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

Luke Harding

COLLUSION

Luke Harding is a journalist, writer, and award-winning foreign correspondent with The Guardian. Between 2007 and 2011, he was the Guardian s Moscow bureau chief. The Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the Cold War.

He is the author of five previous nonfiction books: A Very Expensive Poison: The Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putins War with the West , The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the Worlds Most Wanted Man , Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia , WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assanges War on Secrecy , and The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken (the last two cowritten with David Leigh).

Two have been made into Hollywood movies. Dreamworks The Fifth Estate , based on WikiLeaks , was released in 2013. The director Oliver Stones biopic Snowden , adapted from The Snowden Files , appeared in 2016. A stage version of Poison is forthcoming. His books have been translated into thirty languages. Harding lives near London with his wife, the freelance journalist Phoebe Taplin, and their two children.

ALSO BY LUKE HARDING

The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken (with David Leigh)

WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assanges War on Secrecy (with David Leigh)

Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia

Libya: Murder in Benghazi and the Fall of Gaddafi (with Martin Chulov)

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the Worlds Most Wanted Man

A Very Expensive Poison: The Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putins War with the West

A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, NOVEMBER 2017

Copyright 2017 by Luke Harding

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN9780525562511

Ebook ISBN9780525520931

Cover design by Linda Huang

Cover photograph (detail) Mikhail Metzel/TASS/Getty Images

www.vintagebooks.com

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CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

Meeting

December 2016

Grosvenor Gardens, London SW1

Victoria Station in London. A mixture of shabby and genteel. Theres a railway terminus, a bus station, anda little farther ona triangular park. Here you can find a statue of the French World War I hero Marshal Ferdinand Foch sitting on a horse. Written on the plinth are Fochs words: I am conscious of having served England Someone has added in black pen: by murdering thousands.

Its a zone of arrivals and departures. Around Foch are tall plane trees and brown benches splattered white with pigeon droppings. There are tourists, commuters, and the odd hirsute bum, sipping from a can of lager and muttering. The man who owns this prime slice of real estate is the Duke of Westminster. Hes Britains wealthiest aristocrat.

Keep going and you reach a row of tall neoclassical houses, done in French Renaissance style. This is Grosvenor Gardens. The street looks onto the back wall of a world-famous residence, Buckingham Palace. With a bit of pluck and a long ladder you might vault directly into Her Majestys private back garden. Its fir trees, poking into the gray London skyline, are visible to commoners. The Queens lake is unseen.

Some of the houses here announce their inhabitants: PR firm, Japanese restaurant, language school. But at number 9-11 Grosvenor Gardens theres no clue as to who or what is inside. Two pillars frame an anonymous black front door. Theres a closed-circuit TV sign. No names on the door buzzer. Above, three floors of offices.

If you enter and turn right, you find yourself in a modest ground-floor suite: a couple of bare rooms painted ivory white, a medium-sized color map of the world fixed to one wall, white blinds just above street level on high windows. There are computers, and newspapers, too: a copy of the London Times . The impression is of a small, discreet, professional operation.

The office is home to a British firm, Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd. Orbiss website says its a leading corporate intelligence consultancy. It adds, vaguely: We provide senior decision-makers with strategic insight, intelligence and investigative services. We then work with clients to implement strategies which protect their interests worldwide.

Decoded, Orbis is in the nonstate spying business. It spies for commercial clientsdelving into the secrets of individuals and institutions, governments and international organizations. London is the global capital of private intelligence. A tough sector, in the words of one former British spy, who worked in it for a year before landing a job with a large corporation. There are more than a dozen such firms, staffed mostly by former intelligence officers specializing in foreign know-how.

This isnt quite the world of classic espionage or James Bond. But its not far from it.

The man who runs Orbis is called Christopher Steele. Steele and his business partner, Christopher Burrows, are Orbiss directors. Both are British. Steele is fifty-two; Burrows a little older, fifty-eight. Their names dont appear on Orbiss public material. Nor is there mention of their former careers. A pair of bright younger graduates work alongside them. They form a small team.

Steeles office gives few clues as to the nature of his undercover work.

Theres only one hint.

Lined up near the directors desk are nesting Russian dolls, or matryoshki . A souvenir from Moscow. They feature Russias great nineteenth-century writers: Tolstoy, Gogol, Lermontov, Pushkin. The dolls are hand-painted and have the names of the authors written toward the base in florid Cyrillic characters. The uppercase T of Tolstoy resembles a swirling Greek pi.

In the tumultuous days of 2016, the dolls were as good a metaphor as any for the astonishing secret investigation Steele had recently been asked to do. It was an explosive assignmentto uncover the Kremlins innermost secrets with relation to one Donald J. Trump, to unnest them one by one, like so many dolls, until the truth was finally revealed. Its conclusions would shake the American intelligence community and cause a political earthquake not seen since the dark days of President Richard Nixon and Watergate.

Steeles findings were sensational, and the resulting dossier would in effect accuse President-elect Trump of the gravest of crimes: collusion with a foreign power. That power was Russia. The alleged crimevehemently denied, contested, and in certain key respects unprovablewas treason. The new U.S. president designate was, it was whispered, a traitor.

To find a plot that crazy, you had to turn to fiction: Richard Condons The Manchurian Candidate , about a Soviet-Chinese operation to seize the White House. Or a largely forgotten thriller by the writer Ted Allbeury, The Twentieth Day of January . In this one, Moscow recruits a young American during the 1968 Paris student riots who goes on to greater things. Like Steele, Allbeury was a former British intelligence officer.

Until his work was brought blindingly into the light, Steele was unknown. Unknown, that is, beyond a narrow circle of U.S. and UK government intelligence insiders and Russia experts. That was the way he preferred it.

The year 2016 was an extraordinary historical moment. First, Brexit, Britains shock decision to leave the European Union. Then, to the surprise and dismay of many Americansnot to mention others around the worldDonald J. Trump was unexpectedly elected that November as the United States forty-fifth president.