The door opens, and I run for daylight, bursting out of the building’s entrance and cutting a sharp left up the hill. Then, just as my head is level with their feet and almost entirely out of their view, one catches sight of me out of the corner of his eye, and I hear him rally another to join the chase. I press the button to call for it.Īt first none of the leather-clad door lurkers below notice as I descend in the humming and clanking old elevator behind them. Or I can bolt, using the only practical technology at my disposal: an old-fashioned elevator with a wall-less cab. I can keep going, although access to the roof is probably locked, and what would I do up there anyway? I could try to talk my way into one of these apartments to hide, but “frantic foreigner” just isn’t a good look, and this option is likely to draw even more attention to me. I’ve just gotten used to it and handle it gingerly.īen Affleck, Matt Damon Slam Unauthorized Use of 'Air' Monologue in Trump Campaign Videoīreathlessly, I’m standing on the fourth floor, with my limited options racing through my mind. But it served its purpose then, and the landlord sees little point in replacing it now. Now the door is still charred, with bits of black and rust-colored metal flaking off if you close it with too much force. It is a conveniently located apartment with a narrow view of the nearby Maidan - Kyiv’s central square, where protestors camped out during the winter months both in 20. Russian journalists had holed up here during the government-toppling events of February, and I suppose that made sense. The steel door had been torched earlier in the year. (Full Disclosure: Patten and Rolling Stone’s Editor-in-Chief, Noah Shachtman, have known each other for more than 25 years.) October 2014 In this chapter, Patten offers one of the best descriptions of his former business partner Konstantin Kilimnik, whom Mueller tagged Person A in his 2019 report, and whom the Senate Intelligence Committee called an asset of Russian security services. This is his version of the events that embroiled the early years of the Trump administration and caused so much rancor and division. In this exclusive excerpt from his memoir Dangerous Company: The Misadventures of a Foreign Agent, Patten takes us to Ukraine in the years preceding Russia’s invasion and gives us unique insights into the country’s political class in a time of tumult and change. He was stabbed a second time in November 2020 while leaving Washington, surviving a seemingly random and brutal attack in broad daylight on a busy street. In 1996, Patten was stabbed in Washington, D.C., while defending his grandmother, Susan Mary Alsop, a Georgetown doyenne. foreign intelligence officer and a British politician who resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty over Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement with Hitler. His establishment roots stretch deep: On both his maternal and paternal sides, Patten is a direct descendant of John Jay, an author of the Federalist Papers and America’s first Minister of Foreign Affairs and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He also worked for multiple sides in the country of Georgia – both for and against former president Mikheil Saakashvili, and in Ukraine. In Northern Iraq, he worked for a major Kurdish faction and later the Arab Sunnis in the immediate run-up to ISIS’ 2014 massive land grab and declaration of an Islamic state. From 2008-9, he served as senior advisor to the undersecretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs.Īfter the second Bush administration, Patten became a private consultant working for clients in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, and Africa. Patten had also worked for the London-based Cambridge Analytica, the data-mining political operation made infamous during the 2016 election, prompting commentators like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to question whether he was the missing link in some foreign plot to put Trump in the White House.įor much of his career, before all the controversy and legal battles, Patten says he promoted democracy abroad – for the International Republican Institute (IRI) in Russia and Iraq, and for Freedom House where he oversaw Eurasia programs. An international political operative, Patten had worked on the same team in Ukraine as Paul Manafort, later one of Donald Trump’s campaign chairmen. presidential election when Patten pled guilty to failing to register as a foreign agent for a Ukrainian politician. Sam Patten became briefly notorious during special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 U.S.
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