Manafort has all but vanished from the Washington scene. Mystery man: Ukraine's U.S. fixer

His friends once called him the Count of Monte Cristo.

Today, Paul Manafort is more like The Invisible Man — a worldly political pro whose latest adventure, whispering in the ear of Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych, has handed him a supporting role in a bona fide international crisis.


Over three decades in Washington, Manafort built a storied career as a Beltway man of mystery: a famously discreet operative who worked for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, steered the 1996 GOP convention and built not one but two white-shoe D.C. lobbying shops, a pair of firms that bore Manafort’s name and catered to an eclectic stable of clients including anti-communist Angolan rebels and Ferdinand Marcos, the dictator of the Philippines.

Then, Manafort all but vanished from the Washington scene.

( PHOTOS: American political consultants in Ukraine)

Once-intimate colleagues say they have not seen Manafort, 64, in years and hear from him only in occasional email missives. His most recent firm, Davis Manafort, functionally broke up shortly after the 2008 presidential election.

As that campaign was unfolding in the United States, the notorious political fixer emerged overseas, playing a familiar role in an unfamiliar place: advising Yanukovych, the pro-Russian strongman whose ouster last month has triggered an international crisis reminiscent of a Cold War spy novel.

On Monday, as Russian gunships menaced the Ukrainian fleet in the Black Sea, Manafort’s former business partner Roger Stone sent out an email to a small group of friends asking wryly: “Where is Paul Manafort?”

A multiple-choice list of options followed, including: “Was seen chauffeuring Yanukovych around Moscow,” and “Was seen loading gold bullion on an Army Transport plane from a remote airstrip outside Kiev and taking off seconds before a mob arrived at the site.” The final option was: “Is playing Golf in Palm Beach.”

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The answer to Stone’s query is currently unclear. Manafort’s current location and involvement in Ukraine, not surprisingly, are a mystery. He did not respond to messages sent to half a dozen email accounts or answer calls to nearly as many phone numbers at addresses in Virginia and South Florida.

What’s already certain is this: Even among the many American strategists who test their fortunes abroad, Manafort’s journey from the front lines of the Reagan revolution to the right hand of a Moscow-backed Eastern bloc pol straight out of central casting ranks as one of the more unusual escapades of the Washington consulting class.

To past associates of Manafort, it comes as little surprise that he would be tied into tumult half a world away.

“We fondly used to refer to him as ‘The Count’ — ‘The Count of Monte Cristo.’ It was just the whole air about him,” recalled Scott Reed, who managed Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign. Another Manafort colleague said the nickname came from Manafort’s penchant for swirling his coat around his shoulders dramatically.

( PHOTOS: Ukraine turmoil)

Manafort’s friends describe his relationship with Yanukovych as a political love connection, born out of Yanukovych’s first downfall when he was driven from power by the 2004 Orange Revolution. Feeling that his domestic political advisers had failed him, Yanukovych turned to a foreign company, Davis Manafort, which was already doing work for the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov. The former Ukrainian PM and Manafort, the Georgetown-educated son of a Connecticut politician, hit it off.

Manafort’s firm had a set of international clients and produced an analysis of the Orange Revolution that Yanukovych found instructive, according to one operative involved in Yanukovych’s political rehabilitation. Manafort became, in effect, a general consultant to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, shaping big-picture messaging, coaching Yanukovych to speak in punchy, American-style sound bites and managing teams of consultants and attorneys in both Ukraine and the United States ahead of an anticipated Yanukovych comeback. While it’s difficult to track payments in foreign elections, a former associate familiar with Manafort’s earnings say they ran into the seven figures over several years.

After Yanukovych’s 2010 victory, Manafort stayed on as an adviser to the Russia-friendly president and became involved in other business projects in Eastern Europe. In 2012, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Tefft told the newspaper Ukrainska Pravda that he had met with Manafort, though he declined to elaborate on the American’s role there.

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Several consultants who worked with Manafort during the Yanukovych election say the Republican truly believed in the now-deposed politician’s capabilities as a leader and doubted that his competitors — widely seen as more pro-Western — had more productive aspirations for the country.

To view foreign political schisms less in terms of ideology than pure power politics would be characteristic, Manafort’s colleagues say, of such an experienced political mercenary — a deliberately secretive man who was advising Ferdinand Marcos a decade before Yanukovych even entered politics in the mid-1990s.

“Paul is a very, very smart and experienced political strategist,” said Charlie Black, the veteran Republican consigliere who co-founded the lobbying firm Black, Manafort and Stone in 1980. “I do know that Yanukovych kept him around as an adviser, so he must have thought he had done a good job for him.”

