by Luke Harding
In the United States the FBI was making progress, we agreed, getting some evidence.
Of the wider Trump-Russia conspiracy, Steele said: “It’s massive. Absolutely massive.”
The immediate question was Steele’s return to professional life and to his office in Victoria. At his home in Surrey he had installed new security gates. The paparazzi still dropped by, though. The solution was for Steele to appear again in public. He didn’t have to say a huge amount, I explained—but might make a brief statement for the cameras. This could be arranged. After that the press would leave him in peace.
Steele left the café first. I departed soon after. It had been a fitting place to meet. The steps leading up to the rear of the Albert Hall had featured in the classic 1965 British espionage film The Ipcress File, starring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer. (Palmer, a British spy, fights with Housemartin, the bald chief of staff of the traitor Eric Grantby. Palmer throws Housemartin down the steps. But Housemartin escapes and drives off.)
I returned to the Guardian office on a red double-decker bus. I sat upstairs. I finished the paper. The front-page Metro story turned to page 5. It quoted Trump as defending Flynn, calling him a “wonderful man.” It mentioned another Trump associate now being sucked into the investigation.
This person had masterminded Trump’s campaign for president. He had even closer connections to Moscow than General Misha.
6
He Does Bastards
2004–2017
Ukraine
An evil genius.
—ALEX KOVZHUN, on Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort, summer 2016
It was midmorning. In an attractive town square bathed in autumnal sun and lined with fir trees, a crowd was waiting. A tall figure bounded onto a stage. His supporters cheered and started waving their flags. There were balloons and campaign slogans. The candidate looked like a modern Western politician. He was wearing a suit. There was a note of informality: his top button was undone. He had vigorous hair. Had he, I wondered, blow-dried it?
The town wasn’t in Texas or the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin, or Iowa. Instead we were in Eastern Europe—more specifically, Ukraine, in a place called Ostroh. Arriving by helicopter, I had spotted a medieval castle and a gold-domed monastery twinkling below. The candidate, meanwhile, wasn’t Trump. He was Ukraine’s prime minister and a man seeking reelection. His name was Viktor Yanukovych.
It was September 2007 and a week before polling day. The crowd broke into chants of “Ya-nu-ko-vych, Ya-nu-ko-vych.” Earlier, in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, I had met supporters of Yanukovych’s archrival, Yulia Tymoshenko. Typically, they were the better educated and middle class: attractive students wearing tight-fitting orange T-shirts. Generally, they spoke English.
Yanukovych’s supporters, by contrast, were distinctly unglamorous. They were provincial, Russophone. Most were Soviet-born old ladies wearing headscarves. They were holding blue flags. This was the color of Yanukovych’s Ukrainian parliamentary bloc, the Party of Regions. A few waved Orthodox icons.
After months of political turmoil, Ukrainians were about to vote. The country’s pro-Western president, Viktor Yushchenko, had called an early election because of a standoff with Yanukovych, the prime minister since August 2006. Yushchenko had previously fallen out with Tymoshenko, an ally whom he fired as prime minister.
In 2004 Yanukovych was the villain of the country’s Orange Revolution. Backed by Moscow, he had tried to steal the presidential election using intimidation and fraud. During the 2004 campaign Yushchenko narrowly survived an assassination attempt. He was poisoned with dioxin; his face erupted in blisters. Nothing was proven but suspicion fell on Moscow. Yushchenko won a rerun vote.
Since then, Ukraine’s Orange actors had fallen out and—largely unnoticed by the West—Yanukovych had made an unexpected comeback. His Party of Regions was ahead in the polls, at 32.9 percent. Yushchenko called an election that May after Yanukovych lured away several of the president’s deputies to join the Party of Regions.
The previous evening I had met the man responsible for Yanukovych’s unlikely electoral return.
He was not Russian, but American. His name was Paul Manafort.
Manafort, originally from Connecticut, was a veteran political consultant. His grandfather James had emigrated to the United States from Sicily in 1919. His father had once been mayor of the city of New Britain and leader of the Italian American community there.
