Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 1/4/2019)

An opening title card informs us that `Active Measures' is a `Soviet term for the actions of political warfare conducted by Russian security forces to influence the course of world events'. Alina Polyakova of the Brookings Institution says that Russia knows it can't match America's military might, so it has to find a way to level the playing field. Over footage of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin cosying up at the G20 in Hamburg in 2017, former CIA operative and 2016 presidential candidate Evan McMullin and former FBI special agent Clint Watts opine that Putin wants to make Democracy crumble without having to fight a conventional war. 

Former Secretary of State and Trump's election rival, Hillary Clinton, tells the story of how Putin's father fought in the siege of Leningrad and spotted his wife in a pile of bodies when going home on furlough. He pulled her out and nursed her back to health and, a few years later, she gave birth to her son and Clinton believes that Putin's mission is to pull Russia out from the corpses and revive its fortunes. Republican senator John McCain agrees that Putin has always wanted the presidency and has striven to bring all the elements of control under his office. In McCain's eyes, Putin sees himself as the new tsar. Former CIA Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash and Steven Hall, the onetime head of the CIA's Russia Operations unit, reveal that Putin's KGB role was to develop spies and find ways to undermine the American system. Erstwhile US ambassador to Ukraine, Steven Pifer recalls a clip of Putin claiming that the collapse of the Soviet Union had been a tragedy and Richard Fontaine of the Centre for a New American Security concurs that his intention is to build it back up. 

Ex-US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul remembers meeting Putin in 1991, when he was the deputy mayor of St Petersburg to Anatoly Sobchak, and he insists he would never have believed that this softly spoken pen-pusher would have become president. Heather Conley, the author of The Kremlin Playbook, reveals that Putin was a fixer and an instigator, while Jonathan Winer avers that, during his time as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State (1994-99), St Petersburg was run by organised crime. State Department veteran Daniel Fried declares that Putin was a troubleshooter who could pull factions together. 

Ex-Estonian president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, remembers Putin becoming FSB director and Fontaine and Hall join Clinton in claiming that he used this internal spying network to gain information on the oligarchs who had risen to prominence under Boris Yeltsin. Moreover, Putin exploited his knowledge to persuade an increasingly unreliable leader that he could protect Yeltsin's family and assets if he was permitted to run for president in his stead. Many talking heads agree that Putin secured his position with the Moscow apartment bombings, which were caused by a kind of explosive used exclusively by the KGB and FSB. Former CIA chief James Woolsey is in no doubt that Putin was behind the attack and McCain compares his use of scare tactics to those employed by Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.

Once in power, Putin began silencing critics by making powerful organisations like Russia Today knuckle under and eliminating independent journalists. Columbia Law professor Scott Horton accuses Putin of having Anna Politkovskaya killed and suggests that he brought the oligarchs to heel by forcing them to sign deals or by driving them into exile, arresting them or having them bumped off. Information specialist Molly McKew concurs with others that Putin then parachuted allies into key government positions and made them dependent on him for their continued wealth and status. They also needed to bolster funding and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Vanity Fair editor Craig Unger explain how mob money was laundered before being made available to official bodies. Armed with an economics degree, Semion Mogilevich amassed a $10 billion fortune by working out ways of laundering vast sums in the West and he was a major player in reinforcing Putin's grip on power and helping him become the wealthiest man on the planet.

According to the documentary, one of the people chosen to implement this strategy was Donald Trump. Newsweek reporter Nina Burleigh reminds us that he was the son of a tycoon property developer and she claims that Trump Tower was a launderer's paradise, as condominiums could be purchased without the buyer needing to identify themselves. Consequently, shady characters could acquire property and sell it on in quick order to launder the vast sums involved in the deal. Having noted how the Soviet Union flooded Brighton Beach with crooks after Senator Henry `Scoop' Jackson passed a law to facilitate the migration of Russian Jews, Unger points to mobster David Bogatin buying five condos in Trump Tower for $6 million in 1984. Moreover, Mogilevich sent Vyacheslav Ivankov to run the Brighton Beach operation and he lay low in Trump Tower when the Feds were trying to find him. 

