Roger Stone’s Best Friend: Micheal Caputo and the Shadow of Global Intelligence Services
This is the story of Roger Stone’s friend and associate Michael Caputo, whose biography will take us from Buffalo, NY, to Central America, to Moscow, to Ukraine, and ultimately to the 2016 Trump campaign. It is the sixth article in a continuing series about Roger Stone. While it is not necessary to read the earlier entries, it is recommended.
The first article covers Stone’s involvement in Watergate through to the Reagan campaign, which brought him into contact with Roy Cohn and Donald Trump.
The second article covers Stone’s work on the controversial 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial campaign and his lobbying for Trump in Atlantic City.
The third article covers Stone’s involvement in the 2000 election, his coordinating of Trump’s flirtation with running for President, and the “Brooks Brothers Riot.”
The fourth article covers Stone’s involvement in New York State gubernatorial politics from the years 2000–2010.
The fifth article covers Stone’s involvement in the local politics of Broward County, Florida, and his relationship with Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Michael Caputo describes Roger Stone as his “best friend” and “mentor.” Since they first met in the 1980s, Stone and Caputo have worked on multiple campaigns together, both in the United States and abroad. When asked by the House Intelligence Committee how often he spoke to Stone, Caputo replied: “Every single day since I was 25 years old.”
Caputo’s life blurs the lines between domestic politicking and foreign propagandizing. He has planned and executed influence operations, both at home and abroad, and been their target. While his decades-long proximity to U.S. and foreign intelligence operatives and operations is established, his exact role in these many episodes rarely is.
This article will primarily focus on the years of Caputo’s life leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Caputo was brought on to the Trump campaign to manage the New York State Republican Primary by his friend and associate Paul Manafort.
Following Trump’s victory, Caputo was interviewed by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees as well as by Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office. This did not prevent Caputo from later collaborating with elements of Russian intelligence in an effort to influence the 2020 election.
In August of 2019, Caputo traveled to Ukraine to work on a documentary called The Ukraine Hoax: Impeachment, Biden Cash, Mass Murder. The film contained multiple unsubstantiated claims related to the Biden family and former President Barack Obama and their various dealings with Ukraine.
According to a declassified American intelligence community assessment, Caputo collaborated on the documentary with Konstantin Kilimnik, an alleged Russian intelligence officer who had previously worked with Paul Manafort in Ukraine and passed internal Trump campaign polling data to Russian intelligence in 2016.
Caputo also worked on the documentary with a Ukrainian legislator named Andriy Derkach, described in the assessment as having “ties to Russian officials as well as Russia’s intelligence services.”
US Counterintelligence chief William Evanina described Derkach as a key participant in the Kremlin’s efforts to harm Joe Biden’s candidacy. Derkach met with Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani in December of 2019.
The documentary aired in January 2020. The timing coincided with Trump’s first impeachment, which related to a phone call Trump had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which he illegally threatened to withhold Congressionally approved military aid unless Zelenskyy had Ukrainian prosecutors investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
A month later, Caputo authored a book about Ukraine and the Bidens called The Ukraine Hoax: How Decades of Corruption in the Former Soviet Republic Led to Trump’s Phony Impeachment.
In April of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was descending into an ever deepening crisis and threatening Trump’s re-election prospects, Trump installed Caputo as the spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. Caputo had no background in public health matters and only a month earlier had tweeted, “millions of Chinese suck the blood out of rabid bats as an appetizer and eat the ass out of anteaters.”
Unsurprisingly, his tenure at HHS was marred by controversy.
Caputo began to interfere with the release of the Center for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, attempting to align them with Trump’s often false statements regarding the pandemic. He accused government scientists of “sedition” for their handling of the virus.
In September of 2020, POLITICO reported that Caputo had commandeered $300 million from the CDC budget to produce an ad campaign meant to “defeat despair.” It was widely seen as a transparent attempt to lift Trump’s fortunes before the fast approaching 2020 presidential election.
Of that $300 million, $15 million was routed to Atlas Research with the caveat that they use a company called DD&T as a subcontractor. DD&T is owned and operated by an either Russian or Moldovan-born (reports vary) American filmmaker and Caputo business partner named Den Tolmor.
Caputo and Tolmor previously had worked together on a video streaming platform called Bond.pm. Bond.pm lists Marc Vayn as one of its advisors.
Vayn owns a company that produces night vision goggles called American Technology Network (ATN). He was originally named Marc Morgovsky. His parents, Naum and Irina Morgovsky, were arrested and convicted of an illegal scheme to export military grade night vision technology and image intensifiers to Russia. The devices were smuggled to a company which supplies Russia’s military and its domestic intelligence service the FSB.
In September of 2020, Caputo resigned from HHS due to health reasons. Shortly thereafter, he was diagnosed with metastatic head and neck cancer. As of August 2021, Caputo was cancer free.
While Caputo’s activities between the period of 2016 and 2020 are extraordinary by almost any measure, his earlier life is stranger still.
MICHAEL CAPUTO: THE EARLY YEARS
Michael Caputo was born in Fort Bragg, NC, on March 4th, 1962. His parents divorced when he was five years old. After living with his mother in rural Ohio, at age 14 he moved to Buffalo, NY to live with his father.
