Donald Trump
The Russian secret services have nurtured Donald Trump as their agent for 40 years. Former KGB intelligence officer Yuri Shvets said this in an interview with The Guardian.
“There are cases when people are recruited during their student years, and then they occupy important positions; something like this happened with Trump, ”the spy told the British newspaper. Craig Unger's book American Kompromat, based on Shvets's words, says that the businessman allegedly first came to the attention of the Russian special services back in 1977, when he married the Czech model Ivan Zelnichkova.
Three years later, he opened the Grand Hyatt New York Hotel, for which he bought 200 televisions from the Soviet émigré Semyon Kislin, who allegedly collaborated with the KGB. Shvets claims that it was Kislin who spotted Trump as a potential agent.
In 1987, the businessman first visited Moscow and St. Petersburg with his wife Ivana. The former intelligence officer claims that the KGB agents in every possible way cajoled Trump and instilled in him the idea of going into politics. “They thoroughly studied his personality, understood what kind of person he was. The KGB knew that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually and psychologically, prone to flattery, ”Shvets said.
Shortly after returning to the United States, Trump began to seriously consider the Republican presidential nomination. In the same 1987, he published a kind of appeal to the American people, in which he accused the allied Japan of exploiting the United States and expressed skepticism about US participation in NATO. According to Shvets, the KGB allegedly greeted this publication with jubilation. The ex-intelligence officer also claims that Moscow was very happy about Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election.
In April 2019, United States Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller published a report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The report says that Moscow did interfere in the American electoral process, but the existing suspicions about the connection between the Russian side and Trump could not be confirmed. Later, the Federal Court of Washington ruled that the connection of the “troll factory” with the Russian authorities was also not proven.
