What the removal of Flynn as the national-security adviser reveals about Donald Trump’s White House.
Two
days before the Inauguration of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth
President of the United States, Michael Flynn, a retired lieutenant
general and former intelligence officer, sat down in a Washington
restaurant. On the tablecloth, he placed a leather-bound folder and two
phones, which flashed with text messages and incoming calls. A gaunt,
stern-looking man with hooded eyes and a Roman nose, Flynn is sharp in
both manner and language. He had been one of Trump’s earliest
supporters, a vociferous booster on television, on Twitter, and, most
memorably, from the stage of the Republican National Convention.
Strident views and a penchant for conspiracy theories often embroiled
him in controversy—in a hacked e-mail from last summer, former Secretary
of State Colin Powell called him “right-wing nutty”—but Trump rewarded
Flynn’s loyalty by making him his national-security adviser. Now, after
months of unrelenting scrutiny, Flynn seemed to believe that he could
find a measure of obscurity in the West Wing, steps away from Trump and
the Oval Office. “I want to go back to having an out-of-sight role,” he
told me.
That ambition proved illusory. Three weeks into his job, the Washington Post
revealed that Flynn, while he was still a private citizen and Barack
Obama was still President, had discussed American sanctions against
Russia with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador in Washington. The
conversations were possibly illegal. Flynn and Kislyak’s communications,
by phone and text, occurred on the same day the Obama Administration
announced the expulsion of thirty-five Russian diplomats in retaliation
for Russia’s efforts to swing the election in Trump’s favor. Flynn had
previously denied talking about sanctions with the Ambassador. At the
restaurant, he said that he didn’t think there was anything untoward
about the call: “I’ve had a relationship with him since my days at the
D.I.A.”—the Defense Intelligence Agency, which Flynn directed from 2012
to 2014. But, in a classic Washington spectacle of action followed by
coverup followed by collapse, Flynn soon started backpedalling, saying,
through a spokesman, that he “couldn’t be certain that the topic [of
sanctions] never came up.”
He
compounded his predicament by making the same denial to Vice-President
Mike Pence, who repeated it on television. Flynn later apologized to
Pence. But by then his transgressions had been made public. In a White
House characterized by chaos and conflict—a Byzantine court led by a
reality-television star, family members, and a circle of ideologues and
loyalists—Flynn was finished.
The
episode created countless concerns, about the President’s truthfulness,
competence, temperament, and associations. How much did Trump know and
when did he know it?
John McCain, a
Republican and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said
that the fiasco was a “troubling indication of the dysfunction of the
current national-security apparatus” and raised “further questions”
about the Trump Administration’s intentions regarding Vladimir Putin’s
Russia.
In one of several recent
conversations, Flynn told me, “We have to figure out how to work with
Russia instead of making it an enemy. We have so many problems that we
were handed on a plate from this President”—meaning Obama. He lifted a
bread plate and waved it. He characterized the negative attention on him
as part of a larger conspiracy against Trump. “I’m a target to get at
Trump to delegitimize the election,” he said. The press had him “damn
near all wrong.” Reporters were just chasing after wild theories, while
neglecting to consider his career as a decorated Army officer. “You
don’t just sprinkle magic dust on someone, and, poof, they become a three-star general,” he said.
But,
even before Flynn’s rapid fall, his closest military colleagues had
been struggling to make sense of what had happened to the talented and
grounded general they once knew. “Mike is inarguably one of the finest
leaders the Army has ever produced,” James (Spider) Marks, a retired
major general, told me. And yet, watching the first night of the
Republican National Convention, last July, Marks was taken aback when
his old friend appeared onscreen.
“Wake
up, America!” Flynn said, his jaw set and his hands gripping the sides
of the lectern. The United States was in peril: “Our very existence is
threatened.” The moment demanded a President with “guts,” he declared,
not a “weak, spineless” one who “believes she is above the law.”
In
the early two-thousands, Marks was Flynn’s commanding officer at the
Army’s intelligence academy, in Fort Huachuca, Arizona; one of his
daughters went to school with one of Flynn’s sons. Marks regarded Flynn
as “smart, humble, and funny.” What he saw on TV was something else:
“That’s a vitriolic side of Mike that I never knew.”
When,
twenty minutes into the speech, Flynn mentioned Hillary Clinton, the
Convention audience responded with chants of “Lock her up!” Flynn
nodded, leading the chant: “That’s right—lock her up.” He went on, “Damn
right. . . . And you know why we’re saying that? We’re saying that
because, if I, a guy who knows this business, if I did a tenth—a
tenth—of what she did, I would be in jail today.”
Marks’s
thirty-five-year-old daughter, who was watching with him, turned to her
father and said, “Dad, General Flynn is scaring me.”
Trump,
in his inaugural address, presented a dire image of the country—a
nation suffering from poverty and blight, overextended abroad, and
neglectful of its own citizens. He pledged to end the “carnage” by
putting “America first”—echoing the isolationist creed of the
nineteen-thirties.
The beginning of
Trump’s Presidency remained true to his campaign: even when it came to
the highly sensitive issues of national security, Trump and his aides
acted with ideological ferocity and a heedless sense of procedure that
alarmed many inside the government. The Trump Administration’s early
days have invited comparison to the most unnerving political moments in
memory, particularly Richard Nixon’s behavior during the Watergate
scandal.
On January 27th, a week
after taking office, Trump issued an executive order suspending all
refugee admissions and temporarily banning entry to citizens from seven
Muslim-majority countries. His chief political strategist, Stephen
Bannon, reportedly oversaw the crafting of the order, along with Stephen
Miller, the White House’s senior policy adviser. (Miller disputes
this.) Flynn raised some concerns about how the order might affect
relationships with allies, but those were ignored. James Mattis, the
Secretary of Defense, and General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, received little notice of the order.
The
next day, Trump signed another executive order, reorganizing the
National Security Council. He promoted Bannon, a former investment
banker and chairman of the far-right Web site Breitbart News, to a
permanent seat on the “principals committee.” Elevating a political
adviser to national-security policymaking marked a radical departure
from the practice of recent Administrations.
By
this point, the Justice Department had informed Trump officials of
concerns about Flynn’s conversations with the Russian Ambassador and his
public accounting of them. The acting Attorney General, Sally Yates, a
holdover from the Obama Administration, told the White House that she
worried Flynn might be vulnerable to blackmail by Russian agents, the
Washington Post reported. Yet Flynn remained an important
player in national-security matters. “He was always in the room, and on
every call,” one Administration official told me.
