on Bill Clinton originated from “U.S. intelligence sources,” the former CIA operative named by Simes as his source has since confirmed that some of the information “was intercepted while the president [Bill Clinton] was traveling on Air Force One”—a clear indication that the provenance of the intelligence Simes urged the Trump campaign to use in 2016 was in fact Russian spycraft and kompromat.98 Simes was so enthused about injecting this Russian-held blackmail material into the U.S. general election campaign that, according to Mueller’s report, he even “provided the same information at a small group meeting of foreign policy experts that CNI organized for Sessions.”99 What is unclear is why Simes was discussing with his CIA source, in “2014 or 2015,” what the Washington Examiner calls “a claim that Russians recorded President Bill Clinton having phone sex with White House intern Monica Lewinsky”; while the Kremlin had already initiated its election-interference campaign by 2014—a campaign that included the spreading of negative information about the Clintons—it was not until mid-2015 that Trump joined the presidential race and not until spring 2016 that either Clinton or Trump had clinched their respective parties’ nominations.100 That Simes was collecting kompromat information on the Clintons as early as 2014 raises the question of who if anyone had urged him to do so, and to whom he expected he would ultimately transmit the information he was gathering.
After the 2016 election, Kushner relied on Simes to “identify which Russian emissaries had political clout in Moscow,” and was indeed so reliant on the CNI director that when he needed to confirm the name of the Russian ambassador to the United States, he had his staff consult Simes instead of Google.101
* * *
During the spring of 2014, as Trump is making his plans to run for president public and the Kremlin is beginning its outreach to Papadopoulos’s eventual Kremlin conduit, Joseph Mifsud, the Internet Research Agency—a Kremlin-linked disinformation project overseen by Yevgeny Prigozhin, known in Russia as “Putin’s chef”—begins to “hide its funding and activities” and “consolidate [its] U.S. operations within a single general department, known internally as the ‘Translator’ department,” according to the Mueller Report.102 These shifts signal a new stage in the Kremlin’s upcoming election-interference effort, and are followed in June 2014 by a clandestine visit to the United States by four IRA employees.103 Internal IRA documents will not reflect the agency’s pro-Trump position until February 2016, however, with the operation purchasing its first anti-Clinton ads on social media in March 2016 and its first pro-Trump ads in April 2016 (see chapter 4).104
In May 2014, Russia ramps up its nuclear infrastructure investments in the Middle East, revealing its plans to build eight more nuclear reactors in Bushehr, Iran, having signed its initial contract to build reactors for the plant there in 1995 and then seeing the nuclear plant reach full reactor capacity in August 2012.105 The Kremlin’s late-spring announcement comes as Russia is one of six nations—with the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and China—working with the European Union to seal a nuclear deal with Iran that will prohibit it from enriching uranium to build nuclear weapons. Under the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (known colloquially as the “Iran nuclear deal”), Iran will agree to process uranium ore to only 3.7 percent enrichment—90 percent being the minimum enrichment required for a nuclear weapon—for the next fifteen years, and to allow international inspectors into the country to confirm its compliance with this limitation. In exchange, the punishing international economic sanctions that had been leveled against Iran over its nuclear weapons program will be lifted.106
The Iran nuclear deal is vehemently opposed by Israel, whose “existential fear of a nuclear-armed Iran,” as the Atlantic terms it, causes Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to say of the accord, just two weeks after it is signed, that it is a “stunning historic mistake” and “a very dangerous deal … [that] threatens all of us.”107 Meanwhile, Saudi officials, opining that the deal does not permanently end the Iranian nuclear threat, call it “extremely dangerous” and “unacceptable” and worry that the removal of sanctions will “allow Iran to fund proxy wars [in the Middle East] and extend its regional influence.”108 One result of the deal, according to a CBS News summary of the views of Tariq Al-Shammari, president of the Council of Gulf International Relations, is that “behind the scenes … Gulf Arab countries will work to try and keep Iran isolated politically and economically … [with] Saudi Arabia in