By Rolf Mowatt-Larssen
... everything we know about the meeting — from whom it involved to how it was set up to how it unfolded — is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like. It bears all the hallmarks of a professionally planned, carefully orchestrated intelligence soft pitch designed to gauge receptivity, while leaving room for plausible deniability in case the approach is rejected. And the Trump campaign’s willingness to take the meeting — and, more important, its failure to report the episode to U.S. authorities — may have been exactly the green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election ...
... Veselnitskaya is probably too well-connected to have independently initiated such a high-level and sensitive encounter. If she had, her use of known Trump and Kremlin associates (Aras and Emin Agalarov) to help make introductions and the suggestion, in Goldstone’s account, that she wanted to share “official documents and information” as “part of Russia and its government’s support” for Trump could have gotten her into significant trouble. Her efforts to meet Trump associates would have surely come to the attention of Russian authorities at some point, given Russian government email monitoring and other means of surveillance. The Kremlin would look harshly on someone going rogue in a manner that would surely damage ongoing Russian intelligence efforts related to the campaign.
... Veselnitskaya is far enough removed from Moscow’s halls of power to make her a good fit as an intermediary in an intelligence operation — as a “cut-out” with limited knowledge of the larger scheme and as an “access agent” sent to assess and test a high-priority target’s interest in cooperation. She may have had her own agenda going into the meeting: to lobby against the Magnitsky Act, which happens to affect some of her clients. But her agenda dovetailed with Kremlin interests — and it would have added another layer of plausible deniability. Russian intelligence practice is to co-opt such a person. News Friday that she was accompanied by Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist who is reportedly suspected of having ties to Russian intelligence (which he denies), further bolsters this reading.
... Russian intelligence presumably would not have risked passing high-value information through Veselnitskaya. As an untrained asset or co-optee — not a professional intelligence officer by any account — she would not have been entrusted with making a direct intelligence recruitment approach, including the passage of compromising information. Formalizing a relationship with the Trump campaign would be left for another day. If and when that day came, the pitch would be carried out by an experienced intelligence officer in favorable circumstances, with the right Trump associate and on friendly turf ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-jrs-russia-meeting-sure-sounds-like-a-russian-intelligence-operation/2017/07/14/5f7f3dfe-6762-11e7-9928-22d00a47778f_story.html?utm_term=.6f2924b923a8
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