There Is Nothing for You Here, page 31
With all kinds of conspiracy theories swirling around, we constantly found ourselves going down rabbit holes. And the president was forever wanting people “taken out.” Lewis Carroll had, as he put it, conceived of the Queen of Hearts as the representative of “ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury.” She “had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. ‘Off with his head!’ she said, without even looking around.” That was essentially what Trump demanded of Masha Yovanovitch, equally reflexively: “Get rid of her! Off with her head!”
In four years Trump took off lots of heads. He churned through ambassadors, cabinet officials, and advisers, getting rid of anyone who crossed him or was said to have crossed him, installing loyalists in their place. He often bypassed Congress for extended periods to put acting officials in key positions. They would then be beholden to him to carry out what I called at the impeachment hearings “domestic political errands.” The most obvious was Richard Grenell, whom Trump plucked from his ambassadorial post in Germany to act as director of national intelligence for a short period, with the assumed purpose of ferreting out information for the president to disprove “the Russia hoax.” Acting officials were also installed at various junctures in the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice, especially in the late stages of the presidency, on Trump’s assumption that he could push them to clean out perceived enemies and do his bidding on overturning the election or blocking the transfer of executive power. Trump had the highest cabinet turnover of any contemporary U.S. president between January 2017 and 2021.
From my studies of the USSR, this turnover reminded me of Joseph Stalin’s purges in the 1930s and 1940s, which had caught up figures large and small in their intensity. Stalin famously purged his entire officer class on the eve of World War II, leaving the military headless and reeling as Hitler invaded. Trump frequently called out the U.S. judiciary to go after his political opponents and “lock them all up.”
Fortunately, American judges never did Trump’s bidding on that score. But like Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, American lobbyists and foreign governments soon learned that they could take down U.S. diplomats and other public servants whom they disliked for diligently pressing and holding U.S. policy lines, in the hope that they could then push their own replacement candidates. Many of these diplomats, and others who were targeted, were women, like Masha Yovanovitch. It was easier for Trump to dismiss women and see them as problems—women who got in the way. They were, after all, the “nonplayers in his world,” as a senior administration official put it to the New Yorker journalist Adam Entous. And like these other “nonplayers,” I too found myself in the crosshairs.
The Enemies List
In addition to his “nasty list,” President Trump had a lengthy roster of political enemies, many of them more imagined than real. He and his political team conjured them to stoke controversy, exacerbate existing societal divisions, and mobilize his base. As in the case of all populists, Trump’s politics were framed around “us” against “them.” With the help of Fox News and other pro-Trump media outlets, enemies were fabricated in the broadest possible brushstrokes: a mishmash of Democrats, liberals, globalists, radical socialists, Communists, Antifa leftists, the Black Lives Matter movement, the “mainstream media,” the billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros, various other bogeymen and -women, deep-state bureaucrats, and even congressional Republicans who were loyal to their party rather than to Trump personally. Often it was hard to keep up with the list. New enemies were added and new labels applied by those who claimed to support Trump inside and outside his political circles.
I ended up on the list with surprising speed in my first weeks on the job. At the Trump White House, I learned that anything and anyone could become fodder for someone else’s obscure personal or political game or for a complex conspiracy theory of the kind I had often studied in Russia. In the screeds of trolls on Twitter, I was labeled a “Democrat stooge,” a “globalist,” a “Soros Mole,” a deep-state coup-plotting bureaucrat, a Never Trumper, and many other things besides.
My work on Russia had long made me a target for public and personal criticism. I wasn’t sure that I was actually on Putin’s enemies list, although thanks to the Putin book I might just as well have been. I wrote it after I was seated next to him at the 2011 Valdai dinner and thus rendered myself less of a nondescript woman than I had been. But I certainly popped up in all kinds of weird Russia-related postings on the internet. Even my seating assignment at the Valdai dinner inspired several internet conspiracy theories after I joined the National Security Council in 2017. Just what was it with me and Putin having dinner together?