Each
morning, Flynn attended Trump’s intelligence briefing—the President’s
Daily Brief. Bannon joined occasionally, as did Mike Pompeo, the
director of the C.I.A., and Reince Priebus, the White House chief of
staff. Flynn conferred with senior intelligence officials on how to best
tailor the briefing for Trump. Presidents are particular about how they
receive information, Michael Morell, a former acting C.I.A. director,
who prepared and delivered the President’s Daily Brief to several
Presidents, told me. George H. W. Bush preferred text on a half page, in
a single column, limited to four or five pages; the briefer read
fifteen to twenty pages aloud to George W. Bush, who preferred more
material and liked to discuss it with the briefer; Barack Obama studied
the material alone, over breakfast. Trump’s briefings were being shaped
to address macroeconomics, trade, and “alliances,” Flynn told me, in a
telephone conversation earlier this month. “The P.D.B. is not always
about just your enemies.”
Congress
created the National Security Council in 1947, in the hope of
establishing a more orderly process for coördinating foreign and defense
policy. Six years later, Dwight Eisenhower decided that the council
needed a chief and named the first national-security adviser—a former
soldier and banker, Robert Cutler. The position evolved into one of
enormous importance. McGeorge Bundy, who served under John F. Kennedy
and Lyndon B. Johnson, regarded himself as a “traffic cop”—controlling
access to the President. Under Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger
dramatically expanded the role, often meeting directly with the Soviet
Ambassador, and bypassing the State Department.
The
temptations of power nearly overwhelmed Ronald Reagan’s Presidency, in
what became known as the Iran-Contra affair, when national-security
staffers were discovered to be running covert actions involving Iran and
Central America. The scandal prompted some to call for the
national-security adviser to become a Senate-confirmed position. Heading
off these demands, George H. W. Bush chose a retired general, Brent
Scowcroft, who had held the job under Gerald Ford, to return to the
role, confident that Scowcroft would respect the lines between
intelligence work, military operations, and policymaking. “He will be an
honest broker,” Bush said.
Since
then, according to Stephen Hadley, George W. Bush’s second-term
national-security adviser, the “honest broker” has become the model for
Republican and Democratic Administrations alike. That meant overseeing a
process that is “fair and transparent, where each member of the council
can get his views to the President,” Hadley said. In late November,
Hadley met with Flynn, who was seeking advice, at Trump Tower. Hadley
left the meeting optimistic that Flynn meant to act as a facilitator in
the traditional way.
But
Flynn’s challenge—and now, potentially, his successor’s—was unique, as
Bannon had seemingly moved to set up a kind of “parallel, shadow”
national-security staff for his own purposes, one council staffer told
me. Bannon, who had no direct experience in policymaking, seized a
central role on issues dear to Trump. For example, during the campaign
Trump had railed against NATO members for not paying
their full freight, which unnerved diplomats and politicians throughout
Europe. On February 5th, according to the staffer, Bannon sent questions
to the N.S.C. staff, requesting a breakdown of contributions to NATO
from individual members since 1949. Many of the rank-and-file staffers
were alarmed, not just because the questions seemed designed to impugn NATO’s
legitimacy but because they represented a breach of protocol by tasking
N.S.C. staffers with political duties. “Those were Flynn’s people, not
political operatives,” the staffer said.
Flynn
came into the White House wanting to streamline the bureaucracy of the
N.S.C., which is staffed mostly by career civil servants from the State
Department, the Pentagon, and intelligence agencies, believing that it
moved too ponderously under Obama. But Flynn, in a contest for power
with Bannon, soon seemed to realize that the traditional setup could
help him build influence in the White House. “It was dawning on him that
the process privileged him,” the N.S.C. staffer said. Others in the
White House treated the customary protocols as impediments. “We are
moving big and we are moving fast,” Bannon said, according to the Times.
Before
Flynn’s troubles mounted, I asked him whether it was appropriate for
Bannon to have a permanent seat on the N.S.C. He paused. “Well, I mean,
that decision’s been made,” he said. Besides, didn’t other political
advisers enjoy similar access? He brought up Valerie Jarrett, a senior
adviser to Obama. Jarrett did not have a seat on the National Security
Council, I said. “She didn’t? How about, like, Axelrod? He was Clinton,
right?” (David Axelrod, who was Obama’s chief strategist, sometimes sat
in on N.S.C. meetings but did not participate in policymaking
discussions.) Look, Flynn said, “the President shapes the team that he
needs to be able to do the job that he has to do. So that’s kind of
where we are on that one.”
Flynn
grew up in a large Irish-American household, in Middletown, Rhode
Island. He was one of nine children. His father was a soldier, a veteran
of the Second World War and Korea, who retired as a sergeant first
class in the Army; his mother, a high-school valedictorian, worked at a
secretarial school and was heavily involved in Democratic politics,
before going back to school to get undergraduate and law degrees. A
headstrong teen-ager, Flynn skateboarded in drained swimming pools and
surfed through hurricanes and winter storms. “Mike was a charger,” Sid
Abruzzi, a surf-shop owner in nearby Newport, who knew Flynn as a
teen-ager, said.
In 1981, after
graduating from the University of Rhode Island, Flynn joined the Army.
He qualified as an intelligence officer, and got orders to join the 82nd
Airborne Division, a paratrooper unit in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In
1983, Flynn deployed to Grenada, as part of the American invasion
force. He set up a listening post on a cliffside to intercept Cuban
radio transmissions. One day, spotting two American soldiers being swept
out to sea, Flynn leaped off the cliff—“about a forty-foot jump into
the swirling waters,” he recalls, in his book, “The Field of Fight”—and
rescued the men.
He won a rapid series of promotions. In 1994, he helped plan operations in support of the American in
Flynn
encouraged his men to think more like detectives as they hunted Al
Qaeda militants; he brought F.B.I. agents in to instruct operators in
how to collect and preserve evidence. A former Ranger recalled storming a
house, flex-cuffing the tenants, then staying for several hours,
risking exposure, while he and his teammates searched behind walls and
under mattresses for a single thumb drive—which they found, eventually,
in a pipe beneath the kitchen sink. Intelligence operatives would gather
information by hacking militants’ computers, intercepting their phone
calls, and surveilling them with drones. “We were able to mass so much
information against individuals we captured that at some point they
realized it was no use lying to us anymore,” Flynn says, in “Twilight
Warriors: The Soldiers, Spies, and Special Agents Who Are
Revolutionizing the American Way of War,” by James Kitfield.
