Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

by Luke Harding

Steele knew better. Three days after the coup, surveillance on him resumed. Steele’s colleagues in Hungary and Czechoslovakia reported that after revolutions there the secret police vanished, never to come back. But here were the same KGB guys, with the same familiar faces. They went back to their old routines of bugging, apartment break-ins, and harassing. The regime changed. The system didn’t.

During the primaries, conservative website The Washington Free Beacon commissioned Fusion to investigate Trump. The Washington Free Beacon was backed by one of Trump’s wealthy opponents, Paul Singer, a New York hedge fund billionaire and Republican donor. Singer dropped out after Trump became the presumptive nominee. Senior Democrats seeking to elect Hillary took over the Trump contract. The new client was the Democratic National Committee. A lawyer working for Hillary’s campaign, Marc E. Elias, retained Fusion and received its reports.

Steele had stumbled upon a well-advanced conspiracy that went beyond anything he had discovered with Litvinenko or FIFA. It was the boldest plot yet. It involved the Kremlin and Trump. Their relationship, Steele’s sources claimed, went back a long way. For at least the past five years Russian intelligence had been secretly cultivating Trump. This operation had succeeded beyond Moscow’s wildest expectations.

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.

The electronic intelligence suggested Steele was right. According to one account, the U.S. agencies looked as though they were “asleep.” “‘Wake up! There’s something not right here!’ The BND [German intelligence], the Dutch, the DGSE, SIS were all saying this,” one Washington-based source told me.

It was this leaking that made Russia’s DNC hack different. As General Mike Hayden, the former NSA and CIA director, said, stealing your opponent’s emails was simply “honorable international espionage.” Everybody did that, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the French, the Germans, and other Western nations. “It’s accepted international practice. If I could have broken into Russian servers, I would have done it,” he said. What made this hack different was what happened afterward, Hayden suggested—the fact that Russia “weaponized this data” and “shoved it into U.S. space.”

Yates had assumed that the Trump administration would do something. The White House’s priority, it appeared, was different: to find out what the FBI had on Flynn.

How much of this was down to Manafort? Might he be blamed for the Ukraine disaster? And to what extent was Yanukovych’s kleptocratic family presidency a model for Donald Trump?

Manafort’s specialty, according to Kovzhun, is running expensive campaigns and targeting the “big unwashed.” “It’s the same element who voted for Putin, supported Brexit, back Erdogan, and who like Trump. Manafort works the lowest common denominator. I find him repulsive and his message ugly. He leaves destruction in his wake.”

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.

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. Comme...

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 interest...

Were it not for Steele’s dossier, Trump would have lifted sanctions and created a new alliance with Russia, Chris Steele believed. As one friend put it: “Chris stole a great strategic victory from right under Putin’s nose.”