Having claimed that Czechoslovakia tried to get Trump to run for president in 1988 - as it felt it would be useful having Czech citizen Ivana Trump as First Lady - Burleigh recalls how Trump fell into financial difficulties after opening the Atlantic City Taj Mahal hotel and casino. As he had already filed for bankruptcy six times by 1990 (when his marriage started to crumble), Trump was in a vulnerable position when he was hit with accusations that the Taj Mahal had repeatedly broken money laundering rules. Whitehouse and Unger claims that his plight convinced the Russians that he was a `mark' they could exploit and they stress that funding Trump's rise from his knees put him in their debt. 

A clip follows of Trump telling chat show host David Letterman that he had met mobsters (who were `very nice people'), but that he had learned the lesson not to owe them money, Horton and Unger claim that Mogilevich had identified Trump as a target after studying his bankruptcy documents. The Russian firm Bayrock began leasing space in Trump Tower and the talking heads link this deal to Mogilevich lieutenant Felix Sater. However, they also claim that Putin knew exactly what they were doing and we learn that Trump continued to deal with Sater after the Russian was charged with slashing a man's face and for being involved in a `pump and dump' stock scheme that was linked to the sale of weapons to Al-Qaeda. 

We see numerous pictures of Trump and Sater together. Yet Michael Isikoff, chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo News, reveals that Trump claimed he wouldn't be able to identify Slater if they were in the same room. It's also stated that Slater showed Donald Junior and Ivanka around the city during a trip to Moscow. Furthermore, Russian money was invested in Trump properties in the Sunny Isles development complex in Miami, Florida (which acquired the nickname `Little Moscow'). Key to these Bayrock deals was Kazakh mining billionaire Alexander Mashkevich, who is claimed by some to be Mogilevich's banker. Unger and others link the Trump Towers in Baku and Toronto with Russian concerns, with the latter being partly funded by Vnesheconombank (VEB), which reports directly to Vladimir Putin. Horton, therefore, claims that these projects were undertaken with the knowledge of the Kremlin.

There are over 30 Trump Towers around the world and Unger suggests that 813 apartments can't be accounted for because they are owned by shelll corporations that don't have to declare ownership details. Furthermore, Unger claims that a lot of the money invested in these properties comes from the Russian and Ukrainian energy trade and McCain suggests that this is because Putin is more determined to re-annex this state than any other former Soviet republic. Congressman Eric Swalwell joins Pifer, Fried and Fontaine in recalling Putin backing Viktor Yanukovych in the 2004 election battle against Viktor Yuschenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, which saw the former's facial features radically transformed after he was poisoned. Moreover, Polyakova reports that the computers of the Electoral Commission were hacked into to ensure that Yanukovych won (with voter turnout in some areas being fiddled to exceed 100%). But the commission upheld the result as fair and it took the supreme court to nullify it after the Orange Revolution protests in Kiev. Unsurprisingly, Putin was livid when Yuschenko became president, with Tymoshenko as his prime minister. 

Former Republican Party wheeler-dealer Paul Manafort arrived in Ukraine around this time and Newsweek discovered that the pro-Putin party was paying him $600,000 a month for his services. Since running Robert Dole's convention in 1996, Manafort had been advising regimes in Angola, the Philippines and Zaire. What's more, he was friends with Yanukovych and several speakers suggest that this put him on the Putin radar. 

Ilves remembers how Kremlin foreign policy changed tack with Putin's speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference and McCain recalls how the Russian president kept looking directly at him during his delivery to make sure he knew the Moscow was going to be taking a more active role in world affairs. On 9 May, the Estonian Internet system was brought to a standstill by cyber attacks in reprisal for moving a Soviet statue in Tallinn. Fried and McKew reflect on the concerted attacks on Georgia after Mikhail Saakashvili became president and started to clamp down on gangsters, revive the economy and move towards NATO. But Putin refused to tolerate this - as he wants both NATO and the EU to be broken up because the individual states are weaker than Russia, but stronger in congress - and Saakashvili remembers how Moscow goaded Georgia into a conflict during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and accused them of being the aggressors. 

