Stefan Halper, the FBI’s Rat F****r? by Larry C Johnson

NOTE–THE FOLLOWING IS DRAWN FROM THE COMPLAINT FILED BY SVETLANA LOKHOVA AGAINST STEFAN HALPER, THE DOW JONES & COMPANY, INC. ) [WALL STREET JOURNAL], ) THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY, ) WP COMPANY, LLC ) [WASHINGTON POST] ) ) -and- ) ) NBCUNIVERSAL MEDIA, LLC ) [MSNBC].

I HAVE SIMPLY REORDERED THE COMPLAINT INTO A NARRATIVE THAT I HOPE MAKES IT EASIER FOR YOU TO READ AND UNDERSTAND WHAT A TERRIBLE WRONG HAS BEEN DONE TO SVETLANA LOKHOVA AND GENERAL MICHAEL FLYNN.

(You can find the complaint here).

Stefan Halper played a key role in a sophisticated counterintelligence operation that involved the FBI, the CIA British Intelligence and the media. The ultimate target was Donald Trump. Halper’s part of the operation focused on using an innocent woman who had the misfortune of being born in Russia, Svetlana Lokhova, to destroy General Michael Flynn.

Halper’s nefarious activities included manufacturing and publishing numerous false and defamatory statements. Halper, for example, falsely claimed that Svetlana Lokhova  was a “Russian spy” and a traitor to her country. He also circulated the lie that Lokhova had an affair with General Flynn on the orders of Russian intelligence. Not content to use the unwitting Svetlana as a weapon against General Flynn, Stefan Halper also acted with malice to destroy Svetlana Lokhova’s  professional career and business by asserting that she was not a real academic and that her research was provided by Russian intelligence on the orders of Vladimir Putin.

The most diabolical aspect of Halper’s “rat fucking” activities is that the FBI knowingly used Halper’s lies and the lies of others as the foundation and basis upon which to begin a “special investigation” into “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Svetlana Lokhova (“Lokhova”) was born in Moscow in 1980, but became a citizen of the United Kingdom (UK) in 2002. She was born in Moscow on June 4, 1980. Lokhova matriculated to Cambridge University in 1998, where she studied history. She holds a Master’s in Philosophy (MPhil) and a B.A (Honors) in History. Her groundbreaking Master’s dissertation remains the definitive account of the founder of the Soviet intelligence service, Felix Dzerzhinsky. [https://www.svetlanalokhova.com/biography].

In 1999, as part of her university studies at Cambridge, Lokhova met Professor Christopher M. Andrew (“Andrew”). Andrew became Lokhova’s long-term, academic mentor and co-author. Andrew was the official historian to “MI5”, the counterintelligence organization in the UK. In 2012, Andrew contacted Lokhova. Andrew suggested to Lokhova that she restart her PhD and rejoin the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar (the “Seminar”) as a distraction from the stress of her ongoing legal case with Sberbank.  On rejoining academia, Lokhova became peripherally aware of Halper as a member of the Seminar. Halper went to great pains to avoid social interaction with Lokhova to the point of rudeness. Halper made it a point to sleep through Lokhova’s presentations and, despite the small size of the forum (maybe 20 attendees), Halper would refuse to sit even on the same side of the table as Lokhova.

Who Is Stefan Halper?

Stefan Halper, is a U.S. citizen who calls Great Falls, Virginia home. Halper has an extensive past with intelligence, both U.S. and British, as well as working relationship with the FBI. He graduated from Stanford in 1967, and received a Ph.D. from Oxford in 1971 and Cambridge in 2004. Stefan Halper also married the daughter of a legendary CIA officer, Ray Cline. Cline played a critical analytical role in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Stefan Halper was the director of American studies in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge, where he taught classes and also delivered papers at institutions around the World, including Chatham House in London, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Naval War College. This put him in close and frequent contact with the leaders, present and future, of the British Intelligence Services. While at Cambridge, Halper worked for years alongside Sir Richard Dearlove. Dearlove spent decades with British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), known as MI6, and was its Director from 1999 to 2004.3 [http://www.csap.cam.ac.uk/network/richard-dearlove/].

