By now, you probably know that House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes didn’t really discover that Donald Trump’s campaign communications were incidentally scraped during foreign surveillance by American intelligence. Rather, two White House staffers gave Nunes that information.
But about 24 hours earlier, the BBC uncovered something that, in the long run, may be equally damning. It turns out that American intelligence officials have been able to confirm another key detail in the dossier that reportedly outlines how the Kremlin compromised Trump. Specifically, a senior diplomat in Russia’s embassy in Washington was actually a spy who was deeply immersed in the Russian effort to throw the presidential election.
The BBC’s Paul Wood reports that the investigator who compiled the dossier, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, wrote this.
“A leading Russian diplomat, Mikhail KULAGIN, had been withdrawn from Washington at short notice because Moscow feared his heavy involvement in the US presidential election operation… would be exposed in the media there.”
As it turned out, Steele was actually referring to Mikhail Kalugin, the former head of the economics section at the Russian embassy. He returned to Russia in August 2016–ostensibly because he’d ended his six-year posting in the States. However, as the McClatchy Washington Bureau reported in February, the FBI had been keeping an eye on Kalugin for some time before he returned home.
According to one of Steele’s dispatches, Kalugin was suspected of funneling money to pro-Russian cyberhackers and other operatives in the election hacking effort. He supposedly channeled it through the system that distributes pension payments to Russian veterans living in the United States. According to Louise Shelley, a counterterrorism expert at George Mason University, these pension funds are “poorly monitored,” and can easily be manipulated by people with ties to the Kremlin.
Apparently American intelligence officials believe this is what happened here. According to Wood, they confirmed that Kalugin was indeed a spy masquerading as a diplomat–and were able to do so “using their own methods, outside the dossier.” It’s not clear whether they suspected that Kalugin was a spy before Steele first tipped them off in May 2016. However, a retired American intelligence officer told Wood that Kalugin had indeed been under surveillance at the time he returned to Russia.
State Department staffers who worked with Russia couldn’t recall ever dealing with Kalugin, which would be highly unusual. One former State Department official said this was a “classic” Russian intelligence tactic.
This marks at least the second time that American intelligence has been able to confirm important details in this dossier. You may recall that in February, they were able to confirm that a number of conversations Steele described indeed took place. As of yet, no one has been able to confirm the more salacious anecdotes in the dossier–including claims that Trump engaged in “golden showers” and other graphic sexual acts. However, the details that have been confirmed bolster investigators’ confidence in the dossier’s contents.
These confirmations also burnish Steele’s already sterling reputation in American intelligence circles. To see why intelligence officials thought highly of Steele long before he became a household name, watch this profile of Steele that aired on CBC’s “The National.”
So far, the only other American outlet to pick up on this story has been Daily Kos. That’s too bad. After all, this discovery adds to the growing evidence that Russia did indeed try to hack the election.
For the better part of three months, the Trump administration’s standard response to any questions about ties between Trump and the Kremlin has been “(noun) (verb) FAKE NEWS!” But if that response hadn’t been utterly discredited before, it definitely stands discredited with this revelation.
(featured image courtesy Mike Maguire, available under a Creative Commons-BY license)
