"The Perfect Target." -- KGB on Trump in 1977
‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy
The KGB ‘played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality’, Yuri Shvets, a key source for a new book, tells the Guardian
by David Smith
The Guardian, January 29, 2021
Excerpt…
“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 said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.
Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.
Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.
Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue.
According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/29/trump-russia-asset-claims-former-kgb-spy-new-book
Craig Unger courageously lifted up the lid...
Trump’s Russian Laundromat
How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House.
By CRAIG UNGER
The New Republic, July , 2017
Excerpt...
Trump made his first trip to Russia in 1987, only a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Invited by Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin, Trump was flown to Moscow and Leningrad—all expenses paid—to talk business with high-ups in the Soviet command. In The Art of the Deal, Trump recounted the lunch meeting with Dubinin that led to the trip. “One thing led to another,” he wrote, “and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.”
Over the years, Trump and his sons would try and fail five times to build a new Trump Tower in Moscow. But for Trump, what mattered most were the lucrative connections he had begun to make with the Kremlin—and with the wealthy Russians who would buy so many of his properties in the years to come. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. boasted at a real estate conference in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
The money, illicit and otherwise, began to rain in earnest after the Soviet Union fell in 1991. President Boris Yeltsin’s shift to a market economy was so abrupt that cash-rich gangsters and corrupt government officials were able to privatize and loot state-held assets in oil, coal, minerals, and banking. Yeltsin himself, in fact, would later describe Russia as “the biggest mafia state in the world.” After Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin as president, Russian intelligence effectively joined forces with the country’s mobsters and oligarchs, allowing them to operate freely as long as they strengthen Putin’s power and serve his personal financial interests. According to James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Company who consulted on the Panama Papers, some $1.3 trillion in illicit capital has poured out of Russia since the 1990s.
At the top of the sprawling criminal enterprise was Semion Mogilevich. Beginning in the early 1980s, according to the FBI, the short, squat Ukrainian was the key money-laundering contact for the Solntsevskaya Bratva, or Brotherhood, one of the richest criminal syndicates in the world. Before long, he was running a multibillion-dollar worldwide racket of his own. Mogilevich wasn’t feared because he was the most violent gangster, but because he was reputedly the smartest. The FBI has credited the “brainy don,” who holds a degree in economics from Lviv University, with a staggering range of crimes. He ran drug trafficking and prostitution rings on an international scale; in one characteristic deal, he bought a bankrupt airline to ship heroin from Southeast Asia into Europe. He used a jewelry business in Moscow and Budapest as a front for art that Russian gangsters stole from museums, churches, and synagogues all over Europe. He has also been accused of selling some $20 million in stolen weapons, including ground-to-air missiles and armored troop carriers, to Iran. “He uses this wealth and power to not only further his criminal enterprises,” the FBI says, “but to influence governments and their economies.”
In Russia, Mogilevich’s influence reportedly reaches all the way to the top. In 2005, Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian intelligence agent who defected to London, recorded an interview with investigators detailing his inside knowledge of the Kremlin’s ties to organized crime. “Mogilevich,” he said in broken English, “have good relationship with Putin since 1994 or 1993.” A year later Litvinenko was dead, apparently poisoned by agents of the Kremlin.
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https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate
The stuff the deleted story needed to withstand the lawyers of MAGA…
The Hidden History of Trump's First Trip to Moscow
In 1987, a young real estate developer traveled to the Soviet Union. The KGB almost certainly made the trip happen.
By LUKE HARDING
Politico, November 19, 2017
It was 1984 and General Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov had a problem. The general occupied one of the KGB’s most exalted posts. He was head of the First Chief Directorate, the prestigious KGB arm responsible for gathering foreign intelligence.
Kryuchkov had begun his career with five years at the Soviet mission in Budapest under Ambassador Yuri Andropov. In 1967 Andropov became KGB chairman. Kryuchkov went to Moscow, took up a number of sensitive posts, and established a reputation as a devoted and hardworking officer. By 1984, Kryuchkov’s directorate in Moscow was bigger than ever before—12,000 officers, up from about 3,000 in the 1960s. His headquarters at Yasenevo, on the wooded southern outskirts of the city, was expanding: Workmen were busy constructing a 22-story annex and a new 11-story building.
