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Michael Flynn Carlos Barria | Reuters

By the time Michael Flynn was fired as President Donald Trump's national security adviser in February, he had made a lot of bad decisions. One was taking money from the Russians (and failing to disclose it); another was taking money under the table from the Turks. But an overlooked line in his financial disclosure form, which he was forced to amend to detail those foreign payments, reveals he was also involved in one of the most audacious—and some say harebrained—schemes in recent memory: a plan to build scores of U.S. nuclear power plants in the Middle East. As a safety measure. In 2015 and 2016, according to his filing, Flynn was an adviser to X-Co Dynamics Inc./Iron Bridge Group, which at first glance looks like just another Pentagon consultancy that ex-military officers use to fatten their wallets. Its chairman and CEO was retired Admiral Michael Hewitt; another retired admiral, Frank "Skip" Bowman, who oversaw the Navy's nuclear programs, was an adviser. Other top guns associated with it were former National Security Agency boss Keith Alexander and retired Marine Corps General James "Hoss" Cartwright, former vice chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose stellar career was marred when he was prosecuted last year for lying to the FBI during a leak investigation.

In the summer of 2015, knowledgeable sources tell Newsweek, Flynn flew to Egypt and Israel on behalf of X-Co/Iron Bridge. His mission: to gauge attitudes in Cairo and Jerusalem toward a fantastical plan for a joint U.S.-Russian (and Saudi-financed) program to get control over the Arab world's rush to acquire nuclear power. At the core of their concern was a fear that states in the volatile Middle East would have inadequate security for the plants and safeguards for their radioactive waste—the stuff of nuclear bombs. More from Newsweek:

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'Infrastructure week' symbol of Trump's many problems But no less a concern for Flynn and his partners was the moribund U.S. nuclear industry, which was losing out to Russian and even South Korean contractors in the region. Or as Stuart Solomon, a top executive along with Hewitt at his new venture, IP3 (International Peace, Power and Prosperity), put it in a recent speech to industry executives, "We find ourselves…standing on the sidelines and watching the competition pass us by." That the oil-rich, sun-soaked Arab Middle East would pursue nuclear energy seems paradoxical. But as The Economist noted in 2015, "Demand for electricity is rising, along with pressure to lower carbon emissions; nuclear plants tick both boxes." And some of the region's major players, like Egypt and Jordan, don't have oil and gas resources and "want nuclear power to shore up the security of their energy supplies," The Economist said.

So the genius idea developed by Flynn and Co. was a U.S.-Russian partnership to build and operate plants and export the dangerous spent fuel under strict controls. Flynn's role would be helping X-Co/Iron Bridge design and implement a vast security network for the entire enterprise, according to an internal memo by ACU Strategic Partners, one of the lead companies involved, obtained by Newsweek. Not only would the project revive the U.S. nuclear industry, but it would cost American taxpayers nothing, its principals asserted. It would be "funded entirely by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries," according to the ACU memo. The kingdom's upfront cost? "Close to a trillion dollars," says a project insider, who asked for anonymity in exchange for discussing internal matters. Theoretically, the Saudis would recoup their costs by selling energy to Egypt, Jordan, Yemen and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar—which hosts the largest U.S. military base in the region. (Qatar doesn't seem to be an option for the moment, since six of the Arab states, led by the Saudis, severed diplomatic relations with it on June 5 over its alleged support of terrorism.)

National Security Adviser Mike Flynn listens to President Trump during a listening session with cyber security experts in the Roosevelt Room the White House in Washington, DC on Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2017. Jabin Botsford | The Washington Post | Getty Images

Left out of this grand nuclear scheme: Iran (along with Syria, its war-ravaged Shiite proxy). In fact, "it was always part of the project that Russia's involvement...would tilt Russia away from Iran," Fred Johnson, ACU's chief economist, wrote in an email to his advisers obtained by Newsweek. Not only would Russia earn cash for being a dumping ground for radioactive waste, Johnson wrote, but the consortium would purchase "Russian military hardware" to compensate Moscow for losing military sales to Iran. "Further plans to sideline Iran," Johnson wrote, included "the development of X-Co," the Hewitt company that Flynn was advising, "with its very visible deployment of Sea Launch," a Russian company "that would provide a platform for rockets." It's unclear whether Flynn was involved in negotiating with Sea Launch. The former general, now being pursued by federal investigators probing contacts between Russian officials and Trump's inner circle, did not respond to an inquiry from Newsweek. People associated with the Middle East project say they thought Flynn's involvement was limited to sounding out the Egyptians and Israelis on security aspects of the enterprise. He listed no income from X-Co/Iron Bridge on his financial disclosure form and "was not paid," except for his travel expenses, according to Thomas Cochran, a prominent scientist and nuclear nonproliferation proponent involved with the project. (The cost of business-class round-trip airfare and exclusive hotels for the trip would have ranged between $10,000 and $15,000.) Hewitt denied that isolating Iran was part of the plan. "X-Co wasn't created to simply 'sideline Iran,'" he responded to Johnson and their associates in an email. "It was designed to set the conditions for stability which were the precursors to building 40 plants" and to "solidify the GCC, Jordan, Egypt under a security construct, led by two superpowers, using state of the art capability." But the project faced opposition from the Obama administration, Cochran says. "They didn't want to do it with the Russians and didn't want to do it while they were negotiating the Iran deal," he tells Newsweek.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions delivers remarks at the Department of Justice on February 28, 2017 in Washington, D.C. Getty Images