Dimitri Simes and his alleged handler, Sergei Lavrov

On 14 March 2016, Jared Kushner attended a lunch event at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan. The keynote speaker at the event was Henry Kissinger, the former national security adviser to Richard Nixon who has subsequently met 17 times with Vladimir Putin. The lunch was organized by the Center for the National Interest, a foreign policy think tank once known as the Nixon Center, whose head, the Russian-born Dimitri Simes, had been friendly with the eponymous U.S. president — and is friendly with the current Russian president.

At the time, Kushner was a bit player in the Trump campaign. He’d come aboard in November 2015, just four months before, and was nominally in charge of the campaign’s social media operations, which would not take off until June 2016, when supercharged by Cambridge Analytica. If he was known at all, it was as the husband of Ivanka Trump.

The 14 March lunch is significant, because it is the first known contact between Kushner and representatives of Russian president Vladimir Putin. For Dimitri Simes was not just the head of a think tank and publisher of a periodical, the National Interest, that trumpeted pro-Putin views. He was also, allegedly, one of the highest-ranking Russian intelligence operatives in the United States. He’d met with Putin in Moscow not long before that lunch.

Born in Moscow in 1947, the son of a prominent civil rights lawyer, Simes attended prestigious schools. After graduating in 1970, he worked at Institute of World Economy and International Relations, where as deputy secretary of the Institute’s Komsomol Committee he became politically active. He gave frequent lectures at the Moscow City Committee of the Communist Party, where his favorite topic was the failure of U.S.-style capitalism. The Communist rising star quit this post in 1972/3, in order to immigrate to Israel, as many Soviet Jews were then doing.

But Simes never made it to Jerusalem. Under somewhat unusual circumstances, he instead defected to the United States, the subject of his (derisive) scholarly interest. As the historian Yuri Felshtinsky writes in GORDON:

What was it that Simes told (or did not tell) to the US officials in the US Embassy in Rome in 1973 when applying for the US visa, is not known. It seems unlikely that he was telling him about his Komsomol leadership activities and that his departure was sanctioned by Evgeny Primakov, a long-time KGB official and a future Head of the Foreign Intelligence Service.

By the end of 1973, Simes was living in Washington. Leveraging some highly influential conservative political contacts, he wangled a job at the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Ten years later, he’d become a close associate of Richard Nixon, and an informal adviser to the former president on the Soviet Union. After Nixon died, Simes established the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom, which later changed its name to the Center for the National Interest. Simes’ advice, as Felshtinsky notes, is always a variation on the same theme: “Russia has a lot of nukes, so it’s better to be friends than enemies. Engagement is key.” This is exactly the position advocated by Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator who traveled to Russia last year to hand-deliver a letter from Trump to Putin — which makes perfect sense, as Paul has been an associate of Dimitri Simes for years.

Another Simes BFF is Richard Burt, a Reagan-era State Department official with long ties to Russia. Burt, who sits on the Russian Alfa Bank advisory board, was allegedly a key player in the changing of the Republican party’s platform to soften the party’s stance on Ukraine.

But the most notorious of Simes’ associates, whose pro-Trump/Russia screed “The Bear and the Elephant” he published in the National Interest in 2015, is the self-styled “founding chairman [of] The Right To Bear Arms, a Russian version of the NRA” — Maria Butina.

Soon after Butina’s indictment, Simes fled the United States. He is back in his homeland now, co-hosting a Putin propagandist game show about how Russia will defeat the West.