Caputo spent much his youth near the stadium for the Buffalo Bills football team. His connection to Buffalo, NY, local Erie County politics, and its NFL team are recurring features in his biography. Caputo led a rough-and-tumble childhood, describing himself variously as a “small-time thief” and “juvenile delinquent.”
At the urging of his father, Caputo joined the military and served as an enlisted public affairs specialist for the 25th Infantry Division in the U.S. Army from 1980 to 1983. While in the military he came to support Ronald Reagan and joined the Republican Party.
After leaving the Army, Caputo attended the State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo where he studied journalism and foreign affairs.
On December 1st, 1985, The Buffalo News reported that Caputo was among eight SUNY Buffalo students involved in secretly monitoring and taping “radical and liberal professors.” This was done at the behest of a group called Accuracy in Academia. Caputo acted as a liaison between SUNY Buffalo students and the Washington, DC-based group, which was active on other campuses as well.
Caputo connected with Accuracy in Academia through his friendship with its executive director, Les Csorba, whom he had met while spending the summer of 1985 in Washington, DC.
Accuracy in Academia was a subsidiary of another organization, Accuracy in Media. Founded in 1969, Accuracy in Media was a vocal supporter of the Vietnam war and later claimed negative coverage in the media contributed towards America’s defeat.
Accuracy in Media was founded by a conservative economist named Reed Irvine, who worked on the Federal Reserve board. Irvine, and numerous individuals on Accuracy in Media’s board, had backgrounds in intelligence.
Irvine served as a Marine intelligence officer during the Second World War, and as an intelligence officer in Saipan, Tinian, and Okinawa during the American occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1948.
Other intelligence-linked members of Accuracy in Media’s board included former CIA analyst John McLean, and a teacher at the Defense Intelligence School named Abraham Kalish.
Another was Bernard Yoh, a counterinsurgency expert who led a guerrilla group in China that rescued downed American airmen during WWII, served as a personal adviser to South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and was a professor of psychological warfare at the Air Force University in Montgomery, Alabama.
At the same time he was liaising with Accuracy in Academia, Caputo had a mysterious relationship with General Rahmatullah Safi, a senior figure with the Afghan mujahideen that fought against the Soviet invasion and who later became an ambassador for the Taliban.
While Caputo has described the time he knew Safi as his “college days,” he was by that time a military veteran. Caputo claims that he first met Safi in 1984 at a conference in Washington, DC.
In Going Inside: Memoir of an Afghan Holiday with Rahmatullah Safi 1988, author John England, who met Safi as an Afghan refugee living in the United Kingdom in 1978, describes a trip to Afghanistan he took with Safi.
According to England, in 1973 Safi trained with the elite British special forces unit the SAS. He also completed a “quick kill” course with U.S. special forces at Fort Bragg. Safi returned to Afghanistan to serve King Zahir Shah, but was forced into exile after a coup and ultimately turned up as a refugee in Britain.
Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Safi was deeply involved with the network of Islamic resistance fighters known as the mujahideen, specifically he was allied with The National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, founded by Pir Sayeed Gailani.
The group operated under an umbrella group known as the Peshawar Seven. The National Islamic Front of Afghanistan was used by the Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) service to distribute CIA-funded weapons.
Safi was also friends with Congressman Charlie Wilson (D-TX), a key figure behind U.S. funding of the mujahideen and the subject of the film Charlie Wilson’s War. Safi returned to Peshawar, Pakistan in 1983. That same year, he began fighting in Afghanistan against the Russian invaders.
Caputo assisted Safi on a speaking tour that took him to various American universities, including SUNY Buffalo. In 1985, photos show that Caputo traveled to Peshawar with Safi. Caputo also traveled with Safi to London and Amsterdam. Their relationship extended into the 1990s, before allegedly coming to an end when Caputo moved to Moscow.
Around the time Caputo traveled to Peshawar with Safi, he met Roger Stone. It is unclear whether this was in 1985 or 1986. Their introduction was made possible by Caputo’s connection to Buffalo Congressman Jack Kemp, a former quarterback for the Buffalo Bills.
Caputo testified before Congress that he traveled to Washington, DC in 1986 in preparation for working on Kemp’s 1988 Presidential campaign. Stone has a long history in Buffalo politics. He worked on Jack Kemp’s successful 1984 Congressional campaign, and later advised Kemp’s unsuccessful 1988 presidential campaign.
While waiting for his job on the Kemp campaign to begin, Caputo claims he took a side job working for Black, Manafort, and Stone as a driver, where he met Stone. The meeting made an enormous impression on Caputo, who now describes Stone as has “best friend.”
During this period, Caputo also met Paul Manafort. The two first bumped into each other in the office of Jack Kemp’s political action committee Campaign for Prosperity. Their relationship would extend for thirty years, and include a number of business collaborations.
Manafort had business relationships with individuals and organizations linked to Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) service. He lobbied on behalf of the Kashmiri American Council, which was later revealed to be an ISI front organization operating in America.
Though Kemp’s 1988 bid for the presidency failed, Caputo attended the Republican convention in New Orleans. It was there that he met Donald Trump, who he continued seeing at social occasions. Caputo later worked with Trump on several ventures, including the 2016 campaign.
In 1988, Caputo began working on the ground in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica, for the Reagan administrations Council for Inter-American Security. The Council funded and was “an ardent supporter of the Nicaraguan Contras.”
