The Plot Against the President Read online

  The operatives targeting Flynn needed to assemble a backstory to explain how the former US general had come to sit near the Russian president. They drew on data points scattered throughout Flynn’s past.

  In February 2014, Sir Richard Dearlove, a former director of the United Kingdom’s foreign spy agency, MI6, hosted a dinner for Flynn in his campus apartment at Pembroke College. The dinner was to celebrate a joint initiative between the DIA and the Cambridge Security Initiative (CSI). CSI was a private intelligence firm directed by Dearlove, Christopher Andrew, the official historian of Great Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, and Stefan Halper, a US political operative with family ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. Their idea was to draw on their past reputations and market the in-house talents of Cambridge specialists, including Svetlana Lokhova, a Moscow-born British historian of Soviet intelligence. She is precise in relating the details of Flynn’s 2014 visit.

  “Flynn gave a public talk, and then there was a dinner by private invitation only to honor him,” she says. “It was big event to celebrate Flynn. The organizers wanted to show off for the DIA boss and prove how knowledgeable the group was.”

  But CSI’s analysts had no experience in intelligence work. They were academics, graduate students. “I was invited to the dinner because CSI had been contracted to do a project that involved the Middle East and Russia and I was one of two Russian speakers involved in CSI,” says Lokhova.

  There were twenty or so guests, mostly academics. Dearlove was seated across from the guest of honor. Andrew, a University of Cambridge professor, sat next to Flynn. The third CSI director, Halper, was absent. At the end of the dinner, Andrew asked Lokhova to show their American guest an example of what she’d found during her research studying the Soviet archives.

  “I opened my iPad,” says Lokhova, “and showed Flynn a sample of Stalin’s handwriting on the back of a postcard.”

  Flynn wanted a copy of it to show to a delegation of Russian military intelligence officers due to visit DIA the next month. The trip was canceled because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

  Andrew asked Lokhova to stay in touch with Flynn. He hoped that Flynn might visit Cambridge again. He didn’t, but the 2014 dinner would become an important chapter in the story designed to destroy him.

  The University of Cambridge is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious universities, the centerpiece of a medieval English city less than an hour from London by train. From the station, it’s a fifteen-minute walk to Market Square, dodging students rushing to class on their bikes.

  It was winter 2019 when I visited Cambridge, cool and gray, and the grassy courtyards of the residential colleges were wet with frost.

  The university enjoys a uniquely storied reputation as a breeding ground for spies. The Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, a rival of William Shakespeare, was recruited here as a student to serve Her Majesty’s government.

  Nearly four hundred years later, five of the university’s students, most notoriously Kim Philby, first enlisted at Cambridge in a cause, communism, intended to destroy their society and committed themselves to careers in espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union.

  And it was here in the mid-1980s that one of Dearlove’s future employees, undergraduate Christopher Steele, was tapped to play a role fighting the Cold War.

  Lokhova escaped post–Cold War Russia by moving to England in 1998. “There were breadlines and the violence was so bad that boys in my school brought guns to class,” she says of mid-1990s Moscow. I can hear traces of her Russian accent. She speaks hurriedly, as her two-year-old wants her mother’s full attention.

  “When I arrived here,” she says, “I did everything possible to integrate myself into British society and distance myself from that. I celebrated when I became a British citizen.”

  In 2012, after a career in London’s financial sector in the mid-2000s, she returned to academia, where she’d already started to make a name for herself. Her book, The Spy Who Changed History: The Untold Story of How the Soviet Union Won the Race for America’s Top Secrets, is based on documents drawn from the Soviet archives dating back to the 1930s.

  She thrived at Cambridge, cherishing the painstaking research. “Documents have a story in them,” she says. “If you spend time with them, they’ll start to speak to you.” So do timelines, she says. Her research of the culture and methods of Soviet spy agencies prepared her for how to understand the story that US intelligence officials, political operatives, and the media used to smear her in order to get at Flynn.

  They concocted a false account of the 2014 dinner, claiming she was a Russian spy and had compromised the DIA director. She became notorious as images of her strawberry blond hair and blue eyes were splashed across the media on both sides of the Atlantic. But that fraudulent narrative of the 2014 dinner wasn’t planted in the press until several years later, in the winter of 2016–2017. It was only when Trump was ascendant that the fictional account became useful, an account that dirtied Flynn and by extension Trump. Lokhova, a Russian and a woman, was a convenient instrument. No one blinked when her former Cambridge colleagues threw her to the wolves. Nonetheless, she still speaks sympathetically of the Cambridge group. “They’re people who had done something in the past. They wanted to be treated with respect and feel they should be consulted because of their service to the world. But they’re men in their midseventies who tend to get drowsy while listening to lectures.”

  The American, said Lokhova, was unlike Dearlove and Andrew. “Most of these Cambridge people are very gentle,” she explains. “Halper stood out because he was incredibly rude. Also, he regularly made a point of making anti-Russian comments.”

  Halper was another central figure in the anti-Trump operation. It was he who told the US and British press that Flynn had been compromised by Russian intelligence and that the agent of Flynn’s undoing had been Lokhova.

