KGB spy: Soviet Union began working with Trump in 1977

From: Sophie Tanha

Published: February 6, 2021 at 00.22
Updated: February 6, 2021 at 00.51

The Soviet Union had its eyes on Trump as early as 1977, reveals former spy Yuri Shvets.

KBG even then began to persuade the promising businessman to enter politics.

– He had an intellectual vulnerability and was weak for flattery, says the former agent.

It was when he married his first wife, Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, that the KGB first caught the eye of Donald Trump, former Soviet spy Yuri Shvets tells The Guardian.

-It is a case like this in which someone is already recruited as students and then reaches important positions, that is what happened to Trump, he tells the newspaper.

In 1977, Trump was a promising young businessman who would soon build his first major property in New York, the Grand Hyatt Hotel near Grand Central Station. When the hotel was to be outfitted with 200 televisions three years later, he bought them from an electronics store on Fifth Avenue, which was partly owned by a Soviet emigrant under the control of the KGB. The operation had begun.

Photo: Marty Lederhandler / TT

In ung Donald Trump, 1985.

Studied his personality

Ten years after the KGB noted Trump as a possible asset to the agency, he and Ivana traveled to Moscow and St. Petersburg for the first time. Yuri Shvets, who in the 1980s was stationed in Washington under the pretext that he worked for the Russian news agency Tass, says the KGB was behind the trip. He was fed comments and was flattered by the idea that he should enter politics, Shvets says.

– For the KGB, it was an offensive of charm. They had gathered a lot of information about his personality, so they knew who he was. The perception was that he was very intellectually vulnerable and weak to flattery, he says.

In his book “The Art of the Deal” from the same year of the trip, 1987, Trump himself wrote about how he was inspired to travel to the Soviet Union after sitting with then-Republican ambassador Yuri Dubinin at dinner. Dubinin’s daughter had learned all about Trump Tower, something that flattered him.

“One thing led to another, and suddenly we are talking about building a big luxury hotel in front of the Kremlin with the Soviet government,” Donald Trump wrote in the book.

Candidate after trip to the Soviet Union

– This is what they used. They played the game as if they were incredibly impressed with his personality and thought that one day he might become president of the United States, that it was people like him who could change the world. They gave him that kind of motto, and it happened. So it was a great achievement for the KGB investment at the time, says Yuri Shvets.

Shortly after Trump returned to the United States, he began exploring the possibility of running as a Republican presidential candidate and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Trump bought an entire page in the NY Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe that read “There is not a flaw in America’s foreign defense that can’t heal the spine a little.” He published an open letter containing unconventional views during the Cold War, including how the United States should “stop paying to defend other countries that can afford to defend themselves.”

Yuri Shvets, who was at the KGB headquarters in Yasanevo when the full-page ads were published, received messages celebrating the announcement and the successful investment in the latest KGB asset.

– It was outstanding. I am quite familiar with all the active efforts the KGB had during the ’70s and’ 80s and the Russian investments after that, but I had never heard of anything like this until Trump became president, Yuri Shvets tells The Guardian.

– It was hard to believe that someone wrote this and that it would impress serious people in the West, but they did, and in the end this guy became president.

Published: February 6, 2021 at 00.22