A Wilderness of Mirrors: Carter Page, Russian Foreign Intelligence, the FBI, and the CIA
This article covers the background of Trump Foreign Policy Advisor Carter Page, and his complex ties to Russian foreign intelligence, the FBI, and the CIA.
It is the fifth entry in the series “Mysterious Misfits: the 2016 Trump Foreign Policy Team and the Russian Election Interference Campaign.”
While it is not necessary to read previous entries, it is recommended.
The first article covers the establishment of the 2016 Trump Campaign Foreign Policy team and an effort to find Hillary’s “missing emails.”
The second article covers how George Papadopoulos learned that the Russians possessed Hillary Clinton’s emails.
The third article describes how Papadopoulos revealed that the Russians had Hillary’s emails and his attempts to arrange a Trump/Putin meeting.
The fourth article covers Papadopoulos’ interactions with a man suspected of having ties to Russian intelligence and his last days on the campaign.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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“Carter Page, PhD,” was all Donald Trump had to say about the new member of his foreign policy advisory team when he announced its formation to the world on March 21st, 2016, during his interview with The Washington Post’s editorial board. No one from the Post had ever heard of him.
Page was ultimately the only foreign policy advisor on the Trump campaign to be publicly described as an expert on Russia. Despite his general obscurity, however, there were two organizations that had definitely heard of Carter Page, the FBI and the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence agency.
Born in 1971, Page grew up in Poughkeepsie, NY, where he was an altar boy and Eagle Scout. According to his own account, Page’s interest in Russia started early in life.
Returning home from skateboarding one day in 1986, Page watched the meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland on television. Five years later he visited Moscow for the first time as a midshipman in the Naval Academy. The trip, Page would later claim, created an enduring desire to improve relations between the United States and Russia.
During his senior year, Page interned at the House Armed Services Committee, where he wrote a paper about the conflict between Congress and the Reagan administration over the Strategic Defense Initiative.
After graduating from Naval Academy in 1993, Page served as a Marine intelligence officer based in the Western Sahara. He would also serve several tours as a surface warfare officer in the Middle East and Europe and work at the Pentagon on arms control issues.
After leaving the Navy, Page became an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) where he researched economic development in the former Soviet Union and Middle East, with a particular focus on Caspian Sea energy resource issues.
Specifically, he wrote about Turkey’s role as a hub for oil and natural gas coming from the Caspian Sea region to Europe via pipeline. Stephen Sestanovich, a Columbia University Professor of International Affairs, met Page several times at CFR events related to Russia.
“His view of how the world worked seemed to have an edgy Putinist resentment to it,” Sestanovich later said of Page to The New York Times Magazine. “I think Carter genuinely felt an affinity for Putin’s critique of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment and its unfairness to Russia, because he wasn’t doing any better with that establishment than Putin was.”
Following his Fellowship at CFR, Page worked for a brief three month stint in 1998 at a political risk consultancy called the Eurasia Group. His unorthodox views of Russia were also noticed there.
“It was very clear he was ideologically very pro-Kremlin, which wasn’t at all clear when he interviewed,” said Ian Bremmer, President of the Society. “As a result, he wasn’t a good fit at Eurasia Group.”
In 2000, Page went into investment banking after being hired by Merrill Lynch and joining their capital markets group based out of London. Page later told Bloomberg that he was transferred in 2004 to the Merrill Lynch branch in Moscow after impressing a colleague by having a relationship with the Ukrainian Billionaire Victor Pinchuk.
Pinchuk was the son-in-law of then Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and was a contributor to the Clinton Global Initiative and partially funded Paul Manafort’s campaign against Yulia Tymoshenko.
The nature of the relationship between Page and Pinchuk, and how it began, is unclear.
Between 2004 and 2007, Page served as the deputy branch manager of Merrill Lynch’s Moscow office. His activities in Russia during this period are disputed.
According to Page, he advised Gazprom on some of its largest deals of the time, including its purchase of a stake in the Sakhalin oil and gas field in the Sea of Okhotsk.
The CEO of Sakhalin Energy during the timeframe that Page was in Moscow, however, told Politico that he had never heard of Page and claimed that Merrill Lynch itself wasn’t involved in the deal in any significant way.
Page did play a minor role in the privatization of the Russian electricity giant RAO UES.
Regardless of his involvement in the Sakhalin deal, we know for a fact that he worked with Gazprom during this time period and befriended its Deputy Chief Financial Officer Sergey Yatsenko.
