“They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. When Trump opened the Grand Hyatt New York hotel in 1980, he bought hundreds of televisions from a Russian immigrant who was a KGB spotter and who highlighted him as a potential asset, being an up-and-coming businessman.Īnd when Trump visited Moscow in 1987, he was unknowingly in contact with KGB agents who launched “a charm offensive” on the real estate developer, Shvets said. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election,” Shvets told the Guardian.įormer President Ronald Reagan shaking hands with President Donald Trump and Ivana Trump during the State Visit of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia at the state dinner in the Blue Room, 1985 (White House/ Ronald Reagan Presidential Library) “Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: His vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. The book says Russian officials repeatedly helped Trump get through dire financial straits over the years, providing him with laundered money to support his businesses.

In it he makes the assertion that Trump’s relationship to Russia as president - one in which he appeared repeatedly averse to criticize Moscow and often took actions seen as desirable to leader Vladimir Putin– was directly tied to his cultivation by Russia over long years. Unger’s book is based on interviews with numerous sources, including Soviet defectors and ex-CIA agents. “He was an asset,” former KGB spy Yuri Shvets, who worked for the KGB in Washington DC for years in the 1980s, told journalist Craig Unger in the new book American Kompromat. Former US president Donald Trump was nurtured as a Russian asset for decades, starting in 1980, a new book claims, with Moscow actively encouraging the businessman to enter politics many years before he won the presidency and supporting him through numerous failed business ventures as it built a “deep” relationship with the mogul.

Trump spy network