So at first, when I joined the NSC, I tried to take the opprobrium in my stride. It wasn’t that different really from my experiences in school. As adults, some people still seemed to relish bullying, especially if they could safely launch attacks on their targets from a distance by phone, mail, and email—and later Twitter. Since my debut in an American TV interview back at the Kennedy School in the 1990s, I had kept a file of letters and emails from people who took issue with something I said.
Sometimes my appearance itself was enough to cause offense—just the way I looked or sounded. I was out of place as a woman from the North East of England in the U.S. national security space. I once went back to my Brookings office after an appearance on C-Span to find a long diatribe on my answering machine from a woman in Georgia. She was outraged that a woman who looked and sounded like me would dare to appear on American television. After my November 2019 public testimony, a woman from Nevada wrote a similarly long note complaining about how I still talked “like a British person” rather than “an American,” and who on earth had “chosen” me to become an American citizen?
All these writers asked the same general thing: What gave me the right to comment on anything? What made me an expert? None of these critics cared at all about qualifications, hard work, expertise, books written, if you were an affront to their views and opinions. Often, judging from the notes, something I said was misconstrued or taken out of context.
Initially I tried to respond, to see if I could correct the record and engage in a proper discussion. But most who wrote didn’t want to engage. They were convinced I had some hidden agenda. Random connections would be parsed for meaning. Perhaps I was a British spy? A Russian double agent? As the daughter of a coal miner, surely I must be a Marxist or a Communist playing a long game of subversion?
Over thirty years I could see a pattern emerging: of groups of people latching on to conspiracy theories and refusing to be swayed no matter what contrary evidence was presented to them. The idea that someone might be just what they were on the surface, a nonpartisan national security professional trying to impart information and steer well clear of domestic politics, seemed less believable than a fantastically convoluted tale.
At the White House, the personal attention reached new levels. First someone produced a Wikipedia page for me in my initial month at the White House. I had never previously merited one, nor had I thought about creating one myself. There was plenty of Brookings Institution material on the internet. I was surprised. Who had been so “thoughtful”? Given the curation of the content—Trump calling me a secretary, my reported links with various enemies of the president—it was clear that someone had created it primarily to post derogatory material related to my time at the NSC. Shortly after the Washington Post story relating my May 2017 run-in with the president in the Oval Office came out, someone updated the Wikipedia page to highlight this under the title of “details of Hill’s interactions with H. R. McMaster and Donald Trump.” A couple of tech-savvy friends spotted the page and decided to keep an eye on it. One removed the paragraph and deleted it on the basis that this edit “intentionally presented Ms. Hill in an unfavorable light and was based on anonymous sources.” A few months later, my mystery Wikipedia contributor was back, reposting the references as an “important biographical point” that provided information about my relationships inside the White House. Another friend discovered that the same anonymous contributor’s username had been active elsewhere on Wikipedia at exactly the same time, adding suspiciously flattering material to the page of another NSC senior director and removing anything disparaging. My Wikipedia page was the digital equivalent of a rude note stuck on your school locker door or offensive graffiti about you inside the school bathroom stall.
Given how petty so much of this was, I tried to ignore it and get on with my work. But it was hard to ignore everything. In keeping with the typical, crudely gendered vitriol that women in public life endure, I received frequent phone messages at work from a woman calling me by name and referring to me with an unprintable term—the notorious c-word. The NSC security team traced the number to Palm Beach, Florida, home of some of President Trump’s most ardent supporters. Every time an unknown number popped up at work, I would have to let it go to voicemail. Then the woman called our home. My daughter picked up. I refused to explain to her what the c-word meant, although I eventually had to after Adam Entous retold the story in The New Yorker.