The Contras were a right-wing paramilitary organization which operated in Central America and were accused of involvement in multiple atrocities.
Caputo’s role at the Council was to “craft the [Reagan] administration’s anti-communism propaganda in Central and South America.” Caputo was briefly kidnapped in El Salvador.
Roger Stone’s first wife Ann Stone had worked with the Republican direct mail guru Richard Viguerie to raise money for the the Contras.
The man who oversaw Caputo’s work at the Council for Inter-American Security was J. Michael Waller. Waller traveled to Nicaragua as a student journalist at the age of twenty-one and ended up spending seven years training the Contras and ultimately helping them build a political party.
As a professor at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC, he taught a course on international diplomacy and political warfare. Waller describes himself as an instructor for military, diplomatic, intelligence, and counterintelligence professionals, and a specialist in propaganda, political warfare, psychological strategy, subversion, and strategic communication.
While in Central America, Caputo reportedly “rubbed elbows” with Oliver North, a member of Reagan’s national security council and central figure in the Iran-Contra Affair, in which weapons were illegally sold by the Reagan administration to Revolutionary Iran, the proceeds of which went to illegally fund the Contras.
A website for Caputo’s PR company featured a photo of him standing with General Enrique Bermudez, the founder of the Contras. Another showed him standing on a tarmac with Oliver North in Central America.
“I couldn’t get ahold of Oliver North,” Caputo said in 2010, “so I flew down there and checked into the hotel and said I wanted to speak to the Contras.”
Caputo also reportedly worked on the presidential campaign of Alfredo Cristiani, a hard-right politician who was elected the President of El Salvador in 1989. Human rights groups in El Salvador and the US have accused Cristiani of being involved in the murder of six Jesuit priests.
In May of 1989, The Buffalo News reported that Caputo was working in Panama. A former SUNY Buffalo classmate of Caputo’s named David Chodrow was forced the flee the country after Panamanian authorities caught him photographing polling locations. Caputo was coordinating with Chodrow while he was in Panama, though it is unclear why.
Chodrow, who died in 2021, was involved in the same Accuracy in Academia monitoring effort at SUNY Buffalo as Caputo.
A leaflet distributed by the Buffalo Marxist-Leninist Party on January 24th, 1986 stated: “Last semester the College of Young Republicans, with its chairman David Chodrow, launched a drive to reestablish a ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) program at the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB). This move on their part is right in step with a nationwide campaign carried out by the Defense Department and the U.S. imperialist government to militarize the war.”
FROM CENTRAL AMERICA TO RUSSIA: CAPUTO IN MOSCOW
In 1994, after a stint working in Congress and on the 1992 Bush/Quayle campaign, Caputo traveled to Moscow as a staffer for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Specifically, Caputo worked for the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), which was funded by USAID.
While it is unknown whether Roger Stone had any role in connecting Caputo to IFES, he does have an interesting link to the organization.
Roger Stone’s connection to IFES comes through its founder, F. Clifton White. White was a Republican strategist who had been a central figure in the effort to draft the arch-conservative Barry Goldwater for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. Stone had been a fanatical Goldwater supporter growing up.
In his book Nixon’s Secrets, Stone states that he worked for F. Clifton White in New York in the 1970s.
Stone may have met White through the Young Republicans. White was the architect of the 1950s conservative ascendency in the Young Republicans. He served as a mentor to the lawyers, businessmen and congressional staff who made up the organization. Roger and Ann Stone participated alongside White in the 1975 Young Republican Leadership Conference.
In 1977, Stone was elected as the President of the Young Republicans. His campaign managed by Paul Manafort.
During the Reagan administration, White worked with CIA director William Casey and CIA officer Walter Raymond on Project Democracy, a pro-Contra propaganda network.
Casey had served as Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign director. Stone worked as Reagan’s 1980 Northeastern Coordinator. Roy Cohn, whom Stone met during the 1980 campaign, was in contact with Casey on a daily basis in the lead up to the election.
Paul Manafort has described himself as being friends with Casey, and maintains that he traveled to the Philippines to advise Ferdinand Marcos at Casey’s request.
In 1982, Reagan named F. Clifton White as the head of Radio Marti, a U.S. initiative meant to counter anti-American radio broadcasts coming out of Cuba. Radio Marti had been set up by the United States Information Agency. USIA was a government agency with close ties to the intelligence community devoted to “public diplomacy” during the Cold War.
On April 20th, 1982, Roy Cohn co-hosted a lunch in honor of USIA’s director Charles Z. Wick. Attendees of the lunch included Roger Stone and Richard Viguerie, who employed Stone’s wife in pro-contra mailing campaigns.
According to investigative reporter Robert Parry, on January 18th, 1983, Cohn attended a meeting in the Oval Office and introduced Ronald Reagan to Rupert Murdoch. Mudoch’s company Newscorp., which owns Fox News, was one of Black, Manafort, and Stone’s top corporate clients. Murdoch was recruited to support Casey’s and Raymond’s propaganda effort supporting Reagan’s policies in Central America.
This was the very same effort F. Clifton White was also supporting.
A November 1986 memorandum from Walter Raymond, a former CIA officer and expert on clandestine overseas media operations, to National Security Advisor John Poindexter called for White to establish an organization that would focus on Central America.
