the military intelligence agency that three years later would help disrupt the U.S. election. Prior DIA chiefs had made similar visits, but Flynn was convinced that he had been accorded special treatment and developed a rapport with the Russians that might enable a cooperative breakthrough.
Flynn “was brought into the inner sanctum,” recalled U.S. Army brigadier general Peter Zwack, who was the U.S. defense attaché in Moscow and accompanied Flynn throughout his three-day visit. Flynn was allowed to lay a wreath at Russia’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He was taken to the GRU’s gleaming modern headquarters on the outskirts of Moscow, where—in a remarkable gesture—he was invited to deliver an hour-long address on U.S. counterterrorism methods to a collection of majors and colonels who, Zwack surmised, “had never before encountered an American intelligence general.”
That evening Flynn hosted a dinner for Sergun at Zwack’s residence at the U.S. embassy, decorated with a LeRoy Neiman painting of Red Square. The assembled officers began raising glasses of vodka, culminating in a final toast to making “the airlocks fit,” a reference to the 1975 joining of the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft. Sergun returned the gesture the next night by hosting a dinner for Flynn at the historic Sovietsky Hotel, providing the American general a personal tour of the room where Stalin’s son had lived.
Flynn saw such promise in the encounter that he returned to DIA and began planning a reciprocal visit that would bring Sergun and his GRU entourage to the United States. He continued to pursue the idea even after U.S.-Russia relations went into a protracted skid over Moscow’s military incursions into Ukraine. Eventually Flynn had to be told by his bosses to abandon the plan—an intervention that only added to their growing vexation with him.
DIA directors are expected to serve terms of at least three years. But by early 2014, Clapper and Vickers had had enough, and told Flynn that his troubled tenure would run out after two. Flynn, only fifty-five, was forced to retire.
Flynn’s wife, Lori, wore a festive floral dress with a lei around her neck to his farewell ceremony on August 7, 2014, as if anticipating the coming freedom that she and her husband, an avid surfer, were soon to enjoy. And Flynn, in an Army dress uniform draped with the many medals he’d won during his career, ended his remarks to the five hundred in attendance at DIA headquarters with an expression more associated with sailors than soldiers, a wish for “fair winds and following seas.”
Beneath the surface, he seethed.
FLYNN’S REMOVAL HAD BEEN DELAYED BY MONTHS TO ALLOW HIM to make one final move up in rank and secure his third star. Despite that accommodation, Flynn became increasingly bitter toward those he blamed for his ouster. He began claiming that he was pushed out not because of any leadership deficiencies, but because Obama and his top aides “did not want to hear the truth” that Flynn was speaking about militant Islam. He started a company, Flynn Intel Group, a consulting and lobbying firm that pursued international clients willing to shell out six-figure sums for his overseas expertise and access in Washington. He also began working on a book—half memoir, half call to arms against Islamists—with the neoconservative author Michael Ledeen. Flynn joined a speakers’ bureau and began making appearances on Fox News, NBC, CNN, and other cable news channels. The outlet that seemed most eager to provide a platform for the forced-out former general was RT, an international English-language television channel funded by the Russian government.
“There is a saying I love: truth fears no questions,” Flynn said in one of his RT interviews. He may have loved the saying, but, as it would turn out, didn’t always adhere to its message.
PAGE, PAPADOPOULOS, MANAFORT, AND FLYNN CAME TO THE CAMPAIGN from different directions, but each saw their association with Trump as a way to reach or recover influence. At the time there seemed little downside. If Trump won, a job at the White House or elsewhere in his administration wasn’t out of the question. If he lost—as seemed almost inevitable—the contacts they made and attention they got could only enhance their post-election fortunes.
Moths to Trump’s flame, all four would end up burned, whatever futures they envisioned eventually reduced to a single imperative: staying out of jail.
AS TRUMP GAINED MOMENTUM IN THE REPUBLICAN RACE, HE BEGAN facing pointed questions about how he could continue heaping praise on Putin when so many of the Russian leader’s adversaries ended up disfigured or dead. Trump’s defiant responses were unlike anything ever uttered by a major party candidate. “I think our country does plenty of killing also,” he said in mid-December 2015 on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program. Putin is “running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country.” Two days later, on ABC, Trump said that murdering journalists would be “horrible. But, in all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that. I don’t know that he has … I haven’t seen any evidence that he killed anybody.”
The consistency of his deference to Putin seemed out of character: whether on social media or standing before a packed arena, Trump seemed incapable of stringing together more than a few sentences without insulting or demeaning a rival, a demographic, or an entire country. Unscripted and unapologetic, Trump often seemed to offend even when he didn’t intend to. Yet, with Putin, Trump was disciplined and on-message, never even inadvertently critical.
The pattern was perplexing to Trump’s political adversaries as well as national security officials in Washington. Some saw his early statements about Putin as the uninformed comments of a political neophyte, someone who had only a cursory understanding of world affairs. It was Trump being Trump—staking out a provocative position that he might abandon when it became politically advantageous to do so, or better-informed advisers got through to him.
As Manafort, Page, Papadopoulos, and Flynn came on board, the Trump campaign’s entanglements with Russia—and questions about their purpose—intensified. The search for answers would eventually occupy U.S. intelligence agencies, committees in Congress, and a team of FBI agents and prosecutors led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Before those organizations were fully engaged, however, there was a far smaller, independent inquiry under way.
CHRISTOPHER STEELE HAD PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH THE ruthless side of the Kremlin that Trump could not bring himself to see, stationed in Moscow in the early 1990s under diplomatic cover for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.
Steele and Putin were nearly espionage contemporaries, Steele in Moscow, after the Soviet Union collapsed, while the future Russian leader was based in East Germany for the KGB when the Eastern Bloc began to unravel. Putin was permanently scarred by what had happened when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Crowds stormed the Dresden offices of the East German secret police and then turned their attention to the nearby headquarters of the KGB. Putin, by his own account, radioed a Red Army tank unit to ask for protection. “We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow,” came the reply. “And Moscow is silent.” Putin, sickened by the fecklessness of his government, returned to Russia and had begun pursuing a career in St. Petersburg politics when Steele arrived in Moscow. Their paths would intersect several times in the ensuing decades.
THE SOVIET UNION WAS IN ITS DEATH THROES AT THE START OF Steele’s Moscow assignment, and he would witness the hammer-and-sickle flag lowered for the last time, opening a chaotic new era for Russia and the former Soviet republics. Steele had joined MI6 after graduation from the University of Cambridge, where his success as a student allowed him to transcend his family’s working-class roots. His father worked for the United Kingdom’s weather service; a Welsh grandfather had mined coal. Steele excelled at Cambridge and became president of the prestigious debating society, the Cambridge Union. His path to espionage began when he saw a newspaper ad seeking applicants interested in overseas adventure. Only when he responded did Steele learn the ad had been posted by MI6.
Steele had seemed poised for a series of foreign assignments when his undercover career