Page was introduced to Gazprom through a Russia-based American investor and colleague at Merrill Lynch named Allen Vine.
After working at Merrill, Vine moved on to become the “right-hand man” of Suleiman Kerimov, a Kremlin-connected Russian oligarch from Dagestan with strong links to Gazprom.
In the period that Page and Vine worked there, Merrill Lynch’s Moscow office had helped Kerimov float companies on the London Stock exchange, despite the fact that he was an associate of individuals believed to have received oil bribes from Saddam Hussein.
In 2018, the US Treasury Department added Kerimov to the list of Russians under sanctions, accusing him of laundering money through the purchase of villas in France.
Sergey Yatsenko graduated from Singapore University Page 1984 with a degree in Chinese language. It has been pointed out that during the Soviet period, having studied abroad and learned a foreign language was often in the background of Russian intelligence agents.
When Yatsenko joined Gazprom in 2002, it was during a time when the company was known to hire ex-KGB agents, one example being the former-KGB agent Valery Golubev who was appointed a Deputy Chief Executive. Despite this, there is no direct evidence that Yatsenko is connected to Russian intelligence.
According to Russian corporate records, Yatsenko owns a stake in the Severyanin (Northerner) Homeowners Associate 31, a corporate development for high-level Gazprom employees. Another stakeholder in the development in Vladimir Putin’s 2nd cousin, Mikhail Putin.
Upon his return to the United States, Page’s first known interaction with Russian intelligence occurred.
In 2008, he met a Russian intelligence officer named Alexander Bulatov who was then working undercover as a Trade official at the Russian consulate in New York.
Page and Bulatov’s relationship lasted for approximately a year, during which time Page offered to provide introductions to Bulatov with his political and business contacts. He also provided Bulatov with Merrill Lynch’s annual report, which according to the FBI was not publicly available at the time.
Page, who later came to understand that Bulatov was an SVR agent, would later claim to the FBI that he only provided “immaterial non-public information” to him.
In April of 2008 Page met with another intelligence agency, the CIA. The exact nature of this relationship remains unclear and a matter of great controversy.
Between 2008 and 2013, Page was classified as an “operational contact,” which meant that the agency could ask him about activities that took place during the normal course of his activities, but couldn’t specifically assign him to go out and gather information.
While he was in contact with the CIA during his interactions with Bulatov, which ended two months after Bulatov returned to Moscow in August of 2008, Page didn’t mention their relationship to the agency until August of 2010. At which point, Page claimed to have met with Bulatov four times, described his interest in meeting a specific “US Person,” who remains unidentified, and described him as a “compelling, nice guy.”
Also 2008, Page established an emerging market energy consulting firm called Global Energy Capital LLC (GEC). On corporate documents, GEC was registered to his father’s address in Poughkeepsie, but its office was located in co-working space at 590 Madison Avenue, a building linked to Trump Tower via a glass atrium.
Page listed himself as the “founder and managing partner” of the fund, and his only other partners in the company were James Richard and Sergey Yatsenko, who left Gazprom in 2010 to work at GEC as a semi-retired senior advisor on a contingency basis.
At the same time, Yatsenko and his wife moved to London and went on a high-end European real estate buying spree, purchasing a £3 million flat in Chelsea and a £6.2 million six-bedroom home in Kensington, in addition to owning a €3 million property in the south of France via a real estate holding company.
In June of 2018, Page traveled with his partner James Richard to the authoritarian Central Asian state of Turkmenistan. In addition to his role at GEC, Richard also worked at Firebird Management, a New York-based fund that specialized in publicly traded equities of companies operating in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries.
Following the death and end of the 21-year rule of Turkmenistan’s dictator-for-life Saparmurat Niyazov, it looked as though Turkmenistan’s ample resource wealth, particularly in the area of natural gas, might open up to foreign investment. Under Niyazov, Turkmenistan had sold its gas at a huge discount to Russia, and as a result only 50 of the country’s then 150 known oil and gas fields were under production.
Niyazov had played a key role in establishing Gazprom-linked intermediaries that sold natural gas to Ukraine, first through Igor Makarov and ITERA, and then through Eural Trans Gas and RosUkrEnergo, partially owned by Dymtro Firtash, a suspected front for for the Eurasian organized crime lord Semion Mogilevich.
