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Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win Paperback – Illustrated, November 16, 2017
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“Harding…presents a powerful case for Russian interference, and Trump campaign collusion, by collecting years of reporting on Trump’s connections to Russia and putting it all together in a coherent narrative.” —The Nation
December 2016. Luke Harding, the Guardian reporter and former Moscow bureau chief, quietly meets former MI6 officer Christopher Steele in a London pub to discuss President-elect Donald Trump’s Russia connections. A month later, Steele’s now-famous dossier sparks what may be the biggest scandal of the modern era. The names of the Americans involved are well-known—Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, George Papadopoulos, Carter Page—but here Harding also shines a light on powerful Russian figures like Aras Agalarov, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Sergey Kislyak, whose motivations and instructions may have been coming from the highest echelons of the Kremlin.
Drawing on new material and his expert understanding of Moscow and its players, Harding takes the reader through every bizarre and disquieting detail of the “Trump-Russia” story—an event so huge it involves international espionage, off-shore banks, sketchy real estate deals, the Miss Universe pageant, mobsters, money laundering, poisoned dissidents, computer hacking, and the most shocking election in American history.
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateNovember 16, 2017
- Dimensions5.16 x 0.75 x 7.99 inches
- ISBN-100525562516
- ISBN-13978-0525562511
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“[Collusion] should be read by every conservative in this country.” —Glenn Beck
“Essential…I wish everyone who is skeptical that Russia has leverage over Trump would read it…. Harding, the former Moscow bureau chief of The Guardian, has been reporting on shady characters like Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was indicted last month, long before Trump announced his candidacy…. There’s no longer any serious question that there was cooperation between Trump’s campaign and Russia, but the extent of the cooperation, and the precise nature of it, remains opaque…. [Collusion] is invaluable in collating the overwhelming evidence of a web of relationships between the Kremlin, Trump and members of Trump’s circle.” —Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
“Harding…presents a powerful case for Russian interference, and Trump campaign collusion, by collecting years of reporting on Trump’s connections to Russia and putting it all together in a coherent narrative. It’s the sheer breadth of connections, many of them dating back 20 years or more, between Trump and his associates and Russians with close ties to the Kremlin that put the lie to Trump’s repeated claims that he has no ties to Russia.” —The Nation
“A superb piece of work, wonderfully done and essential reading for anyone who cares for his country. Amazing research and brilliantly collated.” —John le Carré
“Damning indeed…. Harding is at his best connecting dots that may not always be obvious…. If readers emerge from this fast-paced narrative convinced that the Trump White House is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Russian oligarchs, then there’s good reason for it.” —Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Meeting
December 2016
Grosvenor Gardens, London SW1
Victoria Station in London. A mixture of shabby and genteel. There’s a railway terminus, a bus station, and—a little farther on— a triangular park. Here you can find a statue of the French World War I hero Marshal Ferdinand Foch sitting on a horse. Written on the plinth are Foch’s words: “I am conscious of having served England . . .” Someone has added in black pen: “by murdering thousands.”
It’s a zone of arrivals and departures. Around Foch are tall plane trees and brown benches splattered white with pigeon droppings. There are tourists, commuters, and the odd hirsute bum, sipping from a can of lager and muttering. The man who owns this prime slice of real estate is the Duke of Westminster. He’s Britain’s wealthiest aristocrat.
Keep going and you reach a row of tall neoclassical houses, done in French Renaissance style. This is Grosvenor Gardens. The street looks onto the back wall of a world-famous residence, Buckingham Palace. With a bit of pluck and a long ladder you might vault directly into Her Majesty’s private back garden. Its fir trees, poking into the gray London skyline, are visible to commoners. The Queen’s lake is unseen.
Some of the houses here announce their inhabitants: PR firm, Japanese restaurant, language school. But at number 9-11 Grosvenor Gardens there’s no clue as to who or what is inside. Two pillars frame an anonymous black front door. There’s a closed-circuit TV sign. No names on the door buzzer. Above, three floors of offices.