On
the afternoon of April 8, 2006, American soldiers helicoptered into
Yusufiyah, a town outside Baghdad. They raided a suspected Al Qaeda safe
house and detained twelve middle-aged men, who were taken to Balad Air
Base, the site of the command’s Iraq headquarters, for questioning.
Flynn observed some of the interviews. Over weeks of interrogation, the
prisoners repeatedly denied knowing anything about Al Qaeda or its
leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Finally, two interrogators
confronted one of the prisoners about a trip to Amman, Jordan, just
before the devastating hotel bombings the previous year. The prisoner
started talking, and divulged the identity of Zarqawi’s spiritual
adviser and where to find him. Drones tracked the adviser for weeks. One
day, the man came out of his house and got into a silver sedan. After
two vehicle switches, he pulled into a compound in Hibhib, thirty miles
north of Baghdad. A few minutes after the adviser arrived, another man
emerged briefly from the house. He matched the description of Zarqawi.
As Flynn and his boss, General Stanley McChrystal, JSOC’s
commander, watched on a video feed, an F-16 dropped two bombs on the
house. A Delta Force squad quickly arrived at the scene and seized
Zarqawi, who died soon afterward. Back at Balad, Flynn and McChrystal
inspected the corpse, laid out on a tarp, confirming that it was
Zarqawi.
In
2008, Flynn got a new assignment, at the Pentagon, as the senior
intelligence officer reporting to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was an
awkward fit. Flynn, now a major general, was unfamiliar with ordinary
Pentagon decorum and sometimes struggled to summon the diplomacy
required for the job. Intelligence officers are often irascible figures.
“We are trained to be contrarians,” Marks, the retired major general,
who was the senior intelligence officer during the invasion of Iraq,
said. “I’m the only guy in the room who gets paid to tell you that
you’re not as handsome or as smart as you think you are. I’m the one who
looks the boss in the eye and says, ‘Your plan is all fucked up.’ ”
In
November, 2008, Obama won the Presidency, having pledged to draw down
troops in Iraq and shift military resources back to Afghanistan. He
chose McChrystal to lead American forces in Afghanistan. McChrystal
asked his friend Flynn to become his director of intelligence. Their
collaboration in Iraq had severely crippled Al Qaeda. In Afghanistan,
though, the terrain was less familiar, and their mission quite
different, with a much greater emphasis on winning “hearts and minds.”
Still, Flynn was thrilled to be heading to the battlefield again.
According to a friend, when she asked Flynn whether he’d regret missing
an almost certain promotion in Washington, he replied, “Are you kidding
me? I get to go back to the shit with Stan.”
He
landed in Afghanistan in June, 2009. His office was a windowless
converted shipping container, and during long days he took briefings and
pored over classified assessments. Flynn often ate his meals in the
chow hall and chatted with subordinates. “I have no recollection of any
other general officers doing that,” Toni Gidwani, an intelligence
analyst who worked with Flynn in Afghanistan, told me. Flynn was
intense, but he was also funny and “called bullshit when he saw it,”
according to Vikram Singh, who is now at the Center for American
Progress, and at the time was advising Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s chief
envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Flynn’s
directives, however, could at times be difficult to follow. His talent
for absorbing information could race ahead of his analytical abilities.
“He is not a linear thinker,” an intelligence analyst who served on
multiple assignments with Flynn said. Stephen Biddle, a defense-policy
fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, recounted late-night
meetings in Flynn’s container: “His ideas and assessments kept moving
around.” Max Boot, a civilian adviser in Afghanistan at the time, told
me that Flynn got “jerked around by the data”—he would contend that the
Taliban were nearly defeated and then, with no less conviction, argue
that the militant group was stronger than ever.
Part
of the challenge was the shortage of reliable intelligence in
Afghanistan. Flynn considered some of the C.I.A.’s activities
counterproductive. When Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President
Hamid Karzai and a suspected drug trafficker, was revealed as a longtime
C.I.A. asset, Flynn voiced his displeasure with the agency, telling the
Times, “If we are going to conduct a population-centric
strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we
are just undermining ourselves.”
Flynn
dispatched a Marine Corps first lieutenant to travel around the country
interviewing marines, soldiers, and civilian partners about their
intelligence needs. The lieutenant, Matthew Pottinger, had been a
Beijing correspondent for the Wall Street Journal before
enlisting as an intelligence officer in the Marines. Throughout the
autumn of 2009, Pottinger crisscrossed the country. What he heard was
dispiriting. An operations officer told him that his knowledge of what
was happening in villages was “no more than fingernail deep.” The
Americans were ignorant of local power brokers, religious practices, and
economics. Pottinger, Flynn, and a senior official from the Defense
Intelligence Agency compiled their observations, along with
recommendations for changes, into a damning report.
In
late December, Flynn e-mailed the report to dozens of colleagues at the
Pentagon, the White House, and the C.I.A. The response was
underwhelming; most didn’t even bother to reply. Pottinger suggested
finding a publisher outside the government, and Flynn agreed. On January
4, 2010, the Center for a New American Security, a progressive think
tank, released “Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence
Relevant in Afghanistan.” Reviews outside the military were laudatory,
but senior Pentagon and C.I.A. officials were angered by Flynn’s
decision to go public. “I was very concerned about an intelligence
officer openly criticizing our intelligence community,” former C.I.A.
director Leon Panetta told me. Flynn and Pottinger understood that they
might be fired.
Defense Secretary
Robert Gates delivered a judgment of the report that saved them. He
called it “exactly the type of candid, critical self-assessment” that
the military needed. “Fixing Intel” consolidated Flynn’s exalted status
in the intelligence community. In 2012, Defense News ranked him
seventeenth on its “100 Most Influential” list, heralding the report as
something that “might have ended his career” but which, instead,
“accelerated it.”
Three
months after “Fixing Intel” was published, McChrystal and some members
of his staff flew to Paris to strengthen support for the war among
French officials. Flynn stayed behind in Afghanistan. A Rolling Stone
reporter who had been spending time with McChrystal joined him on the
trip and heard him and his staff speaking derisively about the political
leadership in Washington, and witnessed them getting drunk one night at
an Irish pub.
