Spyfail, p.48
Spyfail, page 48
Much of the deliberate fearmongering was being driven by politicians. Channeling the worst of Senator Joe McCarthy, former senator Hillary Clinton charged in 2019 that presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, a congresswoman from Hawaii, was being “groomed” by the Russians. And she accused former presidential candidate Jill Stein of being a “Russian asset.” “Yes,” Clinton said in a television interview, “she’s a Russian asset, I mean, totally.”
Regarding Russiagate, Vanity Fair’s T. A. Frank pointed to “a serious credibility cost to the press.” “Many news outlets,” he noted, “already struggling with credibility problems going into 2016, redoubled their worst traits in the name of what they thought was a higher truth. Mainstream media has hyped the Russia stories so much that less Resistance-minded readers have started to doubt much of their work altogether.”
By far the most serious leak took place on December 14, 2016, when NBC News led its evening broadcast and website with the headline “U.S. Officials: Putin Personally Involved in U.S. Election.” The report went on to state, “Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said… Ultimately, the CIA has assessed, the Russian government wanted to elect Donald Trump… Now the U.S. has solid information tying Putin to the operation, the intelligence officials say. Their use of the term ‘high confidence’ implies that the intelligence is nearly incontrovertible.”
While largely true, this story and others like it created a real blowback problem. The fact that “spies” were close enough to gather “intelligence” that was “nearly incontrovertible” indicating that “Putin personally directed” the hacking operation could only mean someone close to Putin’s inner circle was working for the CIA. Fearing a Russian mole hunt, the agency immediately began planning a highly secret and elaborate exfiltration operation for Smolenkov—and contemplating life without his valuable reports on Ukraine and numerous other critical topics.
This was a huge blow to understanding Putin. Smolenkov was not some corporate executive being asked to transfer to a new sales territory. He was a high-level American spy working at the center of power in his own government. At the time he switched sides in Washington, he was an aide to the Russian ambassador to the United States, Yuri Ushakov, who would eventually serve in that post for a decade. And while there, Smolenkov apparently developed a close working relationship with him. As a result, when Putin became prime minister in 2008, and Ushakov returned to Moscow to become his top foreign affairs advisor, Smolenkov was at his side as his key aide. There, the two worked out of the Presidential Administration Building at 4 Staraya Square.
Similar in function to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, the Presidential Administration Building is a gray neoclassical structure about a dozen blocks from the Kremlin. Formerly it had served as the headquarters of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, home of the party apparatus. It was also where, on February 7, 1990, the Soviet Communist Party leaders voted to end their monopoly on power and create a presidential system of government. Now the CIA had a mole there.
Soon Smolenkov was promoted to state advisor of the 3rd Class, the civilian equivalent of an army two-star general. With a salary of about $136,000 a year, he was in the upper bracket of Russia’s middle class. Appointed as his assistant was Antonina Agafonova, twenty-five, an attractive and stylish blonde student about to graduate from Moscow Regional Institute of Management and Law with a degree in organization management. Before long, they would have an affair, she would leave her husband and take their son, and she and Smolenkov would get married. They moved into Antonina’s modest one-bedroom apartment in a pink-fronted building on Kargopolskaya Street in Moscow’s Otradnoye district. A working-class neighborhood, it was nine miles north of the Kremlin. In addition to Ivan, Antonina’s son, the couple would have two daughters.
As Ushakov’s top aide, Smolenkov would have had access to key details on Putin’s plans and decisions involving virtually every part of the world. “Oleg Smolenkov was a member of the inner circle of Yury Ushakov,” said Ilya Shumanov, a Russian affairs expert at the Wilson Center. He had access to intelligence information and also to military and defense secrets since his portfolio included involvement with the government’s Military-Industrial Commission. One former longtime associate recalled that Smolenkov would sometimes show “excessive curiosity” about certain topics, “which did not look like a simple interest.”
