Victoria Nuland's Red Thread

Photo caption: An American fishing boat approaches a Soviet fish-processing ship off the Pacific Northwest coast in 1979 (KUOW)

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On August 31, 1984, the Kitsap Sun published an AP story headlined: “Soviet fishing vessel makes stop in Portland.” The vessel making news in Washington state was The Aragonit, a 270-foot Soviet factory ship.

The AP story quoted one shipboard source:

“Victoria Nuland, a field representative for Marines Resources Co. of Seattle, has been on the ship for the past 1 1/2 months.”

Victoria Nuland ... on a Soviet ship? Could that be our Victoria Nuland, “veteran diplomat” and “Russia hawk,” recently seen urging the “US” to bomb Russian military bases to restore the borders of Ukraine? (I put “US” in quotation marks because command and control within the undefended borders of the United States is unclear following the Coup of 2016-2020.) Makes me wonder what went on, anyway, in that Great Before — before Victoria Nuland became lodged in the upper echelon of Foggy Bottom as Ambassador to NATO … “Spokesperson” for Hillary Clinton’s State Department … Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs … Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs … Acting Deputy Secretary of State, and, who could forget, Top Doughtnut-Distributor in the Maidan.

Forty years ago, the AP report continued:

“She [Nuland[ said the processor ship serves a fleet of more than twenty Soviet and American trawlers that are part of a joint venture fishing operation for hake off the coasts of Oregon and Washington.

“The Aragonit, which operates out of Nakhodka, near Vladivostok, has a crew of 75, including eight women, Ms. Nuland said. She said half the crew was granted shore leave Thursday, and the other half would have shore leave today. Ms. Nuland said the ship’s captain may allow visitors on board Sunday.”

That’s nice. But, again, was this our Victoria Nuland? The unusual name, the budding spokesmanship, the Russian milieu (Nuland speaks Russian and French) are strong indicators; however, confirmation came twenty-eight years later from Nuland herself.

On August 11, 2012, exactly one month before the US consulate assault at Benghazi and Obama administration “stand down” precluding military rescue (an order attributed to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton), the NYT could still run the frothiest of features on State Department spokesman Nuland. The newspaper regaled readers with what Nuland was “reading,” “watching,” and “listening” to; even what she was “drinking.” On the last question, Nuland replied :

“Who could forget the fermented mare’s milk that the president of Mongolia served in his ceremonial ger? But I learned to drink aboard a Soviet fishing trawler in my early 20s, so my favorite summer beverage is still an ice-cold Stoli with an ocean view.”

I think we have a match. But what does it mean? For starters, Victoria Nuland has a red thread.

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A little background. In March 2019, the Center for Security Policy brought out my short book The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy. With the anti-Trump conspiracy and cover-up in simultaneous overdrive, I ended up developing a special approach to covering fast-moving news targets: Rather than track what was still a blur of obfuscated events, I set about developing, where possible, ideological profiles of the participants. These profiles are based on the principals’ own words, actions, academic papers, favorite authors, mentors, votes, tweets, and the like. Guess what? I quickly found an apologist for Stalin (Nellie Ohr). a Communist Party voter (John Brennan), a Marxist-theologian groupie (James Comey), a confirmed socialist (Christopher Steele) and many others of various revolutionary leanings. They all have “red threads.” Having chosen employment aboard a Soviet ship during the Cold War, Victoria Nuland has one, too.

Nuland only appears on one page of The Red Thread, having been outed, one might say, in connection with the “Steele dossier” by her own former State Department colleague, all-star Steele promoter and “Fixer in Chief” Jonathan Winer (who rates a detailed study of his own in the book). In a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post, Winer admitted meeting with “former” MI6 officer Christopher Steele in September 2019, writing a two-page summary of the “Steele dossier” and sharing it with Victoria Nuland. “Like me,” Winer wrote, “she felt that the Secretary of State needed to be made aware of this material.” That, of course, looped in John Kerry (another case study in The Red Thread). Was Winer telegraphing the old — in finest Swampspeak (blade sheathed) — you know that I know that you know we’re all in this together? Or was this a glimpse of “transparency“ to sate the suckers?

