Spyfail, p.51
Spyfail, page 51
Byrne also arranged the furniture in an attempt to determine if Butina was a Russian seductress, dispatched from Moscow to possibly tap into his secrets about online furniture sales. “I had set it up so we could sit next to each other, or we could sit across the table professionally,” he said. “Curious to see how she would sit. Curious to see if she was trying to throw some seduction into this, in which case I would start thinking she was a ‘red sparrow.’” But Butina was all business. “She sat across from me professionally, was super professional, brisk, to the point. Could have been a Bain consultant,” he said.
As with his uninvited crashing of the Oval Office to suggest a military takeover of the election, Byrne had long suffered from an imagination that could occasionally turn dangerous. Years earlier he had helped the FBI target some crooked Wall Street brokers and hedge fund operators. “It included everything from hiring economists to unscramble trading records and building programs to give them to show them how to spot the illegal trades,” Byrne said. He then added, “I also did all kinds of illegal things… I was dressed as a bum at somebody’s brownstone at three in the morning. I was hacking his computer and downloading crap from the Ukraine to hack his firewall and steal his computer data.”
Since then, Byrne developed an almost childlike worship of the bureau. It is so extreme that he tries never to even say the initials out loud, as some religious groups refuse to say the word “God.” “I don’t even like using the initials, the FBI,” he said. “I’m just going to call them federal agents or Men in Black.”
After assisting in the case, Byrne says that he was given a secret assignment by the Senate Judiciary Committee to find and root out, vigilante-style, evildoers within the Deep State. This authorization came in the form of a mysterious letter he was never allowed to touch. “I had to stand with my hands behind my back so I could read this letter,” he told me. “You can’t go kill anybody,” he says the officials told him. “But this will be sitting in a safe in the Department of Justice and it will make it very unlikely you’re going to get prosecuted.” Byrne had thereby become a modern-day superhero: Peter Parker by day, Spider-Man by night.
Byrne now believes the letter no longer exists because of a conspiracy by Obama to “sanitize” him. “My belief is the copy of that letter that was over in the Justice Department was probably destroyed at the end of the Obama administration. At least no one from the Department of Justice has confirmed the existence of the letter. And I have other reasons to think that they sanitized me on the way out.” Nevertheless, Byrne continued his secret search for evildoers within the Deep State, and after their brief meeting he quickly became convinced he had finally found one. Rather than a simple grad student, Butina was actually a Russian spy out to destroy America. And he would prevent that from happening.
Soon after their lunch, therefore, he quickly notified a federal official of the meeting. “When I heard back from someone,” he told me, “communication was reopened with the Men in Black. It had been a long, long time.” But the FBI, according to Byrne, seemed uninterested. “I was surprised at the lack of response from the channel I was given to communicate with if anything happened like this,” he said. Nevertheless, convinced he had at last found the Deep State evildoer he was commissioned to root out, he would continue his relentless pursuit of Butina until she was finally behind bars.
In a sense, Maria Butina grew up under the eyes and ears of U.S. intelligence. On November 6, 1988, a Titan 34D rocket was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. On board was a highly classified KH-11 imaging satellite placed in an orbit taking it over the Soviet Union several times a day. Four days later Maria was born in the remote Siberian city of Barnaul, then part of the Soviet Union, near the border with Kazakhstan. According to recently declassified CIA documents, Barnaul, home to a secret Soviet space tracking facility and an SS-20 missile base, was a key target of the KH-11 satellite. Other NSA satellites eavesdropped on the area.
In Barnaul, a crossroads between Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan, her family lived in a one-room apartment with a shared kitchen. “There were no phones at the time, no email, so we wrote letters,” she told me. “We didn’t have enough food, we couldn’t buy candy.” Because of a bad case of pneumonia, she spent a great deal of time recuperating with her grandparents in the small village of Kulunda, about five hours south by train. “I grew up in homeschooling with my grandmother—she’s a geography teacher,” Butina told me. Her grandfather taught her chess and “was a huge Stalin supporter,” she said. “He had a kind of old Soviet car, and on the back window of his car he always had a portrait of Stalin—or sometimes he switched it to Lenin.” He had come to Siberia as an electrician during Stalin’s reign, and lit some of the very first lightbulbs there.