If you enter and turn right, you find yourself in a modest ground-floor suite: a couple of bare rooms painted ivory white, a medium-sized color map of the world fixed to one wall, white blinds just above street level on high windows. There are computers, and newspapers, too: a copy of the London Times. The impression is of a small, discreet, professional operation.
The office is home to a British firm, Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd. Orbis’s website says it’s a “leading corporate intelligence consultancy.” It adds, vaguely: “We provide senior decision-makers with strategic insight, intelligence and investigative services. We then work with clients to implement strategies which protect their interests worldwide.”
Decoded, Orbis is in the nonstate spying business. It spies for commercial clients—delving into the secrets of individuals and institutions, governments and international organizations. London is the global capital of private intelligence. “A tough sector,” in the words of one former British spy, who worked in it for a year before landing a job with a large corporation. There are more than a dozen such firms, staffed mostly by former intelligence officers specializing in foreign know-how.
This isn’t quite the world of classic espionage or James Bond. But it’s not far from it.
The man who runs Orbis is called Christopher Steele. Steele and his business partner, Christopher Burrows, are Orbis’s directors. Both are British. Steele is fifty-two; Burrows a little older, fifty-eight. Their names don’t appear on Orbis’s public material. Nor is there mention of their former careers. A pair of bright younger graduates work alongside them. They form a small team.
Steele’s office gives few clues as to the nature of his undercover work.
There’s only one hint.
Lined up near the director’s desk are nesting Russian dolls, or matryoshki. A souvenir from Moscow. They feature Russia’s great nineteenth-century writers: Tolstoy, Gogol, Lermontov, Pushkin. The dolls are hand-painted and have the names of the authors written toward the base in florid Cyrillic characters. The uppercase T of Tolstoy resembles a swirling Greek pi.
In the tumultuous days of 2016, the dolls were as good a metaphor as any for the astonishing secret investigation Steele had recently been asked to do. It was an explosive assignment—to uncover the Kremlin’s innermost secrets with relation to one Donald J. Trump, to unnest them one by one, like so many dolls, until the truth was finally revealed. Its conclusions would shake the American intelligence community and cause a political earthquake not seen since the dark days of President Richard Nixon and Watergate.
Steele’s findings were sensational, and the resulting dossier would in effect accuse President-elect Trump of the gravest of crimes: collusion with a foreign power. That power was Russia. The alleged crime—vehemently denied, contested, and in certain key respects unprovable—was treason. The new U.S. president designate was, it was whispered, a traitor.
To find a plot that crazy, you had to turn to fiction: Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate, about a Soviet-Chinese operation to seize the White House. Or a largely forgotten thriller by the writer Ted Allbeury, The Twentieth Day of January. In this one, Moscow recruits a young American during the 1968 Paris student riots who goes on to greater things. Like Steele, Allbeury was a former British intelligence officer.
Until his work was brought blindingly into the light, Steele was unknown. Unknown, that is, beyond a narrow circle of U.S. and UK government intelligence insiders and Russia experts. That was the way he preferred it.
The year 2016 was an extraordinary historical moment. First, Brexit, Britain’s shock decision to leave the European Union. Then, to the surprise and dismay of many Americans—not to mention others around the world—Donald J. Trump was unexpectedly elected that November as the United States’ forty-fifth president.
The campaign that got him to the White House had been rancorous, divisive, and mean-spirited. Looming above the campaign was this single and scarcely believable accusation: a foreign leader traditionally seen as an enemy of the United States had secretly helped Trump in his against-the-odds presidential campaign—maybe even nudging him across the line to victory. Trump, went the claim, was the Kremlin’s candidate. He was a puppet of Putin, whom top Republicans had previously regarded as a cold-eyed KGB villain—“a murderer and a thug,” according to John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona. Someone who wished America ill.
At this point, the accusation of collusion with Moscow stuck for two reasons. First, there was Trump’s own curious behavior on the campaign trail. Faced with claims that Russia was hacking Democratic emails, and leaking them to damage his rival, Hillary Clinton, Trump publicly urged Moscow to keep going.