A year later, White founded the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES). Michael Caputo joined IFES sometime around 1994, by which time it had turned its attention from Central America to Russia.
While working for IFES in Moscow, Caputo became a fluent Russian speaker and married a Russian astrophysics student. The marriage ended in divorce. Caputo lived next to a Moscow cafe owned by the local mafia.
“Organized crime is everywhere in the former Soviet Union,” Caputo wrote. “In the 1990s, I lived right next door to my krisha — Russian for “roof,” or the guy who doesn’t let it rain on you. Businesses in our area of Moscow paid him monthly to stay dry. Apparently he liked me, because I got a pass. And our street was the safest in the area, if you could wheel your way through the dozen-plus black Mercedes lined up outside the local don’s lair.”
During this time, Caputo interacted with highest levels of the Russian government. His main contact was a former Communist named Nikolai Ryabov, the first Deputy Prime Minister and chairman of the Federal Elections Commission.
He also met with President Boris Yeltsin and the Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin. Caputo shared the dais with Putin at an event in St. Petersburg, ironically, on election law development. In an interview with Wired, Caputo claimed that he hosted Putin at a reception at his house in Russia.
Caputo’s tenure with IFES was short and controversial. In the lead up to the 1996 election, the Russian Federal Election Commission took the controversial step of disqualifying several parties on the basis of a technicality. This included Yabloko, Russia’s most popular pro-reform party. The move inspired protests within Russia and without.
Stanford professor Michael McFaul, the future American ambassador to Russia, described the decision as “totally concocted,” and said that Nikolai “Ryabov would never do it without the approval of higher-ups.”
Caputo, who was close to Ryabov and his aides, had a different take. “Just because Yabloko is the darling of the West doesn’t mean they can operate with impunity,” Caputo told The Washington Post. “If you violate the rules, you’re out. That’s democracy.”
Caputo’s defense of Ryabov’s actions ran counter to the US State Department’s policies in Russia. Embassy officials in Moscow requested that Caputo be removed from his position at IFES. Caputo’s phone, fax machine, and office keys were confiscated and he was fired.
Despite being terminated from IFES, Caputo stayed in Russia and established his own public relations firm called the Florence Group. Florence employed up to 15 Russian nationals and represented various Russian politicians as well as companies seeking to do business in the former Soviet Union.
Caputo worked on Yeltsin’s 1996 re-election campaign, serving as his youth-vote director. He established “Choose or Lose,” a televised program based on MTV’s “Rock the Vote.” The program led to a memorable, if bizarre, moment when Yeltsin danced on stage.
Following Yeltsin’s 1996 victory, Caputo continued to pursue his PR business in Russia, describing himself as “the only executive in history who has worked for both the White House and the Kremlin.”
The first person Caputo hired to work for the Florence Group was a Russian named Sergey “George” Petrushin, who had worked on “Choose or Lose.” In 2015, while Caputo and Petrushin co-founded a PR company together with offices in New York, Miami, and Moscow.
In 2019, Caputo and Petrushin co-produced the documentary The Ukraine Hoax: Impeachment, Biden Cash, and Mass Murder.
In 1997, Petrushin established a brand called Zeppelin. Two years later, he founded the Zeppelin nightclub in Moscow. It became a fixture of Moscow’s club scene.
According to Zarina Zabrisky, Russian language publications report that the club was established with funding from Alexander Mamut, a Russian oligarch with close ties to the Yeltsin administration and to Putin.
In 1996, the oligarchs bankrolling Yeltsin’s campaign funneled money to offshore accounts linked to the Yeltsin campaign through a Mamut company called AML Consulting. Afterwards, he was rewarded by becoming an insider during Yeltsin’s second term.
Mamut was implicated in the Bank of New York money laundering scandal, which was involved the Eurasian organized crime lord Semyon Mogilevich.
He was also a major stakeholder in the Russian bank Troika Dialog, which was later involved in a multi-billion dollar money laundering operation known as the Troika Laundromat.
Mamut sat on the board of directors of an insurance company owned the Russian oligarch and future Paul Manafort client, Oleg Deripaska.
You can read my exploration of Oleg Deripaska’s early life, his ties to Eurasian organized crime, and his introduction to Paul Manafort here.
CAPUTO RETURNS STATESIDE, REPRESENTS RUSSIAN INTERESTS, AND REKINDLES HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH ROGER STONE
Following the devaluation of the ruble and Russia’s 1998 financial crisis, Caputo’s business prospects dimmed. In 2000, he returned the United States and began working as a publicist on behalf of Renaissance Capital, Russia’s largest private investment firm. Caputo’s closest connection at Renaissance was a Russian-American billionaire named Boris Jordan.
Jordan was a central figure in devising the “loans-for-shares” program, which led to the seizure of vast portions of Russia’s natural resource wealth by a small group of oligarchs following Yeltsin’s 1996 victory.
During this time, Caputo co-founded and served as President of the company Rainmaker Interactive. In February of 2001, on the recommendation of Boris Jordan, Caputo was hired by Russia’s largest media holding company, Gazprom Media, a subsidiary of Russia’s largest company, the Kremlin-connected natural gas giant Gazprom.
Caputo represented Gazprom media’s CEO Alfred Koch (aka Alfred Kokh), working to improve his image with American policymakers in Washington, DC. Koch had served as a Deputy Prime Minister under Yeltsin.
