Spyfail, p.50
Spyfail, page 50
A few months before her arrest, Maria Butina and I met for lunch at Mari Vanna, a Russian-cuisine restaurant and nightclub on Connecticut Avenue near Dupont Circle in downtown Washington. Around the corner is the Washington headquarters for ABC News, and half a block toward the White House is the venerable Mayflower Hotel. Spidery houseplants hang from the ceiling, family photos dot the “shabby chic” walls, and its dacha-inspired interior is cluttered with Soviet-era bric-a-brac, like the colorful tchotchkes and nesting dolls that cram the shelves. On tables near crystal bowls of sushki, a traditional Russian tea bread, were steamed dumplings known as pelmeni, and servings of ruby red borscht packed with beets and carrots. And nearby, I would later learn, was an FBI surveillance team that had followed her there.
We first met a year and a half earlier, in October 2016. I was the national security columnist for Foreign Policy magazine, a documentary filmmaker for PBS, and the author of a number of books on intelligence activities, and she had just started graduate school at American University. The venue was a talk in Washington about ways of achieving peace in the Middle East. At the time, I was planning a long train trip from Beijing to Ulan Bator, Mongolia, and from there to Moscow on the Trans-Mongolian and Trans-Siberian Railways. Someone pointed me to Maria Butina and said I should meet her since she was born and grew up in Siberia. I introduced myself and we began a casual friendship as I picked her brain about life in that vast, cold area of Russia.
Over the next year and a half we would occasionally meet for lunch and at lectures and parties. Then, following my trip to Siberia, and another, a monthlong journey aboard a massive container ship, the APL Columbus, from California to China, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka to learn a little about the supply chain, we had that lunch at Mari Vanna. At the time, I had little interest in the Trump-Russia controversy. The breathless reporting it generated reminded me of the pack journalism at the start of the war in Iraq, when groupthink dictated that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. (I ended up writing a book about it called A Pretext for War.) Also, on distant trains and aboard ship, with little internet availability, I had not been able to follow the latest developments in the scandal.
During the lunch, however, Maria showed me several online stories that, based on government leaks, implied she was a spy at the center of a complex and convoluted Russia conspiracy. Some FBI allegations accused her of being a secret conduit for tens of millions of dollars from Putin to Trump. Others charged that, with her red hair, she was a real-life “red sparrow” spy-seductress. What was missing, however, was a shred of evidence. Instead, it was simply overhyped innuendo and conjecture, the basis of much of the Russiagate conspiracy. But it was enough to turn her life into a nightmare. Once-friendly students were now keeping their distance, and she had to keep dodging journalists and photographers even on campus. And later would come the arrest and imprisonment in solitary confinement.
“I’m a huge fan of Alice in Wonderland,” Maria once told me. “I love the story, for some reason it fascinates me. It seems to be simple, but it’s so complicated a story.” Three years earlier, like Alice, she began tumbling down a deep rabbit hole. And on that hot Sunday in July, in that roach-infested cell, she suddenly hit bottom.
“Who in the world am I?” asked Alice. “Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”
To a large extent, it all began when Maria met the Mad Hatter, Patrick Byrne.
Three weeks before the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, when insurrectionists violently attempted to change the vote in the presidential election, Patrick Byrne was standing on a darkened Washington street in jeans, a black hoodie, and a neck gaiter. It was 6:15 p.m. on Friday, December 18, 2020, and his goal was to somehow get a face-to-face with President Donald Trump and urge him to activate the military and overturn the outcome of the election. With him was retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s national security advisor until arrested for lying to the FBI; Flynn’s attorney Sidney Powell; and a former Trump staffer, Emily Newman.
Six feet eight inches tall, with a thick mop of rusty hair and a passing resemblance to a less wrinkled Robert Redford, Byrne was the founder and former CEO of the e-commerce furniture supply company Overstock. In 2021, the company would earn $2.8 billion in revenue. He also had an impressive academic background, with a B.A. from Dartmouth College, his master’s degree as a Marshall Scholar from Cambridge University, and his Ph.D. from Stanford.
Convinced that Biden had stolen the election from Trump with the help of China and Venezuela, and having made close to $100 million when he sold his company, Byrne had become the principal moneyman financing much of the effort to put Trump back in office. The “election was hacked,” he said, and he had “the data, the electronics, everything” to prove it. Key was getting access to critical ballots, and having cyber experts analyze them for tampering while others searched for bits of bamboo shoots proving China’s involvement. And also access to the election software, which, Byrne claimed, “was developed in Venezuela, by Hugo Chavez for him to rig his elections.” The problem, however, was the elaborate cover-up involving a “shredding truck” paid to shred “3,000 pounds of ballots,” he said.
“A few days after the election I rented a block of rooms in the Trump International Hotel and I brought with me a bunch of people I call ‘dolphin speakers,’ hackers, and when I say hackers, I don’t mean bad guys, I mean white-hat hackers, people who are court certified.” Byrne chose Trump’s Washington hotel, he said, because he considered it “the safest place in D.C. for a command bunker.”
A bunker that would cost Byrne over $800,000 for a number of weeks. And by mid-December, it was time to crash the White House.