In politics, change was in the air. Soon a new man would arrive in the Kremlin, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s policy of detente with the West—a refreshing contrast to the global confrontation of previous general secretaries—meant the directorate’s work abroad was more important than ever.
Snipski...
The most revealing section concerned kompromat. The document asked for: “Compromising information about subject, including illegal acts in financial and commercial affairs, intrigues, speculation, bribes, graft … and exploitation of his position to enrich himself.” Plus “any other information” that would compromise the subject before “the country’s authorities and the general public.” Naturally the KGB could exploit this by threatening “disclosure.”
Finally, “his attitude towards women is also of interest.” The document wanted to know: “Is he in the habit of having affairs with women on the side?”
When did the KGB open a file on Donald Trump? We don’t know, but Eastern Bloc security service records suggest this may have been as early as 1977. That was the year when Trump married Ivana Zelnickova, a twenty-eight-year-old model from Czechoslovakia. Zelnickova was a citizen of a communist country. She was therefore of interest both to the Czech intelligence service, the StB, and to the FBI and CIA.
Continues...
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/19/trump-first-moscow-trip-215842/
No wonder Putin, the Kremlin and the GRU and whatever the KGB is called these days call him "America's Gorbachev." Gorby sped up the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Now Putin returns the favor.
So, Donald J Trump represents the most successful spy operation of all time. And thanks to Just-us John Roberts redefining the meaning of "Insurrection" and the very words of the Constitution of the United States of America, an active Russian agent has been allowed to return to the Oval Office to again "serve" as the pee-resident.
Normally, I'd say: "Think about that!" But, destroying truth is what tyrants do. It's why they hate a free press. It's why trumpf is doing all he can to sue anyone who ever wrote anything bad about him. Now he has the DoJ doing his dirty work and handing the legal bill to the U.S. taxpayer.
The photo of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and dip above was taken by TASS, the official Russian news agency. The US media were not informed about the 2017 visit. We learned about it because the Unstable Moron himself spread the pic proudly on social media. How many people do you know who’ve seen that picture or the one below, taken on an earlier date in the Oval Office? Again, very few.
“I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job," Trump said, according to The Times. "I faced great pressure because of Russia. That's taken off.”
"I'm not under investigation," he added.
Sources:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/10/527755991/trump-meets-with-russias-lavrov-at-the-white-house-today
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-nut-job-james-comey-russia-2017-5
And this is the man leading the "restructuring of American government" today winking at Putin at a diplomatic affair during his first madministration.
It ticks me off to think we now have a pee-resident beholden to our nation's chief adversary. Only thing worse than MAGA and the GOP not minding the treason is that the US news media have been cowed into silence by fear of offending a tyrant or coopted into silence as co-conspirators in treason.
= new reply since forum marked as read
What Eric Uday Trump said:
“We don’t do business with American banks. We get all the funding we need from Russia.”
The control panel lights flashed red somewhere. My bet would be Bill Barr long previously determined the protocol: protect the secret relationship with the oligarch’s friend, the “former” asset, Vladimir Putin.
When William Barr was nominated by George Bush Sr. to be attorney general in 1991, I got a jolt of post-traumatic stress. The announcement flashed me back to personal victimization by Barr that I had not thought of for 25 years. “Could it be,” I wondered, “that the sociopath from my childhood is really about to become the highest legal official in the land?” Source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/bill-barr-bullied-me-because-i-backed-civil-rights
Who’s Enabling Putin’s Enablers?
BY SAM PIZZIGATI
CounterPunch, March 29, 2022
Where would Vladimir Putin be without the Russian oligarchy? Without Russia’s oligarchs, political leaders of the Western world have concluded, Putin would be tottering. Western leaders have made squeezing Russia’s richest a central piece of their strategy to end Putin’s Ukraine cross-border assault.
These same Western leaders, unfortunately, have failed to take seriously what ought to be an equally pressing question: Where would Russia’s oligarchs be without the West, without the Wall Streeters, wealth managers, and assorted other high-finance riff-raff “paid millions,” as Institute for Policy Studies analyst Chuck Collins puts it, “to help billionaires sequester trillions”?
