Origin of the Russia Sham – Real Russian Collusion with Robert Eringer
The Deep State’s ties to Jan 6 and the real Russia collusion fairy tale started long ago.
We reported yesterday on how the origins of the Russia collusion narrative started long ago in the early 2000s. This was brought to light in a court case filed in 2018 by a billionaire named Christopher Chandler who claimed a relatively unheard of individual by the name of Don Berlin made up stories about Chandler and Russia.
What was omitted in yesterday’s report is the actions of Don Berlin’s acquaintance, Robert Eringer. This man was also noted in the Buzzfeed article in 2018.
In this biographical vacuum — unknown to the Chandlers — a radically different explanation for their wealth had emerged in the early 2000s, when the brothers lived in Monaco and they came to the attention of Prince Albert’s personal intelligence adviser, an American named Robert Eringer.
Eringer wasn’t a conventional spy. Born in California in 1954, the son of a Disney illustrator, he has led a career including stints as a bartender, investigative journalist, literary agent, spy novelist, freelance FBI counterintelligence operative, and blogger. In memoirs and on his personal website, Eringer styles himself as a globe-trotting raconteur with a taste for fine wine, five-star hotels, and clandestine adventures. He apparently stumbled into the intelligence world after befriending a former senior CIA officer in the late 1980s.
In a self-published memoir, The Spymaster & Me, Eringer claimed he was recruited by Prince Albert II to be his personal intelligence adviser over drinks at the Hotel Columbus in Monaco in the summer of 2002. According to Eringer’s account, Prince Albert was eager to rid the principality of shady characters and asked Eringer to help. For a fee of 80,000 euros a quarter, Eringer agreed to set up a covert unit that would investigate prominent residents, vet public officials, and build relationships with foreign intelligence agencies such as the CIA and MI6. He operated outside formal government structures, working from an office on London’s Marylebone High Street to avoid detection, and styled himself as “Agent 001” of the “Monaco Intelligence Service”.
One of Eringer’s first targets, he recounts in The Spymaster & Me, was the Chandlers. Eringer believed the brothers were suspicious partly because so little was known about them and their apartment building was mostly empty. At best, he figured, they were running an unregistered commodities business. But he thought they might be laundering money for Russian criminals. Eringer began investigating the brothers.
According to Chandler’s lawsuit, Eringer’s decision to investigate them began a sequence of events that led to Chandler being accused of being a Russian spy in the UK more than a decade later. The dossier that circulated in London late last year consisted of material drawn from Eringer’s investigation, including Eringer’s own November 2004 writeup about the findings of the probe and the contentious background reports from Berlin. Some of these documents have been entered into evidence in the US libel claim by Chandler’s lawyers.
Of course, the Chandler brothers argued this entire story from Eringer was false. This is noted in the filing in their case against Berlin which is embedded in Part 1 of this series. Christopher Chandler sued Don Berlin who reportedly provided the data in the Russia dossier to Eringer. But Berlin’s lawyers responded with the following:
According to Berlin’s legal filings, he was hired by Eringer to do a background search on Richard Chandler 16 years ago. He prepared a confidential report for Eringer and gave it to him in February 2003. The information was drawn from “various databases and other sources”. Berlin says he “simply gathered information available to him and passed it along to Mr Eringer with the understanding that the information needed to be evaluated and verified before it could be relied upon as accurate”.
“Some time after receiving Mr Berlin’s limited report, Mr Eringer produced a dossier about [Chandler] and his brother,” Berlin’s lawyers argued. “Mr Eringer’s dossier accused them of acting as Russian agents and laundering money for Russian criminal groups … Mr Berlin had no role in the preparation of Mr Eringer’s dossier and the complaint contains no allegation that he did.”
What’s not shared (and perhaps not known) by the Chandler brothers is that Eringer, who accused the brothers of having a relationship with Russia, had a relationship with Russia himself.
In a recent blog post, Eringer admits that he took frequent trips to Moscow and Havana for the FBI. When asked if he would take a polygraph to retain any relationship with the FBI, Eringer shared this:
You may be aware that for a nine-year period (1993-2002) I operated secretly for the FBI on at least a half-dozen sensitive cases. Because I took FBI-sponsored trips to Moscow and Havana, operating undercover without diplomatic immunity, I believe I earned the appreciation and respect of various special agents and special agents-in-charge in field offices and also inside Headquarters.”
Eringer was so close to the Russians that he had his picture taken with the KGB Chairman. Also, with him at the dinner was Edward Lee Howard.
Howard is famous for being the first CIA officer believed to have defected to the KGB. In July 2002 he was suspected of dying in Russia.
In August 1985, armed with a tip provided by Soviet defector Vitaly Yurchenko, the FBI identified Howard as a possible CIA mole. The agents interviewed him — and he denied being a spy.
The FBI placed his home under constant surveillance, a move that prompted Howard to undertake an escape operation fitting for a spy. He dressed up a dummy and spirited it into his car, then went out to dinner with his wife. When returning from the restaurant, his wife at the wheel, Howard slid out of the car as she turned a corner, having put the dummy in the passenger seat.
When his wife returned to their house, she called an office and played a tape Howard had recorded setting up an interview for the next morning. With that, the FBI, which was listening to Howard’s phone calls, decided he was home.
Meanwhile, Howard apparently went to the airport, flew to Dallas and then overseas, finally arriving in Helsinki, where he took refuge in the Soviet Embassy. Shortly thereafter he walked across the Finnish-Soviet border and turned up in Moscow, where the KGB supplied him with an apartment and a dacha in the country.
Eringer actually wrote a book about his time in Russia, which included the death of Edward Lee Howard.
Ruse_ Undercover With FBI Counterintelligence by Jim Hoft on Scribd
Eringer had much information on Howard, having dined with him in the past in Russia with the Head of the KGB. The Russians liked Eringer so much he received an honorary member card to the KGB.
Eringer was also involved in Russia with the FBI at the same time Robert Hanssen was providing the Russians damaging information. Hanssen gave information to the Russians on multiple spies, some of who were executed. The FBI documented this in a special report.
Hanssen was the most damaging spy in FBI history, and he betrayed some of this nation’s most important counterintelligence and military secrets, including the identities of dozens of human assets, at least three of whom were executed.
Even though Eringer was working for the FBI at the time US human assets outed by Hanssen were executed by Russia, Eringer was saved. There may be no one in the Russia collusion fairy tale who knows more about Russia than Eringer.
Eringer may have been projecting his relationship with Russia onto others like the Chandler brothers and Donald Trump. This explains his relationship with Don Berlin.
