- michael barbaro
From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. 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 16.
So, Julian, tell me about this story that you had been reporting out.
- julian barnes
A few months ago, my colleague Adam Goldman and I started doing some reporting about a key C.I.A. asset who had been offered exfiltration from Russia by the C.I.A., and we knew that this source was the main person who told the C.I.A., 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.
- [music]
- michael barbaro
Julian Barnes covers national security for The Times.
- julian barnes
Any time 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. But last week, as I was doing reporting, I learned that a cable network was onto one of the stories I was working on. But it was Friday, and I was nervous, but I let that go.
- michael barbaro
[LAUGHS] Crossed your fingers and went home for the day.
- julian barnes
Cross your fingers, go home. And Monday morning, I got a call that CNN was going to report the story.
- archived recording (jim sciutto)
Good morning. I’m Jim Sciutto in New York.
- *archived recording (poppy harlow)^
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.
- julian barnes
And I was like, uh-oh.
- *archived recording (poppy harlow)^
And Jim, this is your reporting. You have learned about a highly secretive intelligence operation by the United States.
- archived recording (jim sciutto)
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.
- michael barbaro
And then what happens?
- julian barnes
So it was not long after CNN broke the news that Russia apparently released the spy’s name.
- archived recording
We have not confirmed the name of the spy, nor will we repeat the name the Russians revealed.
- julian barnes
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.
- michael barbaro
So you just Googled 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?
- julian barnes
So it’s sort of shocking to find that. It’s just profoundly weird. This is not how it’s supposed to work. Russia’s not supposed to release the name of the spy. You’re not supposed to Google the spy in your backyard.
- michael barbaro
Right.
- julian barnes
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 Car2Go, 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.
- michael barbaro
You’re in a classic spy thriller car, right?
- julian barnes
[LAUGHS]
You know, it’s not like you’re sneaking up when you drive in basically a clown car to somebody’s house.
- michael barbaro
[LAUGHS]
- julian barnes
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.
- michael barbaro
Hmm.
- julian barnes
So I parked my car, said hello to my rival at The Washington Post, and then I walked up the driveway.
- julian barnes
I’m walking down to the cul-de-sac, where you can see the house has a big porch, three stories, very large house.
- julian barnes
I just remember being surprised. These are huge houses. It’s pretty good to be a spy, I guess.
- julian barnes
The lawn has been freshly mowed, and the little cuttings are still on the driveway here.
- julian barnes
So I walked up to the house.
- julian barnes
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. Wading pool. There’s the card from another reporter left in the door. I’m going to ring the bell.
- julian barnes
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.
- michael barbaro
Right. And you just touched the doorknob.
- julian barnes
And I just touched the doorknob.
- michael barbaro
But of course, you’re fine.
- julian barnes
I’m fine. Momentary scare.
- julian barnes
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.
- julian barnes
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.
- julian barnes
Hi, I’m with The New York Times. I’m Julian Barnes. I’m doing some reporting about the neighbor.
- speaker
O.K.
- julian barnes
I don’t know if you saw the press reports or whatnot, but there was — reports broke out in my paper and CNN yesterday about the informant who told about Russian meddling, and Russian media, Russian government, is reporting it is your next-door neighbor.
- speaker
O.K.
- michael barbaro
And what did they know?
- julian barnes
Well, when you’re reporting about somebody and talking to the neighbors, the classic journalistic joke was, they were very quiet.
- speaker
I remember them being new neighbors. We hadn’t even met them. Been meaning to get over, didn’t get over.
- julian barnes
And of course, stereotypically, we heard they were very quiet. But one of the neighbors described —
- speaker
July 4, 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.
- julian barnes
Inviting them over for the Fourth of July fireworks.
- speaker
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.
- julian barnes
The interactions were a little bit few and far between.
- speaker
That was the only interaction with them other than just waving when we passed on the street and if he was walking the dog, or I’d wave when I’d see him home in the yard. And I did stop when his wife was walking the dog, and I stopped and just said, hi, how you doing? And 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 think you understand me or not. But that was the only time I’d ever talked to either one of them.
- julian barnes
But the details they did provide really seem to confirm that this was our guy, that this was the spot.
- speaker
It was a Russian couple, and I remember two kids, a toddler boy that may have been 3, I don’t know.
- julian barnes
The family moved in June of 2018. They were vague about where they came from, just saying they had moved from Northern Virginia.
- speaker
But 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.
- julian barnes
The husband was friendly, but spoke in what everyone knew was a heavy Russian accent.