Despite all the troubles Russia faced in the 1990s, it did develop a vibrant and independent media in the form of investigative newspapers and independent television stations. By February 2001, Vladimir Putin had been the President of Russia for just over a year. During that time, he was primarily engaged in two major tasks, placing the oligarchs who had gained so much power during the Yeltsin years under his thumb, and seizing control of independent television media in Russia.
Two of Putin’s early opponents were the oligarchs Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky. Both were ultimately forced to flee Russia. With Gusinsky, Putin killed to birds with one stone. He both destroyed the power of an oligarch, striking fear into the hearts of the others, and personally sanctioned the take over of the Gusinsky owned independent-TV station NTV by Gazprom Media. Gazprom Media installed Caputo’s client Boris Jordan as the head of NTV.
Despite technically working on behalf of Koch, Caputo was hired to convince American lawmakers that Putin wasn’t attempting to consolidate his power over Russian media. In fact, that is exactly what he was doing.
“I’m not proud of the work today,” Caputo told The Buffalo News in 2016. “But at the time, Putin wasn’t such a bad guy.”
In 2004, Paul Manafort enlisted Caputo to work on a project for his top client, Oleg Deripaska.
Manafort’s connection to Deripaska ultimately ran through Republican Senator and former Presidential candidate Bob Dole, who had lobbied for Deripaska in the past and later recommended Davis Manafort Partners to the oligarch. Manafort had managed the Republican National Convention for Dole during the 1996 presidential race. Dole’s running mate was Jack Kemp, whom Caputo had worked for in the 1980s.
The U.S. State Department had rejected Deripaska’s application for a visa because of his alleged connections to the Eurasian organized crime syndicate the Ismailovskaya Bratva.
According to Caputo, he worked on the project for a ten day period. Caputo attempted to get stories in the press on Deripaska’s behalf but appears to have me with only limited success.
2004 also saw Caputo write an editorial in The Washington Post decrying the murder of the Russian-American journalist Paul Klebnikov, editor of Forbes Russia. Klebnikov, who fearlessly reported on corruption in post-Soviet Russia, was shot to death outside of his office in Moscow.
“Eight years after we first met as he covered President Boris Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection campaign,” Caputo wrote, “Klebnikov’s murder brings clarity: Nothing has changed. Brutal criminals still run amok in Russia, operating with impunity and no fear of prosecution.”
So does this editorial establish Caputo’s anti-corruption bona fides? Not necessarily. One of the main targets of Klebnikov’s reporting was the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, the arch-enemy of the Putin regime.
Berezovsky, of course, was as corrupt as they come. Klebnikov wrote an excellent book on him titled Godfather of the Kremlin. By criticizing Berezovsky and linking him with Klebnikov’s murder, Caputo was acting firmly in alignment with the interests of the Putin regime in Moscow.
Caputo told The Buffalo News that after the article ran he started to receive death threats. He purchased a .40-caliber Glock and moved onto a tugboat off the Florida coast.
Caputo’s fears of Russian mafia retaliation didn’t stop him from traveling to the former Soviet Republican of Latvia in 2005, a trip he wrote about in an article for The Washington Times covering George W. Bush’s visit to Riga. What exactly Caputo was doing in Latvia at that time is unknown.
Caputo also rekindled his relationship with Roger Stone. Stone and his wife had encouraged him to move to Florida. It was in this context that Caputo was enlisted by Stone to work on Larry Klayman’s Florida Senate campaign.
In his memoir Whores: Why and How I Came to Fight the Establishment, Klayman refers to Caputo as “a frequently well-lubricated press secretary who had once worked for Boris Yelstsin.”
Caputo also had “close ties” to Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler, the law firm operated by the Stone associate and Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein. Rothstein was alleged to have ties to Israeli organized crime.
ROGER STONE, MICHAEL CAPUTO, AND THE 2007 UKRAINIAN PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS
Roger Stone and Michael Caputo worked together in Ukraine on the 2007 Ukrainian parliamentary elections. They worked on behalf a Ukrainian politician named Volodymyr Lytvyn. Lytvyn had recently established his own political alliance known as the Lytvyn Bloc.
It wasn’t the first time Caputo had been to Ukraine. Ten years earlier, in 1997, he had traveled from Moscow to Kyiv. When speaking to a Russian deputy prime minister he had been working with, he learned of the widespread Russian attitude regarding the country.
“Speaking frankly, Michael,” the Russian deputy prime minister said to Caputo, “Ukraine is Russia, and it always will be Russia.”
Stone and Caputo were reportedly joined in Ukraine by G. Steven Pigeon, a Buffalo, NY-based, hard-knuckled political consultant and former Chairman of the Erie County Democratic Party. Pigeon and Stone were partners in a consulting firm called Landen Partners. Pigeon had for years been a lobbyist for the NXIUM, a multi-level marketing scam and sex cult lead by the cult of personality figure Keith Raniere.
In more recent years, Pigeon has been indicted for bribing a judge and for arranging for illegal donations to the Andrew Cuomo campaign by a foreign national. In 2021, Pigeon was arrested for molesting a child.
When the Stone-Caputo-Pigeon trio arrived in Ukraine in 2007, the political consultant and lobbyist most active in Ukraine was Paul Manafort. Manafort worked on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych, Vladimir Putin’s preferred presidential candidate.
