- The KGB has been cultivating Donald Trump as an asset for 40 years and he was a very valuable asset in repeating anti-Western Russian propaganda, a former KGB agent claimed.
- Yuri Shvets told the Guardian that the KGB identified Trump as a potential asset in the 1980s.
- He says they were stunned when he returned from a trip from Moscow and pulled out a full-page advertisement in newspapers repeating anti-Western Russian discussion points.
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The KGB has been cultivating Donald Trump as an asset for 40 years and he has been a very valuable asset in repeating anti-Western Russian propaganda in the United States, a former KGB agent has claimed.
Yuri Shvets is a key source in American Compromise, a new book that outlines the decades-long relationship between Trump and Russia by journalist Craig Unger.
The book, based on interviews with former Russian and American collaborators, describes the KGB’s efforts in the 1980s to cultivate dozens of unconscious businessmen in the United States as useful Russian assets.
Shvets told the Guardian newspaper that the KGB identified Trump, then an emerging real estate developer, as a potential asset in the 1980s.
‘This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then came to important positions; “Something like that happened to Trump,” Shvets told the newspaper.
According to the author of the book, Trump first became a target for the Russians in 1977 when he married his first wife, the Czech model Ivana Zelnickova.
“He was an asset. It was not this wonderful, ingenious plan that we were going to develop this man and 40 years later he will be president,” Unger told the Guardian.
“Trump was the perfect target in many ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target. He was nurtured for a period of 40 years, throughout his election.”
According to his 1987 book “The Art of the Deal”, Trump visited Moscow to build a large luxury hotel across the Kremlin in partnership with the Soviet government.
In fact, Russian agents used the trip to flatter Trump and told him he should go into politics, Shvets said. He told the Guardian that KGB agents were then surprised to discover that Trump had returned to the United States, selected a potential candidate, and pulled out a full-page advertisement in several newspapers containing several anti-Western Russian discussion points. is reproduced.
The ad, which appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times and Boston Globe, was titled “There is nothing wrong with U.S. foreign policy that a small backbone cannot cure.”
Trump attacked Japan in the ad because he “exploited” the United States, saying that the US should stop defending other rich countries – arguments that would become the backbone of his foreign policy when he became president decades later.
Shvets said the ad was seen as an “unprecedented” success in Russia’s efforts to advance anti-Western rhetoric in US media.
Trump has long denied having financial ties with Russia and tweeted in 2017: “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me,” he tweeted in 2017. “NO NOTHING!”
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s extensive and sensational investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election ultimately found that Trump’s campaign did not coordinate with Russia to improperly influence the election.
Several senior members of Trump’s campaign, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, have previously pleaded guilty to lying to prosecutors about their contacts with Russian government-linked individuals.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, also pleaded guilty in 2018 to lying to a Senate committee about attempts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.