Although the West did nothing to respond to Saakashvili's pleas to protect his democracy, Russia failed to sweep to a much-anticipated victory and realised that its armed forces weren't fit for purpose. As a consequence, the Kremlin had to find a new way of seizing the initiative and the various speakers claim that one gambit was to invest in far-right groups abroad. Nigel Farage is included in a photo montage that includes Hungary's Victor Orban, Slovakia's Robert Fico and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as Ilves notes that it's much cheaper to back puppets than risk diplomatic censure and military embarrassment by going to war.

Horton puts Russian energy company Gasprom at the centre of this powerplay and McKew concurs that Russia uses its economic wealth to fund its political strategies, In the 2012 election in Georgia, Putin backed billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili and ran a disinformation campaign on social media that incumbent Saakashvili was an Armenian (cf Barack Obama not being American) and a drug addict. Russian instigators were flown in to cause street violence, as Ivanishvili called for better relations with Russia while simultaneously denying that he was receiving Kremlin backing. Two weeks before the election, the infamous prison abuse tapes were released and they did much damage to Saakashvili's reputation, even though they were later proved to be fakes. He lost power and was driven into exile to avoid prosecution and Putin had another victory without being exposed to accusations of overt interference. 

Clinton accuses Putin of running a similar operation in Ukraine and Horton points to the way the country received gas from Gasprom through companies controlled by Dmitry Firtash, a former associate of Mogilevich and Manafort who is very close to Putin. Manafort was also behind Yanukovich's presidential campaign in 2010 and launched the idea that Tymoshenko was also of Armenian descent in striving to besmirch her reputation after she had cut a deal with Putin to restore gas supplies. Yet, when Yanukovych won power, he charged Tymoshenko with betraying the nation over the gas truce and she was made to pay $2 million in compensation in addition to receiving a seven-year prison sentence, which resulted in her being beaten by the guards. 

On her release, Tymoshenko launched a legal case and released documents linking Manafort to both Firtash and fellow oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who had been denied a US visa because of his `criminal associations' (and yet who, according to a Guardian article shown on screen, entertained George Osborne and Peter Mandelson on his yacht). Unger and Horton note that Manafort had an apartment in Trump Tower and insist that he was backed by Kremlin money through the various business transactions that Putin and his oligarchs put in place to legitimise their operations. 

According to Jeremy Bash, everyone knows that Russia uses propaganda and cyber attacks. But it also runs `agents of influence' and Woolsey and Hall agree there are over 1000 of them in the United States and that the FBI doesn't have the resources to monitor them all. Special agent Asha Rangappa reveals that she had to pick and choose which targets to follow and Woolsey laments the poor show the security services was able to mount during this crucial period. Speakers aver that gambling and prostitution rings were being run from Trump Tower and Winer alludes to the dossier of evidence compiled by former British agent Christopher Steele, who had helped the FBI break the FIFA corruption network. Horton testifies to Steele's reputation for getting the job done, while we also learn that he was Alexander Litvinenko's MI6 handler at the time he was poisoned with polonium while seeking to expose Putin's links with Mogilevich. Winer avows that he trusts Steele and, when his report claimed that Moscow had connections with Trump, he had no doubt about its veracity. 

Following a clip from a 2007 Larry King interview showing Trump praising Putin for doing a good job, Conley initiates a discussion of Putin's disdain for Democracy and the farce of Dimitry Medvedev's 2008-12 presidency. However, even he was unnerved by the scale of the street protests against him and McCain suggests that these will happen again some time in the future because the majority of the demonstrators were under 25. Putin blamed the United States for these rallies and, as she was Secretary of State at the time, Hillary Clinton became a particular bugbear. He was openly chauvinist in his comments about her and she concedes that she found him difficult to deal with, as he was forever manspreading and feigning boredom whenever she was talking to him. 

