Caught in the Crossfire Hurricane Crosshairs: An Interview With Svetlana Lokhova, Part 1 – The Setup'
When Cambridge graduate student Svetlana Lokhova, who was studying espionage history in hopes of writing a book on Soviet spies in 1930s U.S. academia, accepted a dinner invitation organized by Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6 who was then master of Pembroke College, in 2014, she never imagined 3 years later she would be bombarded by a gaggle of prominent reporters, almost on the same day, asking her about a conversation she’d had with a man who had also been in attendance at that dinner, and one she says she barely remembered: Ret. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. Nor did she imagine, when she saw her name later in the press as a woman who had apparently gone home with Flynn that night, she was being used in what she found out later — and has now become something of an expert on as she’s attempted to clear her name — was “a very serious intelligence operation” that was intended to stop the dual disruptors of Flynn, who as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) under Barack Obama had wanted to audit the intelligence services and was fired; and new President Donald Trump, who had run on “draining the swamp” and had recently hired Flynn as his national security adviser against Obama’s warnings. “I had deleted all the emails about that dinner,” Lokhova told RedState. “I had a newborn and quite frankly couldn’t even remember who Flynn was.”
She says she was later told by her professor, after reports began appearing in British and American media outlets that she was a Russian agent and possible “honeytrap” for Flynn, that it was all just a misinterpretation by the press about overblown squabbles on campus. Lokhova had been picked up from that dinner by her now-husband. “At that stage, I didn’t realize it was an intelligence operation. I thought it was just anti-Russian nonsense in the press and wanted to clear the record and tell everyone to stop seeing Russian spies everywhere,” she says. However she did know where the information was coming from because the source was reported to have been an American and there was only one American she knew at Cambridge who also knew about the dinner: Stefan Halper.