At a July 2016 press conference in Florida, he said this:
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.”
As a Clinton aide pointed out, this was a straightforward appeal to a foreign power to commit espionage against a political opponent. Was this Trump opportunism? Or something more coordinated, more sinister?
Few doubted that the emails released via WikiLeaks in June and October 2016 hurt the Democratic candidate. In and of themselves, they weren’t especially scandalous. To an unscrupulous adversary like Trump, however, they were a present, a great gift: an opportunity to grab the media cycle by the neck and to shake home the message of “Crooked Hillary.” Also relevant was the fact that Moscow had stolen Republican National Committee emails, too. Only it hadn’t published them.
Second, how to explain Trump’s consistent praise of Putin? In the febrile months leading up to the November 8, 2016, vote, Trump had lambasted not only Clinton and Obama but also his Republican Party rivals, Saturday Night Live, the “failing” New York Times, the U.S. media in general—his favorite enemy—and Meryl Streep. And others. It was a long list.
Russia’s president, by contrast, was lauded as “very smart.” Putin was practically the only person on the planet to escape Trump’s sweeping invective, delivered in semiliterate exclamatory style via Twitter, at a time when most sane people were in bed. Trump was willing to verbally assault anyone who queried his behavior—anyone but his friend Putin.
The budding Trump-Putin friendship couldn’t merely be explained by personal chemistry; they hadn’t—it appeared—met. Sure, there were ideological similarities: a contempt for international bodies such as the UN and a dislike of the European Union. And, you might argue, Christian-inflected white nationalism. But this wasn’t quite enough. It was as if there were a strange fealty at work, an unexplained factor, an invisible hand, a missing piece of the puzzle. Trump didn’t praise any other foreign leader in quite the same way. Or as often. His obeisance to Putin would continue even as he ascended to office.
These two issues—the promotion of Russia’s hacked emails and the praise of Putin—raised a remarkable question. Had Putin somehow been blackmailing the candidate? If not, how to explain Trump’s infatuation? If yes, blackmailing how, exactly?
There were plenty of rumors, of course. Some of them had reached my newspaper, The Guardian. In the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election, and in the feverish and dumbfounding period afterward, investigative journalists on both sides of the Atlantic were pursuing a number of leads. This was a difficult, frustrating, and tantalizing business. There were doubts about sources. Some of the dirt on Trump came from people close to the Clinton campaign, people with an ax to grind.
Nevertheless, this was, we realized, potentially the most important U.S. political story in a generation. If Trump had indeed conspired with Russia, not only publicly but perhaps covertly, too, via undisclosed back-channels, that looked like treachery. It was Watergate all over again.
But this time around, the “burglars” weren’t low-level Nixon operatives. They weren’t even Americans. According to the CIA and the FBI, they were anonymous hackers working for Putin’s spy agencies. The cash paying their salaries was Russian—and possibly American. They didn’t bust into the DNC using lock picks, surgical gloves, and bugging equipment, like their 1972 counterparts.
Instead, they penetrated the DNC’s computer networks—an ingress by the brute method of thousands of phishing emails. The operation, the FBI would conclude, was simple and inexpensive. It was devastatingly effective. And perhaps proof that America’s political systems were more vulnerable to shadowy electronic forces than anyone had thought.
Meanwhile, Trump hadn’t exactly helped our efforts to establish the truth. Breaking with all precedent, he refused to disclose his tax returns. His global real estate empire was hidden behind a network of several hundred opaque companies. Visualized as a graphic, Trump’s corporate holdings looked like a giant exploding puffball.
Was Trump a multibillionaire, as he flamboyantly claimed? Or was he in fact broke and overleveraged, owing large sums of money to banks abroad? What financial ties, if any, did he have to foreign governments? What might be said of his family, in particular the future president’s powerful son-in-law, Jared Kushner?
