The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © 2018 by W P Company LLC

Cover design by Ploy Siripant; cover photographs © AFP/Getty Images (Trump); © by Phoelixde/Shutterstock (Russian skyline); © by Samiran Sarkar/Shutterstock (D.C. skyline); © Maxym/Shutterstock (texture)

Greg Miller asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008325756

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008325763

Version: 2018-09-27

Dedication

To Rebecca, Katie, Peter, and Cole

For Mom and Dad

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Part One

1. The Hack

2. Putin’s Trolls

3. Moths to the Flame

Part Two

4. “I Believe You Have Some Information for Us”

5. The Missing Emails

6. Crossfire Hurricane

7. Deep Inside the Kremlin

Part Three

8. Dezinformatsiya

9. The Russian Ambassador

10. Briefing the President

Part Four

11. You’re Fired

12. The Special Counsel Strikes

Part Five

13. “I Can’t Put on the Charm”

14. Helsinki

Epilogue

Plate Section

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Greg Miller

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

THE WARREN OF CUBICLES WAS SECURED BEHIND A METAL door. The name on the hallway placard had changed often over the years, most recently designating the space as part of the Mission Center for Europe and Eurasia. But internally, the office was known by its unofficial title: “Russia House.”

The unit had for decades been the center of gravity at the CIA, an agency within the agency, locked in battle with the KGB for the duration of the Cold War. The department’s prestige had waned after the September 11 attacks, and it was forced at one point to surrender space to counterterrorism operatives. But Russia House later reclaimed that real estate and began rebuilding, vaulting back to relevance as Moscow reasserted itself. Here, among a maze of desks, dozens of reports officers fielded encrypted cables from abroad, and “targeters” meticulously scoured data on Russian officials, agencies, businesses, and communications networks the CIA might exploit for intelligence.

Deeper inside was a conference room adorned with Stalin-era posters of heroically depicted Soviets, muscled soldiers and workers striding across fields or factories under the hammer and sickle. The room, swept routinely for listening devices, was the scene of increasingly tense meetings in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, as senior agency officials sought to make sense of a series of disconcerting reports. In late July, the agency had gained access to an extraordinary stream of information showing that Russian president Vladimir Putin was himself directing the “active measures” operation aimed at disrupting the U.S. presidential race. U.S. intelligence partners were also warning Russia House about worrisome contacts between Russian figures and campaign associates of the Republican nominee.

Donald Trump’s vigorous displays of admiration for the Russian leader only made things more bewildering. He routinely praised Putin and even seemed to enlist Moscow in an effort to hack his opponent’s email account. The question was, why? Taking a hard line against Russia was the politically winning move, and yet Trump seemed subservient.

Unlike any presidential candidate in memory, Trump had shielded his finances from public scrutiny. He refused to release his personal tax returns. His business empire was a labyrinth of separate companies registered under different names. Many of those he had done business with hid their identities behind corporate shells. Some of his most prominent developments were deep in debt, though how deep and to whom was nearly impossible to discern.

During the campaign, there was consolation in the idea that Trump’s unsettling behavior toward Moscow was a product of inexperience—a problem that would be contained when he was surrounded by smarter advisers or wouldn’t matter anymore once he lost. But those inside U.S. spy agencies were privy to alarming secrets that were not so easily shrugged off. Among them was that the Kremlin was actively seeking to help elect Trump.

Russia House was the point of origin for that assessment, which would later be embraced by the U.S. intelligence community and infuriate the 45th president. The Kremlin’s objectives began with sowing discord in American democracy, but broadened in mid-2016 to backing a specific candidate—who at this moment, his second day as leader of the free world, was making his way toward CIA headquarters.

President Trump had barely been in office twenty-four hours when his motorcade departed the White House grounds for the nine-mile trip to the CIA’s Northern Virginia campus. The clouds and cold that had dampened Inauguration Day lingered over a city littered with the debris of America’s post-election divide—pro-Trump memorabilia, inauguration programs and celebratory banners along the parade route; broken windows and burned vehicles on blocks where protesters had clashed with police in riot gear. Trump’s arrival in the White House had been followed by a women’s march that drew a crowd three times larger than the inaugural audience,1 and now throngs of pink-clad activists watched the caravan accelerate through the D.C. streets. Their gestures toward the motorcade, countered by some salutes from Trump supporters wandering Washington, reflected in the thick tinted glass of the president’s passing car.

