The Daily - The C.I.A. Spy Inside the Kremlin

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

Last week, CNN broke the story that the United States had secretly extracted a top spy from Russia in 2017. What does that mean now for American intelligence operations? Guest: Julian E. Barnes, who covers national security for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: The Moscow informant was instrumental to the C.I.A.’s conclusion that President Vladimir V. Putin had ordered and orchestrated Russia’s election interference campaign.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. Last week, CNN broke the story that the U.S. had secretly exfiltrated a top spy from Russia back in 2017. What that means now for U.S. intelligence. It's Monday, September 16th. So Julian, tell me about this story that you had been reporting out. A few months ago, my colleague Adam Goldman and I

started doing some reporting about a key CIA asset who had been offered exfiltration from Russia by the CIA. And we knew that this source was the main person who told the CIA, who told the entire intelligence community that Vladimir Putin interfered in the election and favored Donald Trump. So this person was really important. And what happened to this person was a little bit of a mystery. Julian Barnes covers national security for The Times.

Anytime you're trying to report about sensitive intelligence, it's extremely slow going. I had one conversation with a person who, as I was asking the question, he said, stop. I do not want to hear that question. I do not want you to ask me that question. So it's very painstaking work. He said, stop. I do not want to hear that question. I do not want you to ask me that question. So it's very painstaking work. But last week, as I was doing reporting, I learned that a cable network was on to one of the stories I was working on. But it was Friday and I was nervous, but I let that go. Cross your fingers and went home for the day. Cross your fingers, go home.

And Monday morning, I got a call that CNN was going to report the story. Good morning, I'm Jim Sciutto in New York. And I'm Poppy Harlow. We're so glad you're with us this Monday morning, and we do begin with a really significant CNN exclusive. And I was like, uh-oh. Jim, this is your

reporting. You have learned about a highly secretive intelligence operation by the United States. That's right, Poppy. Multiple Trump administration officials with direct knowledge tell me that in a previously undisclosed secret mission in 2017, the U.S. successfully extracted from Russia one of its highest level covert sources inside the Russian government. And then what happens? So it was not long after CNN broke the news that Russia apparently released the spy's name. We have not confirmed the name of the spy, nor will we repeat the name the Russians revealed. At first, when this happens, you think, oh, it's Russian disinformation.

But then you start a quick Google search and looks like this guy was a diplomat. Looks like this guy was a diplomat in the United States at some point. And lo and behold, there's a deed for a house in the Virginia suburbs. So you just Google the name of this spy. And oddly enough, an address pops up for what appears to be a senior Russian official working with the U.S. What do you actually do with that information? So it's sort of shocking to find that it's just profoundly weird. Like this is not how it's supposed to work. Like Russia is not supposed to release the name of the spy. Like you're not supposed to Google the spy in your backyard. But what you do with

that information is you drive out and pay a visit. And so the next morning, the family car was in use. So I rented a car to go, which is this very small, smart car, which you're not supposed to take on the highway. But I discovered you can achieve speeds of 65 miles an hour with a very, very small smart car. You're in a classic spy thriller car, right? You know, it's not like you're sneaking up when you drive in basically a clown car to somebody's house. But I needn't thought as I was weaving through the curvy roads of Virginia subdivisions that I was going to surprise anyone. Because when I arrived at the house, there was a half dozen other reporters there. So I parked my car, said hello to my rival at the Washington Post,

and then I walked up the driveway. I'm walking down to the cul-de-sac where you can see the house. It has a big porch, three stories, very large house. I just remember being, like, surprised. Like, these are huge houses. It's pretty good to be a spy, I guess. Lawn has been freshly mowed, and the little cuttings are still on the driveway here.

So I walked up to the house. A lot of windows right here on the porch. You know, someone has been in here and has drawn the shutters. I walked up earlier and you could see inside. And now you can't. They've drawn the drapes. Children's toys visible in the backyard. Waiting pool. There's the card from another reporter left in the door.

I'm going to ring the bell. And then without thinking, I put my hand on the doorknob, and then I just instantly thought, oh, man, Russia is known for going after spies by coating doorknobs with nerve agents. Right. And you just touched the doorknob. And I just touched the doorknob. But of course you're fine.

I'm fine. I'm fine. Momentary scare. The garbage bin is left out front. The neighbors had said that there was a dog left behind and the sheriff was supposed to come look, but nobody was home. But I wanted to figure out what happened, so I walked down the driveway, crossed the cul-de-sac, and tried to meet some of the neighbors. Hi, I'm with the New York Times. I'm Julian Barnes. I'm doing some reporting about the neighbor.

I don't know if you saw the press reports or whatnot, but there was reports broke out in my paper in CNN yesterday about the informant who told about Russian meddling. And Russian media, Russian government is reporting it is your next-door neighbor. And what did they know? Well, you know, when you're reporting about somebody and talking to the neighbors, the classic journalistic joke was, they were very quiet. I remember them being new neighbors. We hadn't even met them. We needed to get over, didn't get over.

