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Our Man in Cambridge Whistleblower Steven Schrage reveals what America should have known all along – Russiagate was both crime and farce “Was Halper really three hundred pounds?” I asked, looking up from a sheaf of papers. “Hell,” said Steven Schrage, eyes widening. “That’s probably an understatement.” I first met Steven Schrage weeks ago, in a dingy motel hours from either of our homes. Like a lot of whistleblowers, he was cautious, frustrated, and seemingly exhausted and full of energy at the same time. For years, he’d been a doctoral candidate at Cambridge University, where his thesis advisor was none other than Stefan Halper, the so-called “FBI Informant” who conducted surveillance on Trump-related figures like Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and Michael Flynn. A longtime Republican who’d served in senior positions under Colin Powell, Mitt Romney, and Scott Brown, Schrage in a supreme irony only moved to England because he’d become disillusioned with what he calls the “swamp” of Washington politics. Hoping to get away from it all, his relationship with Halper instead put him at the center of the origin story of perhaps the biggest political scandal of our generation, i.e. Russiagate. Adding a layer of absurdity was the fact that he was unaware of this at the time, and, he says, only became aware years later, while walking down a London street in May of 2018, reading news stories that were blowing up his phone about his former boss. (You can read his account of this, “The Spies Who Hijacked America,” here). He recalls being flabbergasted as he read news stories that, among other things, described the elephantine Halper – a bombastic, deeply flawed figure the spy agencies nicknamed “The Walrus” – as a super-spy whose identity was such a terrible secret that exposing him could “risk lives.” There was another thing. “I was about to fly out for my wedding,” Schrage recalls, shaking his head. “I guess I have to give myself some credit – I kept a stiff upper lip for the ceremonies.” After years of silence, Schrage hit the headlines today. This morning, he gave an interview to Maria Bartiromo on Fox that contained explosive information. In a taped conversation on January 10th, 2017, Halper advised Schrage not to bother trying to get a job with Donald Trump’s new National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn. This told Schrage that Flynn wasn’t “going to be around long,” and was “really fucked.” Why was Trump’s new security chief in trouble? Because, Halper told him, “opponents… so-called enemies” of Flynn were “looking for ways of exerting pressure.” Halper added that Flynn would be “squeezed pretty hard” by these enemies, and his “reaction to that is to blow up and get angry,” which was why he was “fucked” and “so unsuitable.” You can listen to the recording below. Halper did not comment to Fox. The conversation didn’t make sense to Schrage at the time. Flynn had served as the head of Barack Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency, was now one of Trump’s closest aides, and was about to assume one of the country’s most powerful intelligence jobs. Schrage, whose academic work at Cambridge – ironically, as he now notes – focused on the vulnerability of presidential campaigns to inappropriate or corrupt influence, had long ago assessed that Flynn was one of the only people in Trump’s orbit with legitimate, top-level intelligence experience. He even once opined to Halper that removing Flynn would be equivalent to “beheading” Trump’s team. If anyone had job security under Trump, it should be Flynn. What was his advisor talking about? Roughly 48 hours later, the Washington Post released an article by reporter David Ignatius entitled, “Why Did Obama Dawdle on Russia’s Hacking?” The January 12th piece contained a seemingly illegal leak of secret telephonic intercepts, “outing” Flynn for having spoken by phone on December 29th, 2016 with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak. This started the ball rolling on a prosecution of Flynn that cast a pall over the Trump presidency from its first months. Schrage believes the “really fucked” exchange he has on tape might have implications for a hearing this Tuesday, August 11th of the full Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. The court will be meeting, essentially, to decide if William Barr’s Department of Justice had the right to drop a false statements case made against Flynn in connection with the Kislyak call. “There’s no more time to wait,” he says. Conservative media and Republican politicians alike are certain to make great hay of Schrage and his tape. It will be a surprise if Donald Trump doesn’t comment on it within an hour of Bartiromo’s broadcast. Still, Schrage has a larger story. The son of a high-achieving military man and athlete, Schrage says he spent much of his early political career “in search a mentor figure.” After compiling a series of degrees that collectively read like a Team America: World Police resume – Duke for undergrad, University of Michigan for the J.D., then Harvard for an M.B.A. and doctoral studies – he set off on a journey through the highest levels of government, working in close proximity with Republican politicians of profile for much of the 2000s and 2010s. He worked at State under Powell during the early Bush years, was foreign policy advisor for Mitt Romney’s first presidential run in 2008, and finally was a chief of staff for one of the first Republicans elected as part of the Tea Party movement, Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown – a man who, Schrage now notes with a disapproving laugh, I once described as a “dingbat cookie-cutter right-wing automaton.” In fact, Schrage had a fairly positive experience with Brown, whom he considers an example of a political outsider trying to do the right thing. Schrage believes voters for Trump and Bernie Sanders have more in common than is usually reported, and considers Brown’s run to be an early, sincere effort to address the sources of disaffection among such voters. It was the Hill itself, with its labyrinthine system of horse trades and other systemic defects, that turned him off. He had similar issues in the executive