'Trump thought I was a secretary': Fiona Hill on the president, Putin and populism
She was the White House’s top Russia expert catapulted to fame by Trump’s impeachment. She reflects on her journey from County Durham to Washington
In the last days before Washington was locked down, Fiona Hill was standing on the street on her phone dealing with a domestic crisis.
Hill’s daughter had become ill, it was unclear whether it was coronavirus (it later turned out to be regular flu) and the family had relatives flying in that weekend for a visit. As she paced up and down making contingency plans, passersby on Connecticut Avenue looked and looked again on recognising her. The British-born White House adviser had temporarily become one of the most famous faces in America after testifying in Donald Trump’s impeachment hearings in November.
As senior director for Europe and Russia in the national security council she had been an eyewitness to Trump’s encounters with Vladimir Putin, and to the White House machinations over Ukraine.
Her calm under pressure, her clarity of recall, and her evident expertise on all things Russian, confirmed what was already suspected: the president and his associates had conducted a parallel foreign policy towards Kyiv to further his political interests.
For many, Hill was a hero. The coalminer’s daughter from County Durham received offers of book contracts, requests for interviews and appearances.
For a few, however, she became a target because her testimony contradicted Trump. In the present era, that is enough. She sought police advice after receiving death threats, and this was one of her early sorties into public life after three months in seclusion. She was planning a cautious return to a normal existence at a Washington thinktank – a plan which was blown up with everyone else’s, by the looming pandemic and lockdown.
When we met in February, impeachment still felt the climactic drama of the Trump saga to date. After all, he was only the third president in US history to be impeached, and the details of his attempt to shake down the Ukrainian government by withholding US aid until it produced damaging information about Trump’s political rival, were stunning.
But a couple of months on, all this was a dim memory, and the Ukraine scandal appears trivial compared with what followed. More than 100,000 Americans had since died in a pandemic the administration was incapable of handling and unrest was spreading across the nation.
When we talked in May, Hill was back in seclusion but so was the rest of Washington. She was speaking from home, where she had an array of books spread around her feet. She had laid them out to try to piece together an explanation of why the three countries with which she was intimately familiar – the UK, where she was born; Russia, the country she had spent her life studying; and the US, where she has lived since 1989 and risen to the highest level of government – had all failed so spectacularly in handling the health crisis.
She is one of a handful of people to have stood at the nexus of these three disastrous governments, to have been in the room to witness Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Boris Johnson operate.
“It’s a story really about how the US, UK and Russia have all ended up in the same spot weirdly, not just in terms of Covid-19 but also populist politics and many of the same out-of-control inequalities,” Hill said.
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Bishop Auckland voted 61% for Brexit. And just as people voted against the seemingly self-evident advantages of the European Union, Hill said they can vote away pillars of the liberal democracy and elect authoritarian narcissists in its place.
“Liberal democracy hasn’t been delivering,” she argued. “If I go back to my home town, it’s still no better than it was when I was growing up in terms of opportunity. The shops are boarded up in the main street. Nothing new is coming in. There’s just no kind of sense of optimism. And when I visit my relatives here in the US in Wisconsin and other places, there’s a lot of sense of: the rest of the world is kind of moving on and leaving us behind. People see that as being closely associated with liberal democracy.”
Given everything that Hill knew and understood about the threats to democracy from populism and Putin’s Russia, some of her friends and colleagues were astonished when she went to work for Trump in the early months of the administration, with one accusing her of “aiding and abetting a criminal enterprise”.
“That was the general thrust. They were telling me: You really shouldn’t do this,” she said. She says she felt obliged to do what she could to address the dangerous volatility of the relationship between two nuclear-armed states.
“What I was most worried about was the toxicity of the issue of Russia. I mean I really felt that actually that was one of the reasons why I should try to do something,” she said.
“You have to be able to balance off deterrence with some forms of engagement to be able to move things in a different direction.”
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“I think honestly, they got this idea initially that I could sit down with the president and do a bit of a spiel on Putin but it just never worked out like that,” she said. “He just wanted to get on with it himself.”
Hill’s first Oval Office encounter with Trump was inauspicious. It was on 3 April 2017. She was on her first day of orientation, but there had been a terror attack on the St Petersburg metro and she was called in to brief the president.
