Putin

PREFACE: PUTIN TRUMPS AMERICA

Until quite recently Russia was an exotic country, distant, huge, both more brutal and cultured—Stalin at the Bolshoi—but then suddenly it was right here with us in the intimacy of the voting booth.

By the time the House Intelligence Committee convened in open session on March 21, 2017, the nature of that intrusion was fairly clear; the Russian state used hackers to break into the computers of the DNC and of Democratic Chairman John Podesta and then revealed their contents via WikiLeaks in an effort to tilt the election in Donald Trump’s favor. The fact that there was no such parallel hack and leak of Republican computers is itself compelling circumstantial evidence of intent. And that in turn indicates that the Russian intelligence services were in no particular hurry to conceal either their favored candidate or their involvement. Had they wanted to remain invisible, they would have. But sometimes they prefer to send a message as in Soviet times when, after a surreptitious search of an apartment, a KGB agent would leave a cigarette butt floating in the toilet, as if to say: We were here.

It will never be known with quantitative certainty how significant the Russian meddling in the 2016 elections was. In time the Russians themselves might come to rue their choice, finding Hilary Clinton, for all her animus toward Moscow, a more seasoned and competent professional, more reliable and predictable than Trump.

But the most important question of all is one that probably can and certainly must be answered. As Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee phrased it: “…if the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it aided or abetted the Russians, it would not only be a serious crime, it would also represent one of the most shocking betrayals of democracy in history.”[3]

Those are the terms, the stakes.

What’s less clear is how much solid evidence there is of collusion. But there would appear to be enough for the question of collusion to be an integral part of the investigation the FBI is conducting. As FBI director James Comey said at those hearings: “I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts. As with any counterintelligence investigation, this will also include an assessment of whether any crimes were committed.”[4]

The problem here is that counterintelligence operations are typically long and drawn-out, taking months, even years—the FBI has already been looking into Russian meddling since July 2016. That means for the foreseeable future, the White House will be under a “gray cloud”[5] of suspicion to use the expression of Devin Nunes, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Mike Morrell, the former acting director of the CIA who made no secret of his support for Hilary Clinton or his disdain for Donald Trump, used a different metaphor: “There is smoke, but there is no fire at all.”[6] In any case, whether it’s gray clouds or smoke, it is clear that we’re in for a long spell of obscurity that can only make the current climate of jittery uncertainty all the more so.

Another point where clarity is of the essence is in assessing Putin’s psychology and forestalling his actions, for there is general agreement that the Russians will strike again.

In his opening remarks, Chairman Nunes said: “A year ago I publicly stated that our inability to predict Putin’s regime and intentions has been the biggest intelligence failure since 9/11 and that remains my view today.”[7]

There are many reasons why America is constantly outwitted by Putin. American categories of thought about Russia are too neat and clean. To the American mind government, crime, business, and the secret police are four quite different things. In Russia they easily shade into one another and it could be argued that at various times, Putin has had his hand in all of the above. Another reason is that the U.S., for all it shortcomings, remains a country of laws while Russia is a more Darwinian society where the law of the jungle, or, as the Russians call it, the law of the wolf, tends to prevail.

For Putin the game of power has only three rules—attain, maintain, retain—and all the rest is nonsense and pretense. Putin views American lack of historical memory not only as the naiveté of a young culture, but a convenient means for eluding responsibility. American can partake in the assassination of leaders—Allende, Hussein, and Gaddafi—and thereby change regimes, but when Russia does anything of the sort it is a crime against humanity.

To Putin the Orange Revolution that broke out in Ukraine in 2004 was no spontaneous uprising of the people but an integral part of the West’s campaign to outflank and weaken Russia. In Putin’s KGB-conditioned worldview, there are very few spontaneous events and the few there are immediately coopted and exploited by those quickest afoot. Someone is always behind everything, every organization is a front.

The expansion of NATO between 1999 and 2004, now flanking Russia from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and the uprising in Ukraine in 2004 were not discrete events but part of a pattern his training and experience had taught Putin to recognize. In interfering in the U.S. domestic political process, Putin was just doing unto others what others had already done unto him, and, if anything, feeling a little guilty about being so remiss in retaliating.

Does Putin have any particular power over Trump and how long have the Russian intelligence service been taking an active interest in Trump? The second part of the question is easier to answer than the first. Trump began making noises about running for president as early as 1988 having switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party the year before. That alone, along with his wealth, celebrity, and later attempts to do business in Russia, would have been more than enough to open a file on him.

