by Howard Blum - Vanity Fair
The man behind the infamous dossier that raises the possibility that Donald Trump may be vulnerable to Kremlin blackmail is Russia expert Christopher Steele formerly of M.I.6. His story reveals why the dossier has scared some powerful people.
"It started off as a fairly general inquiry," Steele would recall in an anonymous interview. Over the next seven incredible months, as the retired spy hunted about in an old adversary's territory, he found himself following a trail marked by as he then put it, hair raising concerns.
His sources, among them Source E, an ethnic Russian and 'close associate of Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump', disclosed: 'There was a well developed conspiracy of cooperation between the Trump campaign and the Russian leadership.' And then this: 'the Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing email messages, emanating from the DNC to the Wikileaks platform.'
And finally, 'in return the Trump team had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise US/NATO defense commitments in the Baltic and eastern Europe to deflect attention away from Ukraine.'
In the end, Steele found the rationale that is every whistleblowers sustaining philosophy: the greater good trumps all other concerns. Fortuitously he discovered that one of the Euroasian Joint FBI agents was now assigned to the Bureau office in Rome. By early August, a copy of his first two memos were shared with the FBI's man in Rome.
"Shock and horror" -- that, Steele would say in his anonymous interview, was the Bureau's reaction to the goodies he left on its doorstep and it wanted copies of all his subsequent reports the sooner the better.
His duty done, Steele waited with anxious anticipation for the official consequences.
There was none. Or at least not any public signs that the FBI was tracking down the right leads he'd offered. And in the weeks that followed, as summer turned to fall and the election drew closer Steele's sense of the mounting necessity of his mission must have intensified.
In early October, on a trip to New York, Steele sat down with David Corn, the Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones. It was a prudent choice. Corn had measured out a career breaking big stories and could be imperious, ruthless in a ruthless profession but he was also a man of his word. If he agreed to protect a source his commitment was unshakable. Steele's identity would be safe with him.
Corn accepted the terms, and then went to work; he began to investigate, trying to get a handle on Steele's credibility from people in the intelligence community. And all the while the clock was ticking, the election was just a month away. On October 31, in what one of Corn's colleagues would describe as a Hail Mary pass, he broke a judicious expurgated version of the story "A veteran spy has given the FBI information alleging a Russian operation to cultivate Donald Trump.'
But in the tidal wave of headlines and breaking news in the weeks before the election the story got swamped.
It was after all the silly season. First the FBI exonerated Hillary Clinton over possible charges involving a secure email server. Then 11 days before the election FBI director James Coney said, in effect, not so fast. Perhaps, he announced gravely, there is a smoking gun. The press swarmed to the story concerning Anthony Weiner's computer. And attention was busily paid to the final jabs the two candidates were taking at each other.
It wasn't long before, as the New York Times would write, the memos by the former spy became one of Washington's worst kept secrets as reporters scrambled to confirm or disprove them.
Within hours of the President-elect's victory speech, Vladimir Putin went on Russian state television to offer his congratulations. And in the Popular Front, a political movement founded by the Russian president, they slyly tweeted, 'they say that Putin once again beat all.'
. . . .
In March 2014 the Russian author Natan Dubovitsky published a short story titled "Without Sky" in the literary journal Russian Pioneer. In the story, which takes place in a dystopian future, a man recalls the events of the 5th World War decades earlier.
He describes these events as the first non-linear war. Instead of fighting in a traditional sense a battle between two sides, WW5 was a more Byzantine conflict. Multiple nations all fought one another at once and could switch sides at any time. Simplicity approaches to victory were seen as obsolete, as armed conflict itself was just one phase of a longer more insidious process.
Some even joined conflicts to facilitate their own defeat. Around the midpoint of the story he writes that the complexity of the war was only realized and analyzed later by historians and economists.
Natan Dubovitsky, as many Russians know, is the literary pseudonym of Vladislav Surkov, Putin's long time political technologist and a chief architect of the Kremlin propaganda machine.
But what looked like a vibrant coalition of support for Russians annexation was really just the booming sound and fury of Kremlin dramaturgia. Moscow spin master Surkov was largely at the helm, choreographing the entire thing, directing its patriotic ensemble in order to confuse and misdirect the countries and international organizations that might otherwise intervene against an act of war.
The Trump team both during its transition to power and at the end of 2016 and in the early stages of its administration, come across as an indecipherable swirl of contradictions, contradicting reports, and apparent hypocrisies.
This can seem at first blush like the obvious result of an inexperienced, seat of the pants presidents and a leadership style that favors flash over substance. We hear talk of draining the swamp, yet billionaires and special interests seem to have quickly infiltrated the White House that Trump assured his supporters would disavow elites.
what if all the Trumpian chaos that the mainstream media have come to take for granted as pugilism and sensation was part of a more involved plan? What if Trump and chief strategist Steve Bannon were actually drawing from a sophisticated post modern propaganda model developed by none other than Vladimir Putin, Surkov, and their political technologists at the Kremlin?
Trump and his team's espousal of fake news, embrace of alternate facts, and relentless lying to reporters, political adversaries, and the American people sabotage a democratic playing field that has existed in this country for more than two centuries.
Trump's use of Twitter is equally destructive. In hijacking headlines and warping the news cycle through sheer gravitational force, Trump is rupturing the journalism landscape, one landmine tweet at a time.
The effect, it would seem, is to undercut any attempt at vigilant analysis or coherent investigation into his administration. He is the distracter in chief, a decoy in the bully pulpit whose self perpetuating charade provides the perfect cover while shadier actors systematically transmogrify the democracy concealed in his immense shadow.
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