In December 2016, Nick Hopkins, a Guardian colleague, and I went to see Chris Steele to ask him these and other questions. Hopkins is the paper’s investigations editor. He had met Steele previously and knew of his expertise on Russia. This was my expertise, too. From 2007 to 2011, I spent four years in Russia as the Guardian’s Moscow bureau chief until I was put in an airport cell and deported from the country. This, I am sure, was a result of some of my less flattering reports on Vladimir Putin.
It was a Thursday afternoon, two and a half weeks before Christmas. London’s streets were crowded and hectic with shoppers. We traveled by underground from the Guardian’s office near Kings Cross. At Victoria Station we got out and walked the short distance to Grosvenor Gardens—past Marshal Foch and his entourage of pigeons.
We buzzed the front door of Orbis. They decided to let us in. Steele greeted us. He was of medium height, dressed in a plain suit, with once-black hair now mostly gray, friendly in manner but with an edge of reserve that was entirely understandable.
Journalists and spies have traditionally viewed each other with suspicion. In some respects, they are engaged in the same trade: cultivating sources, collecting and sifting information, separating fact from fiction. Both write for an audience. A newspaper’s audience is anybody with an Internet connection. Spies write for a small official circle, cleared for secrets. Often, I imagine, the product is the same. The spies have one advantage. They receive material obtained from state eavesdropping and secret sources.
Steele had agreed to chat over four o’clock tea. By this point his investigation had not made worldwide headlines. He had not yet removed himself from the public eye, so the three of us returned to the street and looked for a spot to grab a cup of tea.
We tried Balls Brothers—a café and wine bar, its green awnings overlooking Lower Grosvenor Garden. A waitress told us they had no space: the tables were reserved for Christmas office parties. We wandered across the road into a pub, the Shakespeare, its name marked in letters of black against gold. A portrait of the bard himself hung above the entrance.
We found a tucked-away table. I went to the bar and came back with drinks: beer for Steele, Coke for Nick, pot of tea for me. The decor had a railway theme, publicity for the Great Western Railway. There were old black-and-white photos of men in flat caps reading in a carriage and young women splashing in the sea at a beach.
Steele was someone who liked being in the shadows, away from publicity or fuss. In the world of corporate intelligence, the fewer people who knew what you were doing, the better. Invisible was good. Reporters (they knew things, but could be indiscreet and on occasion treacherous) were a necessary evil.
“Have you heard of me?” he asked.
I confessed I hadn’t.
I knew most people in town who were focused on Russia, but not Steele.
“Good,” he said. “That’s how I like it.”
Steele’s reticence was a matter of professional custom. First, he was a former spy. Second, he was bound by the rules of commercial confidentiality. He wasn’t going to say anything about his clients. There was no hint he had been involved in what was the single most important investigation in decades. Besides, those who investigated, criticized, or betrayed Putin often met with disastrous ends.
One critic was Alexander Litvinenko. Litvinenko was a former FSB officer who fled Russia in 2000 after exposing corruption at the top of his organization. (Two years earlier Putin had personally fired him.) In exile in London, Litvinenko denounced Russia’s president in books and articles. Litvinenko’s friends warned him that nothing good would come of this.
In 2003, MI6 recruited Litvinenko as an occasional expert on Russian organized crime. Litvinenko advised British and Spanish intelligence. His thesis was later cited in leaked U.S. diplomatic cables out of Madrid. It said the Kremlin, its well-resourced spy agencies, and the Russian mafia had merged. In effect, they formed a single criminal entity, a mafia state.
Litvinenko’s reward was a radioactive cup of tea, delivered to him by two Russians in a London hotel bar. The hotel, the Millennium, is next to the U.S. embassy on Grosvenor Square in an area familiar to Russian spies. If the CIA officers stationed there had peered out of their third-floor window on November 1, 2006, they might have seen Litvinenko’s assassins, Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi, walk through the hotel’s revolving door. A UK public inquiry found Putin “probably approved” this operation.