  Stefan Halper graduated from Stanford in 1967 and earned a PhD from Oxford in 1971. He worked for three Republican administrations—Richard Nixon’s, Gerald Ford’s, and Ronald Reagan’s—and was once married to the daughter of the CIA’s director of intelligence Ray Cline. Halper’s family ties to the agency won him a leadership position in a dirty tricks operation targeting a presidential campaign.

  Halper ran a campaign war room for Reagan’s 1980 presidential run. He was hired by David Gergen, a prominent former Republican official and current CNN political analyst, to manage a network of retired CIA officers. Halper’s job was to collect foreign policy information from inside the Jimmy Carter administration.

  Carter, a famously unpopular president, enjoyed two brief surges in the run-up to the 1980 elections. The first time was when Iranian revolutionaries seized American hostages in November 1979 and took over the US Embassy in Tehran. The public sided with Carter again in April 1980, when he ordered an ultimately unsuccessful mission to rescue the hostages.

  Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, and Reagan’s campaign director said that the Republican candidate’s team had been concerned that Carter might take some sort of dramatic action to free the hostages on the eve of the election and overtake Reagan at the polls. The Reagan camp referred to it as an “October surprise.” Halper’s job was reportedly to spot plans for an “October surprise” in time to develop a campaign strategy to counter it.

  Halper is a well-known figure in the Washington, DC, policy community and the author of several relatively popular books on foreign affairs. He earned another doctorate from Cambridge in 2004. He stayed on to teach at Cambridge, where he directed dissertations in the Department of Politics and International Studies and convened conferences and panels with important figures from the intelligence world. For instance, he brought a former head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, to Cambridge twice, in 2012 and 2015.

  On campus, Halper was known to be generous with his money. Part of his wealth came from the US taxpayer. In addition to CSI’s contract wit
h the DIA, he drew income from the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), an internal Pentagon think tank, to write research reports on strategic threats facing the United States. Between 2012 and 2018, ONA paid him more than $1 million—$600,000 alone for two contracts in 2015 and 2016 for academic research related to Russia. He claimed that one of the sources for his reports on Russia had been the former spy chief Trubnikov.

  Halper’s work, says a Defense Department official who requested anonymity, “didn’t meet the standards of the Office of Net Assessment or merit the money he was paid. Halper’s work typically consisted of a collection of essays he’d paid other researchers to write. These were hardly the top names in the field, and the work was substandard.”

  According to the Washington Times, Halper’s research claims were falsified. More than a dozen of the expert sources Halper claimed to have consulted for his projects said they had had nothing to do with his work.

  It appears Halper misrepresented the nature of his professional relationship with a number of well-known academics and intelligence officials, including former CIA director General Michael Hayden. Washington Times reporter Rowan Scarborough asked Hayden if he had contributed to Halper’s work as the contractor claimed. Hayden responded, “No memory of project or person.”

  Pentagon whistle-blower Adam Lovinger contended that ONA was being used to funnel money to favored Beltway insiders such as Halper. In addition, according to records submitted to Congress, Lovinger reported to ONA director Andrew D. May that Halper, a contractor, was being used to “conduct foreign relations,” a violation of federal regulations. Instead of investigating Halper, Lovinger’s supervisors investigated him.

  It appears that Halper was paid not for his research but rather for pet projects that were best kept off the books. The FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team used Halper as an informant to spy on Trump campaign advisers, including Flynn.

  The Cambridge scholars who’d met Flynn in 2014 kept track of him after he announced his resignation from the DIA. They noticed when, more than a year later, his name started to appear in the press as an adviser to the Republican front-runner, Donald Trump.

  “It seemed odd,” says Lokhova. “He’d crossed sides, from Obama official to Trump supporter.”

  That got Halper’s attention as well. Flynn was whispering things in Trump’s ear that threatened the ecosystem that sustained Halper and his Beltway associates. It didn’t matter that Trump’s chances of winning the White House were slim. The logic of power dictates that the powerful use the instruments at their disposal in order to maintain power.

  Richard Nixon had the Democratic National Committee wiretapped because he could. The fact that he was destined to crush his Democratic opponent, George McGovern, in the 1972 election was irrelevant. It was because he had the power to spy on his rivals that he did.

  Halper was such an instrument. His job was to push favorites across the winning line, just as he’d helped ensure Reagan’s victory over Carter more than thirty-five years before.

  Nearly two years after the February 2014 dinner that he didn’t attend, Halper saw how a report of it might be useful: it could serve as the backstory for the photograph of Flynn at Putin’s table. A few short weeks after the RT celebration, Halper directed Christopher Andrew to host him for a dinner and invite Lokhova. “Chris emailed me in January 2016 and insisted I come to dinner with Halper the next month,” says Lokhova. “I’d never spoken with him. It was very strange I’d be invited to a dinner with him. But Chris was insistent.”

  She didn’t understand why until later. Halper was running an operation to dirty Trump and several associates as Russian assets. “I was being set up,” she says. A Cambridge colleague and friend of Halper later confirmed to her that Halper had been spying on her to get to Flynn.