While it is doubtful that Smolenkov would have had regular access to the closely held secrets of the GRU, the group conducting the DNC hacking operations and email releases, it is highly likely that details may have been discussed in relation to the effects the operation was having on U.S.-Russia relations. Therefore, while Smolenkov may not have been able to tip off the CIA to the operation beforehand, his intelligence would likely be crucial in providing a view into ongoing decision making. And among the most critical information he passed on was the fact that Putin directly ordered the hacking and release of the DNC and Clinton emails. After all, Putin believed that Clinton, secretary of state at the time of the Maidan uprising in Kiev, was responsible for fomenting much of the anti-Russian movement and coup plotting, even giving a “signal” to Russia’s opponents. And then there were his fears regarding NATO and Montenegro.
Because of the information’s extraordinary fragility, those reports were handled out of channels, directly between Brennan and President Obama, without a mention even in the President’s Daily Brief. Nor was even the NSA allowed key details concerning Smolenkov, an extremely unusual decision. But Brennan would also share much of the Russia-related intelligence with FBI director James Comey at a time when the bureau was drowning in leaks and misconduct.
Now, secretly informed that he and his family needed to immediately and permanently disappear, Smolenkov balked. It is unlikely anyone else in his family suspected he was an American agent. And he was unwilling to suddenly tell them that their lives as they’d known them were now over and they were to quickly pack up, move to a new country, and assume new lives and new identities.
Smolenkov also had a number of serious obligations. His mother, Valentina Nikolaevna Smolenkova, was very unstable. Bedridden, she often let out screams and needed his care. She lived alone in another part of Moscow, in a thirty-eight-square-meter one-room apartment on Zoya and Aleksandr Kosmodemyanskikh Street. If he suddenly left, there would be no one to take care of her. And then there was his wife’s mother, who worked for the Foreign Ministry. Revenge by the government against family members left behind was still another concern. Plus, there was the issue of custody of his wife’s twelve-year-old son, Ivan, by another marriage. His father had visiting rights and it could be considered kidnapping if they suddenly removed him permanently from the country. This was not a Hollywood movie, it was real life—his and his family’s real life.
Despite the warning, Smolenkov decided that, for now, he would keep up the charade and hope for the best. But the partisan leaks would keep on coming and become even more hazardous to his and his family’s health. Thus, as the American media exploded in the aftermath of the Clinton email release, there was likely no one who had a greater fear of the potential repercussions than Oleg Smolenkov. His life was literally hanging by a headline, one that might contain just the right pieces of a puzzle to reveal his role as a spy in the Kremlin—puzzle pieces that would put him in a cold Siberian work camp for decades, if he were not shot. And there was no greater generator of hype and hysteria than the Steele dossier.
It was midsummer when FBI agent Michael Gaeta stepped off the plane in London, but it felt more like early spring. There was a chill breeze beneath the chalky cauliflower clouds that hung low over the city, and the temperature barely hit the mid-60s. Assigned to the U.S. embassy in Rome, Gaeta was on his way to Grosvenor Gardens, a row of weary gray neoclassical houses converted to assorted offices near Victoria Station. Behind the unmarked black pillar-framed door to number 9-11 was Orbis Business Intelligence, Ltd., one of the dozens of small private intelligence companies run by ex-spooks exploiting for profit their days in the field as phony diplomats or as bureaucrats back in London in stuffy closet-sized government offices.
Gaeta’s appointment was with Orbis’s Christopher Steele, an ex-MI6 officer who had spent a few years under diplomatic cover in Moscow in the early 1990s, and a few more in the 2000s running the agency’s Russia desk back in London. Now Steele was on the outside being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by clients who wanted to know what was on the inside. In its first nine years, his company hauled in approximately $20 million. As a result, unlike during his civil servant days, Steele now lived in a pricy house in suburban Surrey on almost an acre of land, had joined a golf club, and drove to and from work in a classy Land Rover Discovery Sport.