I had spent a decade investigating the Litvinenko assassination, and Steele had also followed the case closely. He hadn’t met Litvinenko, but he led MI6’s subsequent investigation into this unprecedented murder. Steele concluded it was a plot authorized at the highest levels of Russian power. The poison was polonium-210—a rare, lethal, and highly radioactive isotope. Once it is ingested, death is certain. In Litvinenko’s case, it took more than three weeks of suffering.
Not knowing the powder keg Steele was sitting on, we had come to talk to him about the Trump-Russia investigation we were quietly carrying out since the U.S. election. We had two leads. One was intriguing and at this point speculative: that Russia had covertly financed Trump’s campaign. We knew much of the alleged details. There was no proof. We had no primary source. If proof did exist, it was well hidden.
The other lead was more solid. We had documentary evidence that high-ranking Russian bureaucrats and well-connected insiders had laundered $20 billion. The scheme was ingenious—its trail involving British lawyers, Moldovan judges, a Latvian bank, and limited companies registered in London. The cash had gone everywhere, some of it through U.S. accounts with banks like JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Most of the beneficiaries remained a mystery.
Cash had been hidden offshore. The scheme had been partly used for political operations abroad. It illustrated the porousness of the U.S. banking system, its pores open to Russian money. And if you could launder money into New York, you could, presumably, spend it on covert hacking. On anything you wished for.
Steele listened more than he talked. He wouldn’t confirm that our stories were correct, though he implied we were on the right track.
He offered parallel lines of inquiry.
“You need to look at the contracts for the hotel deals and land deals that Trump did. Check their values against the money Trump secured via loans,” Steele told us.
This, it seemed, was a reference to Trump’s former home in Florida. Trump had bought the mansion in 2004 for $41 million. Four years later, he sold it to a Russian oligarch for $95 million. Even allowing for inflation, for the repainting Trump said he’d carried out on the property, for the allure of the Trump brand, and for the whims of a very rich man seeking to invest in the United States, this seemed an extraordinary profit.
“The difference is what’s important,” Steele said.
Another theme of the election campaign was Trump’s relations with women. This had come to the fore after the emergence of a 2005 recording. On it Trump bragged about the privileges of being “a star.” One perk: when he met beautiful women he could simply “grab them by the pussy.” Trump apologized for this. He insisted the women who alleged sexual harassment were liars—jezebels motivated not by justice but by politics.
To our surprise, Steele implied that Trump and sex was an interesting line of inquiry. He gave no details.
Steele wasn’t going to tell us much. Nevertheless, it appeared he might confirm—or trash—information we’d acquired from elsewhere. For an investigative journalist, this was helpful.
After forty-five minutes it was time for Steele to go.
The situation had a distinctly Watergate echo. Our mission was now clear: follow the sex and the money.
We left separately, determined to keep our investigation going. Then things got a whole lot bigger.
Two days later, Steele’s work would land on President Barack Obama’s desk, but its beginnings were decades in the making.
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; Illustrated edition (November 16, 2017)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0525562516
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525562511
- Item Weight : 11.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.16 x 0.75 x 7.99 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #200,969 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #124 in Elections
- #291 in Political Intelligence
- #355 in Russian History (Books)
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About the author

In 2007 I arrived in Moscow with my wife and young family. I was a career foreign correspondent working for the British newspaper The Guardian. My previous postings were to Delhi and Berlin. I had chronicled George Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, reported from the frontline and dodged incoming mortar fire. Surely Russia would be easy? Not quite, it turned out.
Within a few months we found ourselves in a badly written spy novel. Unpromising young men followed me around the icy streets. Secret agents broke into our apartment, on one occasion opening the window next to our six-year-old son's bed. We lived on the tenth floor. The UK embassy explained that these ghostly visitors worked for the FSB. This was the main successor agency to the KGB. Its former boss was Vladimir Putin, Russia's president.