In
mid-June, 2010, the magazine piece, “The Runaway General,” appeared.
McChrystal was quoted calling Vice-President Joe Biden “shortsighted”
for his opposition to the surge in Afghanistan; one aide mocked Biden as
“Bite Me”; and another aide dismissed Jim Jones, Obama’s first
national-security adviser, as a “clown.” Obama fired McChrystal the day
after publication. Flynn chafed at the decision. “It’s hard to see
someone you know have to go through that,” a close associate of Flynn’s
told me. “You don’t heal from that overnight.”
Flynn
prepared to leave Afghanistan, as McChrystal’s successor, David
Petraeus, brought in his own staff. Before Flynn departed, he stopped by
the Joint Intelligence Operations Center to say goodbye. Speaking to
dozens of analysts, Flynn delivered a forty-five-minute lesson, covering
some of the bloodiest engagements in American history: the Battle of
Antietam, in 1862, when twenty-three thousand people were killed or
wounded in a single day; Operation Torch, in 1942, when several hundred
soldiers died establishing beachheads in North Africa as part of the
Allied invasion. “His point was that no one in Washington can ever
appreciate what is happening on the battlefield, and that there aren’t
as many Americans dying now as before,” the intelligence analyst who
worked with Flynn said. “But it was confusing, and these would be the
same kind of discussions you’d have with him about the nature of the
insurgency—you’d leave his office and spend an hour trying to figure out
what he was trying to say.”
Back
in Washington, Flynn was assigned to the office of James Clapper, the
director of national intelligence. Flynn’s success in Iraq and
Afghanistan made him popular in foreign-policy circles. In April, 2011,
he attended a luncheon at the Army and Navy Club, a members-only hotel
and restaurant two blocks from the White House. About two dozen guests
sat in a private room, around a long table. Iran was a major focus of
the conversation, according to one of the event’s hosts, Mary Beth Long,
a former C.I.A. case officer and a senior Pentagon official during the
George W. Bush Administration.
The
attendees included a neoconservative historian named Michael Ledeen,
who was then a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington
think tank. Ledeen had been obsessed with Iran for decades. In the
mid-eighties, as a consultant to Reagan’s National Security Council, he
played a central role in the Iran-Contra affair—introducing Oliver
North, Reagan’s counterterrorism adviser, to Manucher Ghorbanifar, an
Iranian arms dealer. Ledeen’s hope had been to stir up dissent inside
Iran through Ghorbanifar’s network of influential contacts, according to
the Presidential commission that investigated the affair. (Ledeen
disputes this.) Instead, Ghorbanifar wound up as the middleman in the
sale of weapons to Iran, in exchange for Tehran’s assistance in freeing
American hostages held by Iranian-backed Islamists in Lebanon. But
Ledeen’s zeal for regime change in Iran remained undiminished. After the
U.S. invasion of Iraq, he called for American forces to press on, into
Iran. “As Ronald Reagan once said, ‘America is too great a country to
settle for small dreams,’ ” he wrote, in 2002. Iraq was a distraction;
Iran was “the real war.”
Flynn,
too, increasingly viewed Iran as a great menace. In Iraq, he had seen
scores of young Americans killed by sophisticated armor-piercing
explosives, supplied to Shiite militias by the Quds Force, an élite unit
of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Flynn and Ledeen became
close friends; in their shared view of the world, Ledeen supplied an
intellectual and historical perspective, Flynn a tactical one. “I’ve
spent my professional life studying evil,” Ledeen told me. Flynn said,
in a recent speech, “I’ve sat down with really, really evil people”—he
cited Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Russians, Chinese generals—“and all I want
to do is punch the guy in the nose.”
A month after the luncheon, a team of Navy SEALs
raided a compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan, and killed Osama bin Laden.
Flynn was critical of the limitations placed on intelligence work after
the raid. Analysts had spent several weeks going through the hard drives
and phones seized in the raid looking for “targeting data”—clues on the
whereabouts of other terrorists—and leads on imminent threats. But
Flynn and others advocated going deeper, with the hope of learning more
about Al Qaeda’s finances and backers and organizational structure. A
team returned to the materials and uncovered documents that seemed to
point to a closer relationship between Al Qaeda and Iran than was
previously understood. In one memorandum, a lieutenant asks bin Laden
for permission to send an associate planning attacks in Europe into Iran
for “around three months” to “train the brothers.” Flynn saw such
references as evidence of Iran’s duplicity, in supporting Shiite and
Sunni extremists alike. It seemed validation of Ledeen’s views on Iran.
(Others in the intelligence community, including Panetta, the C.I.A.
director at the time of the raid, were dubious about a close
relationship between Al Qaeda and Iran.)
James
Mattis, the Marine general in charge of U.S. Central Command, whose
responsibilities included the Middle East and Central Asia, had been
pushing for more aggressive action against Iran. In the summer of 2011,
Mattis, who is now the Secretary of Defense, wanted to launch a rocket
assault on an Iranian power plant in retaliation for the killing of six
American soldiers by Iranian rockets in Baghdad. But the Obama
Administration was hoping to get out of the Middle East, not risk
starting another war there. Flynn felt that the Administration was being
naïve, and that no one seemed to care about what he insisted was the
collusion between Al Qaeda and Iran. “He was incensed,” an analyst who
worked with Flynn at the time said. “He saw this as truth suppression.”
In
April, 2012, Obama nominated Flynn to be the director of the Defense
Intelligence Agency. Within the intelligence community, the agency was
considered a backwater. “It’s the bastard child,” Mary Beth Long, the
former C.I.A. officer, said. The agency, whose headquarters are in
southwest Washington, produced reports on topics like Middle Eastern
weapons deals, changes of command in China, and troop movements on the
Korean peninsula—essential work for assessing foreign military
capabilities but hardly exciting.
To
invigorate the D.I.A., Flynn wanted to break down the barriers between
collectors and analysts; enhance the stable of clandestine case officers
who operated overseas, like their C.I.A. counterparts; and reorganize
the agency on the basis of geography. The goal was to transform the
D.I.A. into a more agile organization.
Flynn’s ideas were informed by his experience in helping to overhaul JSOC. But it was unclear whether they would work at the D.I.A., with seventeen thousand employees. “JSOC has a small, tight-knit group of folks making real-time tactical decisions that must be executed tonight,” a senior military intelligence official told me. “A big organization like the D.I.A. just can’t respond that quickly.”