Putin made his career by gathering sexually compromising video on Russia’s attorney general, who had launched a potentially ruinous investigation into the economic wrongdoings of President Boris Yeltsin and his family. Saving Yeltsin won Putin the president’s ultimate trust in the deal in which Yeltsin gave Putin power in exchange for immunity. So, Putin needs no convincing that compromising material can be important, even decisive. Does he have any such material on Trump, who has been so fulsome in his praise of Putin and so woefully slow to accept the intelligence community’s assessment that the Russians had conducted politically motivated hacking during the 2016 campaign?

The largely unsubstantiated dossier compiled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele claims that Trump hired prostitutes to urinate on the bed in the presidential suite in the Moscow Ritz Carlton where Barack and Michelle Obama slept, thereby to defile it. “The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.”[8]

If any such material exists, its principal value is in the threat to use it. And oddly enough, developments in modern technology would make it easier to deny. Anyone, a la Zelig, can be photoshopped in, or out, of any image, proving ample grounds for denial. The only way to guess if Putin has any such compromising material on Trump is to watch Trump’s behavior for any unusual constraints on his usually unconstrained behavior.

But the real point here is that the hold Putin has over Trump need not be based on any such lurid material. If there was indeed collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, Putin would have ample evidence of that in his possession and could release it at any moment to WikiLeaks, making FBI director Comey’s drawn-out investigation over in the blink of an eye, the click of a key.

“You know the closest I came to Russia, I bought a house a number of years ago in Palm Beach … for $40 million and I sold it to a Russian for $100 million,”[9] was Donald Trump’s way of combining his two favorite activities—denial and braggadocio.

The buyer was Dmitry Rybolovyev, known as the “fertilizer king,” with a net worth that hovers around the $10 billion mark. After buying the house in summer 2008, Rybolovyev never spent a night in the place, which had a severe mold problem. The house is now slated to become the most expensive tear-down in real estate history.

This might simply be a case a case of hucksters and suckers. Or maybe someone too rich to be the least bit price conscious. Rybolovyev garnered headlines by purchasing an $88 million dollar Manhattan apartment for his daughter, a student. He is also currently suing his art advisor, claiming that he fraudulently overcharged him and sold him Rothkos and Gauguins for something like twice their actual market value.

But there is another explanation that fits nicely with other of the events that have led to the investigations by the FBI and House Intelligence Committee. The Russian leadership could have indicated to Rybolovyev that doing the American real estate magnate a $50 million favor was a good investment all around. For Rybolovyev there was really no downside—he would also have done the Kremlin a service and acquired yet another piece of fancy property which, if he could find the proverbial “greater fool,” he could sell at a profit. That now seems to be the case with the house torn down and the 6.3 acres divided into three parcels, one of which is already sold.

Trump said that was the closest he got to Russia, but in the meantime Russia kept getting closer to him in the person of Felix Sater.

Born in the USSR in 1966, Felix Sater came to the US when he was eight, his family fleeing persecution as Jews. He adapted quickly to American life, both to its brighter and darker sides. He dropped out of Pace University to become a broker at Bear Stearns, a hungry young immigrant on the make. In 1991 at an altercation at a bar in a Manhattan Mexican restaurant, Sater smashed a Margarita glass on the counter and stabbed its jagged stem into his opponent’s face, causing injuries that required 110 stitches to close. He served more than a year in prison for the crime. In 1998, Sater pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering in a $40 million stock fraud carried out with four Mafia families of New York. But Sater would not spend a day in jail for his crime because, as Loretta Lynch would state in her hearings to become U.S. Attorney General, Sater had “provided valuable and sensitive information” to the government, his work “crucial to national security and the conviction of twenty individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra.”[10]

Sater apparently had important connections in the missile black market, negotiating to buy back Stingers before Osama bin Laden could get his hands on them and begin shooting American passenger planes out of the sky. For all the obvious reasons, little is known about this side of Sater’s contribution, but its significance can be judged by the scale of the government’s forgiveness.