Halper organized and hosted a series of Cambridge Intelligence Seminars that were attended by intelligence community members, academics, and researchers from around the World. One such seminar in 2014, put together by both Halper and Dearlove, was attended by then-President Barack Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency Director, General Flynn. Between 2012 and 2018, Halper received a total of $1,058,161.00 USD from the Department of Defense (DoD). Halper’s contract was funded through annual awards paid out of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA”).  Over half of the sum paid to Halper was for his counterintelligence efforts surrounding the 2016 Presidential election.

A Fateful Meeting

In January 2014, Dearlove and Andrew invited Lokhova to attend a group dinner with General Flynn. The purpose of the dinner was to promote the program that was to become the “Cambridge Security Initiative” (CSI), a group chaired by Dearlove.  The object of CSI was to advance education in international security and intelligence issues and to help support graduate students, such as Lokhova, while they were studying at Cambridge.

Lokhova arrived at the dinner with Dr. William Foster (“Foster”). Foster was (and is) Fellow in History and Vice-Principal of Homerton College at Cambridge. He is Director of Studies and Senior Lecturer in the history of modern and contemporary war at Homerton. At the start of the dinner, Foster and Lokhova discussed a troublesome student. General Flynn briefly introduced himself to Foster and Lokhova. Approximately twenty people attended the dinner. Lokhova sat between Foster and Dearlove on the other side of the table from General Flynn. Lokhova never sat next to General Flynn. At the end of the dinner, Andrew invited Lokhova to address General Flynn. Lokhova participated in a brief, public exchange with General Flynn and Dearlove. No one expressed any concerns of any kind.

Nothing inappropriate happened at the dinner. DIA representatives who attended the dinner raised no concerns. After the dinner, General Flynn left with DIA official, Dan O’Brien. Andrew asked Lokhova to stay in occasional contact with General Flynn. Andrew hoped that General Flynn might speak again at the Seminar or do business with CSI. Lokhova had occasional email contact with General Flynn after February 2014. Andrew was copied or saw all the email exchanges, which were general in nature. At no point did General Flynn send any emails trying to establish a personal relationship with Lokhova and never signed any emails using the diminutive,  “General Misha”.

In September 2015, Svetlana Lokhova participated in a Cambridge – U.S. Conference sponsored by CSI. Dearlove chaired the conference. Andrew was a keynote speaker. Lokhova, for her part, appeared on a panel–Ukraine-Russia: Social Media, Culture and Information Warfare–on the 28th.

In December 2015, General Flynn traveled to Moscow as a private citizen and was paid $45,000 to speak at a Russia Today (“RT”) event, where he shared a table with President Vladimir Putin and others, including Green Party candidate, Jill Stein. Before he made the trip to Moscow, General Flynn advised his former employer, the DIA, about the trip; he then attended a “defensive” or “protective” briefing before he ever sat alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin at the RT dinner or before he talked with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. When General Flynn returned from Moscow, he spent time briefing intelligence officials on what he learned during the Moscow contacts. Between two and nine intelligence officials attended the various meetings with General Flynn about the RT event, and the information was moderately useful, about what one would expect from a public event.

Launching the Trump Russia Smear Campaign–April 2016

Christopher Andrew and Stefan Halper became very active in the Spring of 2016, mounting a disinformation campaign that used Svetlana Lokova as a meme connecting General Flynn to a fabricated narrative that members of the Trump campaign were colluding with the Russians.In March 2016, Christoper Andrew insisted on weekly meetings and close supervision of Lokhova’s material as a condition of continuing with the book. A few weeks later, April 2016, Andrew walked away from the lucrative publishing contract with Lokhova. That same month Cambridge Professor Neil Kent advised Lokhova that Halper and another academic, Dr. Peter Martland (“Martland”), were making statements about Lokhova’s background and work. Halper and Martland were asking pointed questions about who Lokhova was meeting with, where and when. Dr. William Foster later advised Lokhova that Halper was spying on Lokhova to get to General Flynn.

