- The KGB has cultivated Donald Trump as a resource for 40 years and he has proven to be a highly valuable resource in the repetition of Russian anti-Western propaganda, said a former KGB agent.
- Yuri Shvets told the Guardian that the KGB identified Trump as a potential asset in the 1980s.
- He says they were shocked when he returned from a Moscow trip and published a full-page ad in newspapers repeating Russia’s anti-Western discussion points.
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The KGB has cultivated Donald Trump as an asset for 40 years and he has proven to be a highly valuable resource in repeating Russian anti-Western propaganda in the United States, said a former KGB agent.
Yuri Shvets is an important source in “American Kompromat”, a new book that details the decades-long relationship between Trump and Russia by journalist Craig Unger.
The book, which is based on interviews with former Russian and American agents, details the KGB’s attempts in the 1980s to cultivate dozens of involuntary entrepreneurs in the United States as useful Russian assets.
Shvets told the Guardian newspaper that the KGB identified Trump, then a promising real estate developer, as a potential asset in the 1980s.
“This is an example in which people were recruited when they were just students and then reached important positions; something like this was happening to Trump, ”Shvets told the newspaper.
The author of the book claims that Trump became a target for Russians in 1977 when he married his first wife, Czech model Ivana Zelnickova.
“He was an asset. It wasn’t that big, ingenious plan that we are going to develop this guy and 40 years later he will be president,” Unger told the Guardian.
“Trump was the perfect target in many ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated for a period of 40 years, until his election.”
According to his 1987 book “The Art of Business”, Trump visited Moscow to discuss the construction of “a large luxury hotel across the street from the Kremlin in partnership with the Soviet government”.
In fact, Russian agents used the trip to flatter Trump and say he should get into politics, Shvets said. He told the Guardian that KGB agents were surprised to find that Trump had returned to the United States, suggested a possible candidacy for the post and published a full-page ad in several newspapers that echoed several anti-Western Russian talking points.
The ad, running in the Washington Post, New York Times and Boston Globe, was entitled “There is nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone cannot cure”.
Trump in the ad attacked Japan for “taking advantage” of the United States and said the United States should stop paying to defend other wealthy countries – arguments that would become the backbone of its foreign policy when he became president decades later.
Shvets said the announcement was considered an “unprecedented” success in Russia’s attempts to promote anti-Western talking points in the American media.
Trump has long denied that he has any financial connection to Russia, tweeting in 2017: “” Russia never tried to take advantage of me, “he tweeted in 2017.” I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO NEGOTIATIONS, NO LOANS, NOTHING! “
Special adviser Robert Mueller’s extensive, high-level investigation into potential Russian interference in the 2016 elections eventually found that the Trump campaign did not coordinate with Russia to unduly influence the election.
Several key members of the Trump campaign, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, had already pleaded guilty to lying to prosecutors about their contacts with individuals linked to the Russian government.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, also pleaded guilty in 2018 to lying to a Senate committee about attempts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.