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When Black and Manafort worked together, the Yanukovych booster was no stranger to controversy. In 1989, Manafort was hauled in front of a congressional panel for allegedly working to steer funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development into a slum-like New Jersey real estate development. Manafort, caused a stir then on the Hill with a tart defense of his profession. “You might call it influence-peddling,” he said, according to reports. “I call it lobbying.”

Stone, another named partner of the long since disbanded firm, described his former collaborator as “charming, entertaining, well-tailored and he certainly understands power and how it works.” And Stone would know: Manafort, helped run Stone’s campaign to lead the Young Republicans.

“Yanukovych came to power through a series of elections and would never have won without Manafort’s counsel,” Stone said. “After all, what do Russian political consultants know about democratic elections?”

In contemporary reports on the 2010 Ukrainian election, Manafort declined to discuss the specifics of his work for Yanukovych. Consultants who worked with him on the race described him as a “hands-on” manager with a sharp sense of how to communicate the Yanukovych message. He brought on other American politicos, including Democratic ad man Tad Devine and the public relations giant Edelman, to bolster his efforts both in Ukraine and internationally.”

A 2008 disclosure form filed by Edelman under the Foreign Agents Registration Act described the Yanukovych team’s determination to “share [Yanukovych’s] vision for Ukraine, his reform slated for 2008, his accomplishments in economic development as well as Ukraine’s business development.” The PR firm earned $35,000 a month for its services.

Devine, who cut ties with the Ukrainian leader after his election, said Manafort was obsessively focused on the race. “There was no hour of the day or night when he was not available to respond to an email,” Devine said. Another Manafort friend described his drive as “maniacal.”

And one operative closely involved in Ukraine emphasized that what may have started as a straightforward business transaction between Davis Manafort and Yanukovych grew into a “real and close relationship” between Manafort and his candidate over the course of the election.

“Manafort really believed that Yanukovych had what was in the best interest of Ukraine at heart,” the operative said, adding that Manafort’s influence ruffled some feathers among other strategists in the Yanukovych camp. “Just from a purely business perspective, the political consultants that were from Russia were in no way, shape or form allies of Manafort.”

Indeed, if dozens of top-flight American consultants dabble in lucrative foreign elections, Manafort seems to have gone native — think Colonel Kurtz — in a way that unsettled even his close allies.

By the end of the 2008 presidential campaign in the United States, the partnership between Manafort and Yanukovych had effectively triggered Davis Manafort’s disintegration. On paper, Davis Manafort still exists as a company registered in Delaware. In practice, Manafort and his business partner, Rick Davis, have not worked together for years.

That’s because even before the Yanukovych campaign revved up, Davis had signed on to manage Arizona Sen. John McCain’s bid for the White House.

Manafort attended a handful of meetings for a McCain 2008 advisory council, according to one Republican involved in the race — but when Manafort expressed interest in chairing the 2008 convention and reprising the role he played in 1996, he was firmly rebuffed. With lobbying already toxic in U.S. politics, the last thing Republicans needed was an international hired gun as their event planner.

Davis declined to comment on his association with Manafort. In 2010, he quietly joined the private equity fund Pegasus Capital Advisers, where he now serves as COO.

The same year, in late February, Pravda published a photo of Manafort in a story about Yanukovych’s installation as president. The caption described Manafort as “in a hurry on the inauguration of his client.” At the inauguration, Manafort was greeted with a kiss on the cheek by Akhmetov, the tycoon who introduced him to Yanukovych in the first place, according to one observer.

Associates say Davis and Manafort are not in touch. The listed phone number for Davis Manafort has been disconnected.

“After they separated, Rick moved on to a successful partnership at a private equity [company] and has left Washington and Manafort in his rear-view mirror,” said Reed, the former Dole adviser.

While Manafort has not publicly surfaced — in the United States or abroad — since Yanukovych was forced out of office in late February, traces of his presence in Ukraine have. Ukrainian journalist Sergii Leshchenko, who was among the journalists who sifted through records in Yanukovych’s lavish estate outside Kiev last week, said he turned up a Davis Manafort business card for a former employee who has since moved to another PR firm.

Leshchenko — who met with Manafort in 2007 in Davos, where he had accompanied Yanukovych for a conference — said the American counselor was viewed with some suspicion in Ukraine. Asked then about the nature of his work, Manafort was evasive. “He wouldn’t answer, Leshchenko said.

Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist, who in the 1980s worked with the Angolan rebel group that retained Black, Manafort and Stone, recalled that even then Manafort had some of the makings of an international adventurer.

“Unlike the other guys in Black, Manafort and Stone-world, he was consistently interested in foreign policy,” Norquist said. “He showed up in foreign policy talks, party-to-party work with Britain, Europe, etc., and I would see him in that zone. Bright. Hardworking.”

Norquist added: “I have not seen him in many years now.”

Kenneth P. Vogel contributed to this report.