Poison, spies and lies

 Washington DC

 

Roger Stone — political consultant, agent provocateur, friend and confidant of Donald Trump — arrives for lunch with a bodyguard in tow. ‘I’ve had way too many death threats,’ he explains. He says he’s recovering from poisoning by polonium, a radioactive substance used to kill the Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko in London. Litvinenko, he says, had ‘a much larger dose, probably done by British intelligence’. But the British government named the Russian agents responsible, I reply. ‘What was the proof?’ he asks. ‘It’s all mirrors. You know that.’

Stone blames his ‘poisoning’ on ‘the deep state’, a term that in Trumpworld means the intelligence community. Trump has taken to Twitter to accuse the deep state of tapping his phone on President Obama’s orders. ‘This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!’ Stone has called for Obama to be ‘charged, convicted and jailed’. All this adds a layer to the tangled skein labelled ‘Trump and Russia’. At its heart is a simple charge: that Trump was bought or blackmailed by the Kremlin. Stone is accused of being a Russian conduit to Trump. Both men say they are victims of a conspiracy of lies by US intelligence agencies, a ‘silent coup’. Stone is an icon to a mass of Trump supporters who believe this is the hidden truth behind the President’s difficulties. Stone slides into the restaurant’s wood-panelled booth. He’s in his sixties, white-haired, and wearing a bold pinstriped suit impeccably cut to make him look like a 1930s gangster. He lives in Florida and maintains a deep year-round tan. On that tanned flesh, beneath the crisp white shirt, right between his shoulder blades, he has, famously, a tattoo of Richard Nixon’s smiling face. Stone worked for Nixon and has seen ten presidential races.