On Saturday, January 15, 2022 at 8:00:05 PM UTC-6, Leroy N. Soetoro wrote:
> "The perfect target": Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years ex-
> KGB spy
>
> The KGB ‘played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his
> personality’, Yuri Shvets, a key source for a new book, tells the Guardian
> David Smith in Washington
> @smithinamerica
> Fri 29 Jan 2021 08.00 GMT
>
> Last modified on Fri 29 Jan 2021 18.32 GMT
>
> Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so
> willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in
> Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.
>
> Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s,
> compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy
> ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early
> cold war.
>
> Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by
> journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House
> of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with
> the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
>
> “This is an example where people were recruited when they were just
> students and then they rose to important positions; something like that
> was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in
> Virginia.
>
> Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for
> the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US
> permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a
> corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko,
> who was assassinated in London in 2006.
>
> Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977
> when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump
> became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s
> intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.
>
> Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the
> Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200
> television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-
> owned Joy-Lud electronics 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 that he had a
> relationship with the KGB.
>
> Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the
> first time. Shvets said he was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB
> operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.
>
> The ex-major recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had
> collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was
> personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable
> intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.
>
> “This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were
> immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who
> should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like
> him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active
> measures soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the
> KGB active measures at the time.”
>
> Soon after he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the
> Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in
> Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On 1 September, he took out a full-page advert
> in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe headlined:
> “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little
> backbone can’t cure.”
>
> The ad offered some highly unorthodox opinions in Ronald Reagan’s cold war
> America, accusing ally Japan of exploiting the US and expressing
> scepticism about US participation in Nato. It took the form of an open
> letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend
> countries that can afford to defend themselves”.
>
> The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in
> Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the
> headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he
> received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful “active measure”
> executed by a new KGB asset.
>
> “It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures
> starting in the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russia active
> measures, and I haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar –
> until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just
> silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his
> name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did
> and, finally, this guy became the president.”
>
> Trump’s election win in 2016 was again welcomed by Moscow. Special counsel
> Robert Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between members of the Trump
> campaign and the Russians. But the Moscow Project, an initiative of the
> Center for American Progress Action Fund, found the Trump campaign and
> transition team had at least 272 known contacts and at least 38 known
> meetings with Russia-linked operatives.
>
> Shvets, who has carried out his own investigation, said: “For me, the
> Mueller report was a big disappointment because people expected that it
> will be a thorough investigation of all ties between Trump and Moscow,
> when in fact what we got was an investigation of just crime-related
> issues. There were no counterintelligence aspects of the relationship
> between Trump and Moscow.”
>
> He added: “This is what basically we decided to correct. So I did my
> investigation and then got together with Craig. So we believe that his
> book will pick up where Mueller left off.”
>
> Unger, the author of seven books and a former contributing editor for
> Vanity Fair magazine, said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not this
> grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years
> later he’ll be president. At the time it started, which was around 1980,
> the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and
> dozens of people.”
>
> “Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism
> made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year
> period, right up through his election.”

On the bright side We converted Leroy!