The US is concerned: Russian spies could have intercepted a call to Trump from a Kyiv restaurant
The phone call from US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, who this summer called President Donald Trump from a restaurant in Ukraine, looks like a shocking security breach and raises serious counterintelligence concerns, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Several former officials told CNN that it is highly likely that the intelligence services of many foreign countries, including Russia, listened to the conversation.
“If this is the case, then the cell phone conversation between Ambassador Sondland and President Trump is a blatant violation of traditional counterintelligence practices about which all national security officials, including political appointee ambassadors such as Sondland, have been repeatedly briefed,” the former CIA officer Mark Polymeropoulos, who oversaw operations in Europe and Russia before resigning this summer.
“I don’t remember that there was a time in my career when an ambassador, in conditions of high counterintelligence, as in Kyiv, would have such a dangerous conversation with the current president. This just shouldn't have happened,” he said.
Top US diplomat Bill Taylor said during the first public impeachment hearing on Wednesday that one of his staffers who accompanied Sondland to a meeting in Kiev saw the ambassador call Trump from his cell phone and overheard the president asking about an “investigation.”
Taylor confirmed that he understood the term “investigation” to mean issues related to the 2016 election, the Joe and Hunter Biden case, and Burisma.
“Ambassador Sondland told President Trump that the Ukrainians are ready to move forward,” Taylor told lawmakers.
Taylor said the call occurred on July 26, the day after Trump's phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that led to a whistleblower complaint that Trump was asking for "interference" from a foreign country in his 2020 presidential campaign.
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A U.S. ambassador who speaks with the president typically does so from the embassy over secure phone lines, one former intelligence official told CNN.
“Of all communications, cell phones are even more vulnerable than dangerous landline phones, which are much more vulnerable than secure communications,” the former official said.
“This omission was only amplified by the fact that Sondland made this call in public, where it could easily be overheard, and in another country that was already being targeted by foreign adversaries of the United States, including Russia,” the current and former officials said.
“There is no doubt that the Russians and perhaps many other foreign intelligence agencies could have intercepted this call. Moscow would undoubtedly be happy,” says Polymeropoulos.
“This would give the Russians important confirmation that President Trump was indeed doing exactly what Moscow almost certainly already knew, that our president was inserting a serious wedge into ongoing US security assistance programs that Ukraine so desperately needed in its ongoing fight against Russia,” he added.
Additionally, Trump's former national security adviser to Russia, Fiona Hill, testified in October, saying she previously tried to get Sondland to stop using his personal cell phone for work.
“I mean, some of them were funny, but they were also deeply disturbing to me and to others. And I actually went to our intelligence bureau and asked him to sit down with him and explain that it was a counterintelligence risk, in particular, giving out our personal phone numbers. All of these communications could easily be penetrated by the Russians,” Hill said in testimony to the House of Representatives.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump said he did not need help from Ukraine to defeat former Vice President Joseph Biden in next November's election.
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