McFaul and McKew have no doubt that Putin backed Trump against her to avenge her temerity in 2012 and Unger suggests that he realised the best way to bring Trump onside was to offer him money, at a time when American banks had cut off his lines of credit. Horton notes how Deutsche Bank came to Trump's rescue, even though he had often criticised it in the past and it had been fined for breaking laundering rules through its Russian connections. When the CEO who incurred this $10 billion fine was fired, he was recruited to run the Bank of Cyprus (which has plentiful Kremlin links) by Wilbur Ross, who is a longtime associate of Trump and later became his Secretary of Commerce. During the 2008 Credit Crunch, oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev (who knows Ross from their involvement in the Bank of Cyprus) paid way over the odds for a Trump mansion in Florida and Swalwell is one of many to suggest that the deal was crooked, as it bolstered Trump's finances and status in the midst of a crisis with no questions asked. 

In 2013, there was a bust at Trump Tower after a Russian gambling ring was bugged. It was run by businessman Alimzhan `Taiwanchik' Tokhtakhounov, who has reported links to Mogilevich. He fled to Moscow and showed up at the 2013 Miss Universe pageant that Trump was running with oligarch Aras Agalarov, who is known as `Putin's builder', as he was behind a number of prestigious construction projects. Swalwell claims Trump met with Putin during this visit and developed tight ties with Agalarov, even uttering his catchphrase from The Apprentice -  `You're fired!' - in a pop video recorded by Agalarov's son. It was also during this trip that Miss Hungary, Kata Sarka, claimed that Trump had invited her to his room. Moreover, the Steele Dossier asserted that the Russians had acquired compromising evidence (`kompromat') from a supposed stay at the Moscow Ritz Carlton that involved prostitutes. 

Yet, Trump cut short his time in Russia in order to return to the United States to attend preacher Billy Graham's 95th birthday party, which many felt signalled his intention to run for the presidency. While in Moscow, Trump admitted to having a relationship with Putin and admiring what he has done for his country. But he later clammed up on this remark and refused to answer questions about knowing Putin personally. 

Just 10 days after the Miss Universe event, Yanukovych was ordered by the Kremlin to drop plans to move closer to the EU and this sparked the protests in Maidan Square in November 2013. These were violently suppressed after two weeks and Fontaine, Fried and Pifer recall how Yanukovych fled to Moscow after losing control (with Manafort still advising him and speaking up for him on US television). Yet, when parliament voted to release Tymoshenko and she called upon the people to keep protesting, Putin panicked and, in February 2014, he decided to annex the Crimea in a bid to punish Ukraine. Wearing uniforms without identifying insignia, units of `little green men' (who turned out to be intelligence and special operations teams) were sent to co-ordinate pro-Russian forces on the ground. During the action that followed, separatists shot down a Malaysian airliner, with the loss of 283 passengers and 15 crew members and Fried avers that he has nothing but contempt for the fact that Putin tried to blame the Ukrainians and the Americans for the crime he had sanctioned. 

Coney and ex-FBI agent Clint Watts concur that Putin was set on dismantling the Western apparatus standing in opposition to him and he took many of his cues from Aleksandr Dugin's book, The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia. The screen is filled with extracts from the text that identify the need to annex Ukraine, drive a wedge between Britain and the Europe Union and sow seeds of socio-cultural division across the United States. One of the tactics involved uniting dissident right-leaning groups and Whitehouse is certain that Trump's presidential candidacy was Kremlin-inspired. Indeed, McCain despairs that he proved so sycophantic to Putin, as he considers him to be a man without a shred of moral decency. Polyakova notes how much of what Trump said on the stump echoed Kremlin propaganda and parallel clips appear to reinforce her point. McMullin also goes to far as to claim that one speech Trump delivered was scripted for him by the Russian National Interest group.