Shy and tall for her age, by the time Butina started elementary school, in 1994, the Soviet Union had disintegrated, and Russia was struggling. With the introduction of capitalism, her father gave up his job, bought some tables and chairs, and began a small furniture company in Barnaul. “My dad is a person who always accepted risk,” said Maria. “He was a university professor, but he abandoned his safe life to become a businessman.” Even by 1998 when Butina was ten, her school, closer to Mongolia than Moscow, could not afford to purchase computers. “My first computer classes, believe it or not, the keyboard was drawn by hand by our teacher on a piece of paper… So by the time we got computers, we had already learned how to type on a keyboard.” Nevertheless, in 2010 she graduated from nearby Altai State University with honors and twin master’s degrees in political science and education. She also became a candidate for a Ph.D., writing a dissertation on the challenges of political organizations as alternatives to traditional political parties.
Following in her father’s footsteps, and with his help, Butina started a furniture business with a company called Home Comfort. “I grew up in this period of freedom in the 1990s when everyone believed that the Soviet Union had collapsed and we got freedom, it’s going to be great. We all believe that now we’re not going to be involved in these Chechen wars, we’ll be building good capital in a good way. People will be earning money and we’ll be helping the world in a good way. We will be part of Europe again. This is why I created my own business because that was inspiration.”
Soon she began thinking large, wanting to finally escape the sameness of Siberia for the exhilaration of the big city. Also, her dream from as far back as she could remember was getting involved in politics and changing things for the better. But that meant leaving Barnaul, so in August 2011 she put a manager in charge of her company and boarded a plane for Moscow. But as she stepped off the plane at the age of twenty-two, the vastness of the city stunned her. “I was frightened by the number of people, especially at rush hour,” she noted in her blog at the time. “And the noise is frightening.”
Much like in Alaska and northern Canada, guns were commonplace in Siberia, where hunting was taken for granted. And there was also a movement to legalize handguns for personal protection, as crime was rising. As a result, Butina had formed a small gun rights group in Barnaul made up of several dozen locals in the area. Now in Moscow, she found the well-established furniture business difficult to penetrate. As a result, she decided to see if there was an interest in a similar gun rights group there. There was, and she formed a small clublike organization called “The Right to Bear Arms.” In Moscow, however, it was a very risky undertaking. Gun ownership in Russia has always been highly restricted. With few exceptions, handguns are illegal, and guns for hunting and sport are difficult to obtain.
Over several years, the group grew, and among the most important members was Alexander P. Torshin. A passionate pro-gun enthusiast, he was deputy chairman of the Federation Council, the upper chamber of Russia’s parliament, the Duma. As a senator, he represented the Republic of Mari El, a small, insular region that hugs the Volga River about five hundred miles east of Moscow. With her interest in politics, Butina became fascinated by Torshin, the first real politician she had ever met. And eventually Torshin took her on as an unpaid intern, just as college and graduate students throughout Washington work as paid and unpaid interns for politicians and government officials.
With politics and gun rights in common, Torshin encouraged Butina to connect with the American NRA. It was a group very familiar to Torshin since he had gone to a number of their conventions and even spoken to the group. Butina therefore joined, paid her membership dues, and invited them to send someone over to give a talk at their second annual meeting in Moscow. It was a reciprocal invitation following the NRA’s invitation to Torshin.
That meeting took place at the end of October 2013. Stepping off a Delta jet from Washington was David Keene, sixty-seven, whose thick sweep of snow white hair, combed JFK-style, gave him the appearance of a retired judge. Instead, he was the former president of the National Rifle Association. Following the invitation, Keene wanted to go but worried about his health and asked an old friend, Paul Erickson, to come along as his “body man,” Erickson told me. “He said we think that this group is probably real, but we don’t know, it’s worth a trip to meet this woman.”
