The Guardian: Russian intelligence recruited Trump for 40 years

The KGB "played the game as if his personality had made a huge impression on them," said The Guardian Yuri Shvets, key source of information for the new book by journalist Craig Unger.

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Donald Trump has been "worked as an asset" to Russia for more than 40 years, a former KGB spy has said.

Yuri Shvets, sent to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to the Cambridge Five, a British spy network that passed secrets to Moscow during World War II and the early Cold War.

Shvets, 67, is a key source for the American book Kompromat, a new work by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump and House of Putin. The book also explores the former president's relationship with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

“This is an example of people being hired as students and then moving into important positions; something similar happened with Trump,” Shvets said by phone from his home in Virginia.

Shvets, a KGB major, worked as a correspondent for the Russian news agency TASS in Washington in the 1980s. In 1993, he moved to the United States permanently and received American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was killed in London in 2006.

Unger describes how Trump first appeared on Russians' radars in 1977, when he married Czech model Ivan Zelnichkova. Trump became the target of an espionage operation controlled by the Czechoslovak secret service in cooperation with the KGB.

Three years later, Trump opened his first major property, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central Station in New York. He bought 200 televisions for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned the Joy-Lud electronics store 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 any connection with the KGB.

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In 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St. Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said Trump was “fed” KGB talking points and was flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.

“For the KGB it was a charm attack. They had collected a lot of information about his personality, so they knew what kind of person he was. There was a feeling that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually and psychologically, and prone to flattery, the ex-major recalled. - That's what they used. They played the game as if they were extremely impressed by his personality, as if they believed that this was the guy who should one day become President of the United States: people like him could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures of soundbeat, and it happened. So this was a great achievement for the active actions of the KGB at that time."

Soon after returning to the United States, Trump began to explore the Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He bought back strips for his political ads in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. The ad expressed highly non-standard views of America in the Cold War under Ronald Reagan, accusing the allied Japan of exploiting the United States and expressing skepticism about US involvement in NATO. He chose the form of an open letter to the American people in the spirit of "why America should stop paying to protect countries that can afford to defend themselves."

This caused surprise and jubilation in Russia, the newspaper notes. A few days later, Shvets, who by this time had returned home, was at the headquarters of the first KGB headquarters in Yasenevo, when he received a telegram in which a successful "active measure" was being carried out by the new KGB agent.

“It was unprecedented. I'm pretty familiar with KGB active measures from the early 70s and 80s and then Russian active measures, and I didn't hear anything like this until Trump became president of this country. It was hard to believe that someone would publish it under his name and that it would impress real serious people in the West, but it happened, and finally this guy became president,” Shvets said.

Trump's election victory in 2016 was again welcomed in Moscow. Special Counsel Robert Mueller did not establish any collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. But the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Action Fund for American Progress, found that the Trump campaign and transition team had at least 272 known contacts and at least 38 known meetings with Russian-linked operatives.

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Shvets, who conducted his own investigation, said: “For me, the Mueller report was a great disappointment, because people expected it to be a thorough investigation of all the links between Trump and Moscow, although in reality what we received was an investigation only on issues, related to crime. There were no counterintelligence aspects in the relationship between Trump and Moscow. "

“So I did my research and then I met with Craig. So we believe his book will pick up where Mueller left off,” he said.

Unger, author of seven books and former editor of Vanity Fair magazine, said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not a grandiose, brilliant plan, according to which they were going to develop him, so that in 40 years he would become president. At the time it started, around 1980, the Russians tried to recruit like crazy, persecuting dozens and dozens of people. "

“Trump was an ideal target in many ways: his vanity and narcissism made him a natural target for recruitment. He was “processed” for 40 years, until his election,” he added.

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