Dayton Daily News

U.S. spies seeking NSA tools are offered Trump dirt

- Matthew Rosenberg

BERLIN — After months of secret negotiatio­ns, a shadowy Russian bilked American spies out of $100,000 last year, promising to deliver stolen National Security Agency cyberweapo­ns in a deal that he insisted would also include compromisi­ng material on President Donald Trump, according to U.S. and European intelligen­ce officials.

The cash, delivered in a suitcase to a Berlin hotel room in September, was intended as the first installmen­t of a $1 million payout, according to U.S. officials, the Russian and communicat­ions reviewed by The New York Times. The theft of the secret hacking tools had been devastatin­g to the NSA, and the agency was struggling to get a full inventory of what was missing.

Several U.S. intelligen­ce officials said they made clear that they did not want the Trump material from the Russian, who was suspected of having murky ties to Russian intelligen­ce and to Eastern European cybercrimi­nals. He claimed the informatio­n would link the president and his associates to Russia. Instead of providing the hacking tools, the Russian produced unverified and possibly fabricated informatio­n involving Trump and others, including bank records, emails and purported Russian intelligen­ce data.

The U.S. intelligen­ce officials said they cut off the deal because they were wary of being entangled in a Russian operation to create discord inside the U.S. government. They were also fearful of political fallout in Washington if they were seen to be buying scurrilous informatio­n on the president.

The CIA declined to comment on the negotiatio­ns with the Russian seller. The NSA, which produced the bulk of the hacking tools that the Americans sought to recover, said only that “all NSA employees have a lifetime obligation to protect classified informatio­n.”

The negotiatio­ns in Europe last year were described by U.S. and European intelligen­ce officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a clandestin­e operation, and the Russian. The U.S. officials worked through an intermedia­ry — an American businessma­n based in Germany — to preserve deniabilit­y. There were meetings in provincial German towns where John le Carré set his early spy novels, and data handoffs in five-star Berlin hotels. U.S. intelligen­ce agencies spent months tracking the Russian’s flights to Berlin, his rendezvous with a mistress in Vienna and his trips home to St. Petersburg, the officials said.

The NSA even used its official Twitter account to send coded messages to the Russian nearly a dozen times. The episode ended with U.S. spies chasing the Russian out of Western Europe, warning him not to return if he valued his freedom, the American businessma­n said. The Trump material was left with the American, who has secured it in Europe.

The Russian claimed to have access to a staggering collection of secrets that included everything from the computer code for the cyberweapo­ns stolen from the NSA and CIA to what he said was a video of Trump consorting with prostitute­s in a Moscow hotel room in 2013, according to U.S. and European officials and the Russian, who agreed to be interviewe­d in Germany on the condition of anonymity. There remains no evidence that such a video exists.

The Russian was known to U.S. and European officials for his ties to Russian intelligen­ce and cybercrimi­nals — two groups suspected in the theft of the NSA and CIA hacking tools.

But his apparent eagerness to sell the Trump “kompromat” — a Russian term for informatio­n used to gain leverage over someone — to U.S. spies raised suspicions among officials that he was part of an operation to feed the informatio­n into U.S. intelligen­ce agencies and pit them against Trump. Early in the negotiatio­ns, for instance, he dropped his asking price from about $10 million to just over $1 million. Then, a few months later, he showed the American businessma­n a 15-second clip of a video showing a man in a room talking to two women.

No audio could be heard on the video, and there was no way to verify if the man was Trump, as the Russian claimed. But the choice of venue for showing the clip heightened U.S. suspicions of a Russian operation: The viewing took place at the Russian Embassy in Berlin, the businessma­n said.

There were other questions about the Russian’s reliabilit­y. He had a history of money laundering and a thin legitimate cover business: a nearly bankrupt company that sold portable grills for street-side sausage salesmen, according to British incorporat­ion papers.

“The distinctio­n between an organized criminal and a Russian intelligen­ce officer and a Russian who knows some Russian intel guys — it all blurs together,” said Steven L. Hall, former chief of Russia operations at the CIA. “This is the difficulty of trying to understand how Russia and Russians operate from the Western viewpoint.”

U.S. intelligen­ce officials were also wary of the purported kompromat the Russian wanted to sell. They saw the informatio­n, especially the video, as the stuff of tabloid gossip pages, not intelligen­ce collection, U.S. officials said.

But the Americans desperatel­y wanted the hacking tools. The cyberweapo­ns had been built to break into the computer networks of Russia, China and other rival powers. Instead, they ended up in the hands of a mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, which has since provided hackers with tools that infected millions of computers around the world, crippling hospitals, factories and businesses.

No officials wanted to refuse informatio­n they thought might help determine what had happened.

“That’s one of the bedeviling things about counterint­elligence and the wilderness that it is: Nobody wants to be caught in a position of saying, ‘We wrote that off,’ and then five years later saying, ‘Holy cow, it was actually a real guy,’” Hall said.

U.S. intelligen­ce agencies believe that Russia’s spy services see the deep political divisions in the United States as a fresh opportunit­y to inflame partisan tensions. Russian hackers are targeting American voting databases ahead of the midterm election this year, they said, and using bot armies to promote partisan causes on social media. The Russians are also particular­ly eager to cast doubt on the federal and congressio­nal investigat­ions into the Russian meddling, U.S. intelligen­ce officials said.

Part of that effort, the officials said, appears to be trying to spread informatio­n that hews closely to unsubstant­iated reports about Trump’s dealings in Russia — including the purported video, whose existence Trump has repeatedly dismissed.

Rumors that Russian intelligen­ce possesses the video surfaced more than a year ago in an explosive and unverified dossier compiled by a former British spy and paid for by Democrats. Since then, at least four Russians with espionage and underworld connection­s have appeared in Central and Eastern Europe, offering to sell kompromat that would corroborat­e the dossier to U.S. political operatives, private investigat­ors and spies, U.S. and European intelligen­ce officials said.

U.S. officials suspect that at least some of the sellers are working for Russia’s spy services.

The Times obtained four of the documents that the Russian in Germany tried to pass to U.S. intelligen­ce (The Times did not pay for the material). All are purported to be Russian intelligen­ce reports, and each focuses on associates of Trump. Carter Page, the former campaign adviser who has been the focus of FBI investigat­ors, features in one; Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the billionair­e Republican donors, in another.

Yet all four appear to be drawn almost entirely from news reports, not secret intelligen­ce. They all also contain stylistic and grammatica­l usages not typically seen in Russian intelligen­ce reports, said Yuri Shvets, a former KGB officer who spent years as a spy in Washington before defecting to the United States just before the end of the Cold War.

 ?? REUTERS ?? The theft of the National Security Agency’s secret hacking tools has been devastatin­g to the agency, which has its headquarte­rs in Fort Meade, Maryland. The tools ended up with a mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, which has since...
REUTERS The theft of the National Security Agency’s secret hacking tools has been devastatin­g to the agency, which has its headquarte­rs in Fort Meade, Maryland. The tools ended up with a mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, which has since...

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