its matrix of persons, places, and events nationals from at least a dozen countries, and it begins many years ago with the slowly converging exploits of three men: a pedophile, a mercenary, and a political flack.
CHAPTER 1
THE PEDOPHILE, THE MERCENARY, AND THE FLACK
As future Trump advisers George Nader, Erik Prince, and Elliott Broidy establish deep Israeli and Arab ties, Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, engage in a series of suspicious business transactions with foreign nationals, and Paul Manafort begins years of work for pro-Kremlin interests. The Kremlin’s intense focus on connecting with Trump advisers during the 2016 election underscores foreign nationals’ ongoing interest in pursuing relationships with Trump and those close to him both before and after his entrance into presidential politics.
In 2002, George Nader shutters Middle East Insight and “disappear[s]” from Washington.1 A likely explanation for his disappearance is that in 2003 Nader receives a one-year prison sentence in the Czech Republic after he is convicted of ten counts of sexually abusing minors.2 According to the New York Times, at some point thereafter Nader begins working for Vice President Dick Cheney.3 He subsequently shows up in Iraq—shortly after the second American invasion of that country—having developed “close ties to national security officials in the Bush White House.”4 Nader’s ties by this point extend well beyond the U.S. government, however. He is also now connected to the newly arrived private contractors who are working in Iraq post-invasion, most notably Blackwater USA, a “private security company” whose founder, future Trump national security adviser and Steve Bannon confidant Erik Prince, has hired him as a Middle East dealmaker.5 Under oath during a 2010 deposition, Prince will claim—contradicting numerous American government officials who have worked with Nader over the years—that while in Prince’s employ Nader was “unsuccessful” in making deals in the Middle East, “did not work directly” with either Prince or anyone in Blackwater despite having been hired by the company, and “pretty much worked on his own.”6
Erik Prince will feature as a significant player in the many future interactions between Donald Trump, his inner circle of advisers and associates, and powerful Israelis, Saudis, Russians, and Emiratis. The Mueller Report will describe Prince as someone with “relationships with various individuals associated with the [2016] Trump Campaign, including Steve Bannon, Donald Trump Jr., and Roger Stone.… [He] sent unsolicited policy papers [to Trump campaign adviser and later CEO] Bannon on issues such as foreign policy, trade, and Russian election interference.”7 The report adds that after Election Day in 2016, Prince “frequently visited transition offices at Trump Tower, primarily to meet with Bannon but on occasion to meet Michael Flynn and others. Prince and Bannon would discuss, inter alia, foreign policy issues and Prince’s recommendations regarding who should be appointed to fill key national security positions.”8 By the time of the presidential transition, Nader, by then an adviser to Mohammed bin Zayed, had “received assurances … that the incoming [Trump] Administration considered Prince a trusted associate.”9
The Intercept, an online news organization, has referred to Prince as “America’s most famous mercenary,” but also, more important, as a man who has long been on an idiosyncratic personal mission: “He continues to dream of deploying his military services in the world’s failed states,” the digital media outlet writes, “and persists in hawking a crackpot scheme of privatizing the U.S. war in Afghanistan … [but] Prince has diversified his portfolio. No longer satisfied with contracting out former special forces operators to the State Department and Pentagon, Prince is now [in 2019] attempting to offer an entire supply chain of warfare and conflict. He wants to be able to skim a profitable cut from each stage of a hostile operation, whether it be overt or covert, foreign or domestic. His offerings range from the traditional mercenary toolkit, military hardware and manpower, to cell phone surveillance technology and malware, to psychological operations and social media manipulation in partnership with shadowy operations like James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas.”10
While Prince’s present ambitions are grand—if chilling—The Intercept positions him, too, as a figure who poses a danger to international peace and stability as much because of his personality as his geopolitical designs. Prince is, the outlet reports, “a man desperately trying to avoid U.S. tax and weapons trafficking laws even as he offers military services, without a license, in no fewer than 15 countries around the world. Prince’s former and current associates describe him as a visionary … who is nonetheless so shady and incompetent that he fails at almost every enterprise he