In any case, even the sparsest information about Nuland’s (and many others’) involvement in the anti-Trump conspiracy would take two, three and more years for investigations and Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuits to extract. Even now, there is only a fragmentary and highly redacted chronology of Nuland’s rather guarded interest in the “Steele dossier” throughout 2016, beginning with her giving the “green light” to the first meeting between the FBI and Christopher Steele in London in late June 2016, as reported by Michael Issikoff and David Corn (I know, I know). Winer’s claim of contact with Nuland on the “Russia matter” is bolstered by a series of September 2016 emails obtained by Judicial Watch. Further, Nuland admitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Steele gave a briefing to select staff at the State Department (not including her, she said) shortly before the presidential election in October 2016. (See Eric Felton’s “Victoria Nuland Can’t Keep Her Steele Story Straight” in the Washington Examiner.) Finally, in December 2016, there was a mysterious flurry of late-night emails among key State Department officials including Nuland (also obtained by Judicial Watch) about a ten-minute conversation on December 23, 2016 between Jonathan Winer and the “political chief” of the Russian Embassy, Alexey Vladimirovich Skosyrev.

Since government censors completely redacted the Winer-Skosyrev “read-out” — not to mention an additionally intriguing “updating” of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s “points” — this one gets filed in the category of Things That Make You Go Hmm.

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If Victoria Nuland learned to drink on a “Soviet trawler,” she still spent, as the AP reported, the better part of the summer of 1984 on a Soviet processing ship. That’s something else again. Her employer at the time, Marine Resources Company (MRC) was an unusual, if not unique, Soviet-US company that hired American trawlers or “catcher boats” to fish and deliver their catches to Soviet processing ships. This was a business plan (Lend-Fish?) that aroused the opposition of many in the US fishing industry at the time. MRC was the brainchild, the story goes, of American businessman Jim Talbot and the Soviet government — the Soviet Ministry of Fisheries, to be precise — and fit into a series of “joint” Soviet-US cultural exchanges, sports events, “sister cities,” and “peace” projects abounding in Washington state at the time. (More information about MRC, along with the “Seattle Peace Chorus,” “Peace Activism,” “Goodwill Games” and more, appears on a website devoted to “Cold War Tales: Citizen Diplomacy in the Pacific Northwest.”) Not for nothing did FDR administration official Jim Farley, it is said, once offer a toast to the 47 states plus “the Seattle Soviet” — now thought of as an Antifa stronghold.

Nonetheless, it was this region, this job, this atmosphere which drew young Victoria Nuland with her freshly minted Russian studies BA from Brown. Nuland was only 23 years old at the time, but that doesn’t change the situation she put herself into, and, it would seem, sanguinely so, when, even thirty years later, she brought up the Soviet “trawler” experience and put it out there as an exciting, if not enviable, experience, just in case anyone wanted to know.

Nuland’s interest in Things Russian, she told the Brown Alumni Magazine in 2013, began at Brown.

“I had both an anti-mentor and a mentor at Brown,” she said. “The anti-mentor, who shall remain nameless, was a guy who taught poli sci, who basically said, `All the evils of the world were the result of Communism and the Soviets.’ And it just wasn’t conceivable to me that a whole nation of humans woke up evil one morning. It had to be the system.” Her mentor, Professor of History Abbot “Tom” Gleason, she told the magazine, helped guide her study of literature, economics, and arms control.

Arms control? Funny that Nuland should bring up “arms control” in 2013. That was the year the Army released an alarming report on the Russian tech city Skolkovo, very much a focus of the Obama-Clinton Russia “reset” agenda. Massive technology transfers underway from the US to Russia (many of the companies involved were also Clinton Foundation donors) might euphemistically be referred to as “technological engagement” with Russia, but the Army explicitly warned that “Skolkovo was arguably an overt alternative to clandestine industrial espionage.” The risk was, the report continued, “Russia could leverage transferred scientific knowledge to modernize and strengthen its military.” Military activities were not “official” Skolkovo activities, but as the Army pointed out, the development of a Russian hypersonic cruise missile engine had been underway at Skolkovo since 2011. Today, of course, hypersonic missiles are a centerpiece of Putin’s war-making arsenal.

Perhaps it was Abbott Gleason, Nuland’s Professor Arms Control — whose father Everett Gleason was in and around the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency when he wasn’t writing Rockefeller-funded court histories with Ralph Langer — who guided Nuland’s way to the “peace”-nikky Pacific Northwest and the Soviet fish factory ship. Perhaps not. But did Nuland, after spending the summer aboard, ever realize or regret what she had gotten herself into?

“Factory ships were part of a whole network of Soviet intelligence collectors,” a retired senior counter-intelligence officer with extensive Cold War experience tells me. “This is not a revelation,” he continues. “This was typical tradecraft, Standard Operating Procedure.” As such, shipboard employment was no casual summer job. “They put her on that ship with full Soviet approval,” he concluded.

This, too, was SOP, and especially so at a time when all foreigners were tightly controlled by Soviet authorities in all terms of travel inside Soviet territory — restrictions discussed in The Red Thread with regard to the Soviet-era access given Nellie Ohr to state archives, and the Soviet-era admission of Fiona Hill to the Maurice Thorez Language Institute.