Read my description of the corruption in the Russian and Ukrainian natural gas trade, and its links to Eurasian organized crime and the Kremlin, here.
Following Niyazov’s death, elements within Turkmenistan sought to establish more independence from Gazprom.
Page and Richards met with Turkmen government officials and American diplomats stationed in the capital Ashgabat and explained they hoped to put together a $1 billion fund to invest in Turkmen oil and gas, then both state-owned enterprises. Where this vast sum of money was to come from is not publicly known.
According to a State Department cable subsequently leaked by Wikileaks, after describing his experience in Moscow with Merrill Lynch, Page told the American Chargé d’affaires Richard Hoagland that he had “helped to take Gazprom from its status in the early 1990s as a national energy company to “super major” status.
He also indicated that his [was] one of the only such investment companies with investors worldwide — from China, Russia, Europe and the Middle East.”
While in Ashgabat, Page and Richards met with Turkmenistan’s Deputy Prime Minister for Oil and Gas Tachberdi Tagiyev. Tagiyev took them seriously enough that he suggested the meet with the country’s Executive Director of the State Agency for Management and Use of Hydrocarbon Resources. The fund, however, never came to fruition, with Page later blaming the global financial crisis that struck later that year.
Given Turkmenistan’s lack of technology and historical reliance on Russia, American diplomats were skeptical that much diversification from Gazprom was possible in the first place.
The next year, Tagiyev was fired due to strained relations with Gazprom and later arrested on charges of suspected corruption. As yet another leaked State Department cable noted at the time, “It was widely known during Tagiyev’s time as Deputy Chairman that in order for energy companies to get high-level meetings… a little “something, something” should be offered to the various gatekeepers.”
Much like the failed Turkmenistan venture, none of Global Energy Capital’s other projects seemed to get off the ground.
Page’s other partner, Sergey Yatsenko, later told Bloomberg that he had worked with Page on attempting to aid a Russian investor looking into oil investment opportunities in Iraqi Kurdistan.
They also advised a Chinese investor who was looking into purchasing oil assets in Eastern Siberia. There is no indication that these projects ever succeeded, and the identities of the Russian and Chinese investors are unknown.
In yet another project, Yatsenko claimed that he and Page worked on a potential deal that would develop natural gas powered vehicles in Russia. This deal too was scuttled after the United States imposed sanctions on Russia, making it untenable.
All these failures raise an interesting question, why would Sergey Yatskeno, an independently wealthy, former Gazprom executive, go into business Carter Page in the first place?
Carter Page, the FBI, and Further Contacts with Russian Foreign Intelligence
In June of 2009, Page was interviewed by an agent from the FBI’s New York Field Office. The Bureau took notice of him after it learned of his association with SVR agent Alexander Bulatov.
Page told the agent that he “knew and kept in regular contact with” Bulatov “and provided him with a copy of a non-public annual report from” Merrill Lynch.
Page also explained to the FBI agent that, due to his overseas work, he had previously been questioned by the CIA and provided them with information on an ongoing basis.
It should be noted that Page did not mention Bulatov to the CIA until October of 2010, well over a year after his initial interview with the FBI.
Judging from the few records available, the FBI and CIA do not appear to have exchanged information regarding their interactions with Page.
While he pursued his career in business, Page entered into a PhD program at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
Getting his dissertation, titled The influence of semiperipheral powers on the balance between capitalism and socialism in Central Asia: an analysis of Russia’s impact on governance and the regional energy sector 1987–2007, turned into a torturous affair.
The first draft he submitted in 2008 was rejected. One of the two academics who read and graded the thesis, Professor Gregory Andrusz, said of Page that he “knew next to nothing” about social science and seemed “unfamiliar with basic concepts like Marxism or state capitalism.”
After his thesis was rejected for a second time in 2010, Page reportedly grew highly agitated.
“He accused us of bias in our assessment of his work on the grounds that we were anti-Russian and anti-American,” Professor Andrusz said, referring to himself and his colleague Dr. Peter Duncan. “Actually, we are both old Moscow hands. We remain neutral and let the facts speak for themselves.”
“Your actions to date have been far more destructive than anything I have personally experienced in my 39 years on this planet,” Page wrote to his examiners at one point, before bizarrely going on to claim that Vladimir Putin’s imprisonment of the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky represented “the closest analogy in recent history to my trials”.
Page was finally awarded his PdD in 2011.
