BUILDING BRIDGES?

Western Intelligence Services Fear Vienna’s in Putin’s Pocket

A pro-Russia party now runs the police, the diplomacy, and the army of Austria.

Josephine Huetlin

Josephine Huetlin

Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast

BERLIN—Spielfeld is a sleepy Austrian farming town at the border of Slovenia. In the winter of 2015 there were up to a thousand migrants and refugees arriving in the freezing cold every couple of days. Emotions were running high, like those of one elderly man, widely publicized, who didn’t want the government to put a fence up through his vineyard.

Meanwhile, at an event that had been organized in Spielfeld by the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), and was filmed by one attendee for YouTube, a stocky man with what looked like a salon tan and a handkerchief in his blazer pocket had some intel to share with the locals about the real number of jihadists coming into Europe with these refugees. His “exclusive information” was, he suggested, from “the very top” of the Russian secret services.

“Everyone can take a picture with me, I am here for you,” FPÖ party leader Heinz-Christian Strache told the Spielfeld audience, which, as the Austrian newspaper Der Standard reported, included at least three men whom the secret service would soon register as dangerous right-wing extremists, before he went to have dinner in a pub that had a picture of Vladimir Putin hanging on the wall.

Cut to 2018, where Strache is Austria’s vice-chancellor and his pro-Kremlin party controls the defense, interior, and foreign ministries under the conservative young chancellor, Sebastian Kurz. And while Strache has calmed his rhetoric, it looks like he and his team still seek out the company of other counter-liberal hotshots.

There is, for instance, the authoritarian Bosnian Serb leader who recently declared Strache a “wonderful friend” and awarded medals to both him and the Night Wolves, a Russian nationalist biker gang favored by Vladimir Putin. And then there’s Strache’s association with fellow Euroskeptics in the European Parliament faction headed by France’s Marine Le Pen.

And if that gets dull, there is always Putin’s ruling party, United Russia, with whom the FPÖ signed a highly publicized cooperation agreement just as the FPÖ was poised to win (then lost) the Austrian presidency in 2016.

According to a source cited by the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, German Chancellor Angela Merkel already expressed concerns to Austrian Chancellor Kurz last week that the FPÖ will take the sensitive information that Western intelligence agencies share and leak it to Moscow.

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Berlin denied these reports. But it’s not the first time since last fall’s elections that Vienna is hearing about these kinds of suspicions. And it’s not just because of that two-page, mainly symbolic, document from 2016. In the hopes of such official recognition from Moscow, FPÖ leaders have been frantically networking with second-rank Kremlin politicians and celebrity fascist ideologues for the past decade.

So far, one Austrian intelligence officer has responded to the speculations. He told the Austrian newspaper Der Standard that foreign cooperation with the Austrian secret service, which has a record of blurting out secrets, is already at a minimum anyway. Foreign intelligence agencies, according to this officer, “think that we are unprofessional.”

In the story of Austrian politics, Strache is neither a reliable narrator nor a particularly skilled liar. He’s been nailed telling badly crafted fibs on live TV with the carelessness of someone who knows it doesn’t matter if he’s caught, like when he accused a photographer of “staging” the disconcerting picture of an asylum-seeking family at an FPÖ protest, and the photographer just called up the network and proved that he did no such thing.

So, back in Spielfeld, Strache also informed his audience that, actually, the USA (aka “the world’s policeman”) was behind the entire refugee crisis. He didn’t go into detail or say where he’d gotten this piece of information. But it’s worth noting that several months earlier, an article was published by the FPÖ-connected far-right magazine Info-Direkt, which alleged that the U.S. had paid smugglers to bring illegal migrants to Europe—this time with reference to “an anonymous source in the Austrian military intelligence.”

Officials at the Austrian Defense Ministry rolled their eyes at this “scoop.” But that didn’t stop the “sensational information bomb“ from making headlines on Russia’s state radio service, Vesti FM. (And later on an extreme-right news website with links to France’s National Front.)

