Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset for 40 years and proved so willing to publish anti-Western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy told The Guardian.
Yuri Shvets, sent to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to the “Cambridge Five”, the British spy ring that secretly went to Moscow during World War II and World War I. cold.
Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous work includes House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the financially dishonored Jeffrey Epstein.
“This is an example of recruiting people when they were just students and then came to important positions; something like that was happening to Trump, “Shvets said by phone Monday from his home in Virginia.
Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved permanently to the United States in 1993 and obtained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security researcher and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.
Unger describes how Trump first appeared on Russian radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of an espionage operation overseen by the Czechoslovak intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.
Three years later, Trump opened his first major real estate development, the Grand Hyatt New York Hotel, near Grand Central Station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet emigrant who owned the Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue.
According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as the so-called “locating agent” who identified Trump, a growing young businessman, as a potential asset. Kislin denies he had a relationship with the KGB.
Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St. Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he was fueled by KGB talk points and flattered by KGB agents who raised the idea that he should get into politics.
The former major recalled: “For the KGB, it was an offensive charm. They had gathered a lot of information about his personality, so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually and psychologically and that he was prone to flattery.
“It simply came to our notice then. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed that this would be the type that should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these active sound calls of active measures and passed. It was therefore a great success for the KGB’s active measures at the time. “
Shortly after returning to the United States, Trump began exploring a Republican candidacy for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On Sept. 1, he published a full-page ad in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, headlining, “There’s nothing wrong with U.S. foreign policy that a small backbone can’t to cure”.
The announcement offered some very unorthodox views on Ronald Reagan’s Cold War of America, accusing ally Japan of exploiting the U.S. and expressing skepticism about U.S. involvement in NATO. It took the form of an open letter to the American people “about why the United States should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.”
The strange intervention caused surprise and joy in Russia. A few days later, Shvets, who had already returned home, was at the headquarters of the first KGB director general in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the announcement as a successful “active measure” executed by a new KGB asset.
“It simply came to our notice then. I’m pretty familiar with the KGB’s active measures in the early 70s and 80s, and then with Russia’s active measures, and I didn’t hear anything like it or anything like it, until Trump became the president of that country, because just silly. It was hard to believe that someone would publish it with his name and that it would impress serious people in the west, but he did, and eventually this guy became the president. ”
Moscow again received Trump’s electoral victory in 2016. Special Adviser Robert Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. But Project Moscow, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, found that Trump’s campaign and transition team had at least 272 known contacts and at least 38 known meetings with agents linked to Russia.
Shvets, who has conducted his own investigation, said: “For me, the Mueller report was a big disappointment because people hoped it would be a thorough investigation of all the ties between Trump and Moscow. when in reality what we got was an investigation only of crime-related issues. There were no counterintelligence aspects of the Trump-Moscow relationship. “
He added: “This is what we basically decided to correct. So I did my research and then met with Craig. Therefore, we believe that his book will be collected where Mueller left off ”.
Unger, the author of seven books and a publisher who contributed to Vanity Fair magazine said of Trump, “It was a good thing. It was not this great and ingenious plan that we will develop for this boy and 40 years later he will be president. By the time it started, which was around 1980, the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and they were going to look for dozens and dozens of people. “
“Trump was the perfect target in many ways: his vanity, his narcissism made him a natural target for recruiting. He was cultivated for a period of 40 years, until his election.”