And once aboard? Nuland, whether she ever figured it out or not, was in a very dicey situation. The 2023 book Spy Ships: One Hundred Years of Intelligence Collection by Ships and Submarines by Norman Polmar and Lee J. Mathers expands on the intelligence role and capabilities of the Soviet fishing fleet.

An excerpt (emphases added):

“In addition to the dedicated collection ships, Soviet fishing craft as well as merchant ships have collected intelligence as opportunities permitted, sometimes with naval intelligence officers embarked. …

“In particular, as flotillas of fishing craft increasingly went to distant seas, there were indications that their accompanying fish factory ships provided suitable platforms for intelligence collection….

“As U.S Navy electronics expert, Master Chief Sonar Technician Jim Bussert, has observed: `Due to standardization within the Soviet economic system, fishing and merchant ship equipment are more closely associated with warship equipment than in many Western countries.’ He added, `In the USSR, non-navy ships are sometimes manned by naval officers and always serve the state’s interests.’

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“Further warnings of the threat posed by the Red fishing fleet came from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in 1982:

“ `Because of its size and equipment, the Soviet Pacific fishing fleet brings with it military and intelligence capabilities. The fleet’s travels, for example, put it into position to implant navigation and surveillance devices, collect communications and radar signals, monitor foreign ships and aircraft, and reprovision naval vessels should the need arise. …’

That’s some summer job Nuland got herself into. This is not to suggest that Nuland engaged in nefarious activities. However, as a “field representative” on The Aragonit, she showed herself to be what the Communists call a useful fool.

On the other side of the “joint”-US-USSR-partnership, it’s not hard to imagine Soviet glee over Nuland as a prospective employee. Comrades: She speaks Russian, rejects Professor Evil Empire, embraces Professor Arms Control and has applied to the State Department — get her aboard on the double!

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Nuland told the Brown alumni magazine that it was during her senior year in 1983 that she took the foreign service exam — on a whim. By my calculation, she entered in 1986 — or, as she put it, 32 years before a 2018 Politico interview, in which she added: “I came into the Foreign Service speaking Russian, and of course the State Department sent me to China, so it took me five years to get back to Moscow.”

Back to Moscow?

Nuland’s government CV fills in some early blanks.

“From 1993 to 1996, Ambassador Nuland was Chief of Staff to the Deputy Secretary of State. Earlier in her career, she covered Russian internal politics at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, served on the Soviet Desk in Washington, helped to open the first U.S. Embassy in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, worked in the State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs and served in Guangzhou, China.”

For the record, the Deputy Secretary Nuland served as Chief of Staff was Strobe “One World/No Nations” Talbott, the FOB (Friend of Bill Clinton) tapped to ruin, sorry, run US-post-Soviet-Russia relations in the Clinton administration. Talbott’s stint was perhaps best excoriated by the so-called Cox Committee Report (“Russia’s Road of Corruption: How the Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise and Failed the Russian People”), and best commemorated by Russian intelligence defector Sergey Tretyakov’s assertion that Russian intelligence services prized Deputy Secretary Talbott as a “Special Unofficial Contact.” Such a source is not a spy, but more important than a spy: a high-level conduit of Washington information and object of Moscow malleability. Talbott (another case study in The Red Thread) rejected Tretyakov’s claims from his 15-year post as president of the Brookings Institution, a left-wing think tank which has not only provided sinecures to Nuland, briefly, and her husband Robert W. Kagan, but was a hive if not a hub of the anti-Trump conspiracy. If it was the State Department’s Victoria Nuland who gave the “green light” to the first FBI meeting with Christopher Steele, it was Brookings’ Fiona Hill (whom I have written about elsewhere) who, according the The National Interest’s Mark Episkopos, introduced Brookings’ Igor Danshenko to Christopher Steele. More, perhaps, for another day.

Meanwhile, don’t forget what the anti-Trump conspiracy was all about. It was about using the powers of the state and its media to create a massive state disinformation campaign to delegitimize the political opposition, the America First candidate and then president as “Putin’s Puppet.” It was as treasonous as was shameful.

As I argued in The Red Thread, Donald Trump in 2016 was the most anti-communist presidential candidate ever to win the presidency. Victoria Nuland saves her superlatives for Joe Biden. As she recently told CNN’s Christine Amanpour, “President Biden has among the strongest moral core, the strongest sense of America's importance as a leader of the free world, of any of the presidents I've worked for.”

Sounds like somebody’s puppet. We just don’t know whose.