In the 2004 election, massive voter fraud nearly delivered Yanukovych the presidency, but a popular uprising known as the Orange Revolution prevented his accession to the highest office in the land. Manafort was brought in to salvage Yanukovych’s political career.
In their book Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, authors David Corn and Michael Isikoff relate a story Stone told them regarding his experience in Ukraine. According to Stone, while he was dining at a restaurant in Kyiv he was confronted by Phil Griffin, a member of Manafort’s team of political advisors in Ukraine. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Griffin asked.
Shortly afterwards, Stone claims that a furious Manafort called him demanding to know, “What are you doing in my country?”
As with most Stone stories, this one is colorful, irresistible, and unsubstantiated.
In later Congressional testimony, Stone and Caputo went to great lengths to describe their candidate Lytvyn as “pro-Western” and an ally of the Orange Revolution. They also emphasized that they were working against Manafort’s client Viktor Yanukovych.
“I worked in one cycle for the splinter party of Volodymyr Lytvyn,” Stone testified before the House Intelligence Committee, “a pro-Western candidate who opposed Paul Manafort’s candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, in the 2006–2007 parliamentary elections in Ukraine.”
As we shall see, these claims aren’t as clear cut as they seem.
Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lytvyn was a member of the Ukrainian Communist Party. In 1994, he was selected by the second president of independent Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, to serve as his aide.
You can read my description of the history and politics of pre-Orange Revolution Ukraine, and the extensive corruption and Eurasian organized crime connections of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, here.
Kuchma’s administration, which lasted from from 1994 to 2005, oversaw the establishment of the Ukrainian oligarchic ruling system and the criminalization of large sections of the Ukrainian economy and its politics.
Between 1996–1999, Lytvyn served as Kuchma’s first assistant and speech writer. In 1999, Lytvyn became Head of the Presidential Administration.
On the evening of September 16th, 2000, a well-known Georgian-Ukrainian investigative journalist named Georgiy Gongadze went missing. Gongadze had founded the muckraking website Ukrayinska Pravda and was well known for his reporting on corruption in Ukraine. On November 3rd, Gongadze’s decapitated corpse was discovered outside of Kyiv. His body bore the signs of torture and mutilation.
A scandal erupted when the existence of tapes purportedly recorded by Kuchma’s bodyguard, Mykola Melnychenko, was revealed by an opposition politician in the Ukrainian parliament. The authenticity of the tapes has been fiercely disputed.
According to Carlos Pascual, a former US Ambassador to Ukraine, experts at the FBI’s Electronic Research Facility determined that the portions of Melnychenko’s recordings provided to them were authentic and had not been tampered with.
The most explosive revelations contained within the tapes related to the kidnapping and murder of Gongadze. Ukrainian President Kuchma was purportedly recorded speaking to Lytvyn and his interior minister Yuriy Kravchenko about the need to silence Gongadze.
Lytvyn was recorded as saying, “In my opinion, let loose Kravchenko to use alternative methods.”
In the aftermath of the tape scandal, protests erupted in Ukraine and Kuchma fired several top officials, including the head of Ukraine’s intelligence service, a former KGB officer named Leonid Derkach.
Years later Leonid’s son, Andriy Derkach, collaborated with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani in digging up dirt on the Biden’s.
Andriy Derkach also assisted Michael Caputo on his 2020 documentary about the Biden families activities in Ukraine.
Years later, in 2013, a former Kyiv police chief named Oleksiy Pukach was convicted of killing Gongadze. After being declared guilty, the court asked Pukach if he accepted the verdict. “I will accept it when Kuchma and Lytvyn join me in this cage,” Pukach replied.
Roger Stone’s comments to the media regarding his work in Ukraine have largely, and characteristically, been facetious. He described himself to Jeffrey Toobin as “the father of the yard sign in Ukraine.” Stone added, “They say, ‘Comrade is genius.’”
In yet another sympathetic media profile written in November of 2007, journalist Matt Labash described Stone as “threatening” to take him to Ukraine where the local media had recently revealed that he was working for Lytvyn.
“I don’t particularly want to go,” Stone quipped. “Our lives will be in danger. We will have bodyguards. Plus, the food sucks.”
Stone told Labash that working in Ukraine was a constant struggle because: “The Russians love intrigue.” He didn’t elaborate further.
Without mentioning the fact that he was working on behalf of Lytvyn, Caputo wrote about the upcoming Ukrainian parliamentary elections in a September 2007 piece for The Washington Times. His article may shed some light on Stone and Caputo’s true aims in Ukraine.
Caputo criticized the Ukrainian politician Yulia Tymoshenko, who had emerged as Viktor Yanukovych’s chief domestic political rival. Tymoshenko had been urging Ukrainians not to waste their votes on the many smaller parties vying for a place in the Ukrainian parliament, but rather to focus on voting on parties that had a shot of winning, such as her own.
“Yulia urged the electorate to choose among mega-blocks instead of wasting votes on smaller parties,” Caputo wrote. Then, without mentioning his conflict-of-interest, he plugged Lytvyn. “[R]eliable research shows other parties may pass the 3 percent minimum threshold and join the Rada. Among them are the communists and the party of democratic reformer Volodymyr Lytvyn, former speaker of the Rada who kept the rowdy legislature from devolving into anarchy during the Orange Revolution. Rested and ready after losing re-election in 2006, he is a fresh face in a tired crowd of self-interested politicians.”