In June 2016, Steele was hired and eventually paid $168,000 to dig up political dirt in Russia on Donald Trump for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. A few months earlier he had done the same thing for the conservative newspaper the Washington Free Beacon. The new contract came from Fusion GPS, a Washington consulting and opposition research firm hired by the Clinton team’s law firm, Perkins Coie, at a rate of $50,000 a month. It was run by an ex–Wall Street Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson, and the company would eventually be paid more than $1 million for its anti-Trump work.
The week before Gaeta flew to London, Steele submitted the first of a multipart report on Trump and Russia to Simpson. Then, to curry favor with the FBI, which was one of his profitable clients, and justify the $95,000 they had thus far paid him as a confidential informant, he quickly telephoned Gaeta in Rome, his so-called bureau handler. But it was bad timing. “Can it wait a while?” Gaeta asked. “You know, it’s Fourth of July week.” But Steele was insistent. “No, you need to see this immediately.” The two were acquainted from an earlier investigation into FIFA, the governing body of the World Cup.
On that chilly July Tuesday in London, the day after America’s Independence Day, Gaeta climbed the stairs at Grosvenor Gardens and pressed the bell for Orbis Business Intelligence, Ltd. In Steele’s office, surrounded by the images of Tolstoy, Gogol, Lermontov, and Pushkin, their faces painted on Russian dolls, Gaeta studied the dossier that had been prepared for Simpson and the Hillary Clinton campaign. “It was explosive,” he would later say, but he was also very suspicious. “I assumed,” he said, that Steele’s investigation “was attached to somebody, politically motivated,” and that “whoever is paying for this information is at some point going to somehow broadcast this information.”
The problem was, it lacked even the slightest verification. “Do you have any corroboration of this? Is there any independent corroboration?” he asked Steele. “Is there a videotape? Is there an audiotape? Do you have anything else? And the answer was ‘no.’”
Gaeta flew back to Rome in the late afternoon and spent a week trying to decide what to do with the strange report that, unverified, consisted of little more than a collection of odd rumors and conspiracy theories. So on July 12 he telephoned the assistant special agent in charge (ASAC) of public corruption in the New York field office and asked him what to do with Steele’s dossier. “Hold on to it,” the official told Gaeta. Two week later, on July 28, the ASAC told Gaeta to send the Steele reports to FBI attorneys in the New York field office. He did, and by August 1, Gaeta was told by the ASAC, they had reached “a very high level” at FBI headquarters. Soon, for many, the Steele dossier would become the Rosetta Stone for the Russiagate investigation. In reality, it was a Tower of Babble.
Much of the private intelligence business is based on a myth the practitioners like to exploit: once a spy always a spy. But once a spy leaves the field, and even worse, leaves the government, they simply become shoe salesmen without shoes. The result is spying from a distance in both time and miles, an unsustainable option. In Steele’s case, it had been seven years since he left the government and nearly a quarter century since he served in Moscow. He had not even traveled to Russia or any of the former Soviet states, his areas of supposed expertise, since 2009. Whatever in-country contacts he might have had, therefore, were likely dead, long gone, or impossible to reach without greatly risking their safety.
It is also completely unethical for ex-spies to attempt to coopt or buy off sources originally recruited while they were with a government intelligence agency. That was never part of the bargain when they were hired. It could be extremely dangerous for the clandestine sources in a hostile country, and it could damage or cripple ongoing intelligence operations. Nevertheless, with large profits to be made, many of them secretly try, with varying levels of success.
For Steele, with no direct, physical access to in-country sources, he, like most ex-spooks, was left to spy from the comfort of his high-backed office chair, relying instead on often questionable and unreliable second- and thirdhand sources. That can be very dangerous, as the war in Iraq demonstrated with its overreliance on sources who turned out to be liars, fraudsters, and know-nothings angling for visas, cash, and favors. And with regard to Iraq, the spies hunting for sources were active-duty CIA officers rather than has-been former agents trying to score big bucks and secretly play politics.
