"I'm not saying Trump is a KGB agent, but ..."
British journalist Luke Harding, author of a shocking book on Donald Trump, argues that the Kremlin has cultivated ties with the American billionaire for more than three decades.
Luke Harding is a senior reporter for the British daily The Guardian. From 2007 to 2011, he ran the newspaper's Moscow office, before being expelled by the Kremlin following its investigation into the assassination of opponent Alexander Litvinenko. He then wrote several books, including Russia State-Mafia (Original Découverte, 2012) and Le Dossier Snowden (Belin, 2015).
He is the only journalist, along with his colleague Nick Hopkins, to have met Christopher Steele, the former British foreign secret service agent converted into the "council" and author of a 35-page report revealing the alleged links between Donald Trump and the regime of Vladimir Putin, posted online in January by the site BuzzFeed. His book Collusion was released simultaneously in more than a dozen countries on Thursday, November 16. Translated into French by Flammarion, it has a subtitle that leaves little room for doubt: "How Russia got Trump elected to the White House." "
What do you expect from your book?
First, I want to say that all of this does not just happen. There is a long and heavy tradition of Russian espionage dating back to the Cold War. What is happening today is just a continuation of those protocols developed and tested over all these years abroad by the KGB and its successors. It has even taken an even more dramatic turn in the age of Twitter and Facebook. I think there is an underestimation, an underestimation of the role of Russian intelligence in everything we see today.
What I have attempted to do with my book is first to reveal a new stage in the investigation of Christopher Steele. I also wanted to try to contextualize this whole story of relations between Moscow and Donald Trump. We have to go back to Mr. Trump's first visit in the summer of 1987 to Moscow. He was then invited by the Soviet authorities, and the trip was organized by Intourist, an auxiliary branch of the KGB. You might even have to go back to the 1970s, when he met his Czechoslovak wife [Ivana Zelnickova, 28-year-old model when they married in 1977]. At the time, the KGB most likely opened a case on him.
How? 'Or' What ?
The KGB traditionally targets individuals to cultivate relationships and encourage recruitment. For this, they have a very specific method of approaching people who could be interesting and useful to them. They look for people who are rather narcissistic, rather open or potentially tempted by extramarital affairs, rather weak also to analyze things and who run after money. Donald Trump, on these points, clearly meets all the criteria. I'm not saying Trump is a KGB agent, but what can be said for sure is that Moscow has made his eyes soft on him from time to time in order to profit and abuse his trust. This is the case with Trump and his entourage. And that goes back a very long time. At least since that famous year 1987 when he was invited to Moscow ...
It was two weeks after his return to New York that Mr. Trump first considered a political career, as you recall in your book. But is it possible that he did not see or know anything about a possible Kremlin "phishing" attempt?
We don't know everything. But if he really didn't know about anything, his best defense would be stupidity. I do not believe this to be the case. The story is unbelievable, though: from 1987 to 2016, Mr. Trump repeatedly revived a project to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. His personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, even sent a ridiculous email [mid-January 2016] to Dimitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, to help him revive this project in the Russian capital.
At the same time, as Trump is campaigning for the Republican nomination, the billionaire publicly asserts that it would be good to get along better with Russia and that Putin is "a good guy." Besides, why has Trump always been so nice to Putin when he's so hard on everyone? He doesn't like, and lets it know, Angela Merkel, NFL soccer players, Jeff Sessions, Republicans, Kim Jong-un ...
The only logical way to understand this path is it appears - from the revelations of the Steele File Inquiry - that Putin has some sort of influence over Trump. You can call it blackmail, detailed knowledge of his financial affairs, evidence, compromising material, or whatever you like, but there is something that makes Trump unable to be mean to Putin or to grab him for what 'he is.
He even happens to say that he "believes" Putin when he talks about the 2016 Russian elections [which were marred by fraud]. It’s still an extraordinary statement! He would rather believe an ex-member of the KGB than all of the American services.
So do you think Mr. Trump knows what he's doing?
In a way, he is a brilliant politician. He became the first president bypassing the elite and the press, reaching a large audience directly through Twitter. He also realized that you can lie in this postmodern era. He lies and it doesn't matter. He understood that the times we live in are more sensitive to the emotional side than the Cartesian aspects of things. The Russians are doing the same, and they have been doing it for a long time. Putin himself learned it on the KGB benches: lying is nothing exceptional, it is only an operational method.
Has Christopher Steele spoken to US investigators?
I think so. He probably spoke to the teams of Robert Mueller [the special prosecutor appointed to investigate Russian interference identified by US intelligence in the presidential campaign], but it must have been done behind closed doors. He never revealed it publicly.
Why did Steele give you an interview?
I cannot answer this question. The only thing I can say is that I met him before his file was released and spoke very frequently with people close to him.
Will he speak one day?
I do not know. He doesn't really like being put in the media spotlight. He was not for the publication of his case. However, he wanted it to be taken seriously by the FBI.
What could be the next step?
I think at some point Mr. Trump is going to fire Special Prosecutor Mueller. Why ? Because if he charges members of the Trump family, like [his son] Donald Trump Jr. or [his son-in-law] Jared Kushner, Donald Trump will have no choice but to throw him out the window! The United States will then be in a much greater constitutional crisis than that caused in the 1970s by Watergate, because this story involves a foreign power, and not just any.