It seems a distinct possibility that, much as Stone had done in numerous races in the United States before, he and Caputo were supporting the so-called “democratic reformer” Lytvyn as a means to siphon off votes from Tymoshenko and ultimately assist the Party of Regions, the party of Paul Manafort’s client Viktor Yanukovych.
Following the election, the Party of Regions won a plurality of the vote, while the Lytvyn bloc won 3.97%, enough to be seated in parliament.
While Stone and Caputo had served as general consultants, their local campaign manager was a Ukrainian named Oleg Sheremet.
“In former Soviet Union races, nobody wants to see American faces,” Caputo later wrote. “So global experts hide behind local managers who execute Western-standard campaign plans.”
On election day, Sheremet was shot six times by an AK-47. He was assassinated in front of his children. It is unclear why Sheremet was murdered in such a grisly fashion. It may have had something to do with a land dispute.
A year after the elections, Lytvyn joined a fractious “pro-West” coalition with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. At the time, Ukraine was reeling in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and in desperate need of Western aid.
After Yanukovych emerged triumphant in the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election, Lytvyn switched sides. Tymoshenko accused Lytvyn of illegally exploiting a loophole to cause the collapse of her parliamentary coalition. Days later, the Lytvyn Bloc joined the Party of Regions in a parliamentary coalition that solidified Yanukovych’s control over Ukraine.
A year later, Lytvyn was awarded with the Order of Friendship in Russia.
MICHAEL CAPUTO, DONALD TRUMP, THE BUFFALO BILLS, AND THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
After successfully getting Lytvyn elected in Ukraine, Caputo returned to the United States. While in Kyiv, he met and later married a Ukrainian woman named Maryna Ponomarenko. Maryna had, in fact, served as a translator for Lytvyn’s murdered campaign manager Oleg Sheremet. They lived for some period of time on Caputo’s tug boat, which they shared with an African gray parrot named August West.
The newlyweds sailed north on a plan to traverse the entire Eastern Seaboard until they were caught in a storm in the Chesapeake Bay that damaged their boat. Around that time, Roger Stone came calling again, this time inviting Caputo to join him in working against an Indian gaming referendum in Ohio.
After the referendum, which they lost, Stone secured Caputo a position managing the gubernatorial campaign of the bombastic and controversial Buffalo-area real estate developer Carl Paladino. As explored in a previous article, Stone advised Paladino while at the same time managing the campaign of the “Manhattan Madam” Kirstin Davis.
Paladino’s campaign was later seen as a harbinger of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Both were led by brash, vulgar, and controversial New Yorker real estate magnates and promoted right-wing, populist themes. And both involved Roger Stone and Michael Caputo.
In late 2013, Caputo was involved in an effort to enlist Donald Trump to run for governor of New York. The idea was hatched during a 2am conversation between New York assembly members Dave DiPietro and Bill Nojay. Others who supported the idea included Carl Paladino and Nick Langworthy, chairman of the Erie County Republican Party.
Roger Stone arranged for Caputo and a host of other Republicans to meet with Trump in December of 2013 at Trump Tower to discuss the possibility of him running against Andrew Cuomo in the upcoming New York gubernatorial race. While Trump claimed he only had five minutes, the meeting reportedly stretched into five hours.
Despite his initial interest, Trump ultimately decided against running. However, Trump soon had use for Caputo in another venture: his attempt to purchase the Buffalo Bills NFL team. It was the latest twist in Trump’s years long and contentions relationship with the National Football League.
In late March of 2014, Ralph Wilson, the owner of the Bills, died at the age of 95. Hardly a week passed before feverish speculation began as to who would become the team’s next owner. The list quickly narrowed down to three: Donald Trump, the billionaire owner of Buffalo’s NHL team the Sabres Terry Pegula, and 80s rock icon Jon Bon Jovi, who represented a consortium of investors from Toronto, Canada.
Aware the couldn’t outbid Bon Jovi and his Canadians, Trump hired Caputo in the Spring of 2014 to manage a campaign to turn local Buffalo residents against the Bon Jovi bid. As part of this mission, Caputo created a “grass-roots” organization of Bills fans he originally named “12th Man Thunder” to attack Bon Jovi and support the Trump bid. The practice of creating artificial grassroots movements is known as “Astroturfing.”
Caputo installed a double-amputee, cancer survivor named Chuck Sontagg as the groups leader. Another of its co-founders was a local Buffalo resident named Charles Pellien. The group began spreading the word that Bon Jovi was planning on moving the team to Canada. They established “Bon Jovi Free Zones” in various parts of Buffalo and in local sports bars.
In a side note, in September of 2020 Charles Pellien founded the New York Watchmen, a local right wing group that later scuffled with protestors. During the latter days of his time as HHS spokesman, Caputo would endorse the group on FacebookLive. The group supported anti-mask, anti-lockdown, and anti-vaccine sentiments. Individuals affiliated with the group were involved in clashes with Black Lives Matter protestors and the January 6th insurrection. Caputo was photographed marching with the group alongside Pellien.