At fifty-two, Erickson was thin, with the physique of a basketball player, and dark curly hair that formed a half circle beneath a balding crown. For years he had maintained long and close ties to America’s conservative power centers. If Keene had been the movement’s general, Erickson was its veteran guerrilla fighter. Sandwiched between campaign stints for conservative Republicans like Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Richard Viguerie, and Mitt Romney were far-flung missions in support of anti-Soviet rebel forces.
Erickson also had a very dark and very hidden side. Charming, polite to a fault, at the same time he was denouncing liberals and Democrats for their unsound economic policies, he was secretly defrauding investors out of millions of dollars in dubious financial schemes ranging from nursing homes to oil fields. But on that Halloween eve in Moscow in 2013, it was not a right-wing con man Maria Butina saw emerge from the airport customs area with Keene, but a charming, successful American businessman and a respected political strategist with a broad smile and a warm and ingratiating manner.
By the end of the visit both Keene and Erickson were surprised and also convinced that Butina’s group was genuine. “We watched over the course of nine hours that day her run this thing like the Trans-Siberian Railroad, boom, boom, boom,” Erickson told me. “And by the time we finished that day, two things were clear to us. The organization was real; it was not a false front. And more to the point, the members were real.” But it was not without risk in a country where nearly all guns are outlawed, Putin distrusted activist organizations, and surveillance is pervasive. “We saw her office in Moscow that day,” said Erickson. “She kept a ‘go’ bag by the door at the office and one in her home. When you get arrested and have to go to prison: a toothbrush, a change of underwear.”
Eventually, Butina and Erickson grew close and began seeing more of each other as she would come to the United States to attend NRA conventions, accompanying Torshin as his translator. At one point, to make it clear that she was working for him as an intern, or unpaid assistant, rather than a paramour, she had him issue her cards listing her as his assistant. And Erickson would occasionally fly to Moscow. In June 2015, following an NRA convention in Nashville, Butina began looking into graduate schools in the United States for a master’s degree in international relations. It was at that point that Erickson invited her to join him at the annual Libertarian Party meeting in Las Vegas, which was when she met Patrick Byrne.
Despite the bureau’s lack of interest in Butina as a spy, Byrne kept in touch with her after she flew back to Moscow. And the emails grew more and more romantic. Byrne was as attracted to the mysterious Russian as he was suspicious of her. And Butina was charmed by the handsome, larger-than-life businessman. But as in the hotel room, Byrne was also attempting to set a trap for her. And he therefore kept trying to convince his FBI contacts that Butina was a Kremlin spy, based on nothing but his increasingly unhinged “Deep State” paranoia and childlike “Men in Black” fantasies.
“Finally, in September of 2015, I received something that sounded like they wanted me to meet her again,” Byrne told me. “But I wanted to make sure there was an unambiguous decision being made, because I didn’t want to meet her again and then have them show up in my life and give me a hard time.” Tired of the indecision, Byrne told his FBI contacts to make up their mind. “In an effort to make things clear, I sent a binary message along the lines of: Not wanting to get in a hassle with the U.S. government, I am not going to meet Maria again unless I hear the word, ‘Greenlight.’ They responded: ‘Greenlight.’”
With that, Byrne invited Butina to meet him in New York for a romantic weekend, and Butina agreed. They got together at The Bowery, an opulent, high-priced seventeen-story hotel in the former Skid Row part of Manhattan. Byrne obviously enjoyed his role as an “undercovers” agent for the FBI and told Butina he wanted to continue it—of course, without telling her she was sleeping with an unofficial freelance FBI informant who would report their every whisper to federal agents.
“So, at the end of our first three-day tryst, I proposed the following,” Byrne said. “Every six weeks or so suits me just fine. Pick a city you want to see while you’re in America, like Miami, or San Francisco, I’ll just send you a ticket and we’ll make a weekend of it.” Living in Moscow, Butina was having second thoughts, but said if they did get together again it would have to be someplace closer, such as in Europe. Byrne therefore wasted little time. He booked a cruise on a charter yacht sailing out of Montenegro’s lavish Porto Montenegro from September 24 to 28. The company was Camper & Nicholson’s International, whose catalog lists charter yachts from the port beginning at about $117,000 a week and running to $584,000 a week for the seventy-three-meter Titania. But Butina canceled. As a result, to Byrne’s disappointment their rendezvouses devolved into simply friendly and occasional platonic dinners rather than romantic trysts. So much for the “red sparrow.”
