https://trumpfile.org/folders/russia/ In a phone call with The Guardian, former KGB spy Yuri Shvets claims that Donald Trump began operating as a Russian asset over 40 years ago. The interview with Shvets is promotion for a new book by Craig Unger, American Kompromat. Shvets is one of Unger’s sources in the book. Trump File has obtained a copy and will add pertinent information to the site in coming weeks. In the meantime, here’s what we know from The Guardian: According to Shvets, Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana. We already knew that Czechoslovakia’s intelligence agency was spying on Trump at that time. Shvets reveals that the Czech operation was coordinated with the KGB. In 1980, Trump bought 200 television sets for the Grand Hyatt New York hotel. The store he bought them from, Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue, was controlled by the KGB. The store co-owner, Semyon Kislin, allegedly worked as a “spotter agent” and identified Trump as a possible asset. When Donald and Ivana visited Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1987, Trump was “fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.” That’s when he was hooked. 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. Yuri Shvets, The Guardian As soon as Trump returned to the U.S., he started planning his first presidential campaign with the help of Roger Stone, who was also working with Paul Manafort. (It’s worth noting that one of Trump’s first campaign messages in 1987 was that he wanted to align the U.S. with Russia to “dominate” less powerful countries.) In September, Trump took out an ad attacking NATO and accusing our allies in Japan of exploiting us. The Kremlin saw the ad as Trump’s first successful “active measure” as one of their assets. 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. Shvets In 1988, after Trump’s campaign was over, Czech intelligence reported that he is being prepped for another campaign in the future, likely 1996. This could be a coincidence, but Trump was first seen with Robert and Ghislaine Maxwell only a year later. Maxwell was also believed to be a KGB asset in addition to working for Israel’s Mossad. According to Unger, there was no detailed plan to make Trump president. A lot of people were targeted for recruitment as KGB assets in the ’80s. Trump was just the “perfect target.” More on Yuri Shvets: In the 1980s, Russia’s KGB stationed Shvets in Washington, disguised as a correspondent for Russian news agency Tass. In 1993, he moved to the U.S. permanently and became a citizen. One of his KGB partners was Alexander Litvinenko who was assassinated after he started digging in to other Russian operations and connections between Vladimir Putin and Semion Mogilevich. Shvets agreed to help with Unger’s investigations because he was disappointed by the Mueller report. 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… 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. External Source The Guardian https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/29/trump-russia-asset-claims-former-kgb-spy-new-book?__twitter_impression=true Photo: CNN