Author Govert SchullerPosted on Categories Parapolitics Ten days before the inauguration of Trump an anonymous bombshell intelligence report was published by Buzzfeed.[1] The report, written by former British MI6 agent and Russia expert Christopher Steele, alleges that 1) Russian intelligence has compromising material on Trump gathered when he visited Leningrad and Moscow a few years ago; 2) there were extensive and frequent contacts between people high in the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence; and 3) that intelligence was swapped between the two parties; Trump giving intelligence on Russian oligarchs in the US and Russia reciprocating with ‘opposition research’ on Hillary Clinton. If the report is even half true it will be the biggest political bombshell in recent history, even bigger than Watergate, and will lead to a hopefully short constitutional crisis solved by Trump stepping down as President and the possible arrests of Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Michael Cohen.
On the other side–and here the full, fascinating wilderness-of-mirrors metaphor is applicable–author, journalist and expert on Russia, David Satter, came up with an alternative explanation of the origin and intentions behind this very controversial Steel Dossier / Trump Report. He thinks that the Russians fed Steele with concocted, but very plausible, compromising information about Trump’s relations with Russian prostitutes, agents and politicians in order to confuse, undermine and demoralize American intelligence, politicians and public.[5] So far that game plan seems to work.
I thought about this possibility before, because Soviet intelligence had probably mounted something similar in the late 1950s when they concocted a very complex but plausible story of Soviet infiltration at very high levels of US intelligence, especially the CIA, and mixed the story with the idea that the big breaks in the international communist world, especially the Russia-China break, were intentional deceptions in order for the Communist bloc to look fragmented and weak to the West. And it was touted as a very smart, very devious long term plan by the Communist world to defeat the West.
This information was carefully fed to one defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, who brought the story to the CIA where the head of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, bought the package, hook, line and sinker. This information triggered an unprecedented mole-hunt within the ranks of the CIA, which had a crippling and polarizing effect on the CIA’s capacity of sorting out genuine defectors from plants and solid information from deceptive fabrications, for example the very tricky question of the extent of Soviet involvement in the JFK assassination about which different defectors presented different stories.[6]
For several reasons I believed the Angleton-Golitsyn thesis on Soviet deception to be correct and wrote an article in 2004 explaining the whole set-up and weaving it together with then stock-in-trade right-wing conspiracy memes about Yale’s semi-secret senior society Skull & Bones and the New York based think tank The Council on Foreign Relations.[7] Though I did not have, then nor now, definitive refutation nor confirmation of the thesis, it was US journalist Ron Rosenbaum who pointed out the possibility that the whole Golitsyn story could have been a very clever concoction of which even the defector himself was not aware.[8]
If Satter’s thesis pans out then Trump and his team could be cleared from most of the Steele allegations, even though the extent of Trump’s financial involvement with Russian oligarchs and Mafya is still unclear, and we can conclude that Russia’s intervention with the US electoral process was one or two layers more devious and smart than most of us might have thought.
Originally posted on Facebook, January 19, 2017.
[1]. Anon. [Steele, Christopher]. “Trump Intelligence Allegations“. Buzzfeed. 10 Jan 2017.
[5]. Satter, David. “The ‘Trump Report’ Is a Russian Provocation”. The National Review. 12 Jan 2017.
[6]. Books sympathetic to the Angleton-Golitsyn thesis are Edward Jay Epstein’s Deception: The Invisible War Between The KGB And The CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989) and Mark Riebling’s Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA (Alfred Knopf, New York, 1994).
More critical books are Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter (New York: Touchstone, 1991) and David Wise’s Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors that Shattered the CIA (New York: Random House, 1992).
[7]. Schuller, Govert. “The Abiding Communist Threat in its Open and Hidden Manifestations“. Alpheus. 4 July 2004.
[8]. Rosenbaum, Ron. “The Shadow of the Mole: Two superpowers, three master spies, four false defectors, five schools of mole lore, and seven types of ambiguity.” Harper’s (October 1983) and in Travels with Dr. Death (New York: Penguin, 1991).