Luke Harding > Quotes

“Trump’s pick for secretary of state? Rex Tillerson, a figure known and trusted in Moscow, and recipient of the Order of Friendship. National security adviser? Michael Flynn, Putin’s dinner companion and a beneficiary of undeclared Russian fees. Campaign manager? Paul Manafort, longtime confidant to ex-Soviet oligarchs. Foreign policy adviser? Carter Page, an alleged Moscow asset who gave documents to Putin’s spies. Commerce secretary? Wilbur Ross, an entrepreneur with Russia-connected investments. Personal lawyer? Michael Cohen, who sent emails to Putin’s press secretary. Business partner? Felix Sater, son of a Russian American mafia boss. And other personalities, too. It was almost as if Putin had played a role in naming Trump’s cabinet. The U.S. president, of course, had done the choosing. But the constellation of individuals, and their immaculate alignment with Russian interests, formed a discernible pattern, like stars against a clear night sky. A pattern of collusion.”
― Luke Harding, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

“Snowden’s itinerary does, however, seem to bear the fingerprints of Julian Assange. Assange was often quick to criticise the US and other western nations when they abused human rights. But he was reluctant to speak out against governments that supported his personal efforts to avoid extradition.”
― Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“The common theme here was contempt: a poisonous disregard for human life. For Vladimir Putin’s critics have an uncanny habit of turning up dead.”
― Luke Harding, A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia's War with the West

“The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland observes that Britain ‘has a fundamentally different conception of power to, say, the United States’. It doesn’t have a Bill of Rights or a written constitution, or the American idea that ‘we the people’ are sovereign. Rather, the British system still bears the ‘imprint of its origins in monarchy’, with power emanating from the top and flowing downwards. Britons remain subjects rather than citizens. Hence their lack of response towards government intrusion.”
― Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“In fact, the aim is to blur what is true with what is not, to the point that the truth disappears altogether. By noisily asserting that something is false, you create a fake counter-reality. In time this constructed sovereign version of events becomes real- at least in the minds of those who are watching.”
― Luke Harding, A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia's War with the West

“Given Germany’s totalitarian backstory – the Nazis then communists – it was hardly surprising that Snowden’s revelations caused outrage. In fact, a newish noun was used to capture German indignation at US spying: der Shitstorm. The Anglicism entered the German dictionary Duden in July 2013, as the NSA affair blew around the world. Der Shitstorm refers to widespread and vociferous outrage expressed on the internet, especially on social media platforms.”
― Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“Snowden called the NSA ‘self-certifying’. In the debate over who ruled the internet, the NSA provided a dismaying answer: ‘We do.’ The slides, given to Poitras and published by Der Spiegel magazine, show that the NSA had developed techniques to hack into iPhones. The agency assigned specialised teams to work on other smartphones too, such as Android. It targeted BlackBerry, previously regarded as the impregnable device of choice for White House aides. The NSA can hoover up photos and voicemail. It can hack Facebook, Google Earth and Yahoo Messenger. Particularly useful is geo-data, which locates where a target has been and when. The agency collects billions of records a day showing the location of mobile phone users across the world. It sifts them – using powerful analytics – to discover ‘co-travellers’. These are previously unknown associates of a target. Another”
― Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“Snowden evidently knew of WikiLeaks, a niche transparency website”
― Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“The encounter demonstrated the difference between newspaper cultures on either side of the pond. In the US, three big newspapers enjoy a virtual monopoly. With little competition, they are free to pursue leads at a leisurely, even gentlemanly, pace. The political culture is different too, with the press generally deferential towards the president. If anyone asked Obama a tough or embarrassing question, this was itself”
― Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“Paradoxically, in its quest to make Americans more secure, the NSA has made American communications less secure; it has undermined the safety of the entire internet.”
― Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“Snowden was horrified to discover that behind bars he would have no access to a computer.”
― Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“Do we want to live in a controlled society or do we want to live in a free society? That’s the fundamental question we’re being faced with.’ EDWARD SNOWDEN”
― Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“As a candidate, Trump’s praise of Putin had been a steady theme. In the White House, his fidelity to Russia’s president had continued, even as he lambasted other world leaders, turned on aides and allies, fired the head of the FBI, bawled out his attorney general, and defenestrated his chief ideologue, Steve Bannon. It was Steele’s dossier that offered a compelling explanation for Trump’s unusual constancy vis-à-vis Russia. First, there was Moscow’s kompromat operation against Trump going back three decades, to the Kryuchkov era. If Trump had indulged in compromising behavior, Putin knew of it. Second, there was the money: the cash from Russia that had gone into Trump’s real estate ventures. The prospect of a lucrative deal in Moscow to build a hotel and tower, a project that was still being negotiated as candidate Trump addressed adoring crowds. And then there were the loans. These had helped rescue Trump after 2008. They had come from a bank that was simultaneously laundering billions of dollars of Russian money. Finally, there was the possibility that the president had other financial connections to Moscow, as yet undisclosed, but perhaps hinted at by his missing tax returns. Together, these factors appeared to place Trump under some sort of obligation. One possible manifestation of this was the president’s courting of Putin in Hamburg. Another was the composition of his campaign team and government, especially in its first iteration. Wherever you looked there was a Russian trace.”
― Luke Harding, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

