There’s a certain basic level of disrespect involved in how the Russians treated George Papadopoulos. There’s no doubt that they deliberately compromised him, but the way in which they did it was sloppy. To begin with, Papadopolous was a member of an organization called the London Centre of International Law Practice. It was in this role, that he traveled to Rome in March of 2016 and met with a professor named Joseph Mifsud.
Mifsud’s résumé has now been deleted from the Centre’s website but until very recently he was listed as their director of international strategic development. In an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica last week, Professor Joseph Mifsud explained how he had met Papadopoulos in Rome.
“[Papadopoulous] came here in Italy, in Rome, with other seven experts of international relations working for the London Centre of International Law Practice. We were dining and, if I remember well, he announced that we [sic] would join Trump’s electoral campaign team. After that, we kept in touch via email or when we subsequently met in person.
Mifsud is a slippery character. For example, he ran an organization called the London Academy of Diplomacy. This academy has vanished.
Today, there is no sign of the London Academy of Diplomacy on Middlesex Street in London. Phone numbers for the organisation that can be found online do not work and websites lead to error messages. A receptionist at the address said the organisation left the premises six months ago.
“Any stuff we get, we just send it back,” she said.
In any case, Prof. Mifsud did indeed keep in touch with Papadopoulos. A couple of weeks later, on March 24th, they met in London where Mifsud introduced a lady calling herself Olga Vinogradova. She represented herself as a blood relation of Russian president Vladimir Putin. In subsequent emails back to the Trump campaign, Papadopoulos referred to her as Putin’s niece.
By all accounts, however, Papadopoulos eventually learned that this was a lie. Ms. Vinogradova was not related to Putin and she was probably using an alias.
It’s important to know when exactly Papadopoulos learned he was being duped, but for now all we know is that he was strung along for a very long time. He kept in touch with “Vinogradova” throughout the spring, but he was passed off before long to another intelligence officer who was ostensibly working for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. You can read about all this in the Special Counsel’s court filings, so I won’t retell the whole saga here.
What I want to focus on is the decision to misrepresent “Vinogradova” as a relative of Putin. She was, by Prof. Mifsud’s account, a very attractive woman. And he says that Papadopoulos’s initial interest in her was “very different from an academic one” and that he even tried to persuade her to travel to America with him, presumably for amorous reasons.
Using her as bait, they got Papadopoulos to enter into protracted negotiations to set up a summit between Putin and Trump. It’s not clear why the “niece” lie was necessary, and it certainly wasn’t prudent. It was discovered as a ruse by someone, and I can’t imagine it’s too difficult to keep track of Putin’s nieces, presuming he actually has any.
Papadopolous actually pitched his connections to Putin at a meeting with Trump on March 31st, 2016. So, the ruse paid immediate dividends. Why set up Papadopolous to look like a dupe? Why jeopardize an easy connection to the top of the campaign with an operationally insecure and unnecessary lie?
One Papadopoulos email to Trump campaign officials said that the woman had offered “to arrange a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss U.S.-Russia ties under President Trump.”
“I have already alerted my personal links to our conversation and your request,” Vinogradova said in an email to Papadopoulos in April, after Papadopoulos asked for help arranging a trip to Moscow.
“As mentioned we are all very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump. The Russian Federation would love to welcome him once his candidature would be officially announced,” she added.
Perhaps the games they were playing with Papadopoulos got too real too fast, which may explain why there was a handoff to the officer working with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Still, the “niece” gambit didn’t go away. It appears to have been a pretty glaring error in tradecraft.
That it was used at all indicates to me a certain lack of seriousness and professionalism on the Russians’ part. But it also spells out how little regard they had for Trump’s prospects. They were willing to use Trump to move the Republican Party in a more pro-Russian direction, but they were more interested in humiliating and compromising his potential foreign policy team than in establishing long-lasting and trust-based relationships.
Now people will go looking for Olga Vinogradova. I don’t think they will find her. She was a mistake.
“how little regard they had for Trump’s prospects…”
This likely is it. It must have seemed clear to Putin’s USA bureau that that Der Trumper and his MAGA was of Goofs, by Goofs, for Goofs.
Now that they can see that we have become a Nation of Goofs, they likely will bring their A game next time…
One lesson is how wrong spy fiction gets it. John le Carré and Brian Freemantle tell stories of complex strategies and brilliant triple-crosses, yet everything we’ve learned tells us that US and Russian intelligence is run more like Dunder Mifflin. They manage to sell paper despite the idiocy.
I mean, the Russians planted obviously false information in an email, because they’re shitty at planting false information. Then the FBI director, knowing that information was false, acted on it anyway. Maybe, fiction aside, they’re all just fucking idiots.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/26/politics/james-comey-fbi-investigation-fake-russian-intelligence/index
.html
Respectfully, what’s especially good about le Carré is how often he’s describing rank incompetence, failure, arrogance, misunderstanding, and disastrous consequences. It’s so prevalent in his work — as early as The Looking Glass War and as late as Our Kind of Traitor — that you might almost call it his fundamental theme.