By 2001 Sater joined Bayrock, a development company with offices in Trump Towers. By 2005 Bayrock got a one-year deal to develop a Trump luxury high-rise in Moscow, a deal which like most other of Trump’s Russian ventures, oddly came to naught. Between 2006–2010, Bayrock and Sater are integrally involved in Trump SoHo, a hotel/condominium in lower Manhattan. This is the time period referred to by Donald Jr. when he said in 2008: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets, say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo.”[11]

If Sater, who it must be remembered came to the U.S. at the tender age of eight, was able to return to Russia and the former Soviet republics and work to buy up missiles on the black market, it would not have been too difficult for him to help raise significant funds for Trump projects, especially since at that time Russia’s prosperity was at an all-time high, with oil reaching nearly $150 a barrel in July 2008.

Trump would later disavow any real connection with Sater, saying, under oath, that if he “were sitting in the room tight now I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.”[12] But other Russians were taking a closer look at Trump as the first decade of the twenty-first century came to a close, at least according to the Christopher Steele dossier whose sources allege as of June 2016 that “the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting … TRUMP for at least 5 years … the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN. Its aim was to sow discord and disunity both within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance, which was viewed as inimical to Russia’s interests.”[13]

Russia also drew nearer to Trump in the person of Paul Manafort, his campaign manager from April to August 2016, who lost that position “after his name surfaced … in a secret ledger listing millions of dollars in payments from a pro-Russian party in Ukraine.”[14] Those payments reportedly ran to $12.7 million. “I don’t think he represented Russia … I think he represented the Ukraine or Ukrainian government or somebody, but everybody knew that,” was Trump’s defense.[15]

Some questions arise here. Isn’t it odd that of all the possible candidates to run Trump’s campaign, it was someone so lavishly rewarded for serving the pro-Russian party that ended up with the job? And what were the services Manafort provided that warranted such extravagant compensation? One possibility was reported in a Daily Beast article of 11/7/16: “Trump and Russia: All the Mogul’s Men,” by James Miller:

Manafort protested such charges saying: “I am trying to play a constructive role in developing a democracy. I am helping to build a political party.”[17]

And it is while Manafort was still running Trump’s campaign that the Republican Party platform underwent a curious change—its plank about “providing lethal defensive weapons” to the Ukrainian armed forces now became “appropriate assistance,” it being unclear how you kill an enemy with that.

Stopping a NATO exercise and changing a plank in the Republican platform to a more pro-Russian position would have been worth several millions, by any standard.

Selling a house to a Russian oligarch for a tidy $50 million profit, developing a SoHo property with a Russian-born businessman who may have beat a racketeering rap by buying back missiles on the Russian and Central Asian black market, and hiring a man to run your campaign who had profited mightily from supporting pro-Russian forces in Ukraine, might seem like a lot of things Russian for one presidential candidate but it was only the tip of the iceberg, one that might yet sink the Trump Titanic.

There is the also the issue of Trump’s suspiciously fulsome praise of Putin, who in 2007 he said, “was doing a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia, period.” Trump often compared Obama to Putin unfavorably, saying of Putin that, “at least he was a leader unlike what we have in this country.”[18]

Praise is all fine and dandy but by 2005 Manafort had figured out a way to monetize it. According to an AP report, “Manafort proposed in a confidential strategy plan as early as June 2005 that he would influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe, and the former Soviet republics to benefit the Putin government…”[19] In the plan Manafort states: “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.” Manafort signed a $10 million contract, not with Putin, of course, but with aluminum magnate Oleg Derepaska, a likely candidate to do the Kremlin’s bidding. While Manafort denies he was acting for Putin’s benefit in his relationship with Derepaska, the political side of the relationship reportedly lasted from 2005 to at least 2010, though elements of the purely business side continued through 2014 when they had a falling out that ended up in a Cayman Islands bankruptcy court.

Manafort, sadly, did not stay with the campaign long enough to taste sweet victory in November. But the Russian connection issue got even more snarled and tangled once Trump was elected.

Ten days after his election, Trump appointed three-star Lt. General and former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Michael Flynn to be his national security advisor. And that gave Felix Sater an idea. His face-stabbing, fraud-committing, missile-retrieving youth was behind him and in the best American fashion he had reinvented himself as a patriot and philanthropist, having twice been chosen as Man of the Year by the Orthodox Jewish religious group Chabad in Port Washington, New York. To that impressive new list of attributes, Sater would now add peacemaker. Working with Trump’s personal lawyer Michael D. and Andrii Artemenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker who styles himself his country’s own Donald Trump, they hammered out a peace plan that would settle the problems in Ukraine and Crimea once and for all. Sanctions would be lifted on Russia, which would withdraw all forces from Eastern Ukraine with Crimea now, instead of being a possession, would be rented to Russia for the next fifty to one-hundred years, a long kick of the can. The plan was “hand-delivered” to the desk of National Security Advisor Flynn. Aside from its inherent unworkability, there was another element that would doom it immediately—Flynn’s career was busily imploding.