Peter
Shelby, a retired marine and former D.I.A. official, told me he assumed
that Flynn would be methodical in his approach: spend a few months at
headquarters; learn how the organization worked; cultivate respected
agency veterans; and then introduce changes. Instead, Shelby said,
“Flynn came in and threw a bomb to explode the whole place, and then
just let the dust settle.”
Employees
started to complain. Many sought reassignment with other agencies.
“Morale was in the toilet,” Shelby said. “To higher-level observers,
Flynn looked like this bold leader, willing to make changes in the face
of opposition. But, the further down you went, the more negative impact
there was, because it was complete chaos.”
Moreover,
Flynn could be sloppy with numbers and details—misstatements that his
staffers derided as “Flynn facts.” His habit of chasing hunches also
exasperated some staff members. In September, 2012, after the terrorist
attack on the U.S. consulate and annex in Benghazi, Flynn urged an
investigation into an Iran connection; his insistence that Iran was
involved “stunned” subordinates, according to the Times. (Flynn
denies that he asked for a probe.) An intelligence analyst who worked
with Flynn during this period told me that his iconoclasm sometimes went
too far. “By nature, Flynn takes a contrarian approach to even the most
simple analytic issues,” the analyst said. “After Benghazi, I remember
him using the phrase ‘black swan’ a lot. What’s a ‘black swan’? He was
looking for the random event that nobody could predict. Look, you
certainly have to keep your eye on the ball for that, but there’s a
reason why it’s a black swan. You shouldn’t dedicate a ton of time to that.”
In
2013, Flynn arranged a trip to Moscow to speak to a group of officers
from the G.R.U., Russia’s intelligence agency, about leadership
development. His decision to go was a controversial one. Flynn believed
that there were opportunities to find common ground with Russia. But
Steven Hall, the C.I.A.’s chief of Russia operations at the time, was
skeptical. “He wanted to build a relationship with his counterparts in
the G.R.U., which seemed, at best, quaint and naïve,” Hall told me.
“Every time we have tried to have some sort of meaningful coöperation
with the Russians, it’s almost always been manipulated and turned back
against us.”
Several months after
Flynn returned from his Moscow trip, he hoped to reciprocate by inviting
several senior G.R.U. officers to the United States. Clapper, the
director of national intelligence, cautioned him against it. Russia had
recently annexed Crimea, and Russian special-forces operatives were
fomenting a violent clash between rebels and Ukrainian troops in eastern
Ukraine.
By then, Flynn had become a
target of scorn for many inside the department. His deputy, David
Shedd, became one of his harshest critics, and did little to hide his
disdain. “I was walking by the front office once and heard David Shedd
say, ‘I’m going to save the agency from the director,’ ” Simone Ledeen,
who works in counter-threat finance at a multinational bank, said.
Ledeen had worked for Flynn in Afghanistan, at the office for the
director of national intelligence, and in the D.I.A., doing
threat-assessment research. (She is also Michael Ledeen’s daughter.)
Normally,
a D.I.A. director serves for three or more years, but, in late 2013,
Clapper and Michael Vickers, the Under-Secretary of Defense for
Intelligence, were concerned about the tumult inside the agency and told
Flynn that his tenure would last just two years. Flynn unsuccessfully
tried to extend his term when his successor’s nomination was delayed.
Shedd later became the acting director.
On August 7, 2014, at a ceremony in the atrium of the D.I.A.’s
headquarters, Flynn retired from the military, after thirty-three years.
His wife and two sons attended, as did Michael Ledeen. The senior
military intelligence official, who was present, told me that Flynn was
obviously bitter: “He was loading up, and he was not going to go
quietly.”
Flynn,
who was fifty-five, began fashioning a post-military life. He started
his own business, the Flynn Intel Group, which offered clients a range
of private intelligence and security services. He did some freelance
consulting and also worked with SBD Advisors, a strategic consulting
firm whose roster included the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff Admiral Michael Mullen; former chief of the Special Operations
Command Admiral Eric Olson; and other retired military officers. In
January, 2015, Flynn signed with Leading Authorities, a speakers’
bureau, which promoted his expertise in leadership, cybersecurity, and
terrorism.
Flynn
began developing a public profile as a decorated former general with
experience in fighting Islamic extremism. A month later, he made an
appearance on “Charlie Rose.” He spoke at length about the threat posed
by the Islamic State, which had been executing hostages and rapidly
acquiring territory in northern Iraq and Syria. But America faced bigger
foes than isis, he said. “Iran has killed more Americans
than Al Qaeda has through state sponsors, through its terrorist
network, called Hezbollah.”
This was a puzzling assertion. “Hezbollah has killed more Americans than Al Qaeda?” Rose asked.
Flynn
began a count, starting with Hezbollah’s 1983 bombing of the Marine
barracks in Beirut that killed two hundred and eighty-three people. He
cited other instances, but his math made little sense, and the numbers
fell far short of the nearly three thousand killed by Al Qaeda’s attacks
on 9/11.
Rose
moved on, but a friend who had accompanied Flynn to the studio pulled
him aside after the taping and questioned his Iran claim. One of Rose’s
producers offered to fact-check the segment, but he waved off the
suggestion. Another friend who’d come to the taping suggested contacting
an expert from the intelligence community. That wouldn’t be necessary,
Flynn said—he would just call Michael Ledeen.
Flynn
and Ledeen’s relationship soon became a professional collaboration.
Flynn asked Ledeen to help him write a book. Flynn wanted to position
himself as a sage counsellor for the upcoming Presidential campaign.
Ledeen had written more than a dozen books, including five on Iran. They
were often polemical works, with titles such as “The War Against the
Terror Masters” and “The Iranian Time Bomb,” and were filled with
sweeping statements like “Islamic fundamentalism, of which the ideology
of the Iranian regime is a textbook case, draws much of its inspiration
from Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin.”
In
April, 2015, Flynn accepted an invitation to spend a week at Dartmouth.
Daniel Benjamin, a former State Department counterterrorism chief who
now directed the school’s international-affairs center, had come to know
Flynn in Afghanistan. He considered him friendly and engaging, and
thought students and faculty would appreciate his insights and his
unconventionality. He set up class visits, dinner discussions, and a
talk, which Flynn titled “World Without Order.”