The street-side crowds dissipated as the line of vehicles left downtown, crossed into Virginia, and followed the Potomac River north, turning onto the main route through the suburb of McLean and then past the zigzagging barricades that guard the entrance to the CIA. The agency occupies a sprawling, leafy campus in Northern Virginia enclosed by miles of electrified fence. At the center of the property is a seven-story building with a row of glass doors opening onto an iconic marble lobby—with the CIA seal inlaid in the terrazzo floor—frequently depicted in movies.

The CIA welcome for Trump would be cordial, even warm, but it was by now well known that the agency was responsible for a series of highly classified reports that had helped trigger an FBI investigation of Russia’s interference and ties to associates of the president. And Trump had made no secret of his growing belief that the CIA and FBI were engaged in a coordinated effort to damage his presidency before it had even begun. His blistering attacks on intelligence agencies had only intensified as he prepared to take office. He disparaged their conclusions about Russia’s involvement in the election and accused them of deliberately sabotaging him by leaking a document that had come to be known as the “dossier.” That collection of memos, compiled by a former British intelligence officer, contained dozens of unproven but explosive allegations about then-candidate Trump’s ties with Russia. Among the most salacious was that he had consorted with prostitutes during a 2013 trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, paying women to defile a hotel room where President Barack Obama had once stayed.

The dossier’s contents had been in circulation in Washington newsrooms for months, disseminated not by spy agencies but the private opposition research firm that had commissioned the reports. Their unsubstantiated assertions had gone mostly unreported in the press until U.S. intelligence officials told Trump about the dossier two weeks before he was sworn in. When its contents were published on BuzzFeed, Trump lashed out on Twitter. “Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public,” he said. “One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

The sting of that slur was acute. The CIA’s lineage traced to World War II and the creation of a spy service whose mission was to help Allied forces defeat the same Nazis that Trump now invoked. The agency’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services, was disbanded after the war, but a statue of its founding director, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, still stands in the agency lobby. Trump likely knew little of that history—or for that matter of the record of CIA abuses and corresponding reforms that had transpired during the intervening decades—and would never retract the insult. Many presidents had clashed with the CIA, but the relationship had never taken such an ugly turn before a commander in chief had even taken office.

No one knew what Trump would say when he addressed the crowd that awaited him, but one thing was certain: he would not be brought into Russia House.

THE TRIP TO LANGLEY HAD BEEN PLACED ON THE PRESIDENT’S CALENDAR weeks earlier by Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff. Priebus, a political operative grounded in the Republican Party establishment, had mapped out the new president’s first days down to the hour, a detailed schedule that was to set a breathtaking pace and serve as an example of the urgency and ambition of the new administration. The CIA was the first government agency on Trump’s itinerary, a decision designed in part to assure the GOP establishment that Trump would settle into office and be “presidential,” which for Republicans entailed being a staunch defender of the country’s national security institutions. More important, the Trump team hoped that the visit could avert an unnecessary rift with an agency whose unique aura and authority had proven seductive to previous presidents but was also capable of fierce bureaucratic combat—even against occupants of the Oval Office.

Trump stepped out of his armored car at 2:06 P.M. in an underground parking garage and was greeted by a CIA leadership team in flux. Now-former director John Brennan and his deputy had resigned once Trump took office, so Meroe Park, who had served for more than three years in the number three role, was officially in charge of the agency and its 20,000 employees. Park (the first woman to hold the reins as director, albeit in an acting capacity) held the job for just three days—long enough for Trump’s pick as CIA chief, Republican congressman Mike Pompeo, to be confirmed.

Park escorted the president into the Original Headquarters building, an H-shaped structure that opened when John F. Kennedy was president. Trump was then taken by golf cart—an accommodation he required even for short distances—to a futuristic command post that operatives of Kennedy’s era could hardly have imagined.

The CIA’s Predator operations floor is a dazzling theater of high-tech warfare. Concentric rows of computer terminals face a wall of high-definition video screens. The ambient lighting is darkened to allow analysts to focus on footage transmitted halfway around the world from aircraft (the early Predators now largely replaced with larger, more powerful Reapers) equipped with cameras and missiles but no cockpits. The number of CIA drone strikes had plunged since the early years of the Obama administration, the peak of the covert war against Al-Qaeda, but the use of unmanned aircraft was still significant. The viewing can be monotonous—countless hours of surveillance over dusty patches of remote terrain in places including Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria. But moments of engagement are dramatic.