And just as Henry Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion had transformed Eliza Doolittle from Cockney flower girl to fine lady, so Manafort had transformed Yanukovych from an oafish Soviet-hewn loser to a plausible Western democrat. Yanukovych had grown up in eastern Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region. He spoke Russian. Manafort had, with some success, got him to learn Ukrainian, the country’s official language and the one used in its west.
I had flown to Ukraine to report for The Guardian. I was staying in the Hotel Dnipro in downtown Kiev, at the bottom of Khreschatyk Street, lined with attractive chestnut trees. Yanukovych’s new Western advisers had promised me an interview with the candidate. That evening I was invited to meet some of his team. They included Kostyantyn Gryshchenko—Yanukovych’s future foreign minister—and Manafort, whose name was unfamiliar to me. Political observers in Kiev told me he was the person who had brought voter-friendly hand gestures to Yanukovych’s campaign and got him to loosen his top button. I wrote the name in my reporter’s notebook for the first time, spelling it “Maniford.”
Our meeting took place in the Cabinet of Ministers. This was a short uphill walk from my hotel along a cobbled street that led to the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament. Close up, Manafort looked every inch the Washington lobbyist. He was wearing an expensively cut suit and tie, conservative and in dark colors. He was a tall, bulky figure, with lustrous chestnut-brown hair. It struck me that he looked not unlike Yanukovych, the politician whom he was advising. Or was it the other way around?
In 2004 political technologists from Russia had masterminded Yanukovych’s disastrous campaign. Exit polls had put Viktor Yushchenko in front but the results gave Yanukovych victory. This, it transpired, came about after Yanukovych’s team hacked into Ukraine’s central election commission from a nearby cinema on…Moscow Street. (The team added 1.1 million votes to Yanukovych’s tally.) Tens of thousands of people protested, turning Kiev’s central Maidan Square into a tent city. Yanukovych’s defeat in the subsequent rerun poll was, for Putin, a rare humiliation.
Manafort had an interesting story to tell. According to his version, Yanukovych was a wronged individual, and someone whom the West had almost willfully misunderstood. This was true especially of its partisan media. Since 2004, Yanukovych had “grown” and “learned a lot” from his time out of power. One symbol of this change was sitting in front of me: Yanukovych had brought in American consultants.
“The other side is not the other side,” Manafort said to me. “People are still looking at the political system in this country through the prism of 2004. That’s not at all the situation here.” He continued: “I can understand this misunderstanding going into the last election. But there’s no excuse anymore for people not giving the right impression.”
Manafort, I realized, was delivering a rebuke. The media had cast Yanukovych in the role of pantomime pro-Russian baddie. In fact, he said, the prime minister had made “more overtures to the West than to Russia.” Ukraine’s culture, history, and geography—not to mention its parlous economic situation—meant that Moscow couldn’t be ignored. But: “He has done more things with the West.” There were “consultations” with the United States, he said.
Other advisers echoed this theme. “He’s very changed. He’s become a democrat,” Serhiy Lyovochkin, the head of Yanukovych’s private office, assured me. The candidate was now studying English. He had even started playing tennis with the U.S. ambassador!
According to Manafort, Yanukovych hadn’t conspired against democracy in 2004. He was merely the “can
didate of a system that was tied to Russia.” When Yanukovych came back to the political stage as prime minister in 2006, “he was his own man.” He wasn’t against America. He had brought stability back to Ukraine. He was a strong leader. He had a plan.
Manafort added: “He’s still his own man. There is no Russian influence in this campaign. The perception that he is the candidate of Russia against the interests of the West is bad reporting.”
I never got my exclusive with Yanukovych. I was allowed to ask him a single question in Ostroh, while kneeling in a semicircle with a gaggle of fellow press members and TV crews. I asked him about his foreign policy priorities. Yanukovych said that under his leadership Ukraine would be “a reliable bridge between Europe and Russia.”
Still, Manafort’s lecture was fascinating. It was made all the more remarkable by the fact that the person delivering it was a former senior adviser to the Republican Party. He had worked in 1976 on the U.S. presidential campaign of Gerald Ford. After that with Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bob Dole. That, surely, must count for something?