And, of course, stereotypically, you know, we heard they were very quiet. But one of the neighbors described... July 4th, we're shooting off fireworks, and I'm like, oh, crap, there's the neighbor, the wife and the kid sitting on the front porch. So I said, let me go over and invite them. Inviting them over for the 4th of July fireworks. So I went over to invite them, So I said, let me go over and invite them. Inviting them over for the 4th of July fireworks. So I went over to invite them and she said she didn't speak English. So her husband came out and said that they would just watch from the steps. The interactions were

a little bit few and far between. That was the only interaction with him other than just waving when we passed on the street. I see. He was walking the dog right away when I'd seen him home in the yard. I did stop him. His wife was walking the dog, and I stopped and just said, hi, how you doing? I don't think she understood me because she said, fine, fine, fine. I said, how do you like the house and the neighborhood? And she's like, fine, fine, fine. So I'm like, I don't know if you understand me or not, but that was the only time I've ever talked to either one of them.

But, you know, the details they did provide really seemed to confirm that this was our guy, that this was the spy. It was a Russian couple, and I remember two kids, a taller boy, there may have been three, I don't know. The family moved in in June of 2018. They were vague about where they came from, just saying they had moved from northern Virginia.

I know there was at least one little kid, and then the other kid was, I don't know if he was junior high or high school. The husband was friendly, but spoke in what everyone knew was a heavy Russian accent. He was a diplomat for many years, so I presume his English was pretty good. Was that right? Yeah, I mean, he definitely had an accent that I could understand real good. And one of the neighbors told me that they had been whisked away the night before. A van came up, loaded them up, and took them to a location unknown. Did these neighbors that you were talking to seem shocked by this seeming spy in their midst?

You know, oddly, they didn't. It's a little bit spy novel-ish, but it's how the world works. So, I mean, you know, we do it to them, they do it to us. One person was like, we live near Washington. There are a lot of spies around here.

It's government, you know? It's every government. And they seemed to very quickly process that this neighbor who they didn't know very well, that he had been a spy. And one of the neighbors was pretty outspoken and turned out to be pretty proud of his neighbor and said, My only concern is if the guy's on our side, I don't know what you're going to do him any favors. This guy was doing important work for America. And, you know, he had really risked his own life to do good for our country. So we didn't know our neighbor was a spy.

But now that we know he was a spy for us, for the good guys, rah-rah. Exactly, which is a pretty quick mental somersault to do, I think. But, yeah, that's what happened. They quickly thought, all right, he's on our side. Let's rally around the flag for him. Hmm. So then what happens? After a few hours, the postman drives up and he is immediately mobbed by six reporters.

And then I just look at that scene and I think the postman doesn't know anything. This is over. So I got back into my car and I headed back to the New York Times Washington Bureau to keep reporting. And presumably drop off your car to go at its car to go place? You can just leave them anywhere in the District of Columbia.

We'll be right back. All right, Julian, how did we get here? What's the story? So decades ago, the CIA approached a low-level or mid-level Russian diplomat with an offer to spy for the United States. Now, we don't know exactly when or where that occurred, but we do know that it was outside Russia because it's very difficult to approach, to cultivate a potential source inside Russia. Inside Russia, American spies are followed everywhere. So this approach occurred overseas. And with this informant, the CIA really struck gold.

The informant rose to be an aid to a key diplomatic figure. The informant's patron was the chief diplomatic advisor to Putin. Wow. And for the CIA, this is the critical thing. It's very hard to understand Vladimir Putin's thinking or his strategy. Vladimir Putin is a former spy himself. He is very careful. He does not communicate over cell phones, over landlines. He does not write a lot of stuff down. He just knows those kinds of things are what get intercepted, recorded, photographed. And so when we're talking about Vladimir Putin,

human intelligence, spies, informants are really, really critical. By the time we get to the Obama administration, the reports coming from the informant are handled with the utmost sensitivity. There are reports for the president's eyes only put into sealed envelopes delivered to the Oval Office and required to be returned to the CIA. Extraordinary levels of secrecy and protection that show how important this spy's information was. And by nurturing this informant over decades, watching him get ever better access, they developed what some people say is the CIA's most important source in 2016. The New York Times reports on the growing FBI

investigation into the Democratic National Committee email hack. The agency reportedly is also trying to determine if aides and groups close to Hillary Clinton were targeted as well. Secretary of State John Kerry this morning raised the issue with Russia's foreign minister. The Russians scoffed at reports Moscow is behind the hack. So this is where we are when the most difficult challenge to the American intelligence agencies in a generation develops, where a adversarial power begins to interfere in an American election. an American election. What specifically do we know about the intelligence that this spy is able to get the U.S. in 2016? There are two pieces of intelligence that we know about that were really important. One of which is that tonight the Central Intelligence Agency is confident that a Russian hacking plot tried to influence the U.S. presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.

Putin affirmatively wanted Donald Trump to be president. There was something about Trump that Putin liked. And this ultimately became a key finding of the CIA. They had multiple sources for it, but this was the first source. This was the most important source, we believe, for that finding. The other thing is that the source confirmed that the DNC hack, the Russian cyber penetration of the Democratic National Committee, had been ordered and approved by Vladimir Putin, that it was part of Putin's larger strategy. And to have this informant confirm that finding really allowed the CIA to have a high level of confidence in that.

