The ex-MI6 spook, UK ambassador - — and the depraved allegations convulsing America
Kremlin secret cameras silently record in a moscow presidential hotel suite as a U.S. businessman watches ‘perverted’ high-class hookers. There are sex parties in St Petersburg, clandestine meetings in Prague and an ex-mi6 agent on a trail across europe for evidence that could amount to the biggest political scandal since Watergate.
And all of it contained in a file locked away in russian intelligence headquarters marked ‘ kompromat’ — or ‘compromising material’ — and with the name of America’s next president on it.
nearly three decades after the Cold War was supposed to have ended, jaw-dropping allegations have emerged in the U.S. that suggest it is not only alive and well, but even murkier than John le Carre or ian Fleming ever imagined. The episode in From russia With love in which enemy spies secretly film James Bond’s hotel room tryst through a twoway mirror is tame compared to what Donald Trump was allegedly filmed getting up to in the presidential suite of the moscow ritz Carlton.
Just days before he is to be inaugurated as president, mr Trump yesterday faced stunning allegations in an unvetted 35-page report that claims that he has been targeted for years by a Putin regime determined, whether through bribery or blackmail, to bend him to its will.
in a major development in the ongoing scandal about alleged russian interference in U.S. politics and the 2016 presidential election, it has emerged that American intelligence chiefs last week presented both President Obama and mr Trump with claims that moscow has collected hugely compromising and salacious information about the president-elect.
Furthermore, the report claims, the Kremlin — sometimes through its diplomatic staff in the U.S. — has been ‘feeding’ mr Trump and his team ‘valuable intelligence on his opponents’ in an intelligence exchange over at least eight years.
Their discussions included the russians’ hacking and leaking of destabilising emails from the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s election team.
in return, it is claimed the Trump team covertly passed on to the Kremlin intelligence about russian oligarchs living in the United States. not only that, they allegedly agreed to ignore moscow’s intervention in the Ukraine as an election campaign issue, deflecting attention by concentrating instead on the failure of some nato members to pay their way on defence spending in the alliance.
Although Obama and Trump were given only a classified two-page synopsis of the claims as part of an intelligence briefing on alleged russian hacking of the presidential election, the full report on which they are based has been published on the internet news site BuzzFeed.
Amid criticism from mr Trump and others for publishing such damaging claims, BuzzFeed editor-in- chief Ben Smith said he published the ‘explosive and unverified’ document so that ‘Americans can make up their own minds about allegations over the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the U.S. government’.
mr Trump himself dismissed it as ‘fake news’ and ‘total fabrication’, while the Kremlin rubbished it as ‘pulp fiction’. At a press conference yesterday, mr Trump specifically addressed the claims of orgies and hidden cameras, insisting he always warned others of the danger of being secretly filmed when abroad. At the same time, he reminded reporters in an apparent reference to the sex parties claim, he was a notorious ‘germaphobe’.
But can the allegations, so extraordinary it is easy to dismiss them as over-excited spy fiction, be disregarded quite so easily? The internet is rife with hoax stories about U.S. politicians — in fact U.S. intelligence has blamed russia for promulgating many aimed at damaging Hillary Clinton. And there have been repeated Democratic accusations that republican mr Trump’s friendly overtures towards the Putin regime are not only suspicious, but indicate he will be a Kremlin ‘puppet’ president.
it also has to be noted that the report is unsubstantiated, and has already been found to have contained several factual errors, such as a misspelt company name and, damagingly, a mix-up involving mr Trump’s lawyer and a man with the same name.
However, the allegations were considered sufficiently credible, not to mention explosive, that the president and Trump needed to be told.
The intelligence chiefs reportedly included the details in order to make mr Trump aware that the information was circulating around Washington, as well as to bolster their claim that while moscow had dirt on both the republicans and Democrats, it had chosen to release only the latter.
What is especially intriguing is that the allegations largely came from memos compiled by a former member of British intelligence — a russia specialist posted to moscow in the nineties. The news channel Cnn, which broke the story, claims U.S. intelligence have checked out his sources.
The man in question was named last night as Christopher Steele, 52, who co-founded a respected londonbased firm called Orbis Business intelligence, with another former intelligence officer in 2009.
The former spook was recruited last year to help mr Trump’s republican rivals investigate his links with russia. When mr Trump won the nomina- tion, he was recruited to do the same job by Clinton supporters. mr Steele’s clients obviously hoped for dirt, and his claims, if true, would provide it.
How the report emerged is just as fascinatingly cloak-and- dagger as what it contains. After handing over his evidence, mr Steele became so alarmed by its gravity that he passed his dossier to a former FBi colleague now working in rome. He is also believed to have alerted his old bosses in British intelligence but they felt it was up to the U.S. to respond.
Worried there had been a cover-up, he flew to new York in October to brief a journalist on a left-wing magazine, mother Jones, which became the first to report the dossier’s exist- ence. in november, Senator John mcCain, a prominent moscow critic in Washington, was attending an intelligence conference in Halifax, Canada. He met a former British ambassador to moscow, said to have alerted the senator to Steele’s dossier.