Nevertheless, Byrne dutifully reported both the September pillow talk and the dinner chatter to the FBI. But there was little to report since Byrne quickly became convinced that he had been mistaken, that Butina was not the Deep State spy he had originally suspected but instead just who she said she was. “I was telling them she’s not a spy,” said Byrne. “From my first ninety-minute discussion with her, I thought she might be the best thing that ever happened to Russia. And even Russian-U.S. relations. Which is what she said she wanted.”
From their own investigation of Butina, the agents quickly came to the same conclusion that she was simply an innocent grad student. “The federal agents showed up and started talking to me about this, I’d say, January through March of 2016,” Byrne said. “The Men in Black were sort of just brushing all this off… Any interest in the U.S. government went, as far as I could tell, to zero. Absolute zero… I was kind of surprised, there was no appetite, not only no appetite but the FBI was telling me, ‘That’s ridiculous, that’s ridiculous, that’s absolutely ridiculous, she’s just some grad student.’”
By March 2016, with nothing suspicious about Butina and her activities over the past six months, the bureau decided to pull the plug on the operation. The FBI agents, said Byrne, told him that “the agency [CIA] has spent a couple of weeks studying her and they’ve decided there’s nothing to her and she’s not connected to anybody… In fact, we think it’s time you break up with her and get her out of your life.” Byrne complied. “So I did,” he said. “Roughly, by text. Curtly. Simply told her I was tired of being ‘the other guy.’ What was she going to say to that? It was unlike me not to be kinder. Thus, when I was told to cut her out of my life, I did. Just like that.”
Three months later, the Washington Post carried the front-page headline “Russian Government Hackers Penetrated DNC, Stole Opposition Research on Trump.” Suddenly caught flat-footed, the FBI began scrambling for Russians to surveil and arrest. The agents therefore contacted Byrne. “Boy, were we wrong,” he says they told him. “You were right about Maria and right about the Russians. Get on this, all Maria all the time. All Russia all the time. Gloves are off, Patrick, you get on this.” Byrne agreed, and a surprised Butina once again heard from the Mad Hatter. Without her knowing it, she now had an FBI bull’s-eye on her back. For the bureau, she was the only game in town.
CHAPTER 35
The Scapegoat
Now, in the toxic atmosphere of Russiagate, nearly every action Butina took would be looked at in retrospect by the FBI counterspies through a conspiratorial lens, as proof she was a spy, even including her simple question to Trump. That same conspiracy-mongering quickly became rampant in much of the press. Calling Butina a “quasi-spy” on National Public Radio, David Corn, Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones, said, “She asked him the most important question there for the Kremlin,” as if she had been sent on a secret diabolical mission by Putin. As a foreign student about to enter grad school to study international relations it was a logical question to ask about her own country. And she had reservations at the hotel long before Trump’s last-minute decision to appear there, making the Moscow spy operation quite an intelligence coup.
Corn also thought it was suspicious that Butina would ask people to friend her on Facebook. “Will you be my Facebook friend? Will you Snapchat with me?” he said, as if it was standard Russian spy tradecraft rather than the actions of a typical college student.
By August 2016, when Maria Butina stepped off a plane from Moscow to begin her two-year grad school course at American University, Russiagate was in full steam. Slim and attractive, with the figure of a dancer and long rose-colored hair that spiraled gently down her back, Butina fit the stereotype of a seductive Russian spy, like Anna Chapman, the redheaded Russian sleeper agent arrested in New York City in 2010; Jennifer Lawrence, who played the redheaded Russian spy-seductress in the film Red Sparrow; and Keri Russell, who starred in the popular television show The Americans as a dedicated Soviet spy posing as a typical U.S. citizen.
