It had become a tradition that I would take the kids camping each summer for my birthday. In the past, we had rented an RV or a cabin, but this time the kids wanted the barebones experience. Our journey took us to a lush forest near the shores of Lake Huron. We arrived on July 16, 2020. Little did I know that the next three days would turn out to be anything but the tranquil camping trip we had come for.
After pitching our tent, we started our campfire. It was a perfect summer’s evening, the sky slowly turning dark and a light whiff of wind blowing through the leaves. Soon, the kids disappeared into the tent. They wanted to lie in their sleeping bags and watch the night sky. The weather forecast was good, so I had left off the rain tarp. The kids were gazing at the stars above. It reminded me of when I was a kid doing the exact same thing. I was still outside watching the embers glow. It was beautiful.
The next day, my phone lit up. The messages were from my friends Fool Nelson, Walkafyre, and Stephen McIntyre. A year earlier, Fool had identified Eric Ciaramella, the so-called whistleblower who had triggered the first impeachment of President Donald Trump. Ciaramella was upset that Trump had asked the president of Ukraine to liaise with U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr to look into the Biden family’s financial and other entanglements in Ukraine. However, Ciaramella himself was involved with those entanglements, at least to the extent that he had organized the White House meeting at which the idea of firing the Ukrainian prosecutor—which was what Trump wanted investigated—had first been raised. Fool uncovered that as well. Although by that point I knew their real names, I often thought that maybe it was for the better that Fool and Walkafyre remained anonymous.
I knew Stephen the best out of the group. We first met two years earlier. At the time, I was not part of any online research efforts. In contrast, Stephen had been doing it for a while, having himself made crucial discoveries along the way, including exposing the hockey stick fraud as part of the Climategate controversy.
My own interest started in 2018, when I read about the strange case of George Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos was a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. He was supposed to have kicked off the Trump–Russia investigation in July 2016 by bragging about Russia helping the Trump campaign by dumping Hillary Clinton’s clandestine emails from her time as secretary of state to the Australian ambassador in London. That entire story sounded contrived.
I had also seen Robert Mueller’s special counsel team use Papadopoulos to advance their Russia collusion narrative. Their court filings, in which they alleged that Papadopoulos had lied to the FBI, were replete with anti-Russian and anti-Trump innuendo. That was par for the course. What wasn’t normal, at least not at the time, was that the legal documents did not match the facts. Why would Papadopoulos admit to things that did not happen, I wondered. Something wasn’t right.
Incidentally, my hunch was right. As has now been shown by special counsel John Durham in his report on the origin of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, “Papadopoulos made no mention of Clinton emails, dirt or any specific approach by the Russian government to the Trump campaign team with an offer or suggestion of providing assistance.”
It was my doubts about the origin of the Russia investigation that led me to contact Stephen, who was frequently sharing his own doubts on Twitter. Stephen agreed to meet and what was scheduled to be a one-hour chat turned into a five-hour marathon. It was also the start of a close friendship that would grow over the months and years ahead.
At the time, not much was known about Russiagate. Other than a few court filings that were trickling out of special counsel Robert Mueller’s operation, our main source was what had become known as the Steele dossier. The dossier is a collection of 16 reports on Trump’s alleged Russian ties that former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele had compiled for Glenn Simpson, owner of Fusion GPS, who, in turn, had been hired by law firm Perkins Coie, which, in turn, had been hired by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. You can say what you want about the Clintons, but they run their operations tightly. Using so many middlemen gave them lots of room for plausible deniability.
I remember reading the dossier the day it was first published by Buzzfeed, the now-defunct online news platform. That was on Jan. 10, 2017, before Trump had even been inaugurated. I did not take long to figure out that the whole thing was frivolous. The first sentence reads: “Russian regime has been cultivating Trump for at least 5 years.” According to Steele, this operation was the brainchild of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had the foresight in 2011 that Trump would become president.
As I read on, the list of transparent lies grew page by page. The dossier talked of Russian operatives working out of their Miami consulate. There is no Russian consulate in Miami. It said that Russia had offered Trump adviser Carter Page “the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft.” To anyone with even an iota of business sense, this was completely fantastical. Rosneft is the Russian oil giant. It has a market cap of $50 billion. The claim was, on its face, preposterous.
The entire dossier reads like it had been written by a 12-year-old with a wild sense of imagination. Stephen and I had both come to that conclusion long before we ever met. We both suspected the entire dossier had been made from whole cloth in Steele’s office. But how do you disprove a fantasy? For that, we needed to know who Steele’s alleged sources were. We suspected there weren’t any real sources. We suspected they were cutouts who were used, wittingly or unwittingly, to masquerade as real sources.
At the time, we did not know that there was a “primary sub-source” who was responsible for passing along most of the accusations in Steele’s dossier. The identification of that source would later become the core task of our little group of four.