Western leaders have essentially been ignoring this question almost ever since the old Soviet Union collapsed. And now we’re paying the price. Those Ukraine sanctions against Russia’s oligarchs? They come with a huge loophole. The Western world’s opaque web of tax havens and anonymous corporations is essentially rendering much of those sanctions ineffective.
Snippe…
The U.S. wealth defense industry, we need to remember, hasn’t just been helping Russian oligarchs hide their fortunes. America’s money-handlers have for years been helping them pile up ever grander fortunes. They’ve steered the illicit funds of Russian oligarchs into U.S. real estate, investment funds, and “even factories,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jake Bernstein, a senior reporter on the 2016 bombshell “Panama Papers” tax avoidance exposé.
The Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has used “a network of banks, law firms and advisers in multiple countries,” the New York Times just reported, to invest “billions in American hedge funds.” Along the way, he tapped the expertise and contacts of U.S. high-finance giants ranging from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to BlackRock and the Carlyle Group.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/29/whos-enabling-putins-enablers/
Gotta have an enemy — the scarier the better — to make money like printing it.
The Ties That Bind Jeffrey Epstein, William Barr & Donald Trump
Todd Neikirk
Hill Reporter, May 19, 2019
During Attorney General, William Barr’s confirmation hearing, he was mostly peppered with questions about how he would handle the Mueller Report. Senator Ben Sasse’s (R-NE) questioning, however, diverged from the pack. Sasse asked Barr about the lenient sentence given out to billionaire pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. The future Attorney General told Sasse that he would look into the matter.
This, however, was not the first connection between Barr and his family and the disgraced pedophile. In 1973, Barr’s father Donald, the headmaster at Manhattan’s Dalton School, hired Epstein as a calculus and physics teacher.
While hiring Epstein, a noted mathematics genius, was not strange on its face, the hire was unusual for a number of reasons. Epstein had not earned a college degree as he dropped out of New York’s prestigious Cooper Union. The other odd circumstance was that the new teacher was only 20 years of age.
Apparently, the hire was a successful one. The New Yorker wrote in a 2003 profile on Epstein, “he was something of a Robin Williams–in–Dead Poets Society type of figure, wowing his high-school classes with passionate mathematical riffs.” Epstein’s mathematical skills caught the eye of Bear Stearns’ chairman, Alan “Ace” Greenberg, whose son attended the Dalton School. Greenberg hired Epstein as an options trader and the former teacher was able to amass a fortune.
Continues....
https://hillreporter.com/the-ties-that-bind-jeffrey-epstein-william-barr-donald-trump-34107
PS: Thank you for grokking, Passing Clouds. As members in good standing of Capitalism’s Invisible Army, both Barr Sr. and Jr. must’ve seen something of value in that young man, otherwise there’s no logical rationale for the Epstein hire or Trump’s political rise. Helping Putin’s chums drain Russia’s wealth into Western banks shows “It all goes to the same place,” meaning the Pockets of the Connected Few.
Trump’s ties to the Russian mafia go back 3 decades
Journalist Craig Unger talks Russia, Trump, and “one of the greatest intelligence operations in history.”
by Sean Illing
Vox, Januar 12, 2019
On November 9, 2016, just a few minutes after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, a man named Vyacheslav Nikonov approached a microphone in the Russian State Duma (their equivalent of the US House of Representatives) and made a very unusual statement.
“Dear friends, respected colleagues!” Nikonov said. “Three minutes ago, Hillary Clinton admitted her defeat in US presidential elections, and a second ago Trump started his speech as an elected president of the United States of America, and I congratulate you on this.”
Nikonov is a leader in the pro-Putin United Russia Party and, incidentally, the grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov — after whom the “Molotov cocktail” was named. His announcement that day was a clear signal that Trump’s victory was, in fact, a victory for Putin’s Russia.
Longtime journalist Craig Unger opens his new book, House of Trump, House of Putin, with this anecdote. The book is an impressive attempt to gather up all the evidence we have of Trump’s numerous connections to the Russian mafia and government and lay it all out in a clear, comprehensive narrative.
The book claims to unpack an “untold story,” but it’s not entirely clear how much of it is new. One of the hardest things to accept about the Trump-Russia saga is how transparent it is. So much of the evidence is hiding in plain sight, and somehow that has made it harder to accept.