She remembers only having her running shoes on, having left home in a rush, leaving her work shoes behind, and trying to hide her feet under her chair. She need not have worried.
“Trump didn’t look up when I came in and I don’t think he looked up the whole time I was giving my spiel about the terrorist attack,” Hill said. The president was busy writing something on a pad on his desk. “And then Ivanka came in and sat down next to me, the first thing she did was look at my shoes.”
The next meeting with Trump was even worse. McFarland tried to introduce her to the president in a crowded room and tell him she was his senior director for Russia, but Trump just waved towards the secretary of state.
“He said: Rex Tillerson is working on Russia, and I thought: this is not going to work,” she recalled. “I never really imprinted.”
That much was clear on her next visit to the Oval Office. Trump was making a call with Putin, and as is customary, relevant White House officials were sitting around the president’s desk.
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Hill had listened to what the Russian president had said and was preparing some notes of analysis, when she suddenly became aware everyone was looking at her. Trump had decided he wanted a press release and assumed Hill, one of the few women in the room, was there to type it up.
“The president thought I was part of the executive secretariat taking notes,” she said. “He was basically saying: ‘Can she go do this?’ and I had no idea what they’re talking about. I was like a deer in the headlights, and thinking: You’re talking to me?
“It’s not like the first time I’ve been mistaken for a secretary. I’ve been mistaken for many things, believe me,” she said.
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For the record, she is dismissive of the Manchurian Candidate theory that Trump was somehow controlled by Putin through the use of kompromat. She knew Christopher Steele, the former MI6 officer, from an earlier job in the national intelligence council. He was her counterpart, and she was taken by surprise when his dossier on Trump and Russia emerged.
She argues Trump’s desire to forge a personal relationship with Putin is no different from his approach to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, or the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, or Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
“He wants to be like he was as a CEO, he has all these discussions with people in private … He has a very informal style with everyone. Putin is similar. He just tries to engage with people in the way that he thinks kind of fits them best,” she said. “Boris is the same. It’s like the guy in the pub. It’s less getting into the weeds of the substance in some sort of formal way, and more two guys talking.
“Trump just wants to sit down with the guy, whoever it is, and create personal chemistry and then everyone else works out the details,” she said. “He wanted to treat Putin the same way he treated Xi or Netanyahu. He wanted to be able to pick up the phone and talk to them.”
But Putin could not be treated like the others. The Trump campaign had dozens of contacts with Russian officials or Kremlin intermediaries, and the candidate had appealed to Moscow to interfere in the election by hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Furthermore, as Hill made clear in her biography of him, Putin has taken all the skills of his long KGB career with him to the Russian presidency. And the Kremlin was constantly outmanoeuvring the White House, arranging events so that Trump would be alone with Putin with only the Russian president’s translator in the room. The state department, which stuck to rigid protocol rules on whose translator should be where and when, was being played.
“Putin doesn’t operate like that. Putin takes translators with him for every occasion,” she said. “The Russians are incredibly organized. They take advantage of every opportunity, every vulnerability, every open door they can walk through.”
In her efforts to have US career officials included in Trump’s meetings with Putin, she found herself facing determined resistance from inside the president’s entourage, as they became more and more distrustful of career officials as disloyal potential whistleblowers.
“I was saying to the people around him it’s the president’s own security here, because then they [the Russians] can say that he said things that he didn’t say. And they did that repeatedly,” she said. “They could be recording things in big meetings like the G20 where we don’t control the site. It gave Russians unnecessary leverage, and made it much more difficult for us to get ahead of things.”
In the end, events got ahead of Hill and many of the people she worked with at the national security council. As 2020 has shown, Trump has few if any advisers ready to push against his impulses. He has torn up one arms control agreement after another with the result that in less than a year’s time, there could be no limits left on the world’s major nuclear arsenals. And Trump’s politics of division have spilled out in the streets of US cities, where liberal democracy appears ever more in jeopardy.
Hill sees some hope for the future in citywide grassroots activism, to confront the climate crisis, the coronavirus, poverty and inequality. But those are more aspirations for the future. Right now, in Washington, London and Moscow, it is the populists who have the upper hand.
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