I kept my notes from my Manafort interview and put them in a cupboard. After I got kicked out of Moscow they traveled with me to London. Over the next few years it turned out that Manafort’s version of history was more than wrong. It went beyond spin or political PR.
Everything he told me was a lie.
—
Ukraine is a long way from Washington, D.C.—nearly eight thousand kilometers, in fact. What was a veteran Republican fixer doing in this murky post-Soviet corner, dominated as it was by oligarchs and others whose sources of wealth were never very transparent? The answer, it appeared, was money. Lots of it.
Manafort began working for Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire Russian oligarch who made his fortune in the aluminum industry during the 1990s. Deripaska’s alleged ties to the mafia meant that for some years he was unable to get an American visa. Deripaska denies these allegations. Like all superrich Russians Deripaska perfectly understood Putin’s requirements. When called upon, you did what the president commanded. (Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, illustrated the fate of any who demurred.)
According to the Associated Press, Manafort signed a $10 million annual contract with Deripaska. In return, the American proposed a wide-ranging political plan to undermine Putin’s opponents in Europe and the United States and in former Soviet republics. Manafort’s pitch covered politics, business dealings, and news coverage. He would influence them positively in Moscow’s favor.
In a 2005 memo Manafort told Deripaska: “We are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success.” It would offer “a great service that can re-focus, both internally and externally,” the Kremlin’s policies. The plan was not made public.
How much work Manafort performed under the terms of his contract is unknown. Next, Deripaska recommended the Republican lobbyist to fellow oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man. Akhmetov was the main financial backer of the Party of Regions. He was considering listing his holding company, System Capital Management, on the London Stock Exchange and was in need of PR advice.
At Akhmetov’s request, Manafort visited Ukraine in December 2004 between the second and third rounds of presidential voting. Manafort’s view—correct, as it turned out—was that Yanukovych’s campaign was doomed.
In summer 2005 the two men met for the first time in the Czech spa town of Karlovy Vary. It was a place known for its ties to the Russian mafia, in a country long used by Soviet and Russian intelligence as a base of operations. The meeting in western Bohemia went well. That autumn the Party of Regions hired Manafort and his team—including long-term aide Rick Gates—as advisers.
The Americans kept a low profile. They rented an anonymous Kiev office at number 4 Sophia Street. It was opposite the stop for the 16 and 18 trolley buses and the premises of Golden Telecom. Typically its white blinds were drawn. When Mustafa Nayyem called around—he was Ukraine’s leading investigative reporter—he was politely told to leave.
Gradually, though, word got around. In a confidential 2006 cable to the State Department in Washington, subsequently leaked, U.S. diplomats in Kiev reported that the Party of Regions had undergone a transformation. The party—“long a haven for Donetsk-based mobsters and oligarchs—is in the midst of an ‘extreme makeover,’” they observed.
The party had enlisted “help and advice from veteran K Street political tacticians,” the State Department was told, referring to D.C.’s lobbying district. Manafort’s firm—Davis, Manafort & Freedman—was busy “nipping and tucking.” Its goal was to rid the party of its clumsy gangster image and to change it, in the minds of Ukrainians and others, into a “legitimate political force.”
—
I didn’t meet Manafort again. But I returned to Ukraine regularly. In 2009 I watched Yanukovych speak at the Yalta European Forum. This was a conference for bigwigs and international grandees held every year at the Livadia Palace, the seaside spot on the Crimean coast where Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at the 1945 Yalta conference divided up postwar Europe.
Yanukovych was still an uninspiring politician. His speech was unmemorable. Maybe that was the point. His Manafort training was holding up well, though. In my notebook I wrote: “Calm. Statesman-like. Quiet.” Yanukovych hadn’t become prime minister again. (His Party of Regions topped the 2007 parliamentary poll, but Tymoshenko got the job after a coalition deal.) Instead, he was aiming higher: to win the 2010 presidential election.