Meanwhile, Info-Direkt is managed by a young Austrian ad-man who stuck a photograph of the Russian president on the magazine’s first cover along with the headline “We want one like Putin.” And like other Western far-right websites Info-Direkt uses Russian hosting services.

As things stand now, the Freedom Party, however loud it lobbies, won’t be ending European sanctions against Russia. “They will not be able to challenge Austria’s general line,” according to Anton Shekhovtsov, an expert on European extremist groups and the author of Russia and the Western Far Right. To placate suspicions, the Freedom Party nominated Karin Kneissl, an independent Middle East expert, as foreign minister.

And Chancellor Kurz, in response to the Freedom Party’s overall diplomatic posture, decided to shift some of the EU departments from the foreign ministry to his own office. The ambitious 31-year-old has also reassured other European leaders that his government will continue to follow a pro-EU line—though to what extent he can guarantee that and hold together his insecure far-right coalition remains to be seen.

Kurz also said that he wants Austria to be “a land of building bridges” between western and eastern Europe, a phrase that harks back to Vienna’s Cold War role as a venue for U.S.-Soviet summits. But others are more skeptical.

“The bridge-building thing has always been historically overestimated,” newspaper columnist Hans Rauscher tells The Daily Beast. “There is also some narcissism in this idea of ‘it particularly depends on us.’”

The risk, of course, is that while the Austrians think of building bridges, the Russians think of building bridgeheads.

PATHETIC LOSER

Mueller Indictment Just a Hint of Roger Stone’s Bonkers Email Abuse of Frenemy Randy Credico

“You crossed a red line,” said Credico after his dog was threatened. “Rot in hell,” Stone replied.

Betsy Woodruff

On April 9, 2018, Roger Stone sent an email that would play a role in his future arrest. Though it wasn’t the only reason he was hauled into a Florida courtroom on Friday morning, Special Counsel Robert Mueller quoted portions of it in his indictment of the Trump ally—an indictment that shook Washington and added an absurdist edge to the Mueller probe.

The email, which The Daily Beast obtained before a grand jury indicted Stone on several charges, shows just how irate Stone was about an acquaintance, Randy Credico. The exchange began when Credico emailed a group of people on the evening of April 9, 2018, about what he called an upcoming “media tour.”

“It’s the “RANDY IS FULL OF SHIT “ tour Co- sponsored by Jack Daniels and Pablo Escobar,” Stone replied.

In another email, about an upcoming Credico appearance on MSNBC, Stone speculated that he would be able to sue Credico over comments he might make.

“Send me your address,” Stone wrote. “I bet I can get you served in a lawsuit the very next morning.”

“Remember to bathe,” he added.

Another email included more invective.

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“When I wipe my ass what’s on the toilet paper is worth more than You are,” Stone wrote.

“Your threats are a violation of state and federal law,” Credico replied.

Then Stone sent the email Mueller would quote portions of.

“I know u are a dumb shit but read the Constitution,” he wrote.

I have a constitutional right to call you a lightweight pantywaist cocksucker drunk asshole piece of shit and I just did

You are a rat. A stoolie. You backstab your friends-run your mouth my lawyers are dying Rip you to shreds

I’m going to take that dog away from you.  Not a fucking thing you can do about it either because you are a weak broke piece of shit

I will prove to the world you’re a liar

“You don't have a constitutional right to threaten me and especially not threaten my dog… you crossed a red line,” Credico retorted. Stone had threatened to steal his service dog.

“Rot in hell,” Stone replied.

The next month, Stone and Credico had another dramatic exchange.

“You are a pathetic loser,” Stone wrote on May 21. “Let’s see who’s around a year from now and who isn’t cocksucker”

“Another one of your threats,” Credico replied.

“Not a threat. A prediction. How you feeling champ ?” Roger replied.