  Halper wanted to probe her to get information on Flynn that he could leak to the press and deliver to his associates in the intelligence bureaucracy. He was looking for material with which to write the false backstory of the Flynn-Putin photograph.

  How did the former DIA chief wind up at Putin’s table in December 2015 to celebrate a Kremlin-owned TV station? He’d been compromised by the Russians back in February 2014, Halper would eventually tell journalists. In his account, which finally surfaced in December 2016, the postcard with Stalin’s signature had been an erotic come-on from Lokhova, the prelude to a seduction. They had left the dinner together. She was a Russian agent.

  The premise of that story, says Lokhova, is ridiculous. “Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, hosted the dinner, in his apartment,” she says. “It has obviously been cleared with the intelligence services. They’re not going to let someone they haven’t checked out dine at the home of the former head of the foreign intelligence service while he’s hosting the active chief of American military intelligence.”

  Nonetheless, Halper’s account became part of the narrative that Flynn had been compromised by the Russians.

  “On this telling,” says Lokhova, “at the end of the evening I supposedly walk off alone with Flynn for some rendezvous, and no one says a thing—not his security detail, not the former head of MI6. Instead, everyone just finishes their port and cheese without saying a thing.”

  Lokhova declined the February 2016 invitation to meet with Halper at Andrew’s home, but the anti-Flynn operation launched nonetheless. A February 26, 2016, Reuters article by Mark Hosenball and Steve Holland was the first public evidence of it.

  Trump adviser Michael Flynn, according to the article, “raised eyebrows among some U.S. foreign policy veterans when he was pictured sitting at the head table with Putin at a banquet in Moscow late last year celebrating Russia Today, an international broadcasting network funded by the Russian government.”

  Political operatives turned Flynn into an enemy of the state by erasing facts from the real account of his Moscow trip and the RT banquet. And the photograph of him seated with Putin became the first piece of falsified evidence in the dirty tricks campaign alleging that the Trump team had been compromised by the Kremlin.

  Chapter 3

  FRAMING TRUMP: THE RUSSIA JOB

  IN EARLY SPRING 2016, the press began to fill with stories expressing alarm about Trump’s often favorable opinions regarding Vladimir Putin. That was odd. The media had never concerned itself with the sitting president’s Russia policy, no matter how many US interests and allies were damaged because of it.

  To the contrary, the press had fully backed Obama’s efforts to improve ties with the Kremlin, the vaunted Russia “reset” policy managed by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

  Obama and Clinton’s “reset” amounted to turning a blind eye to Putin’s aggressions—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, annexation of Crimea, cyberattacks against the United States’ Baltic allies, military intervention in Syria, where it had established air bases, and a naval base on the Mediterranean.

  All that time, the press had failed to note the dangers of Obama’s Russia policy, even as Putin participated in a genocidal campaign in support of his Syrian client Bashar al-Assad. Obama appeased Russia by withdrawing missile defense from the United States’ central European allies Poland and the Czech Republic. The US president even ignored Russian cyberattacks on the Pentagon in 2015 and State Department in 2014.

  Nunes, watching from his perch on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, believed that the Obama White House was letting Putin get away with murder.

  We’re sitting at a long table in Nunes’s office in the Longworth House Office Building on Capitol Hill. The jerseys of two Portuguese soccer legends, Luís Figo and Rui Costa, hang on the wall behind him, and a large TV is at the other end of the room. Pictures of his family, his wife, Elizabeth, and his three daughters, Evelyn, Julia, and Margaret, fill the bookcases. It’s a seven- to eight-hour trip to get home for the weekends, and often he’s traveling far abroad for committee work.

  In the summer of 2014, he’d just returned from a trip to Ukraine, where the Russi
ans had downed a passenger jet. He wrote an op-ed for the Washington Times warning about Russian aggression—drawing particular attention to the Kremlin’s international disinformation campaign—and advocating active steps to counter Putin’s actions. “We cannot afford to be a mere bystander as his destabilizing actions begin to threaten the economies of the Baltics and other NATO allies, possibly including our own.”

  When Nunes became HPSCI chairman in 2015, he set out to address the problem. “The committee got the intelligence community more money for Russia,” he says. “Millions. But they didn’t use it.”

  They didn’t want the money because Russia wasn’t an Obama priority. “There are plenty of people in the intelligence community who know lots about Russia,” he explains. “But the IC takes direction from the administration. And the Obama White House wasn’t interested in focusing on Russia because it needed Moscow on board for the Iran deal.”

  The administration believed that Russian support for sanctions designed to bring the Iranians to the negotiating table was vital to striking the deal. Thus Obama showed early on his willingness to accommodate the Russians on other matters.

  During a July 2009 trip to Moscow, Obama gave a speech at the New Economic School, where he spoke of a sixty-day review for a proposed US missile defense shield protecting Poland and the Czech Republic. The Russians strongly opposed the shield, a George W. Bush–era initiative, believing that it targeted their nuclear arsenal.