“Comey had turned away from his upbringing and embraced various kinds of evangelism. He wrote his thesis on how the evangelist teacher Jerry Falwell somehow embodied the teachings of Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was America’s greatest mid-twentieth-century theologian. His work Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, published in 1932, is a classic of Christian thinking. Niebuhr’s view of the world was pessimistic. He described himself as a member of a “disillusioned generation” and wrote from an age of war, totalitarianism, racial injustice, and economic depression. Individuals were capable of virtuous acts, he thought, but groups and nations struggled to transcend their collective egoism. This makes social conflict inevitable. Niebuhr was brutally honest about human failings. American contemporary culture was “still pretty firmly enmeshed in the illusions and sentimentalities of the Age of Reason,” he wrote. He didn’t see much room for goodness in politics. Instead he identified “greed, the will-to-power and other forms of self-assertion” at the level of group politics.”
― Luke Harding, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

“Putin’s method, Steele said, was unseen. “Nothing was written down. Don’t expect me or anyone to produce a piece of paper saying please X bribe Y with this amount in this way. He’s not going to do this.” He added: “Putin is an ex-intelligence officer. Everything he does has to be deniable.” The oligarchs were brought in to disguise the Kremlin’s controlling role, Steele said, according to The Sunday Times.”
― Luke Harding, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

“As much as 25 per cent of the world’s current internet traffic crosses British territory via the cables, en route between the US, Europe, Africa and all points east. Much of the remaining traffic has landing or departure points in the US. So between them Britain and the US play host to most of the planet’s burgeoning data flows.”
― Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“then the two FSB assassins put a mini-nuclear poison in Litvinenko’s teapot. It was an audacious operation, and a sign of things to come.”
― Luke Harding, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

“Barack Obama, in a 2007 stump speech for his nascent presidential campaign, had pledged, ‘No more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more National Security Letters to spy on American citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do no more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.”
― Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“instructions from Trump, or people close to him. These instructions were to send a message to the Russians via Kislyak that the Trump administration was minded to scrap sanctions.”
― Luke Harding, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

“Facebook would eventually admit that Russia had employed 470 “inauthentic accounts and pages” as part of its influence campaign. It worked. One page, Secure Borders, got 133,000 followers before it was closed down. The page dubbed immigrants “freeloaders” and “scum.” Moscow spent $100,000 on more than three thousand ads, Facebook said. The numbers could be higher, Mark Zuckerberg, its CEO, acknowledged later.”
― Luke Harding, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

“One of Trump’s advisers had even conducted an enthusiastic correspondence with a Russian spy. And given him documents. Not in Moscow but in Manhattan.”
― Luke Harding, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

“Nayyem described the American as “deeply cynical.” “He didn’t think about the history or about the people of Ukraine. He treated Ukraine as if he was playing a computer game, dividing the country into three parts, making these clashes.”
― Luke Harding, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

“In late 2015 GCHQ was carrying out standard “collection” against Moscow targets. These were known Kremlin operatives already on the grid. Nothing unusual here. Except that the Russians were talking to people associated with Trump. The precise nature of these exchanges has not been made public.”
― Luke Harding, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

“the easy bit – passing the material to sympathetic journalists – was proving tricky.”
― Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“Trump’s hedgehog-like signature.”
― Luke Harding, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

“For four decades Trump’s property empire effectively functioned as a laundromat for Moscow money.”
― Luke Harding, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

“Litvinenko was undoubtedly Mayak’s most spectacular victim. But there were thousands of anonymous others in Chelyabinsk province and beyond who were consigned to agonising leukemias and premature deaths. Their suffering played out at home and in hospitals, largely unnoticed, beyond a small circle of family and friends, before an indifferent world.”
― Luke Harding, A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia's War with the West

“[Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert]”
― Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

“A dossier of compromising material on Hillary CLINTON has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct. The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesman, PESKOV, directly on Putin’s orders. However, it has not yet been distributed abroad, including to TRUMP. Russian intentions for its deployment still unclear.”
― Luke Harding, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

“Further improvement in operational work with agents calls for fuller and wider utilisation of confidential and special unofficial contacts. These should be acquired chiefly among prominent figures in politics and society, and important representatives of business and science.” These should not only “supply valuable information” but also “actively influence” a country’s foreign policy “in a direction of advantage to the USSR.”
― Luke Harding, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win