- julian barnes
He was a diplomat for many years, so I presume his English was pretty good. Was that right?
- speaker
Yeah, I mean, he definitely had an accent, but I could understand him real good.
- julian barnes
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.
- michael barbaro
Did these neighbors that you were talking to seem shocked by this seeming spy in their midst?
- julian barnes
You know, oddly, they didn’t.
- speaker
It’s a little bit spy novel-ish, but it’s how the world works. So, I mean, we do it to them, they do it to us.
- julian barnes
One person was like, we live near Washington, there are a lot of spies around here.
- speaker
It’s government, you know? It’s every government.
- julian barnes
And they seem 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 —
- speaker
My only concern is, if the guy is on our side, I don’t know that y’all are doing him any favors.
- julian barnes
This guy was doing important work for America, and he had really risked his own life to do good for our country.
- michael barbaro
Hmm. 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.
- julian barnes
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.
- michael barbaro
Hmm. So then what happens?
- julian barnes
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.
- michael barbaro
[LAUGHS]
- julian barnes
This is over. So I got back into my car, and I headed back to The New York Times Washington bureau to keep reporting.
- michael barbaro
And presumably drop off your Car2Go at its Car2Go place?
- julian barnes
You can just leave them anywhere in the District of Columbia.
- [music]
- michael barbaro
We’ll be right back.
All right, Julian, how did we get here? What’s the story?
- julian barnes
So decades ago, the C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. really struck gold.
- [music]
- julian barnes
The informant rose to be an aide to a key diplomatic figure. The informant’s patron was the chief diplomatic adviser to Putin.
- michael barbaro
Wow.
- julian barnes
And for the C.I.A., 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.
- michael barbaro
Right.
- julian barnes
He is very careful. He does not communicate over cellphones, 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 C.I.A., 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 C.I.A.‘s most important source in 2016.
- archived recording
The New York Times reports on the growing F.B.I. 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 was behind the hack.
- julian barnes
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.
- [music]
- michael barbaro
What specifically do we know about the intelligence that this spy is able to get the U.S. in 2016?
- julian barnes
There are two pieces of intelligence that we know about that were really important, one of which is that —
- archived recording
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.
- julian barnes
— 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 C.I.A. 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 D.N.C. 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 C.I.A. to have a high level of confidence in that. That really shaped the understanding in 2016 about what had happened.
- archived recording
In a memo to C.I.A. staff, director John Brennan said that he, F.B.I. 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.
- julian barnes
But there is a downside. When you are delivering the most explosive, the most important intelligence, and that intelligence is entering the political debate —
- archived recording (donald trump)
I think it’s ridiculous. I think it’s just another excuse. I don’t believe it.
- julian barnes
— there is a level of scrutiny.
- archived recording
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.
- julian barnes
Reporters start asking questions.
- archived recording
We haven’t been given a shred of evidence to substantiate the claim that the Russians were behind this.
- julian barnes
Members of Congress start asking questions. People want to know, how does the C.I.A. know this?
- [music]
- julian barnes
And there are hints at the end of 2016 that the C.I.A. has a source in Russia.
- archived recording
New information derived from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies points directly to the Russian president.
- michael barbaro
So despite all the secrecy and the care around this informant, his existence is suddenly something people understand.
- julian barnes
Yes. Now, if you go back and look at the stories at the end of 2016, they’re just the lightest hints, but the C.I.A. is getting nervous, because the C.I.A. 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.
- [music]
- julian barnes
And as the news stories increased in early 2017 —
- archived recording
This morning, a Washington Post investigation focuses on Russian government interference in our election. In August, the C.I.A. gave then-President Obama a report, quote, “drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government.”
- julian barnes
— the C.I.A. went to the spy and said, it’s time to go. You need to come to America. That offer was accepted.
- michael barbaro
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?
- julian barnes
So in 2018, I started reporting about why 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 C.I.A.‘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.
- michael barbaro
Mm-hmm. 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?
- julian barnes
Now, of course, there are multiple sources. You can’t have high confidence in 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 kind 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.
- michael barbaro
Everything you just said does not seem to bode very well for our intelligence on Russia with the 2020 election approaching.
- julian barnes
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.
- [music]
- michael barbaro
Julian, thank you very much.
- julian barnes
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
- michael barbaro
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 yearslong 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. That classmate reported the incident to the F.B.I. before Kavanaugh was confirmed, but the F.B.I. 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 Barbaro. See you tomorrow.