Olga Lautman went past the money on Narativ Live Thursday and named the service. Umar Kremlev, who funded Donald Trump Jr.'s Bahamas celebrations in May, never belonged to Russia's business class, she said. An officer from the unit that guards Vladimir Putin built his career.
"This is an intelligence operation at the highest level," Lautman said. "This is even a higher level than FSB."
Sean Wiswesser spent thirty years at the CIA, finished as a chief of station, and wrote this year's Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks. He did not soften her.
"This is a breach of the inner sanctum," Wiswesser said.
He studied a photograph and watched a man work it. "He's like popping his head in the back, making sure he's seen," Wiswesser said. "Who's he doing that for? He's doing that for Vladimir Vladimirovich, for Putin."
Lautman, a senior fellow at CEPA who writes Unmasking Russia, walked Kremlev's life backwards. He grew up outside Moscow under another surname, ran with the local mafia, and went in and out of arrest. He carried the name Umar Lutfulloyev until 2009, and a record for extortion and battery with it. He chose the name Kremlev himself. It means of the Kremlin.
He joined the Night Wolves, which Lautman refuses to call a motorcycle club: "there is absolutely no biker gang on this planet that is involved in invasions." The riders gathered intelligence and recruited on the front lines in Crimea and the Donbas, she said, and helped plan the assassination of Montenegro's prime minister. She calls the club a unit of the GRU.
Alexander Zaldostanov, who leads the Night Wolves, walked Kremlev to Alexei Rubezhnoi — the chief of Putin's Presidential Security Service. Not only the FSO, Lautman said, "but the unit within FSO that handles Putin's security." Nobody reaches that desk on a résumé. "There is absolutely zero chance that he would have been selected unless Putin knew him and trusted his life with him," she said.
