Привет от Стила

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В новом номере New Yorker - длинная статья о Кристофере Стиле: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/12/christopher-steele-the-man-behind-the-trump-dossier

Автор - Джейн Майер, одна из лучших журналистов-расследователей, которая писала в 2016 про Тони Шварца, соавтора The Art of the Deal, и его роли в создании имиджа Трампа как удачного бизнесмена, а в 2017 - про Роберта Мерсера и его роль в создании Трампа как удачного политика.

Как и другие рассказы про Кристофера Стила, статья подтверждает его безупречную репутацию разведчика и эксперта по России. Когда он заведовал русским отделом MI-6, результаты его работы активно использовались ЦРУ и появлялись в том числе в докладах американскому президенту.

The British Secret Intelligence Service is highly regarded by the United States, particularly for its ability to harvest information from face-to-face sources, rather than from signals intelligence, such as electronic surveillance, as the U.S. often does. British and American intelligence services work closely together, and, while Steele was at M.I.6, British intelligence was often included in the U.S. President’s daily-briefing reports. In 2008, Michael Hayden, the C.I.A. director, visited the U.K., and Steele briefed him on Russian developments. The following year, President Obama visited the U.K., and was briefed on a report that Steele had written about Russia. Steve Hall, a former chief of the C.I.A.’s Central Eurasia Division, which includes Russia, the former Soviet states, and the Balkans, told me, “M.I.6 is second only perhaps to the U.S. in its ability to collect intelligence from Russia.” He added, “We’ve always coördinated closely with them because they did such a great job. We’re playing in the Yankee Stadium of espionage here. This isn’t Guatemala.”

WATCH our full interview with former CIA Director John Brennan in "The #Putin Files" https://t.co/So7CeU9mmL #frontlinePBS pic.twitter.com/gzI8PfN80z
- FRONTLINE (@frontlinepbs) November 2, 2017

В статье упоминается также о том, что британцы прослушивали подозрительные контакты российских спецслужб с представителями Трампа и передали эту информацию в ЦРУ.

Robert Hannigan, then the head of the U.K.’s intelligence service the G.C.H.Q., had recently flown to Washington and briefed the C.I.A.’s director, John Brennan, on a stream of illicit communications between Trump’s team and Moscow that had been intercepted. (The content of these intercepts has not become public.)

По словам Джона Бреннана, бывшего директора ЦРУ, он передавал всю такую информацию ФБР.

There were things that happened, meetings that took place between individuals on the Russian side and on the U.S. side that raised my concerns about collaboration related to the election. I didn’t know what was motivating some people, but I certainly was concerned. And anything that we had that involved U.S. persons, anything that the CIA collected or had information about involving U.S. persons, we immediately shared it with the FBI, because it’s their responsibility to pull those investigative threads.
So I was aware, contemporaneously, of some things that were going on, which again caused me to furrow my brow and say, “What's this all about?” But I didn’t follow it up. I was confident that the FBI would be able to do its job.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/john-brennan/



Статья проясняет вопрос о том, каким образом копия досье оказалась у Buzzfeed. Судя по всему, ее передал журналистам Дэвид Крaмер, помощник Джона Маккейна. Крамер был звеном цепочки, по которой досье через британцев попало к Маккейну, который затем передал его из рук в руки директору ФБР.

The week before Thanksgiving, Wood briefed McCain at the Halifax International Security Forum. McCain was deeply concerned. He asked a former aide, David Kramer, to go to England to meet Steele. Kramer, a Russia expert who had served at the State Department, went over the dossier with Steele for hours. After Kramer promised to share the document only with McCain, Steele arranged for Kramer to receive a copy in Washington. But a former national-security official who spoke with Kramer at the time told me that one of Kramer’s ideas was to have McCain confront Trump with the evidence, in the hope that Trump would resign. “He would tell Trump, ‘The Russians have got you,’ ” the former official told me. (A lawyer for Kramer maintains that Kramer never considered getting Trump to resign and never promised to show the dossier only to McCain.) Ultimately, though, McCain and Kramer agreed that McCain should take the dossier to the head of the F.B.I. On December 9th, McCain handed Comey a copy of the dossier. The meeting lasted less than ten minutes, because, to McCain’s surprise, the F.B.I. had possessed a copy since the summer. According to the former national-security official, when Kramer learned about the meeting his reaction was “Shit, if they’ve had it all this time, why didn’t they do something?” Kramer then heard that the dossier was an open secret among journalists, too. He asked, “Is there anyone in Washington who doesn’t know about this?” <...> BuzzFeed has declined to reveal its source for the dossier, but both Orbis and Fusion have denied supplying it. By a process of elimination, speculation has centered on McCain’s aide, Kramer, who has not responded to inquiries about it, and whose congressional testimony is sealed.



Но самая сногсшибательная новость - в опубликованной версии досье не хватает доклада, написанного позже. Слухи о этом докладе мелькали и раньше, но теперь они подтверждены. Если верить сообщению в этом докладе, Трамп под давлением своих кураторов из Кремля отверг кандидатуру Митта Ромни в качестве госсекретаря и выбрал вместо него одобренного Россией Тиллерсона.

One subject that Steele is believed to have discussed with Mueller’s investigators is a memo that he wrote in late November, 2016, after his contract with Fusion had ended. This memo, which did not surface publicly with the others, is shorter than the rest, and is based on one source, described as “a senior Russian official.” The official said that he was merely relaying talk circulating in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but what he’d heard was astonishing: people were saying that the Kremlin had intervened to block Trump’s initial choice for Secretary of State, Mitt Romney. (During Romney’s run for the White House in 2012, he was notably hawkish on Russia, calling it the single greatest threat to the U.S.) The memo said that the Kremlin, through unspecified channels, had asked Trump to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Ukraine-related sanctions, and who would coöperate on security issues of interest to Russia, such as the conflict in Syria. If what the source heard was true, then a foreign power was exercising pivotal influence over U.S. foreign policy-and an incoming President.

Это согласуется со странными обстоятельствами вокруг назначения Тиллерсона и паникой, которая охватила Трампа и его окружение, когда к Мюллеру попала переписка переходной команды.

Это также сочетается с сообщением о том, что из $120 миллионов долларов, за два года выделенных Госдепу Конгрессом на борьбу с пропагандой (главным образом российской) на сегодняшний день под мудрым руководством Тиллерсона израсходовано $0.

As Russia’s virtual war against the United States continues unabated with the midterm elections approaching, the State Department has yet to spend any of the $120 million it has been allocated since late 2016 to counter foreign efforts to meddle in elections or sow distrust in democracy.
As a result, not one of the 23 analysts working in the department’s Global Engagement Center - which has been tasked with countering Moscow’s disinformation campaign - speaks Russian, and a department hiring freeze has hindered efforts to recruit the computer experts needed to track the Russian efforts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/world/europe/state-department-russia-global-engagement-center.html