As an aside, even in the pantheon of swear words in the North East of England, a place where swearing is routine, using that word will get you into trouble. Grandad Hill, who swore a lot, only ever used it once in my presence. He uttered it as he accidentally sliced a spade into his foot, digging through the hard-packed earth of his allotment. I was probably around seven or eight. I had no idea what it meant. I liked to try out new words whenever they seemed situationally appropriate, so when I cut my hand with a paring knife helping Mam in the kitchen, I went ahead. Mam never swore at all, but the fury of her response shocked me. She grabbed my head and washed my mouth out with the bar of green soap by the sink that we used for scrubbing the clothes. The soap caught in the gap between my front teeth. I was gagging. She was yelling, “Where did you hear that word? Who told you that? Don’t you ever use that again!” I didn’t dare say I’d heard it from Grandad and cause a family rift. I endured the punishment but made a mental note of the word’s potentially severe reactions. Later, when I was a student in Scotland, on a visit to Glasgow with my sister, a man in a pub was savagely beaten after he deployed this word against another patron during an argument. This was a fighting term in the UK, so I had no illusions about the intent of those who used it against me in the United States.
“Soros Mole”
At the end of May 2017, I featured on Infowars, the website run by the notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that ruined many an ordinary American’s life by targeting them, including the grieving families of children killed in school shootings, which Jones declared “government hoaxes.” I was excoriated by Jones and Trump’s adviser Roger Stone in a lengthy segment in which they “unmasked” me as George Soros’s mole in the White House. Apparently I was in cahoots with General McMaster in a plot against the president.
I eventually learned that this attack had originated with a former Republican congressman from Florida, Connie Mack. He was now a lobbyist working for Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. Mack had sold me out to Roger Stone as part of his efforts to secure Orbán his meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office. Mack had even officially filed information on what he planned to do with the U.S. government in accordance with the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). This act was passed in the 1940s to prevent representatives of Nazi Germany from covertly trying to influence members of the U.S. Congress and other public officials.
By the early 2000s, a FARA filing was a pro forma cover-your-ass exercise for U.S. lobbyists. People like Connie Mack could register their activities in a government database without any scrutiny or response, even if they were intending to damage the reputation of a public servant or government official. If a target complained about these activities after the fact, the lobbyist could point to the filing. The lobbyists were transparent. They had done nothing wrong. The filing outlined everything they intended to do. No one had tried to stop them (probably because no one from the government ever seemed to review the database), so therefore there was no problem.
The whole thing was perverse and preposterous and even more reminiscent of the kind of denunciations that Russians used to file against their enemies with the Soviet security services during Stalin’s purges. A colleague sent me a link to Connie Mack’s FARA filing. Mack had shown up for a meeting with the vice president’s national security team shortly before the Infowars segment and proceeded to denounce me. He demanded that I be removed from my position. They were surprised and so was I. What had I done so early in my tenure to merit his ire? I had never even met the man.
I later learned that, based on an early congratulatory phone call between Orbán and Trump that Mack had facilitated, the Hungarians believed that Viktor Orbán would be one of the first European leaders to visit the White House. When the promised visit did not materialize, they wanted to know why. Mack thought someone must be blocking it. He presumed the problem must be in the White House, although meeting requests were also channeled through the State Department.
Mack started looking at the backgrounds of some of the staff and spotted me as the senior director for Europe. A quick look on the internet turned up my curriculum vitae on the Brookings website. Mack learned that up until 2006, I had served on advisory boards for Open Society Foundation (OSF) initiatives in the Caucasus and Central Asia. OSF was George Soros’s philanthropic enterprise. The fact that this had been ten years ago was irrelevant. George Soros was by now the central feature of a right-wing conspiracy theory that had him orchestrating all kinds of left-wing political activities domestically and internationally. My previous employers—Harvard University, the Eurasia Foundation, and the Brookings Institution—also had various institutional ties to Soros-funded programs.
