bishop, plus various Cubans on the island. Flynn swiftly moved with his team and took over the phone company in downtown St. George’s. There, they got to work:
“We tapped the telecommunications network on the island and started listening for Cuban communications for those trying to escape,” he wrote.
Later he went back to the U.S.-controlled airfield. It was “a superb location offering a line of sight into the city, and along the southern and western part of [Grenada].”
“We could, in essence, electronically ‘see’ and ‘hear’ any communications,” Flynn explained.
Flynn, then, knew everything about the United States’ ability to bug conversations—it was his professional specialty. In the subsequent three decades these powers had increased. As the former head of the DIA, he must have known that Russian envoys in New York and D.C. would be routinely monitored. All of which made his behavior that December and January truly bizarre.
On January 12—two days after the Steele dossier came out—the journalist and writer David Ignatius published a column in The Washington Post.
It compared the dark drama in Washington over Trump-Russia to the ghosts and other strange goings-on haunting Elsinore in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “After this past week of salacious leaks about foreign espionage plots and indignant denials, people must be wondering if something is rotten in the state of our democracy,” Ignatius noted. (In his telling, Obama played the role of prince of Denmark—dithering while “dastardly deeds” like Russian hacking unfolded before his eyes.)
Ignatius examined the troubling questions. And then, almost as an afterthought, quoted a “senior U.S. government official,” who told him Flynn had spoken to Kislyak on December 29, the day after Obama threw out the thirty-five diplomats. This was followed by Putin’s curious response—no Americans would be expelled from Moscow. The columnist wondered if Flynn had breached the Logan Act. It bars American citizens from correspondence meant to influence foreign governments involved
in “disputes” with the United States.
Flynn, it appeared, had cut an informal deal in his chats with Kislyak. There was no public proof, of course. But a logical explanation of events would suggest that the general had given a few hints. He had conveyed a message that a future Trump administration would drop sanctions imposed by Obama against Russia. Or, at a minimum, reduce them.
Trump transition officials dismissed this interpretation. One told the Post that “sanctions were not discussed whatsoever.” Sean Spicer, Trump’s press secretary, echoed this. Two days later Flynn spoke to Vice President–elect Mike Pence and told him the same thing—there’d been no discussions of sanctions. Pence and Reince Priebus, Trump’s incoming chief of staff, gave the same message on Sunday morning TV shows. “None of that came up,” Priebus declared.
Flynn, it would soon emerge, was lying.
Certainly, he was lying to Pence. And possibly to the FBI, who interviewed him at the White House on January 24. Reportedly he spoke to investigators without an attorney present. Lying to federal agents would have been unwise. That was a crime.
Inside the Department of Justice, Flynn’s public comments were a cause of alarm. Evidently, a classified transcript of the Flynn-Kislyak conversation was circulating inside the government.
Sally Yates, Obama’s acting attorney general, still in office for the time being, realized that the situation was spinning out of control. Flynn was lying to Pence. Pence was misleading the American people. What’s more, the Russians were aware of this discrepancy. That left Flynn—the new national security adviser—open to blackmail.
Two days after Flynn’s FBI interview Yates called up Don McGahn, the White House’s counsel. She told him she “had a very sensitive matter she needed to discuss with him.” It couldn’t be done by phone. That afternoon, according to her testimony to the Senate’s judiciary subcommittee, Yates visited McGahn at his White House office. The conversation was held in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF—a place where secret material can be examined.
She explained the situation—that Flynn’s “underlying conduct” had “created a compromise” that Moscow might exploit. Yates said Pence was entitled to know that the information he was conveying “wasn’t true.” McGahn asked about Flynn’s FBI interview, saying: “How did he do?” Yates was noncommittal. She hadn’t seen the FD-302 form, the official summary of Flynn’s FBI statement. She had been given a readout.
The next morning, Friday, January 27, McGahn called Yates and asked her to come back to the White House. There was some discussion as to whether Flynn might now face criminal charges. McGahn’s view of the situation was weirdly lackadaisical. According to Yates, he asked her: “Why does it matter to the Department of Justice if one White House official lies to another White House official?”
Yates replied: “It was a whole lot more than that.…To state the obvious, you don’t want to have your national security adviser compromised by the Russians.”
Yates had assumed that the Trump administration would do something. The White House’s priority, it appeared, was different: to find out what the FBI had on Flynn. McGahn said he wanted to look at the underlying evidence. Yates said her officials would work over the weekend to make that possible.
This was the moment for President Trump to show leadership—and to fire Flynn. Flynn’s conduct and pattern of deceit had laid the United States open to Russian string-pulling, or worse. The lies were piling up. Instead, Trump responded by firing Yates. He fired her after she told Justice Department attorneys not to defend his new executive order banning travelers arriving in the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Did McGahn pass on Yates’s warning and tell Trump? Why was the White House’s response a stupefying nothing? The answers were not clear. Yates never discovered what happened.
For the next eighteen days Flynn remained in his post. The Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse made an analogy with Watergate—and the missing eighteen and a half minutes of tape recorded from Nixon’s Oval Office. (The section was from a 1973 conversation between Nixon and his lawyer, Bob Haldeman. It was never found.)