That really shaped the understanding in 2016 about what had happened. In a memo to CIA staff, Director John Brennan said that he, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper were now all on the same page about the scope, nature, and intent of the Russian interference in our presidential election. But there's a downside. When you're delivering the most explosive, the most important intelligence, and that intelligence is entering the political debate.

I think it's ridiculous. I think it's just another excuse. I don't believe it. There's a level of scrutiny. So we have to be very careful right now. We cannot make these wild assumptions that the Russian government was behind this, because right now we do not have all of the evidence. Reporters start asking questions.

We haven't been given a shred of evidence to substantiate the claim that the Russians were behind this. Members of Congress start asking questions. People want to know, how does the CIA know this? And there are hints at the end of 2016 that the CIA has a source in Russia. New information derived from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies points directly to the Russian president. So despite all the secrecy and the care around this informant, his existence is suddenly something people understand. Yes. Now, if you go back and look at the stories at the end of 2016, they're just the lightest hints. But the CIA is getting nervous because the CIA knows when reporters are asking questions, so too are the Russians.

And Putin is ruthless about people he considers traitors. So they begin to write a plan to extract the informant from Russia. And as the news stories increased in early 2017. This morning, a Washington Post investigation focuses on Russian government interference in our election. In August, the CIA gave then President Obama a report, quote, drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government interference in our election. In August, the CIA gave then-President Obama a report, quote, drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government. The CIA went to the spy and said, it's time to go, you need to come to America.

That offer was accepted. So, Julian, the spy is in the United States. I guess we didn't know it at the time, but he's in Virginia. How do you come to get on this story a few months back? the U.S. seemed to have not a very good understanding about what Russia's intentions or strategy for interfering in the midterm elections would be. There was assumptions that they were going to do it, but the intelligence community didn't have a high level of confidence about exactly what would be going on. So we wrote a story about how the CIA's assets in Russia had gone dark and that they no longer had eyes on the Kremlin. Now, at that time, we didn't know exactly

why that was. And that story sort of speculated that there was a number of different reasons why the spies could have gone silent. But what we didn't know is that the really good spy had been brought out. It's sort of amazing that you could tell even from the outside that something had changed and that what had changed turned out to be the absence of a single person. So how common is that for a country like the U.S. to be so reliant on a single source in a place as important strategically as Russia? Now, of course, there are multiple sources. You can't have high confidence in a conclusion and still have one source.

and a conclusion and still have one source. But this source is probably the most important one because of the access to the Kremlin. And the reality is, in this day and age, it is very hard to develop good sources. As this story shows, it takes decades. It took years to cultivate this person, to get this person into a place where they could offer the highest and most valuable level of intelligence. You don't turn around and develop a spy in a year. You don't get a

high-ranking Kremlin official to just turn and give you the crown jewels. And in Russia, the kinds of technical intelligence that the U.S. relies on in so many places, eavesdropping, signals intelligence, spy satellites, the Russians are very sophisticated at sort of blocking some of that stuff. And so that puts so much importance on the old school human spies. Everything you just said does not seem to bode very well for our intelligence on Russia with the 2020 election approaching. That's right. That's what's really important about this story. Going forward, looking at the 2020 election, when everyone believes that Russia will mount another interference campaign,

we know that they'll do that, but we don't know how they'll do it. They're going to use different tactics than they used before. And if you don't have the eyes on the ground, you don't have an early warning system. You don't know what Russia is going to do. You don't know what Putin himself is ordering. Julian, thank you very much. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

In an interview with The Times, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence under President Obama, said there was little doubt that this past week's revelations were going to, quote, make recruiting assets in Russia even more difficult than it already is. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Sunday night, President Trump said he was prepared to take military action in response to a series of devastating attacks on Saudi Arabia's oil production system over the weekend, which knocked out about half the kingdom's oil output and sent global oil prices soaring. Responsibility for the attacks was claimed by the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have been engaged in a years-long battle with Saudi Arabia. But U.S. intelligence suggested

that the attack was actually conducted by Iran, potentially escalating an already tense standoff with the Trump administration. Iran denied any role in the attack, but in a tweet, President Trump wrote that the U.S. was, quote, locked and loaded, depending on verification of Iran's role. And,

an investigation by two reporters at the Times has further corroborated the allegation that while a student at Yale, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh pulled down his pants at a party and thrust his penis at a female classmate, Deborah Ramirez. Kavanaugh denied the claim during his confirmation hearings, but the reporters found that at least seven people, including Ramirez's mother, had heard about the incident before Kavanaugh became a federal judge. Two of them just days after the incident had occurred. The reporters also found a Yale classmate who said that Kavanaugh had thrust his penis into the hand of a different female student.

Kavanaugh had thrust his penis into the hand of a different female student. That classmate reported the incident to the FBI before Kavanaugh was confirmed. But the FBI did not investigate the claim. On Sunday, the Times reported that the Justice Department will present one of its most prestigious awards for distinguished service to the lawyers who worked to confirm Kavanaugh. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. See you tomorrow.