Halper’s role in the information warfare campaign against Trump escalated. Christopher Andrew told Svetlana in July 2016 that “ludicrous rumours were circulating” about her family’s links to Russian intelligence. Stefan Halper resigned from the Seminar in July 2016, which coincided with what was later reported–i.e., that the FBI officially began a covert counterintelligence operation known as “Crossfire Hurricane”. As I have reported in a previous piece (see The Campaign to Paint Trump as a Russian Stooge Started on May 4, 2016), the July 2016 alleged start date was a lie. It started earlier.

Halper took part as well in the FBI fabrication to paint George Papadopolous as a pipeline for the Russians. Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat with close ties to the Clintons, told the FBI that Papadopoulos revealed he knew of hacked Democratic Party emails. He claimed, falsely, that this conversation took place over late-night drinks in London.

Halper stepped in to help build the lie on September 2, 2016, when he sent an unsolicited email to Papadopoulos offering to pay the Trump adviser $3,000 to write an academic paper about a gas field located in the Mediterranean Sea. Thereafter, Halper and CIA honeypot, Azra Turk, met with Papdopoulos. Halper lied to Papadopoulos and introduced Turk as his “assistant”.

The Financial Times published an article on 16 December 2016, entitled “Intelligence experts accuse Cambridge forum of Kremlin links”, and reported that Dearlove and Halper had cut ties with “fellow academics” at Cambridge “in a varsity spy scare harking back to the heyday of Soviet espionage at the heart of the British establishment.” The FT Article stated that Dearlove and Halper resigned “because of concerns over what they fear could be a Kremlin-backed operation to compromise the group.” Halper said he stepped down due to “unacceptable Russian influence on the group”. Lokhova was not named in this article.

Following publication of the FT piece, Halper told Sean O’Neill (“O’Neill”), a chief reporter with The Times of London (Britain’s oldest national daily newspaper), that Lokhova was a Russian spy. On December 19, 2016, O’Neill called Lokhova and repeated the false accusation.

On February 19, 2017, Christopher Andrew published an article in the Sunday Times of London, entitled “Impulsive General Misha shoots himself in the foot”. This was deliberate disinformation. Although The Andrew Article did not mention Lokhova by name, but was most certainly of and concerning Svetlana in light of her participation in the Cambridge forum. The Andrew Article contained many untruths about Lokhova and General Flynn and was laden with sexual innuendo. For instance, Andrew falsely stated that General Flynn asked Lokhova to travel with him as a translator to Moscow on his next official visit and that General Flynn signed an email to Lokhova as “General Misha”. According to Svetlana Lokhova’s attorneys, no such email was ever received. In fact, Christopher Andrew was copied on Lokhova’s email communication with General Flynn. General Flynn never signed a single reply email, “General Misha”.

The introduction of the defamatory “General Misha” claimed worked its magic and went viral:

• https://twitter.com/TheDailyEdge/status/847992638640881665 (“Mike Flynn didn’t disclose contacts w/Russian spy ‘expert’ Svetlana Lokhova, he signed emails to her ‘General Misha’”);
• https://twitter.com/blakehounshell/status/848012993262735361 (“Michael Flynn signed his emails to a Russian-British graduate student ‘General Misha’”);
• https://twitter.com/ericgarland/status/848088269468438528 (“Flynn signed his letters ‘General Misha.’ Doesn’t every three-star go by his own Russian nickname?”);
• https://twitter.com/tedlieu/status/848570747152777217 (“Hmmm, Trump’s former National Security Adviser & confidant #Flynn signed email as ‘General Misha’ to a Russian woman”);
• https://twitter.com/olgaNYC1211/status/901225253216583681 (“Thread on General Misha’s honey pot.. and yes he had one who most definitely is Russian Intel”);

Stefan Halper then told the Wall Street Journal that Lokhova and Flynn had an affair. On February 28, 2017, two WSJ “journalists” emailed Lokhova asking about her “relationship with Flynn”. Lokhova did not reply. She was ill and dealing with a newborn. When they could not get a comment out of Lokhova, the WSJ “journalists” then put it to senior academics at Cambridge that Lokhova and General Flynn had had an affair. The WSJ was informed that the accusations were untrue. In spite of these red flags and reasons to doubt Halper’s veracity, the Journal published Halper’s lies.