Returning to Trump’s bid to buy the Bills, 12th Man Thunder garnered national media attention, much to Caputo’s delight. It also attracted the attention of Texas A&M, which sent the group a cease and desist letter over related to a similarly named group affiliated with the university. As a result, Caputo changed the groups name to “Bills Fan Thunder.”
Trump entered a $1 billion bid for the Bills. As part of the offer, Trump signed a NDA that prevented him from participating in PR efforts related to the sale of the team. Trump supposedly ceased communicating with Caputo, but Caputo kept up the campaign against Bon Jovi.
Around this time, Caputo and Bills Fan Thunder came into conflict with an eccentric, local Buffalo area blogger named James Kriger. The ensuing online conflict would lead to one of the more bizarre and intriguing episodes in the entire Caputo story.
Kriger was a Buffalo bills fan and wrote a blog called BuffaloBruises.com. After initially decrying Bon Jovi, Kriger set his sights on Caputo’s 12th Man Thunder. The conflict eventually got so bad that Caputo personally got involved in the spat. The group later successfully sued Kriger for defamation.
Kriger’s online war of words against Caputo and his astroturf group gained the notice of a third party. In November of 2015, an anonymous Twitter account claiming to belong to an American intelligence officer in Belgium reached out to Kriger after having seen Caputo’s tweets attacking him.
“Figured it out,” the anonymous account wrote to Kriger, “you’re going to blog about him and it’s good for our designs if you do.”
Between November and December of 2015, the anonymous Twitter account sent Kriger over 100 messages. According to The Buffalo News, the source possessed “surprisingly detailed knowledge of Caputo’s movements in Russia and Europe and was familiar with some of his childhood friends and current partners.”
The information the source sent to Kriger consisted of known facts about Caputo’s life mixed in with unsubstantiated assertions. For example, the source told Kriger that Caputo had worked in Ukraine in 2007 on behalf of the Russian Federal Security Service.
In December, the account sent Kriger a copy of a supposedly Top Secret CIA document which described Caputo as a “Specialized Skills Officer” or who retired from the CIA in July of 2006 after having defied orders.
While the document reflected known facts, such as Caputo’s relationship with General Ramatullah Safi, it ventured into unsubstantiated allegations that Safi was affiliated with al-Qaeda.
After sharing the document with Kriger, the source suggested 19 specific Twitter accounts that he tweet the document to. Kriger ultimately only sent a single tweet about the document. Afterwards, two anonymous Twitter accounts forwarded Kriger’s tweet to various local, state and national reporters who had written about Caputo in the past.
The only publication that decided to write about the curious incident was The Buffalo News. When Kriger told the anonymous source that a reporter wanted to contact them, the source deleted their private twitter correspondence.
The author of the article, Sandra Tan, concluded that the document was a forgery. The Afghanistan experts she spoke with told her that there was no evidence Safi had any connection to al-Qaeda. The CIA sources she spoke with told her that the document contained irregularities, such as the wrong font and a lack of codenames, that established its inauthenticity.
The only named source in the story is retired CIA officer Gary Berntsen. While Bertnsen claimed the document was a forgery, he added “whoever is perpetrating this hoax is clearly a student of American intelligence work and spent considerable time building the damaging story.”
This, of course, raises the obvious questions. Who was behind the stunt? We are left only to speculate. Presumably not Bills fans in Toronto. Also, while the document itself might be forgery, what actually is the nature of relationship of Caputo’s with the American intelligence community?
Berntsen told Tan that Caputo had never been a CIA agent. It’s perhaps only a small detail, but the official term used within the CIA is “officer” rather than “agent.” The article mentions that Berntsen was previously “acquainted” with Caputo, but doesn’t elaborate further.
In fact, Berntsen had known Caputo since at least 2010. At that time, Berntsen was running in the Republican Senate primary and hoping to take on Democrat Chuck Schumer in the general election.
“Gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino and I had grown close to Berntsen, a military and CIA veteran decorated for combat heroism in Afghanistan,” Caputo wrote in his blog. “Paladino backed Berntsen in the race.”
Berntsen had quite a remarkable career in the CIA which spanned from 1982 to 2006. He served as CIA head of station on three separate occasions, including in Latin America. Most notably, he was part of the CIA team which pursued Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda to the cave complex of Tora Bora in Afghanistan. Berntsen wrote about the experience in his book Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA’s Key Field Commander.
In 2016, the Associated Press reported that Berntsen was a co-owner of a business partnership called Denx LLC. The other owners were another former CIA officer named Scott Modell and an Iranian-born American citizen named Farzad Ahima. According to AP, Azima was a CIA-linked gunrunner who had been involved in the Iran-Contra Affair.
The strange story of the “CIA document” never traveled beyond the local Buffalo press. Donald Trump failed in his bid to buy the Bills, but Caputo succeeded in derailing Bon Jovi anyway. In fact, he succeeded in souring the 80’s rocker on Buffalo altogether.
“I won’t ever go back to the city of Buffalo,” Bon Jovi stated in an interview. “You will never see my face in Buffalo ever. I have knocked it off the map.”
Donald Trump now had bigger fish to fry. He was running to be the President of the United States. When Paul Manafort became Trump’s chairman, the first person he hired to manage the New York State Primary was his and Roger Stone’s old friend Michael Caputo.
The next article in the series will examine Roger Stone’s activities during the 2016 election.
You can find my collected writings here.