I wrote about these experiences in a 2011 memoir, Mafia State (published in the US as Expelled). They fuelled much of my subsequent work as a non-fiction writer. Why had Putin's undercover agents picked on me? I was never entirely sure. My attempts to unravel the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko may have played a part and certainly contributed to the Kremlin's decision to deport me from Russia, in the first case of its kind since the Cold War.
In London, I followed a public inquiry into Litvinenko's teapot assassination. It concluded Putin "probably" approved the operation using radioactive polonium. My book about the case, A Very Expensive Poison, is a dramatic account of one of this century's most lurid crimes. The playwright Lucy Prebble adapted it into an award-winning stage play at the Old Vic theatre in London; it was shortlisted for the 2017 Crime Writers' Association Non-fiction Dagger Prize.
My next book sought to answer a question which haunts us still: what does Vladimir Putin have on the former US president Donald Trump? The dossier by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele says Putin's spies secretly filmed Trump in a Moscow hotel room. The claim always struck me as plausible; the FSB specialises in covert recordings and once left a sex manual by our marital bed. "Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money and How Russia helped Trump Win" was a number one New York Times best-seller.
Like its predecessors, my 2018 book Shadow State is a real-life thriller. The story is incredible but true. Two Russian colonels arrive in Salisbury on a mission to murder a renegade colleague, Sergei Skripal. Shadow State further describes the myriad ways in which the Kremlin is seeking to subvert our democracy and overwhelm our politics, via cyber-hacking, disinformation, and corruption.
My latest book "Invasion: Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival", is published in November 2022 by Vintage and Guardian Faber. It is the first account of a war that has transformed international relations and which has led to an outpouring of support for Ukraine in the US, UK and beyond. Invasion is a gripping and compelling first draft of history, I hope, of a story that concerns and touches us all.
When Putin's overweening assault began at 4am on February 24, 2022 I was in Kyiv. His goal? To topple president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and to wipe Ukraine from the map. As Putin saw it Ukraine was "historical Russia". I spent the early hours of the invasion sheltering in an underground car park. A mother arrived with her children; the kids' were clutching colouring books. War had arrived. It was Europe's biggest since 1945. Civilians would be its main victims. I spent 2022 on the frontline.
My focus as a writer and correspondent is on the human story. "Invasion" describes the horrors of Bucha and Mariupol; the grinding artillery battle in eastern Ukraine; and the mass graves and torture chambers found in former zones of Russian occupation. I travelled to the north-east Kharkiv region, to areas liberated in autumn by a Ukrainian counter-offensive. In November 2022 I visited bombed villages in Kherson oblast, in the south, days after a Russian pull-out across the Dnipro river.
I have also written books on Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and the Conservative politician Jonathan Aitken. The director Oliver Stone made The Snowden Files into a biopic, Snowden; Dreamworks adapted my book WikiLeaks - written with David Leigh - into The Fifth Estate, starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
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One Russian critic, Alexander Litvinenko (former FSB officer), had made the claim that the Kremlin, its spy agencies, and the Russian Mafia had actually merged into a single, you could say, criminal entity. He met his demise via a radioactive cup of tea – careful what you say.
The author covers the story by devoting each chapter to various time periods. Chapter one covers events from 1990 to 2016. Here we see the beginnings of Fusion GPS and its relationship to Orbis (the company Chris Steele founded). It was during this time that the famous dossier was developed, which Steele ascertained to be 70 to 90 percent accurate. We see how the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, British intelligence), and the NSA worked closely together and how their intelligence operations started picking up Russian communications between people associated with Trump. Other countries’ spy agencies supplied similar Trump-Russian electronic material. These include Germany, Estonia, Sweden, Poland, Australia, and French and Dutch spy agency contributions. The FBI’s reaction seemed lukewarm; they seemed more interested in trashing Clinton. So it appears Steele had found prima facie evidence of a conspiracy here.