Snipski...
Craig Unger: Yes, absolutely. But let’s go back in time, because I think all of this began as a money-laundering operation with the Russian mafia. It’s well known that Trump likes doing business with gangsters, in part because they pay top dollar and loan money when traditional banks won’t, so it was a win-win for both sides.
The key point I want to get across in the book is that the Russian mafia is different than the American mafia, and I think a lot of Americans don’t understand this. In Russia, the mafia is essentially a state actor. When I interviewed Gen. Oleg Kalugin, who is a former head of counterintelligence in the KGB and had been Vladimir Putin’s boss at one point, I asked him about the mafia. He said, “Oh, it’s part of the KGB. It’s part of the Russian government.”
And that’s essential to the whole premise of the book. Trump was working with the Russian mafia for more than 30 years. He was profiting from them. They rescued him. They bailed him out. They took him from being $4 billion in debt to becoming a multibillionaire again, and they fueled his political ambitions, starting more than 30 years ago. This means Trump was in bed with the Kremlin as well, whether he knew it or not.
Continueski...
https://www.vox.com/world/2018/9/12/17764132/trump-fbi-russia-new-york-times-craig-unger
The back story:
The Strange Ties between Semion Mogilevich and Vladimir Putin
by Roman Kupchinsky
Eurasia Daily Monitor, Volume: 6 Issue: 57; March 25, 2009
Excerpt...
The questions surrounding the Putin-Mogilevich relationship – if indeed there is one – are not simply theoretical; the answers touch on the nature of power in the Kremlin; how it functions and which players serve its purposes. Part of the answer can be found in the Kuchma-Derkach dialogue held in Kuchma’s office on February 8, 2000. According to a recording of the conversation made by a member of Kuchma’s security detail, Mykola Melnychenko:
Kuchma: "Have you found Mogilevich?"
Derkach: "I found him."
Kuchma: "So, are you two working now?"
Derkach: "We’re working. We have another meeting tomorrow. He arrives incognito.
Later in the discussion Derkach revealed a few details about Mogilevich.
Derkach: "He’s on good terms with Putin. He and Putin have been in contact since Putin was still in Leningrad."
Kuchma: "I hope we won’t have any problems because of this."
Derkach: "They have their own affairs" (The transcript appears in the forthcoming book by J.V. Koshiw, The Politics of Kuchma – the Melnychenko Recordings August 1999 to September 2000).
A second key to the puzzle lies in the alleged relationship between Firtash and Mogilevich in the Eural Trans Gas and RosUkrEnergo, companies involved in the strategically important transit of natural gas from Central Asia to Ukraine which worked closely with Gazprom, the Russian state-owned gas company apparently controlled by Putin.
Continuesnoshitski...
https://jamestown.org/program/the-strange-ties-between-semion-mogilevich-and-vladimir-putin/
My problem is how Corporate McPravda (ABCNNBCBSFakeNoiseNutworks) has managed to miss even mentioning Craig Unger for the last 10 years on tee vee.
Frank Gardner(BBC Security Correspondent): "Steve Witkoff isn't a professional negotiator... he's a New York property tycoon, who plays golf with Donald Trump..."
https://bsky.app/profile/janeezee01.bsky.social/post/3ll67e4s5is2c
So I put a quick timeline on the insane Signal classified chat and sure enough it looks like Kremlin asset Witkoff was in Moscow when he was added to the Houthi chat. I checked Russian media and he left 3/14 Friday morning (Moscow time) meanwhile the chat was set up Thursday
My other question is why did Witkoff fly from Moscow to Baku airport. That’s the opposite route of coming back to US
9:50 PM · Mar 24, 2025
https://bsky.app/profile/olgalautman.bsky.social/post/3ll663snbc224
https://bsky.app/profile/governorwalz.mn.gov/post/3ll64s6ztuc2x
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220174234
In the original, one can detect the smile on Putin as he listens to Trump report.
President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin walk together at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, on June 28, 2019.
Susan Walsh/AP
That photograph really bothers me, too.
On the image:
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/24/nx-s1-5304271/trump-russia-putin-history