“We had a vague plan regarding how we were going to get through all the rings of Police, Secret Service, and Marines without any invitation,” he said, “and get to the Oval Office. Beyond that, we’d be playing it by ear.” On his cell phone, Byrne contacted a staffer on the National Security Council he had briefly met and asked if he could stop by for a chat. Moments later, the group was invited into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. And after a short discussion, Garrett Ziegler, an aide to Trump advisor Peter Navarro, escorted them into the West Wing. Then, as they stood in the hallway, a surprised Trump heading to his office recognized Flynn. “After a moment he beckoned us in,” said Byrne. “Within seconds General Flynn, Sidney Powell, and I were all sitting in the Oval Office with President Donald J. Trump, with the door shut behind us.”
It was an extraordinary four-hour-plus meeting, one in which the president was urged to involve the military and spy agencies to overturn the election results. The day before, Flynn, a retired general and the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said that President Trump could deploy the military to redo the 2020 election. “He could order, within the swing states if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities and basically rerun an election in each of those states,” he said. “People out there talk about martial law like it’s something that we’ve never done. Martial law has been instituted 64 times.”
Seated in a row in front of Trump’s heavy wooden Resolute Desk, the group discussed ways in which the president could send in troops and spies to seize voting machines and redo the ballot counting. Byrne, a compulsive conspiracy theorist, long believed that China was behind a massive operation to rig the election results. “China’s involved in this,” he would later claim. “I think we’re living through the assassin’s mace.” It was a reference to a centuries-old Chinese concept of overcoming an enemy with a surprise weapon, in this case the U.S. presidential election results. “It would be so Chinese to do it this way.”
Key to uncovering the conspiracy was issuing a presidential order, or “finding.” “Sidney and Mike began walking the president through things from our perspective,” said Byrne. “He could ‘find’ [i.e., issue a finding] that there was adequate evidence of foreign interference with the election.” And then, Byrne added, “all he had to do was one small thing: direct a federal force.” At that point Flynn and Powell presented Trump with the document for his signature. Created two days earlier, it was titled “Presidential Findings: To Preserve Collect and Analyze National Security Information Regarding the 2020 General Election.” Eventually Trump rejected it. But had he signed the order, it would have placed extraordinary powers in the hands of the nation’s top military and intelligence officials to overturn the election.
“Effective immediately, the Secretary of Defense shall seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records,” the finding said. Then, “Within 7 days of commencement of operations, the initial assessment must be provided to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The final assessment must be provided to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence no later than 60 days from commencement of operations. The Director of National Intelligence shall deliver this assessment and appropriate supporting information to the President…”
Another curious document may also have been presented to Trump, one that further elaborated on the proposed involvement of the spy agencies in overturning the election. The memo recommended that President Trump issue an extraordinary order allowing a team to secretly access NSA’s highly classified intercepts to search for evidence of foreign involvement in the election. The team would be made up of “trained senior intelligence analysts,” it said. Among other things, the document laid out a plan whereby the team “will run targeted inquiries of NSA raw signals that may not have been processed yet to pursue suspected foreign interference of the 2020 election vote count manipulation.” Finally, printed on the bottom of the document were the words “DISPOSE OF VIA SHREDDING.”
Although there is no indication who actually originated the document, it was dated December 18, the same day that Byrne and the others met with Trump. And Byrne recalled that the group brought numerous papers to the Oval Office with them. “Sidney and her staff printed up some documents,” he said. “There may or may not have been a memo dated December 18 from Sidney for the president to sign. I believe I saw that off her printer in her suite in the hotel.”
During the Oval Office meeting, Byrne suggested that Trump put Flynn, the former military intelligence chief, in charge as his “field marshal” and appoint Sidney Powell his special counsel. “If you do I put your chances at around 50–75%,” he said. “You should see how well [Flynn] has this planned, it would run like clockwork.” Later, to the surprise and shock of everyone, Byrne repeated several times an elaborate story of how he was involved in a multimillion-dollar bribery attempt of Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign. “I know how this works. I bribed Hillary Clinton $18 million on behalf of the FBI for a sting operation,” he claimed.
It was an indication of just how deep Byrne’s paranoid conspiracy theories ran. For safety, he would also later give up flying in his private jet. “I fly commercial now so as to not get blown up,” he said. “Because I assume they’re not going to blow up a commercial airliner to get me.” “I’m a sucker for conspiracy theories,” he admits. Soon the cabal would follow Trump upstairs to the Yellow Oval Room in his private quarters to continue the plotting past midnight over Swedish meatballs. According to one of the participants, Byrne was “nonstop housing meatballs.”
The late-night meeting had been exhilarating for Trump. Encouraged and energized by what he had heard from Byrne and the others, he could now see a path to victory. At 1:42 in the morning, a little more than an hour after everyone departed, he decided to take action and began tapping out a tweet to his followers. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” The tweet, according to the congressional January 6th Committee, would be “pivotal.” “The tweet led to the planning for what occurred on January 6th,” said committee vice chair Liz Cheney, “and the violence on that day.”