He in turn sent an emissary to meet mr Steele in london, his representative having apparently been told to look out for a man holding a copy of the Financial Times when he got to the airport. mr mcCain reportedly knew of mr Steele’s solid reputation and passed on the report to FBi director James Comey last month. That set in train the process that took it to the White House and Trump Tower. it hasn’t come completely out of the blue, since knowledge of the dossier has been floating around Washington for months, prompting Democrat congressmen to badger mr Comey to come clean and publish it.
The memos — dated from June to December 2016 — suggest that the russians have spent years targeting mr Trump as he visited the country to look into property deals, and to oversee the miss Universe beauty contest, which he owned for nearly a decade.
in the clipped language one might associate with the Secret intelligence Service, the dossier baldly states: russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least five years. Aim, endorsed by Putin, has been to
The claims were explosive enough to alert Obama
encourage splits and divisions in Western alliance.’
The most personally embarrassing allegations — even for a man caught bragging about sexually assaulting women — relate to his sexual peccadilloes. According to the dossier, a Russian strategy to ‘exploit Trump’s personal obsessions and sexual perversion’ in order to obtain compromising material on him had ‘borne fruit’.
Citing two informants — one of whom claimed to have been present — it alleges that in 2013 Mr Trump hired the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton hotel, ‘where he knew President and Mrs Obama [whom he hated] had stayed’ on an official trip. he then ‘defiled’ the bed where they had slept by hiring prostitutes to perform a depraved act as he watched.
The hotel, the memo added, was known to be under the control of the Russian intelligence agency FSB ‘with microphones and concealed cameras in the rooms to record anything they wanted to’.
That wasn’t the only incident, the memos allege, that prompted Russia to conclude that the U.S. tycoon’s ‘unorthodox behaviour’ there over the years had provided them with enough embarrassing information to blackmail him.
Two ‘knowledgeable St Petersburg sources’ apparently claimed Mr Trump attended ‘sex parties’ in the city, but all direct witnesses to these sordid affairs had recently been ‘silenced’ — bribed or coerced to disappear. The informants are said to have mentioned Araz Agalarov, an Azerbaijan billionaire businessman with offices in London, who has been identified as a link man between Mr Trump and Putin.
Mr Agalarov, they said, would know most of the details of what Mr Trump ‘had got up to’.
The report suggests Mr Trump’s alleged sexual escapades may have been set up by the Russians, referring to ‘perverted sex acts arranged and monitored’ by FSB agents. Mr Trump wasn’t the only one being looked at, the dossier claims. Kremlin officials have allegedly been feeding Mr Trump and key aides damaging information on his opponents, including Mrs Clinton, for years.
The president- elect doesn’t come out of the dossier completely negatively. It claims Kremlin apparatchiks tried to butter him up by offering him the chance to participate in potentially lucrative property deals tied to the 2018 World Cup in Russia, but he had declined these ‘sweeteners’.
In the end, as he has loudly protests, Mr Trump invested little in Russia. Instead, says the report archly, he ‘had to settle for the use of extensive sexual services there from local prostitutes’.
Mr Putin’s direct involvement — long asserted by Washington in last year’s general election hacking scandal — is asserted repeatedly in the dossier. Citing information from a former ‘top-level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin’, the operation’s aim was to ‘sow discord and disunity’ both within the U.S. and within the Nato alliance ‘viewed as inimical to Russian interests’.
Mr Trump was apparently not the only target of the Kremlin trawl for embarrassing material. The report suggests Mr Putin’s press secretary, Dmitri Peskov, ‘ controlled’ another dossier, compiled over many years by Russian intelligence, containing compromising information on Mrs Clinton.
In her case, however, the material didn’t relate to embarrassing conduct, but to ‘bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls’. The dossier claimed Putin was ‘motivated by fear and hatred of hillary Clinton’.
The report also addresses the tantalising question of whether the Trump camp knew what the Kremlin had on him.
It names a clutch of Trump aides as being involved in meeting Kremlin officials in the U.S. and Moscow.
The dossier also mentions ‘clandestine meetings’ between Mr Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, and Russian government representatives in August last year.
however, in an early rebuff to the report’s credibility, Mr Cohen retorted yesterday that he had never been to Prague, let alone met Putin cronies there. According to CNN, the Michael Cohen who visited Prague in the report was not Trump’s lawyer.
On the same day that Mr Trump was insisting he will be tough on Russia if needs be, his nominee for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was defending his own chummy connections with the Kremlin as head of oil giant exxonMobil during a congressional hearing.
even before the appearance of the astonishing allegations in this new report, there have long been doubts that Mr Trump would ever be able to make any decision involving Russia without facing accusations that he was being guided by a hidden agenda.
But if Putin does hold compromising material on the incoming U.S. president, will a Trump White house stand up to a belligerent, bullying Kremlin?
The aim was to sow disunity and discord