The attack on General Flynn, with Lokhova as the cudgel, intensified. On March 17, 2017, the WSJ published an article, entitled “Mike Flynn Didn’t Report 2014 Interaction With Russian-British National”. This was a lie. There was nothing for Flynn to report. Saying hello at a dinner and exchanging professional emails with a British National is not considered a CI issue.

The gist and defamatory implication of the WSJ Article was that Lokhova engaged in unlawful or suspicious interactions with General Flynn on behalf of the Russia government that should have been reported to the DIA. The WSJ Article is intentionally laden with false facts in order to support Halper’s preconceived false narrative. The Article referred to the February 2014 dinner as a “U.K. security conference”. It was not. It was a dinner.

The Article misstated that General Flynn’s contact with Lokhova at the Cambridge dinner “came to the notice of US intelligence”. It did not. The Article falsely stated that Lokhova was a “foreign stranger”. She was a citizen of the UK. Moreover, Lokhova’s name, the fact that she was invited to the dinner by Dearlove, and the fact that she would show her research were all pre-reported to the DIA. The Article falsely insinuated and implied that General Flynn and Lokhova had engaged in “anomalous behavior” and that there were inappropriate interactions between the two.

The WSJ Article falsely stated that Lokhova worked for “Russia’s statecontrolled Sberbank” and suggested that the “contact” between General Flynn and Lokhova at the February 2014 dinner might be the subject of the FBI’s “wide-ranging counterintelligence probe into any contacts that Trump campaign personnel may have had with Russian officials”. The WSJ Article further falsely implies that Lokhova had an ulterior motive in attending the dinner and that she “approached Mr. Flynn at the start” (untrue) and “sat next” to him (false) with a view to gathering information from him on behalf of the Russian government. The Article portrays Lokhova and her behavior as so suspicious that it leaves the reader in no doubt that Lokhova was an agent of an “adversarial power”.

This article also went viral, cementing in the mind of the unwitting public that General Flynn was consorting with a Russian honey pot. To give you a recent example that this toxic lie persists, one of my now retired CIA colleagues responded to my inquiry this week about his experience with Stefan Halper and he wrote:

He [Halper] would be in his rights to be sniffing around Flynn if he was playing footsie with a Russki femme fatale. I soured on Flynn after 2007 in Afghanistan.

This is how the big lie works. I should know. I was used by the Clinton Campaign to spread a lie in the 2008 campaign about Michelle Obama. When I was told by Sidney Blumenthal that he had heard, “Michelle Obama is on tape using the word, “whitey,” I foolishly and stupidly believed him. The fact that I passed that lie on is my fault. It also is my fault that I trusted Sid.

I can not state with certainty that Halper was working as an FBI informant. It also is possible that he was working for the CIA or for British intelligence or for some other entity not yet identified. What is certain is that he was involved in a broad conspiracy to paint anyone associated with the Trump Campaign as an agent of Russia.

This kind of blatant lying cannot be allowed to go unpunished. Fortunately, Svetlana Lokhova is not waiting for the U.S. Department of Justice to sort things out. She is going directly after Stefan Halper and the media whores who willingly carried his lies to the public. I do not know if she will succeed, but the facts that are laid out above makes very clear that this honorable young woman, a citizen of the U.K was a victim of what can only be described as a media rape. Let us pray that the “rat fuckers” and “rapists” are brought to justice.