Michael Flynn had been paid handsomely by the Kremlin’s media propaganda arm, RT, but it was lying about his secret conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak that brought him down.

John Schindler, former NSA analyst and counterintelligence officer, says: “Ambassador Kislyak surely knew his conversations with Flynn were being intercepted, and it’s incomprehensible that a career military intelligence officer who once headed a major intelligence agency didn’t realize the same. Whether Flynn is monumentally stupid or monumentally arrogant is the big question that hangs over this increasingly strange affair.”[20]

But perhaps clarity could be achieved and justice done by the right appointment for attorney general. Except that at his own hearings, Jeff Sessions failed to tell the Senate about his own meetings with the Russian ambassador at the Republican convention, but also at a more private meeting in his office. Exposed, Sessions had to recuse himself from any relationship to his own justice department’s investigation into the possibility of collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign for which he himself worked. The situation begins to hover at the fine line between the hilarious and the nauseating.

The Trump administration betrays a lack of intelligence about how intelligence works. That, along with the damage done by Trump’s earlier contemptuously disparaging remarks about the intelligence community and the obvious connections with the Russians, have caused some members of the intelligence community to begin withholding information from the White House. Schindler says of his former NSA colleagues with whom he is apparently still in touch: “A senior National Security Agency official explained that the NSA was systematically holding back some of the ‘good stuff’ from the White House … Since NSA provides something like 80 percent of the actionable intelligence in our government, what’s being kept from the White House may be very significant indeed … a senior Pentagon intelligence official … stated that ‘since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM’ meaning the White House Situation Room, the 5,500 square-foot conference room in the West Wing where the president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings. ‘There’s not much the Russians don’t know at this point,’ the official added in wry frustration.”

That’s probably an overstatement. And it’s important not to ascribe too much importance to Putin’s various tactical successes. Putin looked tough and successful in Syria but the bill for that particular venture has yet to be paid in full, the downing of a Russian jet in the Sinai desert killing 224 in December 2015, and the assassination of the Russian ambassador in Ankara in December 2016 by a killer shouting he was avenging Aleppo are only the first of more such incidents to come. Russia’s attacks on NATO and American democracy may inadvertently end up making both stronger. The results of the investigation into the Russia connection can also force the U.S. take the necessary steps to make the country less vulnerable to the various forms of cyber warfare that will increasingly dominate the international scene.

Trump and his supporters have a different view of that investigation, taking it more personally, more politically, the two almost inseparable in Trump’s case. “The Russia investigation is being used by his political opponents to delegitimize his entire presidency and to delegitimize his agenda,” said Sam Nunberg, identified as a “longtime Trump political advisor who remains close with West Wing aides.”[21]

Though it may be difficult for Trump and some of his supporters to fathom, national security is of greater importance than Trump’s presidency and agenda. Yet there is also no denying that for Trump’s political opponents the Russia investigation offers the tantalizing prospect of a Trump impeachment. Still, Trump and his rise to power prove that this is a time where even the most grotesquely improbable events can and do occur.

And there is, as historian Douglas Brinkley put it, “a smell of treason in the air.”[22]

But even in all this swirling murk a few things are definite and clear. There are simply too many points of connection between the Trump campaign and the Russians to be mere matters of chance. On the opening day of the House Intelligence Committee hearings, ranking member Adam Schiff stated the matter with eloquent logic in this abbreviated version of his remarks since there are simply too many instances to cite here:

And there was one other point that that was raised by the Committee Chairman Devin Nunes with equal clarity and urgency, concerning the fact that “our inability to predict Putin’s regime plans and intentions has been the biggest intelligence failure that we have seen since 9/11…”[24]

To resolve the issue of collusion is the task of congressional investigative committees and the FBI.

To illuminate Putin, his background, his mind-set, his style of rule, and to indicate where he has brilliantly succeeded and grievously failed, is the task of this book.