By this stage, Manafort was running the Trump campaign and Alexandra Chalupa, a part-time consultant on the Democratic National Committee, recalls noticing the first attempts to hack DNC e-mails. Moreover, Watts declares that Russia ran a concerted campaign from 2015 to disrupt the Clinton campaign. A pfishing link led to campaign chair John Podesta's e-mail account being infiltrated and Clinton and McCain confess to being taken aback by the scale of the Russian interference, with attempts being made to hack into voter rolls so that they could be manipulated. McFaul suggests that most Americans don't get the importance of this chicanery, as `hacking' is a nebulous term when `theft' would be more accurate and alarming. Winer agrees that serious criminal acts have taken place and that the American people should be affronted and concerned. 

At this point in the campaign, Agalarov threw his weight behind Trump with the express support of Putin, who dismissed the cyber accusations as the work of patriots doing what they thought was right to defend Russia from its critics. He offered to provide damaging material on Clinton and Trump, Jr. informed Manafort and brother-in-law Jared Kushner about the offer before sending a reply that any material would be highly useful. John Dean, the White House Counsel to Richard Nixon (1970-73), explains that conspiracies are very easy to enter into and very difficult to keep quiet or exit. 

Back on the campaign trail, Carter Page had been named among Trump's foreign policy advisers. Nobody seemed to know anything about him, even though he had worked in Moscow and invested in Gasprom. Moreover, he had defended the Putin regime and openly opposed sanctions. According to a number of speakers, he had visited Moscow during the campaign with the knowledge of the Trump team and had supposedly held a meeting with Igor Sechin of the Rosneft oil company, who had been Putin's closest ally in his security service days. Unger and Horton state categorically that deals were struck that involved vast sums. However, no concrete evidence is provided in he film (in what proves to be one of its major weaknesses). Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, is also accused of having had covert links with Russia during this period and such rumours started to circulate and disturb the Clinton team. Senior Republicans were also unhappy, but opted not to speak out for fear of being attacked by the `Russian troll army'. 

Security adviser Michael Flynn also went to Russia around this time and sat next to Putin at a dinner sponsored by Russia Today. He denied doing anything wrong or receiving any payments from Russian interests, but McMullin is not impressed by Flynn's statements. McCain also recalls being dismayed that references to a condemnation of the invasion of the Crimea were removed from the Republican Convention policy agenda and few doubt that this was at the behest of Trump's team. Meanwhile, the Democratic Convention opened to a scandal sparked by Clinton's e-mails being released by Wikileaks, which enabled Trump to repeatedly used the term `Crooked Hillary' in calling for her to be locked up. Cyber security expert Herb Lin has no doubt that Julian Assange used Wikileaks to wreak revenge on Clinton, while Whitehouse suggests that Trump's speech inviting Russia to find the 33,000 missing e-mails sounds very odd, as it's almost a confession of association dressed up as a throwaway line. Clinton supporters insist that Assange also had dirt on Manafort, but deliberately chose to suppress it, as he wanted to harm her prospects. 

By this juncture, Bernie Sanders was already out of the race. But assistant John Mattes noticed Facebook postings from eastern Europe spreading disinformation about Clinton and her campaign. Polyakova and Conley concur that Moscow had learned how to exploit social media and almost weaponise it. Clinton reveals that the Russians used bots on Google to drive fake news to the top of search lists and all of it was damaging to her, while nothing in a similar vein appeared about Trump. Polyakova and Watts also describe how hackers worked hard to create profiles to earn trust and then fed lies through them and relied upon the prejudices and fears of their readers to spread them on their behalf. Saakashvili laments that Americans are forever in a hurry and take things at face value rather than doing research that might lead them to question things, as Russians know about this combination of entrenched opinion and a lack of curiosity and play on it incessantly. 

Among the fake stories is one announcing that Seth Rich had died after being exposed as the person who had compromised the Democrat e-mails. But there is no evidence for this claim and a couple of the speakers swear that the far right exploited an unsolved murder in order to mislead the public. Podesta and Clinton also recall the `Pizzagate' scandal, in which it was stated that hacked e-mails made coded reference to a child smuggling ring in the non-existent basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, DC. Even Clinton's health was questioned through planted stories and she despairs of the `totally creepy falsehood' that was spread online to sabotage her campaign. Podesta reveals that the top 20 fake stories got more Facebook likes than true stories running in the mainstream media, while several speakers are appalled that freedom of speech was being turned in on itself. Indeed, Clinton admits that she had trusted that her compatriots would realise that they were being manipulated and, as a result, had failed to see the anger that the fake news was generating.