Benjamin
told me that he quickly realized during the visit that Flynn’s
“easygoing pragmatism” had given way to some “very hard-edged ideas,”
particularly on Iran. Flynn voiced contempt toward Iran’s leaders (“They
are liars”) and said that they had “no right” to participate in
negotiations with the United States over their nuclear program. (The
Iran nuclear deal was signed in July, 2015.)
“I’ve
encountered plenty of military officers who were deeply upset by the
role that Iranian-backed militias played in Iraq, but Flynn’s animosity
was off the charts,” Benjamin said. Flynn expressed similarly harsh
views of Islam in general, describing the faith as a political ideology,
and not a religion. Benjamin, who, in 2002, co-wrote a book, “The Age
of Sacred Terror,” about the ideological war that America faced against
radical Islam, deemed Flynn’s comments “pointlessly pejorative” and
thought they would serve only to inflame extremists. He began
discouraging Dartmouth’s administrators and faculty from attending the
events.
On
Fox News, NBC’s “Meet the Press,” CNN, and elsewhere, Flynn became
increasingly critical of the Obama Administration. He lashed out at the
Iran nuclear deal, the Administration’s ISIS strategy,
and its approach to radical Islam generally. Several Republican hopefuls
preparing to run against Hillary Clinton asked for his advice. Carly
Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, brought Flynn on as
an informal adviser for her Presidential bid. She told me that she
found him refreshing. “He is a very down-to-earth, approachable guy,”
she said. She was also impressed by his candor. Flynn, she said,
“doesn’t pull punches.”
In August,
2015, Flynn went to New York to meet Trump for the first time. They were
scheduled to talk for thirty minutes; the conversation lasted ninety.
Flynn was deeply impressed. “I knew he was going to be the President of
the United States,” he told me.
Two
months later, Flynn appeared on RT, the English-language Russian
television channel, formerly known as Russia Today. The outlet was
widely regarded as a propaganda arm of the Kremlin, even before a recent
U.S. intelligence report on Russian hacking and the Presidential
election said that the channel had become an important part of a
“Kremlin-directed campaign to undermine faith in the US Government.”
Flynn discussed the civil war in Syria, where Russian jets were flying
bombing sorties in support of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. He
contrasted Putin’s resolve with what he described as Obama’s dithering
in the region: “There’s no coherence or no clarity to the strategy.”
In
early November, 2015, a D.C.-based representative of RT contacted
Flynn’s speakers’ bureau and invited him to Moscow for the channel’s
tenth-anniversary celebration. The fee was approximately forty thousand
dollars, according to a source familiar with the arrangement. This trip
was considerably more fraught than the one he had made as D.I.A.
director. On December 1st, RT issued a press release announcing Flynn’s
participation. In e-mails, Simone Ledeen urged her former boss, and
family friend, to reconsider. “I begged him, ‘Please, sir: don’t do
this. It’s not just you. You’re a retired three-star general. It’s the
Army. It’s all of the people who have been with you, all of these
analysts known as “Flynn’s people.” Don’t do this to them. Don’t do this
to yourself.’ ”
Flynn assured his
critics that he knew what he was doing. “Know my values and beliefs are
mine & won’t change because I’m on a different piece of geography,”
he tweeted. Before the trip, Flynn received a classified
counterespionage briefing at D.I.A. headquarters. Hall, the former
C.I.A. chief of Russia operations, told me, “Whatever personal
electronic device you carry with you into Russia will be compromised.”
Flynn
stayed at a hotel near Red Square. The RT gala featured speakers and
panel discussions during the day and a dinner at night. That morning,
Sophie Shevardnadze, an RT correspondent, interviewed Flynn. From the
stage, he confessed to feeling as if he were behind enemy lines. “I’m
sort of in the lair,” he said.
A
Russian jet had recently been shot down near the Syrian border by a
Turkish plane, and Shevardnadze asked Flynn how Russia should respond.
“Are we not to react? What does Turkey expect?” she asked. Circumspect,
Flynn said, “I don’t know what Turkey expects. I don’t know what Russia
expects.”
Flynn also seemed to go
out of his way to tweak the Russian government and its partners in
Damascus and Tehran. “Let’s face it, come on, is Assad the future of
Syria, given the way the situation has unfolded?” Flynn said. He added
that Assad’s allies in Iran were making things worse in Syria and
elsewhere. “Iran exports a lot of terrorism,” he declared.
Flynn
was seated at the head table for dinner that evening. Putin sat to his
left. Cyril Svoboda, the former foreign minister of the Czech Republic,
sat to Flynn’s right. I called Svoboda, who speaks fluent English and
Russian, and who translated a brief exchange between the two men, and
asked what they discussed. “It was very, very short,” Svoboda said. “ ‘Kak vashi dela?’ ‘Shto novovo?’ ‘Khorosho.’ ” (“How are you?” “What’s new?” “Good.”)
After
dinner, Putin went onstage and congratulated RT on its success. The
Russian government wasn’t perfect, he said, so he appreciated RT for its
presentation of “various points of view.” After Putin concluded his
remarks, Flynn, joining other diners, stood and applauded.
Last year, Flynn talked to Dana Priest, of the Washington Post, about the trip. When Priest asked why he would go on RT, a state-run channel, Flynn replied, “Well, what’s CNN?”
“Well, it’s not run by the state,” Priest said. “You’re rolling your eyes.”
“Well, what’s MSNBC?” Flynn said. “I mean, come on . . . what’s Al Jazeera?”
By
early 2016, Flynn was enthusiastic about Trump. “He picked the right
horse and he picked it early,” the close Flynn associate told me.
Flynn’s Twitter feed, which had once been full of sunset photos and surf
reports, turned increasingly reactionary, particularly on immigration
and Islam. “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL,” he posted, last
February. Not long afterward, he retweeted a picture apparently showing
refugees tromping across the European countryside with text that read,
“Historians will look back in amazement that the West destroyed its own
civilization.”
In July, his book
with Ledeen, “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against
Radical Islam and Its Allies,” came out. After Trump tweeted an
endorsement, the book made the Times best-seller list. Although
Ledeen’s name appears (in small type) on the cover, “The Field of
Fight” is written in the first person and presented in Flynn’s voice.
But I ran the book through software that allowed me to compare it to the
text of Ledeen’s previous books and articles. Dozens of matches turned
up. The similarities suggested just how much Ledeen’s long-standing
obsessions had melded into Flynn’s. Although an ISIS flag
is pictured on the front cover, “The Field of Fight” is, in many ways, a
call to action against Iran. “Every day we see evidence of Iranian
espionage in the United States,” Flynn writes. “It is hard to imagine
that there are no Hezbollah terrorist groups inside this country. If
they could blow up buildings in Buenos Aires, they can surely do the
same here.”
