© GettyGetty
- The KGB cultivated Donald Trump as an asset for 40 years and he proved a highly valuable asset in repeating anti-western Russian propaganda, a former KGB operative has claimed.
- Yuri Shvets told the Guardian that the KGB had identified Trump as a potential asset in the 1980s.
- He says they were stunned when he returned from a trip from Moscow and took out a full-page advert in newspapers repeating anti-western Russian talking points.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
The KGB cultivated Donald Trump as an asset for 40 years and he proved a highly valuable asset in repeating anti-western Russian propaganda in the United States, a former KGB operative has claimed.
Yuri Shvets is a key source in "American Kompromat," a new book detailing the decades-long relationship between Trump and Russia by the journalist Craig Unger.
The book, which is based on interviews with former Russian and US operatives, details the KGB's attempts in the 1980s to cultivate dozens of unwitting businesspeople in the United States as useful Russian assets.
Shvets told the Guardian newspaper that the KGB had identified Trump, then an up-and-coming property developer, as a potential asset in the 1980s.
"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 told the paper.
The book's author states that 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 grand, ingenious plan that we're going to develop this guy and 40 years later he'll be president," Unger told the Guardian.
"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."
According to his 1987 book "The Art of the Deal," Trump had visited Moscow to discuss building "a large luxury hotel across the street from the Kremlin in partnership with the Soviet government."
In fact, Russian operatives used the trip to flatter Trump and told him he should go into politics, Shvets said. He told the Guardian that KGB operatives were then stunned to discover that Trump had returned to the United States, mooted a potential run for office, and taken out a full-page advert in several newspapers which echoed several anti-Western Russian talking points.
The advert, which ran in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Boston Globe, was titled "There's nothing wrong with America's Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can't cure."
Trump in the advert attacked Japan for "taking advantage" of the United States and said the US should stop paying to defend other rich countries - arguments which would become the backbone of his foreign policy when he became president decades later.
Shvets said that the advert was considered an "unprecedented" success in Russia's attempts to promote anti-Western talking points in American media.
Trump has long denied that he had any financial connections to Russia, tweeting in 2017: ""Russia has never tried to use leverage over me," he tweeted in 2017. "I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!"
Special counsel Robert Mueller's extensive and high-profile investigation into potential Russian interference in the 2016 election ultimately found that Trump's campaign did not coordinate with Russia to unduly influence the election.
Several senior members of Trump's campaign, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, had 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.