Donald Trump has been cultivated as a Russian asset for more than 40 years and has been so willing to repeat 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 President of the United States to the “Cambridge Five”, the British spy network that passed secrets to Moscow during World War II and the start of the cold war .
Now 67, Shvets is an important 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 ex-president’s relationship with financial wretch Jeffrey Epstein.
“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they came to important positions; something like this was happening to Trump, ”Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.
KGB major Shvets worked as a Washington correspondent for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained US citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner in Alexander Litvinenko, who was murdered 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 Czechoslovakian 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 Semyon Kislin hotel, a Soviet emigrant who co-owned Joy-Lud Electronics on Fifth Avenue.
According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as an alleged “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denies having a relationship with the KGB.
Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St. Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he received talking points from the KGB and was flattered by KGB members who suggested he should get into politics.
The former major recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected 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 prone to praise.
“This is what they explored. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed with his personality and believed that this is the guy who should one day be the president of the United States: it’s people like him who can change the world. They fed him with these so-called catchphrases of active measures and it happened. So it was a great achievement for the active measures of the KGB at the time ”.
Shortly after returning to the United States, Trump began exploring a race for the Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On September 1, he published a full-page ad in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe with the headline: “There is nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone cannot cure” .
The announcement offered some highly unorthodox views on Ronald Reagan’s cold war in America, accusing Japan’s ally of exploiting the United States and expressing skepticism about US participation in NATO. It took the form of an open letter to the American people “about why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves”.
The bizarre intervention was a source of astonishment and joy in Russia. A few days later, Shvets, who had now returned home, was at the headquarters of the first KGB chief executive in Yasenevo when he received a telegram celebrating the announcement as an “active measure” of success carried out by a new KGB asset.
“It was unprecedented. I am very well acquainted with the active measures of the KGB beginning in the early 70s and 80s, and then with the active measures of Russia, and I did not hear anything like it or something – until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just Stew. It was hard to believe that someone would publish it on his behalf and that it would impress really serious people in the West, but it did, and ultimately this guy became the president. “
Trump’s victory in the 2016 elections was again hailed by Moscow. 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 the American Progress Action Fund, found that the Trump campaign and the transition team had at least 272 known contacts and at least 38 known meetings with Russian-related operatives.
Shvets, who conducted his own investigation, said: “For me, the Mueller report was a huge disappointment because people expected it to be a complete investigation of all ties between Trump and Moscow, when in fact what we got was an investigation only crime-related issues. There were no counter-espionage aspects to the relationship between Trump and Moscow. “
He added: “This is what we basically decided to correct. So I did my investigation and met with Craig. Therefore, we believe that your book will continue where Mueller left off. “
Unger, the author of seven books and a former collaborating editor for Vanity Fair magazine, said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not this big and ingenious plan that we are going to develop this guy and 40 years later he will be president. At the time it started, around 1980, the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and were chasing dozens and dozens of people ”.
“Trump was the perfect target in many ways: his vanity and narcissism made him a natural target for recruiting. It was cultivated for a period of 40 years, until its election. “