For more than 40 years, the Soviet Union’s feared security service, the KGB, sought to recruit the United States’ former president, Donald Trump, claims a former KBG major.
When a young Donald Trump married the Czechoslovakian model Ivana Zelničkova in 1977, the real estate magnate, who later became the 45th president of the United States, ended up on the KGB’s radar.
The Soviet Union’s feared security and intelligence service became involved after Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service began to obtain and systematize intelligence about Trump and his new wife.
That marked the beginning of a nearly 40-year-long flirtation from the KGB side that culminated in jubilation when Trump was elected president in 2016. That is what the former KBG major, Yuri Shvets, maintains in the book “American Kompromat,” written by journalist and author Craig Unger.
’Perfect Target’
The former KGB major, who fled to the U.S. in 1993 and later became an American citizen, described Trump as the “perfect target” for recruiting.
His vanity and narcissism made him a natural fit for recruiting. He was cultivated across a 40-year-long period that was unbroken all the way up to the presidential election, Shvets told The Guardian.
The KGB major’s statements produced major headlines last week, when they were first published. Shvets was stationed in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, and worked as a KGB spy posing undercover as a journalist for the state news agency Tass.
He told The Guardian that he saw Trump mentioned as a KGB asset in classified documents.
Against the War Hawks
That Trump has been named as an asset, and not agent, has significant meaning, wrote the academic Kyle Cunliffe, media researcher at Aberystwyth University in Wales.
In the online newspaper The Conversation, a news medium where all the articles are written by researchers and academics, Cunliffe argued that the references to the KGB’s alleged attempt to recruit Trump lacked important nuances.
“’Assets’ in intelligence jargon can mean anything from full-blown agents (people who knowingly offer their country’s secrets to a foreign intelligence agency) to those who might serve some use along the way,” Cunliffe wrote.
They can also unconsciously run errands for another country’s intelligence service, he wrote.
“Few assets ever become spies proper,” he wrote, adding: “In many cases, an asset doesn’t even know they’re an asset.”
Neither Shvets nor Unger alleged that Trump knowingly and intentionally worked for the KGB or the Soviet Union.
“He was an asset. There was no great, ingenious plan to develop this guy to become president 40 years later. At that time, around 1980, Russians tried to recruit like mad,” Unger said.
Trump’s Moscow Visit
There was still great joy in the KGB after Trump’s first visit to Moscow in 1987, according to Shvets, who, back then, was working at the KGB’s main office in the Russian capital.
While Trump was in Moscow, a number of KGB officers made a preliminary approach to Trump to try to flatter him, according to Shvets. They also suggested that he should get started in American politics.
The KGB had collected a great deal of information on his personality. They felt that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually and politically, and was susceptible to flattery. They took advantage of that. They pretended they were tremendously impressed by his personality, and told him that it was people like him who should be president of the United States, Shvets said.
And not long after Trump returned from Moscow, he, for the first time, explored the possibility of running for president. He also took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe in which he criticized then-President Ronald Reagan’s foreign and security policies, according to The Guardian.
In the advertisement Trump accused Japan of sponging off the U.S., and expressed skepticism about American membership in NATO. The advertisement was in the form of an open letter about why America “should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.”
It was from the KGB’s assessment of this advertisement that they described Trump as an asset, Shvets claims.
Trump’s Russia Ties
Ever since Trump began to run for election in 2015, his and his companies’ contacts with Russians and Russia have been a hot topic. Even before the 2016 election, the existence of a series of ties between Trump, Trump’s campaign and persons with connections to Russian authorities was revealed.
It was claimed that Russians had compromising material on Trump, including from a hotel room in Moscow, but none of these allegations was ever verified.
After Trump’s election victory, a special counsel was appointed from the U.S. Justice Department. The mission was to look for connections to Russia’s apparent meddling in the presidential election, and the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
After an extensive and lengthy investigation, led by former FBI Director Robert Mueller, there was no documentary proof found to indicate that Trump or anyone in his organization or circles in any way collaborated with Russians.
A number of Trump’s close aides were nevertheless charged, prosecuted and little by little sentenced for a range of other criminal affairs, which were all uncovered in the course of Mueller’s investigation.
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