Further confirming what I wrote in this space last week, about the fact that the Soviet KGB began cultivating Trump as an agent of influence in 1987, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, “American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power and Treachery,” provides details about this critical information.
Unger writes that a former KGB spy now living in Northern Virginia revealed that Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over a 40 year period, so eager to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow.
Yuri Shvets, now 67, was posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s. He is a key source for Unger’s new book, the latest of seven. A KGB major, he had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the U.S. permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship and now works as a corporate security investigator.
Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.
Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics.
According to Shvets, although he denies it, Kislin worked as a “spotter agent” for the KGB and he identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset.
Then, in 1987, Trump visited Moscow for the first time. Shvets said he was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.
Shvets recalled in a recent phone conversation reported by Andrew Tobias: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.
“They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: people like him who could change the world,” Shvets said.
Soon after he returned to the U.S., Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president and held a campaign rally in New Hampshire. He took full-page ads in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe headlined, “There’s Nothing Wrong With America’s Foreign Defense Policy That a Little Backbone Can’t Cure.”
The ads accused Japan of exploiting the U.S. and expressing skepticism about U.S. participation in NATO. It took the form of an “open letter to the American people on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.”
A few days later Shvets, who had returned to Moscow, was at the KGB headquarters in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating Trump’s ad as a successful “active measure” executed by a new KGB asset.
“It was unprecedented. I am familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russian active measures, and I hadn’t heard anything like that or anything similar until Trump became the president of this country. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish this under his name and impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president,” Shvets said.
Trump’s election win in 2016 was again welcomed by Moscow. The Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, found the Trump campaign and transition team had at least 272 known contacts and at least 38 known meetings with Russia-linked operatives.
Unger, a former contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, says of Trump: “He was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.”