During
the summer of 2016, the Trump campaign floated Flynn, a lifelong
Democrat, as a Vice-Presidential candidate. After the Republican
Convention, Flynn became a regular presence at Trump campaign events,
sometimes accompanied by his older son, Michael, Jr. Flynn had been
absent for long stretches of Michael, Jr.,’s, teen-age years and early
adulthood—he reportedly missed his wedding while deployed in Iraq. Flynn
made Michael, Jr., his chief of staff.
In
part through his son, Flynn began flirting with an online community of
conspiracy theorists and white nationalists who referred to themselves
as the “alt-right.” The neo-Nazis among them called Trump the “God
Emperor.” On Twitter, Flynn frequently tagged Mike Cernovich, an
alt-right activist, in tweets, and encouraged others to follow his feed.
Michael, Jr., promoted stories from Alex Jones, the right-wing radio
host who believes that the 9/11 attacks, and the 2012 school shooting in
Sandy Hook, were inside jobs. A little more than a year ago, Michael,
Jr., tweeted @billclinton, “You’re a Rapist.”
Flynn’s
own views seemed to be tilting increasingly toward the fringe. He, as
Trump has, publicly insinuated that Obama was a secret Muslim, and not a
true American. “I’m not going to sit here and say he’s Islamic,” Flynn
said of Obama, during remarks last year before the American Congress for
Truth, an anti-Muslim group. But Obama “didn’t grow up an American
kid,” Flynn said, adding that the President’s values were “totally
different than mine.”
Flynn also
stoked fear about Muslims and, in a tweet that used the hashtag
#NeverHillary, shared an anti-Semitic comment that read, in part, “Not
anymore, Jews. Not anymore.” (He subsequently deleted the tweet, calling
it “a mistake.”) “I’m not perfect. I’m not a very good social-media
person,” he told me in one of our conversations. Stanley McChrystal and
Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, both contacted
Flynn and tried, unsuccessfully, to get him to tone it down.
Flynn
predicted a Trump win, but he was making contingency plans. He began
reorienting his firm, the Flynn Intel Group, so that it would be able to
compete for lobbying clients after the election. The firm arranged to
work with Sphere Consulting, a public-relations and lobbying business in
Washington.
In August of last
year, a Turkish businessman with close ties to the government of Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan hired Flynn Intel Group on a lobbying contract to help
promote the view that Turkey’s business climate was a positive one. This
was a challenging task, given that Erdoğan had survived a coup attempt
just the month before, and was, in retaliation, rounding up anyone
considered insufficiently faithful to his regime. Flynn had previously
been critical of Erdoğan, whom he viewed as an Islamist threat. He put
those concerns aside now as he vouched for Erdoğan’s government, writing
an op-ed for The Hill that heralded Turkey as “our strongest ally” against ISIS.
Flynn
remembered Election Night fondly, a moment of triumph. “I like to think
that I helped get Donald Trump elected President,” he told me. “Maybe I
helped a little, maybe a lot.” One of Trump’s first major decisions was
to appoint Flynn his national-security adviser, calling him “an
invaluable asset to me and my Administration.” Flynn told me, “Service
was something our family was always encouraged to do.” He went on, “I
made some mistakes, but I’m still serving. It’s like being a priest, you
know. I’ve been called to serve.”
After
the election, Flynn spent his days at Trump Tower, down the hall from
Bannon and Reince Priebus. “My sched is so tight, literally from sunrise
to well past sunset,” Flynn wrote me, in a text message. He was
“consumed with reading.”
The team he
assembled drew heavily from his former military colleagues, but the
qualifications of others were less apparent. K. T. McFarland, until
recently a Fox News analyst, became his deputy. Flynn’s son, Michael,
Jr., did a brief stint on the transition, before he was dismissed, after
continuing to push on Twitter the fake-news story about Hillary
Clinton’s role in a child-sex-trafficking ring in a pizzeria in
northwest Washington, D.C.
Michael
Ledeen volunteered to help Flynn by examining Obama’s executive orders
on foreign policy, particularly on Iran, recommending “which ones should
be cancelled, which ones should be expanded, and so on.” Ledeen
considered the moment an auspicious one. “I’ve been agitating for thirty
years to go after Iran,” he said. “Now all of a sudden we’ve got a
national-security adviser, a Secretary of Defense, and the head of the
C.I.A. who all agree.”
Like Trump, Flynn stewed over what was said, and written, about him. Much of it was unfavorable. A scathing Times
editorial called his appointment “alarming,” saying that he “would
encourage Mr. Trump’s worst impulses.” The editorial went on, “A core
theme of Mr. Trump’s campaign was making America safer. With this
appointment, he is doing the opposite.”
When
we met at the restaurant before the Inauguration, Flynn was guarded.
“What’s the purpose of this thing?” he asked me. He had previously
questioned whether I would “rehash all this stuff about me being
anti-Semitic and pro-Russia and an Islamophobe.”
Flynn told me he prided himself as a strategist. I asked about his strategy for combatting ISIS.
He said that Obama had “too narrowly defined” efforts to defeat the
enemy. Part of the Trump Administration’s military strategy should
include “fighting these guys on the battlefield,” he told me.
Although
Bannon’s clout seemingly grew by the day, Flynn’s imprint on
national-security policy was unmistakable. Traditionally, the measure of
a national-security adviser’s effectiveness has been defined by his
relationship with the President. That may well have enabled Flynn to
hold on to his job as long as he did; Trump’s loyalty is well known.
(When I asked Flynn if he regarded himself as the “honest broker,” he
said that model was a “misnomer” with Trump. “The honest broker? It’s
Donald Trump.”)
Nine days into the
new Administration, Iran test-fired a ballistic missile from a remote
base in the desert. Flynn regarded the test as a violation of U.N.
Security Council Resolution 2231, covering the agreement on Iran’s
nuclear program. (In fact, the resolution does not prohibit Iran from
firing missiles but, rather, calls upon Iran “not to undertake any
activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of
delivering nuclear weapons.”)
Flynn’s
team drafted a strongly worded warning that criticized the Obama
Administration for “fail[ing] to respond adequately to Tehran’s malign
actions.” The White House sent a draft to the Pentagon for review.