Arrogance and disaster, but I’m not sure I’m with you on rank incompetence. I mean, that’s why Smiley, say, is so utterly cunning. He’s a genius. Karla and Haydon are careful, incisive, disciplined. These are not incompetent men.
Systemic, chronic incompetence. Smiley is a genius, to be sure, but he’s consistently picked out as a contrast to nearly everyone surrounding him. For every Smiley, there are five Percy Allelines.
Look at the opening chapter of Smiley’s People for a detailed examination of how the entire circus has fallen completely apart under Enderby (or, look at the horrible, cynical dealing that makes the end of The Honourable Schoolboy so tragic.
Nearly always, the great work done by the unremarked, uncelebrated heroes and titans gets reversed or erased by the ineptitude of everyone surrounding them.
That’s true. I guess I think that reality is like the Smiley books without Smiley, though. Without Karla. It’s Allelines all the way down. (God, I’d never have remembered the name Alleline! My hat is off to you.)
My take is that the Russians are too cocky by half and have to spend far too much time cleaning up their own messes. Look at all the diplomats they have had to off, and other such mysterious deaths in the recent past. But hey, their entire diplomatic corps and intelligence apparatus appears to be made up of disposable assets.
CNN is reporting that Mifsud has disappeared.
One of the very interesting attitudes about covert operations is that the actions are always flawless tradecraft, the inititation is always thought-out or if opportunististic, done from a brilliant strategic master plan, and failures are happenstance instead of fundamental flows in the characters.
As we get evidence, it is striking that the characters are not more directly Russian. A Greek-American with Greek-Cyprus international ambitions. A cosmopolitan Maltese with seeming good connections, and a lady who could pass for Putin’s niece with someone familiar with London.
The question to ask is which of these actors are free-lancers? So far there is an assumption that some are linked in more direct contact with Russian intelligence agencies. That tenuous link is required because of the assumption of Russian state involvement.
It is possible for there to be international grift within grift within grift. All trying to make deals with the “right people”. And multiple plates spinning. Cyprus and Russia and oil are one play. We know a couple of Trump cabinet members who made that play personally. Malta can summon up a number of hypothethical plays for a peripatetic professor. If Putin is involved, is he involved on his private account or on the account of the Russian Federation?
Whatever the main grift is is what Trump’s wild behavior is hiding.
My suspicion is that it has to do with cashing in on peak oil and climate change by frustrating regulations into early catastrophe.
Someone claiming knowledge of international fossil fuel markets would have an interest in bringing Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the US into a cartel.
A good con works by playing on deep desires of the “mark”. Stars get in the eyes. The Russians knew that Papadopoulos was not likely to look the gift horse in the mouth, at least not for a while. Putin’s niece, and beautiful …
More important, “Vinogradova” was not an end in herself for either side. As you point out, “he was passed off before long to another intelligence officer who was ostensibly working for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
I think the problem lies there. Vinogradova was supposed to lead on to bigger and better things, after which time, if everything had worked out, she would have been forgotten. Even if they did find out she was not as advertised, success is its own reward.
The problem was not so much with Vinogradova as with the fact that pursuing that avenue promised the Trump side too much too soon. That’s where the sloppiness enters the picture. The Russian leadership were, or at least became, more cautious than their operatives.
Anyway, the only reason this is coming out as a big “mistake” is that the Russian thing has been exposed. And even now we don’t know how many (mainly business and financial) ties that developed in relation to it (some starting years ago), are still in play. Mueller & Co. by this point probably have a good idea.
You can say the whole Russian thing was a mistake, it certainly was reckless, but it was a huge factor in Trump’s victory
The donald has been dealing directly with the Russian Oligarchs for years and to date he has no direct relationship with Putin…the man with the money. He has sold them real estate, leased space in the Trump Tower, and who knows what kind of loans or money laundering that has flowed thru the donald’s shell companies. He held the Miss Univ. in Moscow and did not get to meet Putin. Made Tillerson SOS thinking that would be his in to Putin but it appears that failed too. Feels like Putin’s long game is here. The donald has withdrawn us from the world and Putin can now spend his money to bribe of buy what ever influence he wants in the world.
The Russians are not impressive across the board. The Soviets seemed a lot more capable (and they had plenty of problems). Their military has a lot of shiny new toys but compare Russian performance to what the US has managed in Iraq/Syria. (Right now the Russians and Syrians are supposed to be mounting an operation to catch al-Baghdadi in Bukamal – I’m betting on a colossal bloody mess if true). If this is also true about Russian spycraft – Trump is toast.
Communism must be a better system of govt then klepto-autocracy.
Any competent American president and state department could (and did) run rings around the Putin clownshow. Instead?
Apropos of nothing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN7pkFNEg5c
It was neither mistake nor accident; Papadopoulos was meant to blip Western radar to conceal something else. They were content to burn Milsud; he was expendable, deniable and had outlived his usefulness or had perhaps betrayed them. Hard to explain otherwise.