The sight of missiles streaming toward a target is particularly adrenaline-inducing to the newly initiated, and the agency often brings those it most wants to impress to the Predator display, with highlights of successful strikes cued up. Trump appeared suitably enthused, though puzzled by what he regarded as undue restraint. When told that the CIA flew surveillance flights over Syria, but that only the military conducted strikes—an Obama policy meant to return the agency’s focus to its core espionage mission—Trump made clear he disagreed. When the agency’s head of drone operations explained how the CIA had developed special munitions to limit civilian casualties, the president seemed nonplussed. Shown a strike on a Taliban compound, Trump noticed that the militants had scattered seconds before the explosion. “Can they hear the bombs coming?” Trump said. “We should make the bombs silent so they can’t get away.”

Agency officials had been given just three days’ notice that Trump had planned to visit CIA and would deliver remarks; they had scrambled to make preparations that typically take weeks. An email to the workforce had offered tickets to the first four hundred employees to respond, a move that helped to ensure the new president would encounter a friendly crowd since the event was being held on a weekend. The agency readied a teleprompter, hoping the president would work from a prepared text. But the White House sent word at the last minute to scrap the screens—Trump would speak off the cuff.

THERE ARE NUMEROUS LOCATIONS AT CIA HEADQUARTERS SUITABLE for a speech, among them a cavernous hallway lined with past directors’ portraits and a semi-spherical auditorium known as the Bubble. But the risers for Trump’s visit were placed before the agency’s most hallowed backdrop: a marble wall on the north side of the main lobby marked by six rows of hand-carved stars, 117 in total at that time, each representing an agency officer killed in the line of duty. The number had grown by at least forty since the September 11 attacks, reflecting the toll of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The constellation had gained three new hand-chiseled stars just months before Trump’s visit, commemorating a trio of paramilitary officers killed in eastern Afghanistan in 2016. The names of many of the dead are entered in a grim ledger that rests beneath the field of stars, protected by an inch-thick plate of glass; the goatskin-bound volume also contains blank spaces for those whose identities and CIA missions remain classified.

The wall is, to the CIA, Arlington National Cemetery in miniature, a sacred space. In addition to somber memorial services when new stars are unveiled, the setting has been used for ceremonies marking momentous agency events, including the culmination of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. It has also been a backdrop for presidents. In 2009, Obama stood before the stars for a first visit that was also uncomfortable. As a presidential candidate, he had called the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation methods torture. Once in office, he ordered the agency’s secret prisons dismantled, and directed that the legal memos used to justify their operation be made public. Obama defended those decisions to a wary audience that he acknowledged viewed him with “understandable anxiety and concern.” But he also spoke of employees’ sacrifice and courage, describing the stars behind him—eighty-nine at the time—as “a testament to both the men and women of the CIA who gave their lives in service to their country.” Even those who considered Obama hostile to the agency (and there were many) respected his recognition of so many lives lost.

As the ceremony for Trump got under way, Park was first to the podium, telling the new president that “hundreds more” agency employees wished to attend but were turned away for lack of space. “It means a great deal that you chose to come to CIA on your first full day as president,” she said.

Vice President Mike Pence was next to speak, and hit all the politically expedient notes. It was “deeply humbling,” he said, to appear before “men and women of character who have sacrificed greatly and to stand before this hallowed wall, this memorial wall, where we remember 117 who paid the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.” He then set the table for Trump, saying he knew the new president was “going to make America safe again,” and that he had “never met anyone with a greater heart for those who every day, in diverse ways, protect the people of this nation through their character and their service and their sacrifice.”

Trump took the stage in a striped blue tie and, though indoors, a topcoat that fell below his knees. “There is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump,” he said as he stood facing the bronze gaze of Donovan’s statue. The agency would get so much support under his administration, he said, that “maybe you’re going to say, ‘Please don’t give us so much backing.’” He vowed to rid the world of terrorist groups and assured employees that their new director, Pompeo, was a “total star.”