This was sufficient for Connie Mack. I was the source of the problem, so I had to be neutralized. He made his FARA filing, included my CV as proof, then proceeded to shop my information around town, telling everyone that I was doing Soros’s bidding and trying to undermine President Trump and the entire country of Hungary.
In the aftermath of my appearance on Infowars, my sister, Angela, who tracked social media, counted hundreds of abusive and threatening comments against me and my family on Twitter and YouTube. She called me in alarm and advised me to “get out of the White House.” She asked how I had managed to get myself from Bishop Auckland into the middle of all this. It clearly wasn’t a normal or safe place to be. Angela also spent hours writing to the platforms’ managers asking them to remove the threats and other inflammatory content. By now I kept away from social media, but this was certainly taking things up a notch from previous experiences. The internet had indeed become a perverse version of a perpetual middle or high school in a rough neighborhood where people traded insults and threats at the slightest provocation. In middle school you personally knew who you were dealing with. You could defend yourself one way or another. But here were hundreds of often anonymous strangers, egged on by Alex Jones and Roger Stone, calling for me to be harmed and even killed, with no accountability whatsoever.
Connie Mack was apologetic about the death threats, at least, when asked about them later by a reporter. I also got a card from the Hungarian ambassador, who realized things had gotten out of hand. Roger Stone, for his part, was completely unrepentant.
I now knew at first hand that this was the way that Trump and some (although not all) of the people in his circle pressed their agendas. They traded in disinformation and weaponized it, just like the Soviets had during the Cold War and Putin still did in Russia. “Soros Mole” was a particularly useful label. Once applied, it could bring someone down.
After the Infowars episode, I started to pay close attention to how “Soros Mole” was used. Others noticed too. In early 2019, while I was still at the White House, BuzzFeed News published an article laying out the origins of the “Soros conspiracy.” It had originated in 2008, when two prominent political consultants in New York, Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum, were recruited by Viktor Orbán to assist his political campaign. They had previously worked for Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu, who was friendly with Orbán. Netanyahu recommended them.
Finkelstein and Birnbaum decided they should create an external political enemy to help Orbán mobilize support for his bid to become Hungarian prime minister. They selected Soros, a prominent Hungarian Jew whose family had fled Budapest during the Holocaust. Soros was both famous and controversial, and still connected to Hungary. He funded a range of nonprofit organizations and educational institutions there and had even provided a scholarship for Orbán early in his career. It was not a complete stretch to suggest that Soros had now turned against Orbán and was trying to pull political strings to control the country from abroad, all for disreputable left-wing purposes.
The Soros ploy was successful. Orbán won the ballot and became prime minister. Soros became his permanent political foil, rolled out at every election. Finkelstein and Birnbaum then refreshed the Soros conspiracy for political figures elsewhere, including in the United States. Finkelstein was a political player in Republican Party circles and connected to Roger Stone. By 2016, Soros was also one of Trump’s political enemies.
The Protocols of Conspiracy
No matter who invented the Soros conspiracy myth, its content and propagation followed the pattern of a classic, historical anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that was also specifically devised for political ends, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols was a fabricated document circulated in the early 1900s, outlining a long-running Jewish plot to subvert European governments. The basic ideas of the plot were pulled from a number of sources, including a pamphlet attacking Napoleon III in France in the 1860s. The document was often used as the basis for anti-Jewish purges and pogroms in czarist Russia. It was still widely in print in the West as well as in Russia. On a trip in the Russian provinces a few years earlier, I had seen copies for sale in church bookstores. I pointed out the parallels in my November 2019 testimony before Congress, explaining how all the accusations against George Soros and the anti-Semitic undertones were obvious to any historian of modern Europe. I had even discussed this directly with David Cornstein. He was a friend not only of Trump but also of Finkelstein from his days as a prominent New York jeweler. Ambassador Cornstein’s mother’s family, like Soros, were Hungarian Jews. I wondered why he didn’t try to push back on the attacks against Soros, given the risks that this might get out of hand.