In the early days, before we knew of the primary sub-source, we focused on specific issues that we had information on. For instance, we had Mueller’s court documents in the Papadopoulos case. There were also bits and pieces of information that we gleaned from Congressman Devin Nunes’s (R-Calif.) March 2018 memo that would later become the basis for Lee Smith’s fantastic book, “The Plot Against the President.”
As more information started filtering out over the next few months, including the Mueller Report in April 2019, it became clear that Steele was hiding behind someone. At the time, we did not know who it was and weren’t even sure that there was such a person, but we inferred that someone had fed Steele information that he then used to write his dossiers. But who was his patsy? Or was it Steele who was the patsy? Had he been fed false information by a foreign government? That was highly unlikely, but we wouldn’t know for sure unless we knew who the mysterious alleged source was.
Our group began collecting the clues. There weren’t many, so we were essentially making educated guesses, including our basic premise that the alleged source had to have been someone with a modicum of credibility or else the FBI would not have used the materials in their FISA warrant applications on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
We thought Steele’s source would probably turn out to be a former member of the KGB or its successor organization, the FSB. Perhaps someone whom Steele had met as part of his assignment to Moscow in the 1990s, where he worked for British intelligence. That turned out to be wrong. As we would later learn, Steele could have told the FBI anything he wanted, and they would just run with it, which is exactly what happened. Steele’s source was as credible as any random person picked out of a phonebook. But the FBI did not care. Like Steele, they only had one goal: to get Trump.
Our luck changed with the release of an FBI interview of the primary sub-source, which takes us back to the shores of Lake Huron.
Stephen, Fool, and Walkafyre were sending messages about a big break in our endeavor. They asked me: “Have you seen it?” I didn’t know what they were talking about. “Lindsey released the primary sub-source interview!” the next message read. Lindsey was Lindsey Graham, the senior Senator from South Carolina and then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Barr had given him the primary sub-source interview, which Graham released to the public, albeit in heavily redacted form.
This was huge news. There was no stable internet connection in the forest we were in, so I put the kids in the car and started driving to the nearest town. The kids weren’t thrilled. I told them it was very important and that I would explain when they were older. As luck would have it, we found a Burger King three-quarters of the way along, which kind of made up for their inconvenience.
With the help of Burger King’s Wi-Fi connection, I got my first look at the source’s interview notes. They were astounding. Although his name and many other details were redacted, it became clear that Steele’s supposed source was not a former KGB agent at all. The dates suggested that he was still a kid when the KGB was dissolved in 1991. At least that part of the puzzle was resolved. Steele was not a patsy. Instead, he had hired a Russian speaker to use as an intermediary to help him fabricate a story for the Clinton campaign.
As we continued dissecting the 57 pages of interview notes, we were able to deduce that the primary sub-source and his childhood drinking buddies had grown up in what appeared to be a large four-letter city in Russia. We narrowed the search down further and concluded that the city must be Perm, a city located near the Ural Mountains, about 1,000 miles east of Moscow.
We continued what had by then become a game of deducing the redactions. Walkafyre was particularly good at it. Up to that point, the FBI’s reports had always used a monospaced font, which means a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. We worked out that the primary sub-source’s name was 14 characters long, including a space between the first and the last name.
We used the same redactions trick to piece together additional information. We deduced that, after finishing school, the source had studied at a 21-character college. That one was easy: Perm State University. The one after that was trickier but turned out to be a very helpful clue. As a student, Steele’s source had participated in some type of global leadership initiative. We knew the initiative had an 18-character name. We eventually worked out that this was the Open World Program, a program that brings students from Eurasia to the United States for a 10-day trip. It is somewhat ironic that this program had been devised in the 1990s to foster cultural and political ties between the United States and Russia. Instead, at least in this instance, it had brought someone to the United States who would become instrumental in the attempted takedown of the Republican candidate for president and then the president himself.
By this point, I had persuaded the kids that we were going to move to a campground that had Wi-Fi. I promised we would go back to barebones camping as soon as possible, and I kept that promise. We got a cabin with a bunk bed, which the kids loved. Now I had proper internet and was able to really dive in.
Our next task was to figure out where the primary sub-source had studied after leaving Russia. All we knew was that it was a university with a 10-character name, “University of 1234567890.” There were also some clues that he had moved to the United States after attending the Open World Program. There was mention of another 10-character university, this time spelled as “1234567890 University.” Was this intentional or were these the same universities? We found out that Perm was twinned with Louisville. Using the same modus operandi, we had also worked out that Steele’s source had likely worked at the Brookings Institution and was an acquaintance of Fiona Hill, one of the main witnesses who testified against Trump in the Ukraine impeachment affair.
We were looking for someone originally from Perm, who had participated in the Open World Program, who lived in Northern Virginia, who had studied at Louisville or Georgetown, or both, and had a four-letter first name and nine-letter last name.