By the close of 2009 Yanukovych was tantalizingly close to that ambition. Yushchenko’s poll ratings were miserable. Manafort confirmed to the U.S. embassy—with whom he was on friendly terms—that his client had “a double-digit lead.” The novelist Andrey Kurkov told me in Kiev that people were tired of what he called Yushchenko’s “semi-romantic Ukrainian nationalism.” They were also weary of Tymoshenko, whose campaigning passion felt familiar.
Yanukovych’s aides had honed their critique of Tymoshenko. She was widely expected to face Yanukovych in a presidential runoff vote. They argued that it was she, not Yanukovych, who was Putin’s choice as leader, and a danger to the country’s fragile democracy. Tymoshenko’s key objective was to rein in Ukraine’s powerful oligarchs. She could do this only with Putin’s help. The same oligarchs—Akhmetov and now the gas tycoon Dmytro Firtash—were Yanukovych’s primary backers.
The election went as predicted. I was in Kiev in January 2010 to witness Yushchenko’s elimination. I came back in February for the final runoff between Tymoshenko and Yanukovych. On election night most journalists went to Tymoshenko’s election party, held in the swanky surroundings of Kiev’s Hyatt Hotel. I found the usual young English-speaking crowd. There were canapés, wine, beautiful people.
It was the Party of Regions, however, that had reason to celebrate. It gathered at the InterContinental Hotel, just across Saint Sophia Square from the Hyatt and next to Ukraine’s foreign ministry. The hotel had served as Manafort’s operations HQ. The downstairs ballroom was full. Many of Yanukovych’s supporters looked like mafia bosses on a day out. They were enormous, with thick bouncer-like necks stuffed into dinner jackets. There were fewer women than at Tymoshenko’s bash.
Throughout the campaign Yanukovych had spoken in Ukrainian. This was down to Manafort. There was a sinister aspect to this, too, however. The Party of Regions had used the Russian language and its political status as an electoral weapon—a campaign tool to galvanize support in the traditional Russophone areas of eastern Ukraine. The same tactics alienated many in the west of the country—and in turn fueled support for radical Ukrainian nationalism.
Yanukovych wasn’t a bad pupil. (He still made verbal gaffes, for example, describing Anton Chekhov as a “Ukrainian poet.”) By the end, his Ukrainian was more than decent. Yanukovych appeared in the early hours of the morning. I didn’t spot Manafort among those partying, but for sure this was
his victory. A onetime crook, jailed twice during the Soviet period for hooliganism, and written off as a dummy, had just become president of a European state of 45 million people.
Yanukovych made his short statement to the media. He spoke in Russian. It was a sign of things to come.
Soon after, on a cold February morning, Yanukovych was inaugurated as president. The well-known reporter Serhiy Leshchenko watched the event, as men and women wearing tailcoats and evening gowns hurried toward Kiev’s Lenin monument.
“There was a little bit of a commotion at the entrance,” Leshchenko wrote in The Guardian. “Rinat Akhmetov, the richest Ukrainian man and the right arm of Yanukovych, was trying to make way for an inconspicuous American. It was only me and a few of my colleagues who recognized the mysterious stranger’s face: it was Paul Manafort.”
Within a few months it became clear that Yanukovych was hell-bent on reversing the modest democratic gains of the Orange Revolution. His goal was simple: to destroy the opposition. This meant destroying Tymoshenko and the independence of Ukraine’s institutions.
Yanukovych moved quickly to consolidate all instruments of power: the courts, parliament, the prosecutor’s office. Plus the media and TV. The claim that Yanukovych was a reformed character was unfounded. In power, he was behaving—as Manafort must have known he would—as a classic bully and thug. Underneath the aggressive behavior there seemed a person shot through with insecurity and cowardice.
Judges charged Tymoshenko with corruption. The allegations dated back to the 1990s when Tymoshenko was known as the gas princess, and to recent deals with Russia. Nobody was above the law, the Party of Regions said. True or not, this looked like a case of selective justice. The same allegations of embezzlement could be made against practically all of Ukraine’s politicians, including Yanukovych.