Burleigh has examined the role played by Alexander Nix and Cambridge Analytica in harvesting information from Facebook and showing how it could be used to push political messages. She points to the company's impact on the Brexit vote and its connection to Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), which is linked to shell companies with connections to Firtash and Mogilevich. Moreover, the New York Times discovered that alt-right guru Steve Bannon had a stake in Cambridge Analytica. Another big investor is hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who had corporate links to Russia's Alfa-Bank, which was seemingly in communication with a exclusive computer server in Trump Tower. 

On 7 October 2016, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the Russian Federation had been hacking into US government systems on the express orders of Vladimir Putin. Hours later, the distasteful Access Hollywood chat between Trump and Billy Bush was broadcast. But the release of the Podesta e-mails by Wikileaks that same day drew attention away from these negative stories and gave Trump an axe to grind. Clinton tried to fight back during the third TV debate by accusing Trump of being Putin's puppet. But he merely shouted her down and the press proved disinterested in more positive political stories, as it continued to follow the scandals. 

As Election Day approached, the Democrats felt they had a majority in the popular vote. But their figures let them down and Trump prevailed - much to Putin's evident delight. During the transition period, Kushner met with a sanctioned Russian bank official (despite claims being made that Sergei Gorkov was a trained KGB agent) and Swalwell suggests that any economic deal they discussed would have been illegal, while any political talks invite questions about the extent to which Kushner and his father-in-law knew about Russian interference in the election. In the opinion of some speakers, the appointment of Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser after he had been lobbying unofficially for Turkey also shows poor judgement and Woolsey reveals that he turned down an offer to head the CIA after he had discovered that there was a plan to arrest and deport Turkish opposition leader, Fethullah Gülen. 

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also had close ties to Russia and McMullin and Unger highlight the fact he had signed an Arctic pipeline deal with Rosneft while working for ExxonMobil. President Obama had shelved the deal after sanctions were imposed, but Winer notes that the Steele Dossier claims that 19% of Rosneft shares were sold off in order to raise a slush fund to reward those who could use their influence to get sanctions lifted. As the sale was conducted through Cayman Island shell companies, however, no details could be disclosed. Moreover, people suspected of giving information to Steele began to be assassinated, while links between Trump intimates and Russia started emerging at such a rate that there seemed to be too much smoke for there not to be a fire. 

Unger insists that there are too many coincidences for this not to have been the biggest breach of national security in American history. John Dean also thinks Trump is conducting a cover-up and Clinton points to the attempts he has made since Inauguration Day to cosy up to the Kremlin. We see comparisons between the attempts to damn Tymoshenko and Clinton, as Dean opines that there are lots of charges (some treasonous) that could be brought, while Rangappa warns that it's always difficult to hide money trails. She also cautions that the Russians will be back, while Clinton and the late Senator McCain are among the closing voices demanding that something is done to tighten security. As McFaul and McCullin reveal, however, nothing has been done since Trump came to power and that this failure alone should be viewed as suspicious and concerning, as the values of the past and the future of US Democracy are at stake. 

With so much to digest in the preceding précis, we shall content ourselves with commending the editing of Andrew Napier and noting the efforts of Jack Bryan and co-writer Marley Clements to present their follow-the-money thesis in a calm and rational manner. Although they make the majority of their points persuasively, they sometimes strain to establish associations and often assume Stateside connections to be self-evident simply because some of the key players have links to either organised criminals, oligarchs and/or Vladimir Putin's inner circle. There's no doubt this makes for compelling viewing and many will be astonished that Mueller could have reached his conclusion with so much evidence seeming so damning. But smoke is still swirling over the White House and someone may yet identify the source of the fire.