The speech to that point seemed on track. Park and other agency officials appeared to exhale, gaining confidence that their fears—a confrontation, an attack on the Russia analysts, another Nazi slur—would not materialize. Then midway through his fifteen-minute appearance, without any pause or outward sign, Trump changed course. Abandoning discussion of anything relevant to the agency, he set off on a riff about how youthful he felt—“thirty, thirty-five, thirty-nine”—and described the size of his crowds during the final days of the campaign—“twenty-five thousand, thirty thousand people, fifteen thousand, nineteen thousand.” He falsely claimed to hold the record for Time magazine covers, and teased that he would help build a new room at CIA so that “your thousands of other people that have been trying to come in” would have the privilege of seeing him next time. Drifting into solipsism, Trump called members of the media “the most dishonest human beings on earth” for refusing to acknowledge the “million, million and a half people” he said had attended his inauguration the previous day—an erroneous claim off by a factor of four.

Hard-core Trump loyalists in the crowd stayed with him, standing throughout, cheering the taunts and boasts. But others began to shift uncomfortably, and CIA veterans who read his remarks or watched them online recoiled. There is no shortage of braggadocio at the CIA, an agency regarded by other U.S. intelligence services as permanently afflicted with a superiority complex. But in that setting, between the flags that frame the memorial wall, the display of rampant egotism felt offensive. A CIA veteran called Trump’s address “one of the more disconcerting speeches I’ve seen.” Another called it a “freewheeling narcissistic diatribe.” Brennan, whose career at the agency spanned twenty-five years, issued a statement later that day describing Trump’s appearance as a “despicable display of self-aggrandizement.” The president, Brennan said, “should be ashamed of himself.”

Members of Trump’s entourage had a different reaction: the applause and ovations persuaded his handlers, including Priebus, that the president had made headway in mending his rift with the CIA, and possibly had begun to win over the agency workforce. Pompeo, according to aides, saw the dynamic in reverse: that through ovation and flattery the workforce had begun to win over a president who craved adoration. Either way, Trump’s team considered his appearance at CIA a success.

During his speech, Trump directed applause to two of his closest aides, both sitting in the front row. “General Flynn is right over here. Put up your hand. What a good guy,” Trump said of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn. A retired Army general who had been one of Trump’s most vocal campaign supporters, Flynn was by then already under FBI investigation for omitting large foreign payments from his financial disclosure forms. Within days, he would also be questioned by FBI agents over his troubling post-election contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States. Next to get presidential praise was Priebus: “Reince. He’s like this political guy that turned out to be a superstar, right?” Trump said of his chief of staff, who was already struggling to tame the chaos of the Trump White House and was soon, like Flynn, banished.

Absorbed in self-adulation and grievances, Trump was blind to a stunning array of problems, some in plain view from the CIA stage: the failings of a national security adviser he’d insisted on hiring despite warnings; the existence of a larger agency workforce beyond this clapping, self-selected crowd that would be profoundly disturbed by his vainglorious performance; the fragments of intelligence being assembled in that very building that would help expose a web of connections between his campaign and Russia, and feed into investigations that would threaten his presidency.

Trump’s ability to see these perils was impaired by his own unfamiliarity with the norms of governance, his insecurity and narcissism. Other presidents had varying levels of these traits, but none had ever possessed such a concentrated combination. These qualities had been on display from the start of his campaign. But now, against a backdrop that symbolized the profound burden of presidential responsibility, his shortcomings seemed suddenly and gravely consequential.

In the reality show that had propelled him to great fame, Trump was depicted as a business titan with peerless instincts—a consummate negotiator, a fearless dealmaker, and an unflinching evaluator of talent who forgot nothing. Week after week, contestants competed for the chance to learn from a boardroom master—to be, as the show’s title put it, his apprentice.

In the reality that commenced with his inauguration, Trump seemed incapable of basic executive aspects of the job. His White House was consumed by dysfunction, with warring factions waiting for direction—or at least a coherent decision-making process—from the president. His outbursts sent waves of panic through the West Wing, with aides scrambling to contain the president’s anger or divine some broader mandate from the latest 140-character blast. He made rash hiring decisions, installing cabinet officials who seemed unfamiliar with the functions of their agencies, let alone their ethical and administrative requirements. Decorated public servants were subjected to tirades in the Oval Office and humiliating dress-downs in public. White House documents were littered with typos and obvious mistakes. Senior aides showed up at meetings without the requisite security clearances—and sometimes stayed anyway. Trump refused to read intelligence reports, and he grew so visibly bored during briefings that analysts took to reducing the world’s complexities to a collection of bullet points.