Russian intelligence would have seen Paul Manafort as the perfect mark
Trying to signal Russian oligarchs would have put him on their radar.
By Steven L. Hall September 29 at 6:00 AM
Steven L. Hall retired from the CIA in 2015 after 30 years of running and managing Russian operations.
For 30 years, my job as a CIA officer was to try to figure out how Russian operatives were trying to attack the United States. I oversaw intelligence operations in the former Soviet Union and the former Warsaw Pact and worked on counterintelligence and cybersecurity at CIA headquarters. So when I read the recent reports that President Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had offered to brief Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska on the presidential election last year, I was alarmed.
Because to Russian intelligence in 2016, Manafort would have looked like the ideal spy. Someone like Deripaska is exactly how they would have gotten to him.
Deripaska, an aluminum magnate worth about $6.5 billion, is a member of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy. Putin demands fealty and pretty much whatever else he wants from people like Deripaska, who understand that if they don’t live up to their end of the bargain, they could end up like another famous former oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who displeased Putin and was sent to a tuberculosis-ridden prison for more than a dozen years. Although Deripaska has repeatedly denied any connection to Russian intelligence, these oligarchs understand that in addition to making money for themselves and Putin, they occasionally will be asked to be the Kremlin’s eyes and ears, and facilitators, if need be. Russia’s security services work closely with them; unlike in Western democracies, there’s no concept of a conflict of interest. Everyone has the same interests at heart: Putin’s.
[Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting sure sounds like a Russian intelligence operation
Manafort would have understood all of this clearly, of course. Before getting himself onto the Trump team, Manafort made a living as an influence broker, a sort of foreign lobbyist whose connections in Washington and elsewhere made him attractive to Deripaska and former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. If you choose to wade in that swamp, and you are trying to make money doing it, you cannot help becoming highly attuned to the power relationships in that part of the world. From my experience with Russia, I believe it is highly likely that Ukraine’s intelligence services would have at least run Manafort’s name by their Russian counterparts, to ensure that an American working at the senior levels of the Ukrainian government was not also working for the CIA. Given Manafort’s experience, I doubt this would have surprised or alarmed him. Deripaska’s relationship with Putin was no secret when Manafort’s firm began doing business with the billionaire in 2005. (Both sides say those business dealings concluded years ago.) Not long after that, WikiLeaks published a U.S. government description of Deripaska as “among the 2-3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis.”
Manafort’s representative says his offer to provide “a private briefing” on the campaign to Deripaska was part of an attempt to collect on debts. The meeting does not appear to have happened — Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni has denied it, and a spokeswoman for Deripaska has said The Washington Post’s inquiries about whether Manafort briefed Deripaska “veer into manufactured questions so grossly false and insinuating that I am concerned even responding to these fake connotations provides them the patina of reality.”
But Russian oligarchs, and their friends in the Russian government, keep track of who’s who and what jobs they have or might end up with. The prospect of using Manafort’s already existing — and already complicated — financial ties to one of Putin’s closest allies would have been irresistible to Russian intelligence services. In the world of Russian human intelligence collection, the ideal spy looks something like this: an individual with a significant financial vulnerability or motivation (such as debt or a threat of meaningful financial loss); someone with access to inside information of interest to the Russian government; a person who understands the need for discretion and, if necessary, secrecy. It is a plus to the Russian security services if the person in question also has ideological motivations (being pro-Russian, or at least not anti-Russia) and is already a known quantity.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/29/russian-intelligence-would-have-seen-paul-manafort-as-the-perfect-mark
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