branch, where the deceptive narrative arc of the Iraq invasion soured him on some of his former heroes. He ended up in Cambridge in part because Halper had been a critic of the Iraq war. Schrage describes feeling a sense of wonder when wandering the ancient campuses of Britain’s great universities. “You look around, and you realize, this is where they claim the apple fell on Newton’s head, and there were all these great thinkers,” he recalls. “But there’s also another side.” He learned early on that some American academics in Britain spend long careers dining out on government experience they had in Washington eons ago. He noticed the academic world never catches on, nor seemingly wants to catch on, to the fact that some of its personalities have long ago fallen out of the loop. This dynamic ended up coming into play with Halper, the last in the string of Schrage’s would-be mentors mentors or role models – a procession that began with “outsider” figures in Republican revolutions like Reagan and Newt Gingrich and ended with a man who, according to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, the FBI nearly fired in 2011 for being “mercurial,” and having “questionable allegiance to [intelligence] targets.” Schrage describes Halper with a combination of awe and distant revulsion, as one might an extraordinary but not entirely pleasant natural phenomenon, like a two-hundred foot tapeworm – you’d stop and look, but for minutes, not years. By 2016, he says, he was becoming frustrated with how long it was taking to follow Halper’s “increasingly erratic” direction and complete his doctorate, when the Russiagate lunacy began. The gist of Schrage’s account suggests that “Russiagate” was both an outrageous abuse of power and a tale of grasping has-beens who first dug themselves an enormous hole, then worsened matters through a series of double-downs. Russiagate was two narratives, initially. One involved the FBI’s pre-election effort to use “informants” to obtain information about the likes of Flynn, Page, and Papadolpoulos. Since this activity was conducted through Halper, Schrage has intimate knowledge of nearly the entirety of that story. “Halper wouldn’t have known who any of those people were without me,” he says. The second narrative involved the hire of Christopher Steele by the Hillary Clinton campaign, the production of his famous “dossier,” the dossier’s use by the FBI, and its eventual leak to the press. That story was also connected to Cambridge, via Richard Dearlove, Steele’s former superior at the British Secret Service MI6 and a colleague of Halper’s. Schrage has less direct knowledge of Steele’s efforts, but what he did see suggested the Halper and Steele narratives were connected early on. For instance, Page first appeared in Steele’s reports to the Clinton campaign just seven days after Schrage’s Cambridge conference, when Dearlove and Halper met Page for the first time. Other parts of the story suggest Halper’s later efforts at “gathering information” were on some level intended to “confirm” information in the Steele dossier. Schrage believes Page would never have come to Halper’s attention had Schrage not invited Page to a conference at Cambridge in July of 2016 – and the invitation was a nearly 100% random event in his telling: After a 20-something Cambridge administrative official smugly told me “there’s no way Trump can win” and cut our travel funding, it sent me on a mad scramble. I had to find someone—anyone—to fly over on a last-minute economy ticket to represent the Trump campaign. This is the only reason Spygate’s “FBI Spy” Halper and Russiagate’s “Russian Spy” Carter Page ever met, with consequences still shaking politics today. In this telling, neither Christopher Steele nor Halper had any organic reason to settle on Page as an investigatory target. Page, Schrage insists, was purely a victim of terrible luck, and, perhaps, his own over-availability that spring. Between stories like Schrage’s and the deluge of revelations/declassifications that have come out since last year, including thousands of pages of secret testimony by dozens of key actors, it’s now possible to see and understand the outlines of what really happened between 2015-2019, and in particular in 2016 and 2017, when the Trump-Russia affair gradually became the dominant political story in the world. There’s a theme about intelligence work that runs from fictional accounts like Our Man in Havana through real fiascoes like “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and, now, Russiagate. It concerns an insular community of flakes, fakes, has-beens, and never-will-bes, each representing that they have information to sell to the handful of deep-pocketed whale clients who drive the spy business – Washington, Whitehall, Moscow, here and there an odd sultan, Shah, corporation or private political concern. The unique feature of this information industry is that for a lot of the biggest clients (and the Americans in particular), quantity is more important than quality. Those flying desks in this world need something to send upstairs, but whether that something is real or fake, Osama’s address or nonsense, turns out to matter a lot less than we’d think or hope. In this case, when the decision was made by Washington officials to start “gathering information” on figures associated with the Trump campaign, the choice to head up the spying campaign was someone who literally could not do basic operations on the Internet – Schrage has emails attesting to this – had not long before come within a hair of being dismissed by the FBI, and had been out of the loop for decades. “That’s the problem with being out of Washington for twenty years,” Schrage says Halper at one point told him. One of the remarkable details of Schrage’s story is that the Internet-challenged Halper appears to have used his academic advisory role to commission oppo research on Trump. As Schrage describes: Starting in 2016, Halper made odd requests for me to brief him and others on Trump’s team. He even had me extensively research Trump, allegedly as part of my thesis work, even though my thesis was focused on past, not present, presidents. Halper at Cambridge had also been moonlighting for the U.S. military, compiling essentially open-source