On January 28 Putin called Trump and congratulated him. Flynn sat in on the Oval Office call. The two leaders spoke for an hour. The press summary of their conversation was a single paragraph. A week later Flynn told The Washington Post that he “categorically denied discussion of sanctions” with Kislyak.
Flynn’s apparent strategy was to tough things out and hope that his multiple problems might somehow go away. The strategy died a day later when The New York Times, citing current and former American officials, revealed that sanctions had in fact been discussed during the late December call. The general’s spokesman then admitted that Flynn “could not be certain that the topic hadn’t come up.” Trump, meanwhile, did his best to pretend the scandal wasn’t happening. Asked by reporters on Air Force One if Flynn had misled him, he replied: “I don’t know about that.”
There was one final surreal scene when Trump, Flynn, and the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, huddled together on the patio of Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida resort. They discussed how to respond to North Korea’s latest missile test. As other diners and—one imagines—foreign spies posing as well-heeled guests looked on, the leaders peered at their mobile phones.
On February 13 Trump reluctantly fired Flynn. As usual, the president blamed the press rather than the person who had dissembled and cheated, possibly committing federal crimes along the way. Flynn was a “wonderful man.” What had befallen him was “really a sad thing,” Trump said. “I think he’s been treated very, very unfairly by the media—as I call it, the fake news media, in many cases.”
Flynn had lasted twenty-four days. It was the shortest tenure ever of a national security adviser. He had the rare distinction of being fired twice. In his letter of resignation, Flynn admitted he had “inadvertently” briefed Pence with incomplete information. The general said he had been “extremely honored” to serve Trump, Pence, and their superb team. They would, he wrote, “go down in history as one of the greatest presidencies in U.S. history.”
Flynn was right about history: it won’t forget Trump in a hurry. But Flynn’s almost messianic tone was at odds with what was actually happening: a series of pratfalls, errors, and crass self-inflicted wounds from a presidency scarcely out of its cradle. Flynn’s implosion was one example. What might explain the national security adviser’s kamikaze-like behavior?
One scenario was that in his dealings with the Russians, Flynn was engaged in a piece of reckless freelancing and the White House knew nothing about it.
There was a second, more troubling scenario. It said that Flynn wasn’t acting on his own at all. Rather, he was following instructions from Trump, or people close to him. These instructions were to send a message to the Russians via Kislyak that the Trump administration was minded to scrap sanctions. Flynn’s text: give us time and we will deliver.
If true, this meant that Trump himself might soon be sucked into the FBI’s investigation. Any conversations Trump had with Flynn would be key. The disgraced general was now in a position of unusual power. Should he choose to cooperate with federal agents—a big if—he could pull Trump into the abyss.
In the coming months Trump would continue to defend Flynn, and even send him encouraging messages. “This level of fealty is puzzling,” Charles M. Blow wrote in May in The New York Times. “It seems to me there is something else at play here, something as yet unknown.”
Blow added: “Trump’s attachment to Flynn strikes me as less an act of fidelity and more as an exercise in fear. What does Flynn know that Trump doesn’t want the world to know?”
—
Three days after Flynn exited the White House I got into a taxi at a London train station. I learned my destination at the last minute. It was a Thursday and the half-term school holidays. On the sidewalks were families with children; the city’s mood was bright; the first snowdrops were
appearing beneath tall plane trees. As we trundled south, along Hyde Park, a spring sun broke through misty clouds.
I leafed through a copy of the free newspaper Metro. On the front page was a photo of Donald Trump and the headline “The Spies Who Bug Me—Angry Trump at War with Own Security Services over Russia Leaks.” Trump, I read, was furious at the way his intelligence chiefs were briefing journalists. His latest tweet:
The real scandal here is that classified information is being illegally given out by “intelligence” like candy. Very un-American.
The taxi rounded a Gothic Revival monument with a golden figure at its center. This was Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s beloved German husband. We arrived at the Royal Albert Hall. I paid the cabby and walked around the concert venue to the café at the back. After ten minutes, Steele arrived—the same person I’d met in December but now with a gray-white beard. He looked, he later told friends, a bit like Saddam Hussein. We found a couple of bar stools at the rear of the café, out of sight. I got out my Faraday bag, a black sack that cuts out radio signals and prevents eavesdropping. We put our mobile phones inside.
The purpose of the meeting was to discuss how Steele might return to normal life. For more than a month he had been living away from home—seeing his wife, children, and stepchildren only fleetingly. Despite this, he was bearing up. Steele had followed events in Washington closely and listened to the denials by Trump’s associates that they had had anything to do with Russia.
“They are all lying,” he said simply.
The best answers to the story of collusion were to be found in Moscow, Steele felt, where there had been a major cover-up. Finding information from inside Russia was tricky, I pointed out. The Kremlin was evasive and opaque. My own investigation into Litvinenko’s murder came to a halt of sorts in February 2011 with the authorities and the FSB deporting me from the country, in the first case of its kind since the Cold War.
