DONALD LOVED HIM FOR HIS PRO-PUTIN VIEWS:

This was a strange business--Kremlin officers careening around Manhattan, spycraft involving fake umbrellas, and an American intelligence source who spent more time in Moscow than his Russian handlers. Plus espionage professionals who turned out to be suffering from ennui.

The American willing to provide information to Putin's foreign intelligence officers rented a working space at 590 Madison Avenue. The building was linked by a glass atrium to a well-known New York landmark, Trump Tower. The atrium had a pleasant courtyard, with bamboo trees, where you could sit and drink coffee. Next door was a franchise of Niketown.

From the atrium you could take the elevator up to the Trump Tower public garden on the fourth floor, with its sparrows and maple trees. The din from West 57th Street meant the garden wasn't exactly tranquil. Or you could queue up with Japanese and German tourists at the Trump Tower basement restaurant and salad bar. Failing that, there was Starbucks on the first floor.

Male-1 had a name. At this point few had heard of him. He was Carter Page. 

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Page is a balding figure in his mid-forties, with buzz-cut hair and the super-lean physique of a cyclist or fitness fanatic. When not on his Cannondale mountain bike, he is typically dressed in a suit and tie. When he is nervous, he grins. One person who met him around this period described the encounter as "excruciating." Page was "awkward" and "uncomfortable" and "broke into a sweat."

Page's résumé was curious, too. He spent five years in the navy and served as a Marine intelligence officer in the western Sahara. During his navy days, he spent lavishly and drove a black Mercedes, according to a friend from his academy class, Richard Guerin.

He was smart enough to get academic qualifications: fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, master's from Georgetown University, a degree from New York University's business school. And a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

This, it transpired, was hard won. Page's British academic supervisors failed his doctoral thesis twice, an unusual move. In a report they described his work as "verbose" and "vague". Page responded by angrily accusing his examiners of "anti-Russian bias".

Page's apparent Russian sympathies were evident from much earlier. In 1998 Page spent three months working for the Eurasia Group, a strategy consulting firm. Its founder, Ian Bremmer, later described Page as his "most wackadoodle alumnus." Page's vehemently pro-Kremlin views meant that "he wasn't a good fit," Bremmer said.

In 2004 Page moved to Moscow, where he became an energy consultant with Merrill Lynch. As Page tells it, it was while working as an investment banker that he struck up a relationship with Gazprom. He advised Gazprom on transactions, including a deal to buy a stake in an oil and gas eld near Sakhalin, the desolate island on Russia's Pacific coast. He bought Gazprom shares.

According to Politico, few people in Moscow's foreign business community knew of him. Those who did were underwhelmed. "He wasn't great and he wasn't terrible," his former boss, Sergei Aleksashenko, said, adding that Page was "without any special talents or accomplishments," "in no way exceptional," and "a gray spot."

Three years later, Page returned to New York and to his new office next to Trump Tower. From there he set up a private equity business, Global Energy Capital LLC. His partner was Russian--a wealthy former Gazprom manager called Sergei Yatsenko. Did Yatsenko know Podobnyy and Sporyshev? Or indeed other members of Russia's underground espionage community?

In the worsening dispute between Putin and the Obama administration, Page sided with Moscow. He was against US sanctions imposed by Obama on Russia in the wake of Crimea. In a blog post for Global Policy, an online journal, he wrote that Putin wasn't to blame for the 2014 Ukraine conflict. The White House's superior "smack-down" approach had "started the crisis in the first place," he wrote.

Page's rampant pro-Moscow views were at odds with the US State Department under Clinton and with almost all American scholars of Russia. After all, it was Putin who had smuggled tanks across the border into eastern Ukraine. Not that Page's opinions counted for much. Global Policy had a small circulation. It was edited out of Durham University in the north of England.

His relationship with the journal fizzled out when he wrote an opinion piece lavishly praising a pro-Russian candidate ahead of the U.S. presidential election--Trump.

And then something odd happened.

In March 2016 candidate Trump met with the Washington Post's editorial board. At this point it seemed likely that Trump would clinch the Republican nomination. Foreign affairs came up. Who were the candidate's foreign policy advisers? Trump read five names. The second was "Carter Page, PhD." Given Trump's obvious lack of experience of world affairs, this was a pivotal job.

One former Eurasia Group colleague said he was stunned when he discovered Page had mysteriously become one of Trump's foreign policy advisers. "I nearly dropped my coffee," he told me. The colleague added: "We had wanted people who could engage in critical analysis of what's going on. This is a guy who has no critical insight into the situation. He wasn't a smart person."

Page's real qualification for the role, it appeared, had little to do with his restless CV. What appeared to recommend him to Trump was his boundless enthusiasm for Putin and his corresponding loathing of Obama and Clinton. Page's view of the world was not unlike the Kremlin's. Boiled down: the United States' attempts to spread democracy had brought chaos and disaster.

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