‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as
asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy
Donald Trump’s election win in 2016 was welcomed by
Moscow.
David Smith
in Washington
@smithinamerica
Fri 29 Jan
2021 08.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/29/trump-russia-asset-claims-former-kgb-spy-new-book
Donald
Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to
parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former
KGB spy has told the Guardian.
Yuri
Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the
former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed
secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.
Now 67,
Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig
Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book
also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier
Jeffrey Epstein.
“This is an
example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they
rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,”
Shvets said by phone on 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 to the US permanently in 1993 and
gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and
was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.
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 near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the
hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on
Fifth Avenue.
According
to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called
“spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a
potential asset. Kislin denies that 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 fed by KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives
who floated the idea that he should go into the politics.
The
ex-major recalled: “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.
“This is
what they exploited. 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: it is people like him who could change the world.
They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. So it
was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”
Soon after
he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican
nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New
Hampshire. On 1 September, he took out a full-page advert 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 ad
offered some highly unorthodox opinions in Ronald Reagan’s cold war America,
accusing ally Japan of exploiting the US and expressing scepticism about US
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”.
The bizarre
intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days
later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the
KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating
the ad as a successful “active measure” executed by a new KGB asset.
“It was
unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in
the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russia active measures, and I
haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar – until Trump became the
president of this country – because it was just silly. It was hard to believe
that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real
serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the
president.”
Trump’s
election win in 2016 was again welcomed by Moscow. Special counsel Robert
Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between members of the Trump campaign
and the Russians. But 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.
Shvets, who
has carried out his own investigation, said: “For me, the Mueller report was a
big disappointment because people expected that it will be a thorough
investigation of all ties between Trump and Moscow, when in fact what we got
was an investigation of just crime-related issues. There were no
counterintelligence aspects of the relationship between Trump and Moscow.”
He added:
“This is what basically we decided to correct. So I did my investigation and
then got together with Craig. So we believe that his book will pick up where
Mueller left off.”
Unger, the
author of seven books and a former contributing editor for Vanity Fair
magazine, said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not this grand, ingenious
plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be
president. At the time it started, which was around 1980, the Russians were
trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.”
“Trump 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.”
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