Without any sources within the Kremlin, Moscow, or anywhere in Russia, Steele was left to rely on Igor Danchenko, a freelance researcher just across the Potomac River from his client, Simpson. Entrusting such a secret and important mission—digging up dirt in Russia on a presidential candidate—to Danchenko was a sign of Steele’s desperate lack of real sources. Later Danchenko would tell the FBI in a secret debriefing that the assignment was to find “compromising materials” not only on Trump but also on Hillary Clinton. It’s possible Steele wanted to play both sides of the fence for double the money. The whole idea made Danchenko very uncomfortable. It was a “strange task to have been given,” he would later say. And he knew nothing about the subject. As the FBI would note, he was “clueless as to who Paul Manafort was.”
Slim, with a boyish face and a receding, spiky brown hairline, Danchenko was far from a highly experienced clandestine operative with an intimate knowledge of the Washington/Moscow political netherworld. Instead, he was a forty-one-year-old academic with a background in Russian oil, gas, and economic analysis. Raised on the edge of Siberia, he had left Russia years before to attend graduate school in Kentucky. He also had a drinking problem, having been arrested several times in the Washington area for drunk and disorderly conduct and thrown in Prince George’s County Jail. He was released on the condition he undergo substance abuse and mental health counseling, according to criminal records. He also would later tell the FBI that he and one of his “sources” “drink heavily together.”
With his background, it would have been difficult to find someone less qualified for such a sensitive assignment than Danchenko. Now as Steele’s “principal source,” he was left to find his own “principal source.” Never before having had a need for such a person, he simply turned to his “social circle” and pestered his bar mates with questions. They offered little of use beyond a few rumors. Finally, as a shot in the dark he called Olga Galkina, an old friend from high school now living on the island of Cyprus and working for a tech company. The two had been classmates in Perm, a railway junction on the Trans-Siberian Railway in the shadow of the Ural Mountains. Nearly a thousand miles east of Moscow, and a former transit stop for political prisoners on their way to the Siberian gulags, it was called the last stop to nowhere.
After high school, both Galkina and Danchenko studied at Perm State University. Danchenko later moved to the United States to attend graduate school in political science at the University of Louisville. And Galkina, an attractive woman with dark hair cut in a short pixie style, went for advanced study in philology at the Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow. With an ability to speak five languages, she eventually specialized in public relations. Despite the distance, however, she and Danchenko would stay in touch and occasionally exchange emails.
At the time Danchenko contacted Galkina in 2016, she was living with her young son in Limassol, the capital of Cyprus. She worked as a press secretary and belonged to an intellectual Russian expat social club created to discuss poetry. Her boss was Aleksej Gubarev, the owner of XTB Holding SA and its subsidiary, Webzilla. An enterprise data service company, it was housed in a modern three-story cement building in Agios Athanasios, just outside the capital. Previously, Galkina had been based in Moscow working for Gazeta.ru, a popular online news service, and then later as head of the press service for Russia’s nuclear watchdog, the Environmental, Technological and Nuclear Supervision Agency.
For Galkina, it was a difficult period. In August 2016 she became involved in a messy dispute with Gubarev, her boss, a Russian-born Cyprus resident, and was fired in November. But around the time of her dismissal, at the end of October, Danchenko started dropping her friendly notes on Facebook and getting back in touch with her. He then began fishing for anything that might be useful to pass on to Steele for his dossier on Trump. But it was just more unsubstantiated rumors and street gossip. Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, she heard somewhere, had met in Prague with Russian intelligence agents to discuss ways to finance the hackers attacking the DNC and hide their activities. It never happened, but that made little difference—it would nevertheless wind up in Steele’s dossier as if from a Moscow insider rather than an unemployed tech worker on the island of Cyprus, who happened to be the high school chum of the source.