Even before the meeting with Trump, Byrne began flying what he said were “many dozens” of people to Washington to take part in briefings and rallies. Among them, he said, were “fifteen pro-freedom Latinos from Texas” who were flown to Washington to take part in a large rally on December 12. They included, he was later told, Enrique Tarrio, the national chairman of the Proud Boys, along with several other Proud Boys. In the following weeks, according to a June 2022 indictment, Tarrio and four of his lieutenants would plan and coordinate the movements of as many as three hundred people who stormed the Capitol on January 6. Charged with “seditious conspiracy,” their purpose, said the indictment, was “opposing the lawful transfer of presidential power by force.” Byrne was also in Washington that day but says he stayed away from the Capitol and only later learned that Tarrio and the other Proud Boys were on the December flight. “The names of very few of those people have reached me,” he said.
In the end, Byrne’s meeting with Trump helped convince the former president to send the “pivotal” tweet announcing the “wild” protest on January 6. Shortly before, Byrne flew a key planner of the Capitol attack to Washington. A man wallowing in fantasies and conspiracies, with over $100 million in the bank, can be a very big danger to himself, and especially to those around him.
Five years earlier Byrne had first met Maria Butina, an attractive young Russian, as she was preparing to enter graduate school in Washington. And just as he was positive that China and Venezuela had stolen the election from Trump, and that Clinton was involved in a multimillion-dollar “Deep State” bribery scheme, he was convinced that Butina must be an insidious Russian spy. Believing he had been secretly deputized by the U.S. Senate to search the Deep State for evildoers, he now made Butina his target. And from that moment onward, her life would be forever altered.
“It’s Burning Man for Libertarians,” said financial writer Gary Alexander of the Libertarian Party’s annual three-day thinkathon in Las Vegas. Known for its wonkish, freedom-themed speeches, the convention bills itself as “the world’s largest gathering of free minds.” In July 2015, those free minds mingled with the free spenders in Planet Hollywood, a hotel and casino with a hip vibe and an uptempo atmosphere midway up the Strip and across from Bellagio’s famous fountains. A key draw was the sixty-one-thousand-square-foot gaming area that occupied a broad pit with a mini-baccarat table, craps tables, roulette wheels, a high-limit card room, and over twelve hundred slot machines. And for a 3 a.m. dinner there was a Gordon Ramsay burger joint.
It was the political season. A few weeks earlier, a short distance away at the Venetian Hotel, Sheldon Adelson had formed his secret task force of millionaires and billionaires to fight the boycott movement on behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu. And at Planet Hollywood, at the last minute, just four days before the Libertarian conference, Donald Trump had asked to speak to the crowd and was granted a time slot. He had just announced his candidacy a few weeks before. Among those in the audience was Maria Butina, who at the time was preparing for graduate school to study international relations and deciding which one to attend. She had been brought there by her close friend Paul Erickson, who had long been involved in politics and was among those invited.
Taking advantage of the unexpected appearance of Trump, Butina stood in line with other attendees in the large Celebrity Ballroom during the question-and-answer session. “I’m from Russia,” she said when her turn came, holding a microphone up to her lips. “My question will be about foreign politics. If you will be elected as president, what will be your foreign politics, especially in the relationships with my country? Do you want to continue the policy of sanctions that are damaging both economies? Or do you have any other ideas?” Trump replied, “I know Putin, and I’ll tell you what, we’ll get along with Putin… I would get along very nicely with Putin, I mean, where we have the strength. I don’t think you’d need the sanctions. I think we would get along very, very well.”
Following the Trump talk, Butina decided to attend another lecture at the conference, one by Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. She had developed an interest in blockchain and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, and it would later be one of her principal areas of focus at American University. And Byrne had gained a reputation as an expert in the field, even becoming the first major retailer to begin accepting bitcoin. He also established an offshoot company, tZERO, to further develop crypto ventures.
At fifty-three, Byrne had never been married and often boasted of his short-term sexual conquests. “I am a lifelong bachelor,” he declared on his webpage. “I give great tryst. I have no Act III whatsoever, but my Acts I and II are dynamite.” He also boasted of his lifestyle: “I’m a pot-smoking, hippy, libertarian, bachelor, Catholic, lapsed Catholic, living in Utah.” His father, Jack Byrne, was a prominent financier, insurance executive, and close associate of Warren Buffett. And from an early age, Patrick Byrne looked to Buffett as a mentor.
Following his talk, Butina asked him if he would like to be a speaker to a group interested in blockchain and economics in Russia. Byrne said it sounded interesting but suggested that they discuss it further the next day over lunch in his suite. Butina was surprised by the invitation but agreed. By then, Byrne was swimming in a sea of paranoia. After their very brief encounter he became convinced that Butina, because she was from Russia, was a hired assassin out to kill or drug him.
“The truth is, when she came into the room, I had two makeshift weapons made out of wooden pieces of furniture. I of course wasn’t going to hurt her, but I was prepared to defend myself,” he told me, looking very serious and concerned. “And to be honest, in Vegas I always have a handgun in my luggage. So, I was prepared if this turned into something strange.” A couple of years later, Byrne would be arrested at Salt Lake City International Airport attempting to carry a loaded .40-caliber Glock 23 handgun onto a passenger plane.
