To The Guardian Newspaper:
The attached column is submitted for publication in The Guardian’s Opinion section on behalf of its author, Ronald Estes, a 25 year CIA officer. My name is Brian Nelson, a former CNN correspondent, producer and anchor. I am a friend of Ron and the Estes family. My contacts are included in this email. Mr. Estes’ contact information can be found at the bottom of his column. Note: Mr. Estes is sharp of mind but suffers hearing difficulties. I, or his daughter, can arrange to be with him at a pre-determined time should you wish to speak with him personally.
Thank you for considering his submission. The CIA has cleared it for publication.
The Verity Courier
Trump – An Agent of Influence?
By Ron Estes
10 October
There is a growing concern in the Intelligence Community that Donald Trump may once again introduce the bona fides of an agent of a foreign government to the Oval Office. The concern is unprecedented in the history of the nation.The degree of concern was recently surfaced by Andrew McCabe the former FBI Deputy Director. Asked if he thought it possible that President Trump was a Russian asset, McCabe responded, “I do.” The FBI and CIA work closely monitoring foreign intelligence interests and activities in the United States.
In the early months of Donald Trump’s presidency, speculation began to grow that America’s new Commander-in-Chief was an “Agent of Influence” of the Russian Government. There were reasons.
An “Agent of Influence” is a person of significant political or bureaucratic stature who uses his/her position to influence public opinion and foreign policy to produce results beneficial to a controlling foreign government. As such, the individual does not act in the same way as the traditional spy does, gathering or stealing classified material and passing it clandestinely to a foreign intelligence service.
Several sources reported the tantalizing news around 2016 that the SVR, the current name for Cold War KGB, acquired compromising film and recordings of Donald Trump cavorting with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room in 2013. The incident was first reported in the Steele Dossier. There was some skepticism about the accuracy of the Steele Dossier report at the time. However, according to the BBC, the same information was also reported by "multiple intelligence sources" and "at least one East European intelligence service". Those reports detail "compromising material on Mr. Trump" that included "more than one tape, not just video, but audio as well, on more than one date, in more than one place, in both Moscow and St. Petersburg.”
The Guardian, the British global news organization that publishes investigative journalism and is known to receive information provided by British intelligence, published a report on July 15, 2021, that cited Kremlin documents said to be “leaked,” and reviewed by the Guardian.
Those documents reveal that on 22 January, 2016, during a session of Russia’s national security council, Russian President Putin personally authorized an intelligence agency operation to support a ‘mentally unstable’ Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. The Russian president, his intelligence chiefs and senior ministers were all present. At the meeting it was agreed that a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the U.S.
Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature. The Guardian claims it has shown the leaked documents to independent experts who say they appear to be genuine. Their overall tone and thrust are said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking. Following his election, Trump held five private meetings with the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel. Trump insisted that all translator notes of the meetings be destroyed. Thus, there is no written record of any of the meetings. It is unprecedented for a president of the United States to meet with a leader of a foreign nation and have no record of the meeting. There was, and remains, much speculation in the US intelligence community about what President Trump was trying to hide by destroying all records of the meetings.
Within the CIA, any understanding of the term “Agent of Influence” would be applied to someone holding a position of U.S. political leadership who would be expected, as part of his/her mission, to steer U.S. policy, foreign and even domestic, to serve the interests of the nation in control of said agent. The question is, did President Trump do so on behalf of Russia?
Let’s look at the record.
Moscow views the former Soviet East Bloc countries that are now members of NATO and the EU as a security threat to Russian interests. As such, Russian objectives have been to weaken NATO, cause disunity and confusion of purpose in the EU, and negatively influence the unity and economic significance of the G7 nations.
As President, Donald Trump undertook to treat our European NATO allies, the countries that we are by treaty sworn to defend, more cavalierly than any President since World War II. He single-handedly pulled the United States out of the Paris climate change accord, withdrew U.S. troops from Germany, and withdrew the U.S. from the international treaty constraining Iran’s development of a nuclear program which Europeans were frantic to save.
However, it was Trump’s focus on belittling NATO that shook the foundations of the defense alliance. Even before his election, the New York real estate tycoon and reality TV star claimed that NATO was “obsolete” because it was not paying its share of its own defense and was not doing enough to fight terrorists. That last accusation caused puzzlement in European capitals, given NATO’s fifteen-year involvement in Afghanistan. Of even greater concern, however, was his apparent readiness to make conditional the holiest of holies, the US commitment under Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty to defend any ally that comes under attack. Never had a leading US political figure gone so far as to call into question US treaty obligations to its European allies and to question the value of NATO itself.
Following his election and his first appearance at a NATO Leaders’ Meeting in Brussels, Trump further sowed doubts about the US commitment to its oldest military alliance. NATO officials feared they were watching iron clad vows of mutual security under the US umbrella crumble beneath their feet.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Trump’s sycophantic support of Israeli violations of international law, while also giving the US the dubious distinction of becoming the first nation to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, alienated 1.9 billion Muslims and relinquished much U.S. stature and influence in the region, to the delight of Moscow.
Intelligence agencies began asking themselves the unthinkable.
According to the Washington Post, in a perspective piece in September 2020, “The FBI faced a national security nightmare under Trump: it suspected that the new President of the United States was, in some unknown way, in the sway of Russia. Was an agent of a foreign power in the White House?” The No. 2 man in FBI counterintelligence was quoted as saying “I can’t tell you how ominous and stressful those days were…similar to the Cuban missile crisis, in a domestic counterintelligence sense.”
The Post concludes that “We still don’t know why the President kowtows to Vladimir Putin.”
Keep in mind that Trump delivered a stunning defense of Putin in Helsinki in 2018 against US intelligence findings that Russia meddled on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 election. Trump at the time said he “believed” Putin’s denial over his own spy agencies. Putin returned the favor by supporting Trump’s false claims of a “rigged election” and a “rigged trial”.
The dictator has defended his protege.
Ron Estes served 25 years as an Operations Officer in the CIA Clandestine Service. He was the CIA Station Chief in three countries, recipient of the agency’s highest award, and the author of two books, The Recruitment and The Mission: CIA in the Balkans