material into “reports” for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment that, as one Senate source laughed to me years ago, “did not even assess anything.” Halper prepared studies with titles like “China: The Three Warfares” that contained anodyne insights like “China seeks to regain premier world status,” wrapped around long articles written by sub-contractors, work that earned commissions for Halper far beyond the rates of the highest-paid journalists. This modern-day version of the lucrative diagrams of giant vacuum cleaners drawn by Graham Greene’s fictional James Wormold earned Halper over a million dollars from government contracts between 2012 and 2018. Christopher Steele’s boss and Halper’s colleague at the now-defunct Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, Dearlove, had similarly been out of active duty for years. Schrage notes that while Russiagate was going on, Dearlove was facing investigation for Britain’s “Chilcot Report” about the abuse of Iraq War intelligence – among other things, he faced allegations that an incorrect detail about potential Iraqi chemical weapons being kept in “glass beads or spheres” mirrored the plot of The Rock, a WMD-heist movie starring Nicholas Cage. The Steele report has likewise been debunked as fanciful gibberish by the Horowitz report, with the infamous “pee tape” story that gripped the world, for instance, revealed to have been a comment made in “jest” by two people “over beers.” Steele’s primary sub-source was recently revealed to be a Washington-based Brookings institution analyst named Igor Dyachenko who later told the FBI that “to his knowledge,” he never had contact with Russian intelligence sources on behalf of Steele. Of the sources he did have, one was always trying to “monetize [their] relationship,” while the routine with another was to “drink heavily together.” The declassified report of the FBI’s interview of this “primary sub-source” is particularly striking, in light of Schrage’s account of the random way in which Carter Page seems to have entered this story. The February 9th, 2017 report writes, “As [the primary sub-source] recalls, Carter Page was one of 4-5 names that Steele provided to [primary sub-source]”: To recap: a Washington-based contract employee of Christopher Steele’s firm traveled to Russia armed with a series of names, which he then bounced off cash-hungry contacts in liquor-lubricated meetings that, in an amazing coincidence, produced a series of devastating if ultimately unconfirmable stories. It should be noted that Steele’s “primary sub-source” told the FBI his first queries about Page were made in the first week of July, 2016, while Schrage’s conference ended on July 12th, with Dearlove giving a speech denouncing Trump in front of Page on that date. Schrage says Halper was indifferent to Page until that moment, when he “suddenly seemed desperately interested in isolating, cornering, and ingratiating himself to Page and promoting himself to the Trump campaign.” Schrage’s story, when told in full, will demystify the efforts by FBI “informants” to gather “information” on people like Page, Papadopoulos, and Flynn. In a narrative that is somehow more comic than The Honorary Consul, Scoop or any of the other literary spy spoofs, Russiagate began as a few aging bull artists from Cambridge who cross-burnished other’s dicey reports to sell the World’s Finest Law Enforcement Institution, the FBI, on a shaggy dog story of supreme dumbness and improbability. The FBI then compounded the error first by launching real investigations of the real people named in these dubious reports, then by leaking their names to the news media. None of this might have done much damage, but Trump ruined everything by winning the 2016 election, by which point this mess had grown out of control. Key actors in a third, post-electoral stage of the scandal then opted for total commitment rather than transparency, with the result that real human beings went to prison and a democratically-elected president was forced to fight off phony accusations of espionage for years. Blue-state voters will not want to hear this, but this investigation of a major-party presidential candidate (and later a president) by a combination of the FBI and hired Democratic Party oppo researchers is much the same story as Watergate, only worse. It’s probably not a coincidence that Watergate was also undertaken by a group of men trained in political sabotage at the university level. The same sophomoric progressions are evident. Watergate started with ordering bundles of pizzas for Ed Muskie and escalated to burglary and bugging; Russiagate began with dirty jokes over beer and tales of nonexistent Miami consulates, and ended with FISA warrants and arrests. Then and now, the ugly truth, as “Deep Throat” once commented in All The President’s Men, is “these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.” Schrage wants to tell what he knows about all this in parts, over the course of the next months. He thinks it’s critical that people understand the farcical nature not just of this story but of government in general, and I hope to help with this, in addition to my other work in this space. Schrage is also motivated to try to convince investigators to subpoena people like the Cambridge characters in his narrative. He can’t believe that it’s now been four years, and no one has heard yet from people like Halper. “This isn’t supposed to be my job,” he sighs. “In any kind of functioning government, these people would have been interviewed already.” A year ago, after Robert Mueller wrapped up his work without filing additional charges, it seemed impossible to tell what Russiagate ever had been — apart from significantly less than the presidency-wrecking espionage conspiracy everyone from Rachel Maddow to Chris Cuomo spent years insisting it was. Now, with a new election fast approaching, it’s becoming clear the affair was, at best, a half-baked amateur smear campaign that somehow became a real international emergency for years on end. With a pandemic and nationwide protests afoot, it may be no one wants to face the enormity of the prank we played on ourselves. But those who care to look are now able to see the joke was on all of us, from the beginning.