Shortly thereafter, he was once again in contact with Russian intelligence. In January 2013, Page was attending an event on China and energy development at the Asia Society in New York City when he met a Russian junior attaché at the Russian consulate in New York City in the audience named Victor Podobnyy.
In fact, Podobnyy’s position at the Russian Consulate was a cover for his real job as an economic intelligence agent for the SVR. Podobnyy worked alongside another SVR agent named Igor Sporyshev working undercover as a trade representative of the Russian Federation in New York.
While Podobnyy and Sporyshev operated under official diplomatic cover, Evgeny Buryakov, yet another SVR colleague of theirs, worked out of the New York office of the Russian state-controlled Vnesheconombank under “non-official cover,” i.e. he posed as a private Russian citizen in the United States as opposed to having diplomatic status.
Podobnyy, Sporyshev and Buryakov were tasked by Moscow Center with gathering information on potential US sanctions against Russia and on American efforts to exploit alternative energy resources. In order to do so, they attempted to recruit New York City residents as potential sources.
One of the sources they attempted to recruit was Page.
None of this later surprised the FBI, who knew that Podobnyy had directly replaced Page’s previous Russian intelligence contact, Alexander Bulatov.
After their initial meeting in January 2013 at the Asia Society, Page and Podobnyy met again in March of the same year. Page later recollected to the House Intelligence Committee that they met only once again over coffee or coke. When asked why he replied because of his “general interest in Russia” and to “practice my Russian.”
When asked if they ever met again, Page answered, “[t]here may have been some other brief interaction in passing, but I believe that’s the only meeting, yeah. And we traded some emails, but that was about it.”
The next month, on April 8th, 2013, Podobnyy was secretly recorded by the FBI having a conversation with his fellow SVR agent Igor Sporyshev about his attempts to recruit Page.
“[Carter] wrote that he is sorry,” Podobnyy told Sporyshev, “he went to Moscow and forgot to check his inbox, but he wants to meet when he gets back. I think he is an idiot and forgot who I am. Plus he writes to me in Russian [to] practice the language. He flies to Moscow more often than I do. He got hooked on Gazprom thinking that if they have a project, he could be [sic] rise up. Maybe he can. I don’t know, but it’s obvious he wants to earn a lot of money.”
“Without a doubt,” Sporyshev replied.
“He said they have a new project right now, new energy boom,” Podobnyy continued. “He says that it is about to take off. I don’t say anything for now.”
“Yeah,” Sporyshev cracked, “first we will spend a couple of borrowed million and then…”
“[I]t’s worth it,” Podobnyy replied with a laugh. “I like that he takes on everything. For now his enthusiasm works for me. I also promised him a lot: that I have connections in the Trade Representation, meaning you that can push contacts [laughs]. I will feed him empty promises.”
“Shit, then he will write to me” Sporyshev exclaimed. “Not even me, to our clean one.” Here Sporyshev is likely alluding to non-intelligence affiliated Russian trade officials as clean.
“I didn’t say the Trade Representation,” Podobnyy replied. “I did not even indicate this is connected to a government agency. This is intelligence method to cheat, how else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself. But not to upset you, I will take you to a restaurant and give you an expensive gift. You just need to sign for it. This is ideal working method.”
A month later, FBI Agent Gregory Monaghan and a colleague interviewed Carter Page at the Plaza Hotel in New York, coincidentally once owned by Donald Trump.
Page told Monaghan and his partner that during the January meeting Podobnyy had provided him with a business card and two email addresses. Page explained that he and Podobnyy exchanged emails over several months and met in person “on occasion” so Page could tell him about his views on the future of the energy industry and provide him documents about the energy business.
During the interview, Page told Monaghan that, “it seemed to me that the resources of the U.S. government might be better allocated toward addressing real national security threats, particularly given the recent Boston Marathon bombing.”
The FBI was never able to definitively determine whether Page was aware that he was interacting with Russian intelligence officers at the time of the interactions.
Witting or not, Page’s run-ins with spies didn’t prevent him from seeking out and promoting his contacts within Russia. In a letter sent to an academic press on August 25th, 2013, Page touted his relationship with the Kremlin.
“Over the past half year,” Page wrote, “I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin in preparation for their Presidency of the G-20 Summit next month, where energy issues will be a prominent point on the agenda.”
The next entry will cover Carter Pages mysterious visit to Moscow while a member of the Trump Campaign.