According to a senior military official, staffers in the Defense
Secretary’s office recommended softening some of the language and
removing the condemnations of the Obama Administration. Their
suggestions were ignored.
Three days
after the missile test, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary,
interrupted his daily briefing and invited Flynn to the lectern. The Times
had just published a story describing Flynn’s influence as waning, and
he seemed intent on proving otherwise. Trump had encouraged him to read
the statement himself, Flynn later told me. The President “felt a strong
message needed to be put out,” he said, as if he could dispel rumors of
White House turmoil by threatening war overseas.
Flynn
scolded Iran for its “destabilizing behavior across the entire Middle
East” and declared, “As of today, we are officially putting Iran on
notice.” I spoke to Flynn a few days later. I asked him what he meant by
“on notice.” He replied, “We have a standard, set by sanctions that
have been put in place, that we expect they will meet.” I asked if he
thought there were ways to modify Iran’s behavior short of regime
change.
“You’ll have to ask
Khomeini,” he said. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the cleric who led the
Islamic Revolution, died in 1989. Did Flynn mean Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
who has led the country since then?
“Come
on,” Flynn said. “That’s my Irish brogue.” He declined to specify how
Iran might be punished, because he didn’t want to “telegraph” military
action. “One thing I learned as a lieutenant in the Army is that the
best plan is the one that gives you the most options at the last
possible minute,” he said.
Military
officials have been drawing up retaliatory options, including warplanes,
drones, troops, and cyberattacks. “Planning is trying to keep up with
the rhetoric,” one senior defense official told me.
The
end for Flynn came rather abruptly. He had spent the weekend with the
President and the Prime Minister of Japan at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s resort
in Palm Beach, Florida, where they had used a table in an open dining
area as an impromptu—and unsecured—situation room after a ballistic
missile test by North Korea. But, back in Washington on Monday
afternoon, there was confusion about Flynn’s standing. During a
television interview, Kellyanne Conway, a senior White House adviser,
said that Flynn enjoyed Trump’s “full confidence.” Then, within the
hour, Spicer said that Trump was “evaluating the situation.” Flynn went
about his duties as usual that afternoon, participating in
foreign-policy discussions in the Oval Office, an Administration
official told me.
But, that evening, another Post
article appeared online, this time about the Justice Department’s
blackmail fears. Soon afterward, Trump asked for Flynn’s resignation.
The news broke just before eleven.
Since
the election, Flynn had been “read in” to dozens of “special access
programs,” the country’s most highly classified intelligence operations.
By protocol, he would have spent his final moments in the White House
being “read out” of each program, a process that involves signing
multiple confidentiality forms. At around 11:30 p.m., he walked out of the White House and called his wife.
At
that hour, the roads were empty and Flynn drove, alone, to his home, in
Old Town Alexandria. He barely slept that night. On Tuesday, a
government representative came to his home to collect his phones,
badges, and keys. He spent the next few days with his wife, taking long
walks, “reflecting and capturing his thoughts,” the close associate told
me. As Washington, just across the Potomac River, convulsed, Flynn was
going through his own “range of emotional swings,” the associate said.
Last
Wednesday, at a midday press conference, Trump, who Spicer said earlier
had lost trust in Flynn, now praised him (“a fine person”), blamed the
media for his ouster (“The press should be ashamed of themselves”), and
attributed Flynn’s resignation not to potentially criminal contacts with
the Russian Ambassador but to “illegal” leaks.
There
were reports of investigations on an array of fronts: an F.B.I.-led
inquiry into Flynn’s communications with the Russian Ambassador; an
Army-led one into payments that Flynn might have received from the
Russian government when he went to Moscow in 2015; and calls for probes
from members of the Senate and House intelligence committees.
Flynn
has been consulting with a lawyer. It is illegal for unauthorized
private citizens to conduct diplomacy with foreign governments, but such
a violation would be difficult to prosecute. When, soon after Flynn
became national-security adviser, F.B.I. agents questioned him, he
denied discussing sanctions with Kislyak, the Post reported. If he lied to the F.B.I., he could be vulnerable to felony charges.
Russian
officials deny any improper contact with Flynn or anyone else in
Trump’s circle. The predominant view in the state media and among
Russian analysts is that the Flynn affair, coupled with the American
intelligence report on the hack of the Democratic National Committee, is
likely to limit Trump’s ability to make some of the major changes in
U.S.-Russia policy that he was hinting at throughout the campaign.
Last
week, Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence
committee, along with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, requested a
briefing from the director of national intelligence on Flynn’s contacts
with Russian officials, including unredacted transcripts of
conversations. Schiff expressed concern to me about evidence
preservation; the Administration had already shown its capacity for
deceit. After all, he said, Trump had known “for weeks” that Flynn was
lying. “The fact that they were O.K. with that tells you a lot about
their comfort level misleading the public.”
A
former C.I.A. official raised similar concerns about how long Flynn was
allowed to stay in his job. “We’ve now got a guy briefed on our most
closely guarded secrets about a whole host of issues—including
Russia—who has been canned,” the official said. “We don’t have something
from the movies where you can put an eraser on someone’s head and it
all goes away. We’ve got to rely on Mike Flynn to keep those secrets,
just as we rely on others who’ve been given access to classified
information when they leave those positions.”
White
House officials portrayed Flynn as having had his conversations with
the Russian Ambassador on his own. But Schiff and others are doubtful.
Schiff said he thought that it would be “extraordinary” if Flynn was
“some kind of free agent, entering into discussions with the Russians
about undermining President Obama’s sanctions against Russia for its
interference in our elections to help elect Donald Trump.” (During a
news conference last Thursday, Trump said that Flynn had done nothing
wrong in his discussions with the Russian envoy. “I didn’t direct him,”
Trump said, “but I would have directed him if he didn’t do it.”)
Some
of Flynn’s former military colleagues, even those from whom he’s
drifted apart in recent years, told me they were skeptical that Flynn
would have conducted shadow diplomacy on his own. Despite his reputation
as an agitator, he was, in the end, a soldier who followed orders, they
said.
“This
story is bigger than Mike Flynn,” the senior military intelligence
official said. “Who told Mike to go do this? I think somebody said,
‘Mike, you’ve got some contacts. Let them know it’s gonna be all right.’
Mike’s a soldier. He did not go rogue.” ♦
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