The next several chapters concentrate on the years 2013 to 2017. Here we learn of interesting pro-Russian changes to the Republican Party platform. On the Russian side, we see just how paper thin the wall is between state assets and criminal hackers. In fact, intelligence from deep inside the Kremlin even said that Putin directed the cyber operation against the US, the objective being to defeat or at least damage Clinton and to help elect Trump. It appears that WikiLeaks had become a sub-branch of Russian intelligence; in fact, they are reputed to have moved their hosting to Moscow in September 2016. We also see the involvement of Facebook in the spread of “fake news.” There were 470 inauthentic accounts and Moscow spent around $100,000 on more than 3000 ads or more. Then there was Michael Flynn who claimed to be the first American to be allowed inside the Kremlin’s most secret espionage facility called Aquarium. It is interesting that he got this access.
Another chapter is devoted to Paul Manafort, and Viktor Yanukovych, and others. Manafort’s relationship with Trump appears to have gone back many years – all the way back to 1980. We learn of secret payments, conspiracies, laundering, shell companies, and other intriguing stuff. It is also interesting to note that the KGB had opened a file on Donald Trump as far back as 1977, so he has been on Russian radar for quite some time. The author covers the history of Trump and Russian interest over the decades. All of this provides a background leading to the big story of collusion, which as of this writing is still being investigated. According to the author, Russian clients were a core part of Trump’s business, noting that “Trump’s links to the underworld were multifarious.” The author reports of many Russian clients purchasing property in Trump-branded towers in Florida, many being sold to limited liability companies where the buyers are unidentified. We are provided with much detail about Trump’s involvement in Deutsche Bank. Then of course, there is the dossier and the prospect of a Kompromat operation against Trump. It was noted that “Wherever you looked there was a Russian trace.” The book concludes with a discussion of the Mueller investigation. It will be interesting to see where it all leads.
Harding tells the story from the perspective of a highly knowledgeable outside observer who can't believe what he's seeing as he witnesses our country under attack--meaning he can't believe we weren't doing anything about it. He does an excellent job of explaining who Christopher Steele is--giving biographical details that establish his Russian expertise and experience--and how he came to write the famous dossier at the center of the Trump-Russia investigation. He also guides you through the swampy and confusing world of Russian money laundering and corrupt financial dealings.He's especially good at "follow the money" stuff.
He goes over a lot of the same ground other books cover, but with insights about the Russian side of the story that other authors don't provide--again, especially the dirty money details. He's very good at giving the context and extensive info about Flynn's and Manafort's Russian connections, both guys near and dear to Putin and his oligarchs. Harding has written other books on Russia and he convinces you he knows what he's talking about.
As I understand it, Putin's goal in electing Trump seems to be to get sanctions removed so he can continue his corrupt business dealings (which involve laundering money all over the globe) and invade and exploit nearby countries that he thinks are his for the taking. Ultimately he wants to weaken the West and restore Russia to its USSR superpower glory--in fact, he wants nothing less than world domination. Putin is a freaking bonafide Bond villain.
Harding also convinces you that Trump is neck-deep in shady Russian deals. The Deutsche Bank part of the story is something I never really understood, but Harding explains how they were laundering Russian money while lending millions to Trump. Trump owes Deutsche Bank around $300 million right now. We still don't have all the answers about Trump's connections to this bank because no one will talk. Kushner too is indebted to Deutsche Bank for millions of dollars. The full story behind this has yet to be told--I hope Mueller gets to the bottom of it.
Harding postulates that Russia is probably blackmailing Trump--everywhere you look, he's obligated to Russians. The fact that he flatters Putin constantly and says he believes Putin over the analysis of all our intelligence agencies, and in fact undermines our government agencies and rule of law is more than suspect. He tells you what he thinks of Mueller and what will happen with that investigation.
I liked this book very much--it's extremely informative and clearly written. I'll definitely read more of Harding's books.
Top reviews from other countries
learning more is the helpless concern I have ended up with due to the power and collusion that I understand is just a past and ongoing system in the bowels of our political and financial worlds. Enlightening. I certainly have respect for the courage of Harding to write this book and especially Christopher Steele. Believable and makes total sense.











