To Donald Trump, at least, few candidates must have seemed as well qualified to become his national security adviser as chisel-jawed all-American hero General Mike Flynn, retired.
On paper, the 58-year-old former Lieutnant General had it all, from a distinguished 33-year career in the intelligence branch of the US Army, during which he earned a chest full of medals serving in theatres including Afghanistan and Iraq, to his appointment by president Barack Obama in 2012 as director of the Defence Intelligence Agency.
Then there was his ferocious support for Trump in the presidential election campaign, during which Flynn – once a registered Democrat – was brought on board as an adviser and demonstrated such enthusiasm for his boss’s world view that he was considered for the vice-presidential nomination.
The job of national security adviser, once held by the likes of Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, was a shining consolation. Appointed by the president without congressional oversight, the adviser has the president’s ear on national security matters.
Flynn, the man who had it all, was about to add a final feather to his cap. Unfortunately, he also had something else – a series of inappropriate and curiously timed telephone conversations with the Russian ambassador to the US, secretly recorded by the FBI, which have revived suspicions that the Kremlin interfered with the US presidential election.
The scandal has cost Flynn his job, triggered a call by Democrats and Republicans alike for a wide-ranging investigation into his and the administration’s links with Russia and left president Trump looking at best hapless and at worst dangerously compromised.
Michael Thomas Flynn was born in December 1958, one of a family of nine children raised on Rhode Island by his "tough Irish" parents Helen and Charles, an army veteran of the Second World War and Korean war who made it no farther up the chain of command than sergeant first-class.
The army was an obvious choice for the son of a man who "taught me that the name soldier is the proudest name anyone can bear", as Flynn once recalled. Graduating from the University of Rhode Island in 1981 in management science, Flynn was commissioned into military intelligence as a second lieutenant.
Promotions quickly followed, as an article in the university’s alumni magazine in 2009 recalled.
At first, Flynn wasn’t sure he wanted to be a career soldier but, as he told the magazine, "after getting to know some of the best people …. in our country, you can’t help but want to be around [them] all the time".
Pausing only to marry his high-school sweetheart, Lori Andrade, in 1982, Flynn shot up the army career ladder. By August 2014, when he retired as director of the Defence Intelligence Agency and brought his distinguished 33-year army career to a close, he seemed to have reached the top.
Only, as he claimed in a book last year, he was "fired" as director of the agency by president Obama "after telling a congressional committee that we were not as safe as we had been a few years back". Insiders blamed an increasingly "disruptive" management style.
Flynn responded with a counter-blast, published in July last year. The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, is a discomforting mix of boastfulness and bellicosity. Describing himself as "a maverick, an atypical square peg in a round hole", Flynn portrays himself as a lone voice. America, he says, is "in a world war, but very few Americans recognise it".
As for the Obama administration, it had "forbidden us to describe our enemies properly and clearly: they are Radical Islamists" and he made no secret of his broader contempt for Islam.

Source: The National