The Daily Beast shared screenshots of the emails with Stone’s lawyer, Grant Smith. When asked if he had any comment, Smith replied, “No.”

Martin Stolar, a lawyer for Credico, declined to comment. “Randy will make public statements concerning the indictment if and when he’s called to testify.” he said.

Stone and Credico’s relationship—the link between a political arch-villain and a New York stand-up comic—has found its way into the investigation of the century. And it highlights one of the most amusing realities of the special counsel's into Russian meddling in the 2016 election: Mueller, a notoriously serious and straight-faced law man, has spent a huge amount of time dealing with clowns.

Stone, for his part, is basically a political performance artist. He spent his decades-long career in the public eye enmeshing himself in scandals, lobbing wild-eyed accusations at his critics, and honing the practice of wildly over-the-top political dirty tricks. He also wrote a column on men’s fashion for The Daily Caller.

He wore a top hat to Trump’s inauguration. He paraded around the 2016 Republican National Convention alongside conspiracy-monger Alex Jones while sporting a T-shirt accusing Bill Clinton of rape. He suggested Trump fans should storm the hotel rooms of RNC delegates who didn’t support Trump. He got booted from Twitter and banned from CNN.

He ran a lobbying firm with Paul Manafort. He got fired from Bob Dole’s campaign for putting out a newspaper ad for swingers. He starred in a Netflix documentary. He left the Trump campaign under contested circumstances and endeared himself to the internet conspiracy community, even questioning the scientific consensus on vaccines.

This is the man Mueller has dogged for months.

Credico, whose communications with Stone featured in his indictment, is also an ur-eccentric. As a comedian and drug-legalization activist, he drew notoriety for marching into the New York State Capitol dressed as the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes, complete with a toga and a fake beard. Once there, he protested the state’s drug laws by lighting up a joint.

Credico is an expert at mimicking other people’s voices, impersonating Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump at the drop of a hat. A small, white long-haired dog named Bianca is his constant companion. He even took her along for questioning by Mueller’s team.

Both men drew Mueller’s interest—Credico as a witness, Stone as a target—because of their shared interest in WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Credico, a self-described lefty, has long been a fan of WikiLeaks for revealing government secrets. Stone, meanwhile, wanted to get to Assange during the 2016 campaign in the his site had emails Hillary Clinton hadn’t made public.

A few weeks before the election, Credico interviewed Assange on his radio show. He would later visit the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The two men exchanged emails about Wikileaks before Assange started dumping emails stolen from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. And Stone also made a series of cryptic, apparently prescient, statements about Wikileaks, which generated noisy speculation that he was getting information from inside the embassy.

After the election, when Special Counsel Mueller started investigating potential coordination between the Kremlin and Trumpworld, he soon zeroed in on Stone. As Mueller questioned a host of Stone’s long-time associates, congressional investigators grilled Stone himself.

Credico, in turn, faced questions about his relationships with WikiLeaks, ties to Stone, and alleged work as an intermediary between Stone and Assange. Stone had hinted in the past that Credico connected him to WikiLeaks, while Credico has long denied acting as any sort of go-between.

As those probes unfolded, Stone grew increasingly agitated. He told reporters he expected to be charged, and he lambasted Mueller for running a witch hunt. A few days before his indictment, he texted The Daily Beast to say he would expose monstrous misconduct by Mueller’s team if indicted.

On Friday morning, it was clear Stone’s actions after Mueller’s probe started had created his most immediate legal problems. The indictment alleges that he lied to Congress about his communications with Credico and another associate, Jerome Corsi; that he obstructed an official proceeding; and that he tampered with an unnamed witness, known to be Credico. And it cites the email printed above as one example of a statement “intended to prevent Person 2 from cooperating with the investigations.”

That’s how a foul-mouthed exchange that reads like it's written on the wall of a dive-bar bathroom found its way into what’s arguably the most geopolitically consequential criminal investigation in decades.