Trump’s Russian handlers
If he wasn't a Russian asset, there sure were a lot of amazing coincidences.
SpyTalk has a lengthy excerpt from Craig Unger’s new book, American Kompromat, about Soviet and Russian security agencies’ decades-long relationship with the 45th President, and it makes for fascinating reading.
It seems quite fitting that Trump, who skillfully portrayed a successful businessman on TV, started his relationship with the KGB via an order of television sets:
The operation began after Trump, about 30 years old at the time, acquired the enormous and decrepit Commodore Hotel adjacent to New York City’s Grand Central Terminal in 1976. It has been widely reported over the years how Trump, who paid only $1 for the option to buy the hotel, made an immense fortune by converting it into the Grand Hyatt New York in 1980.
Despite all we know about the deal, one obscure, seemingly mundane detail in the development of the Grand Hyatt may be key to unraveling Donald Trump’s ties to Russian intelligence. The incident in question is the reported purchase by Trump of hundreds of television sets for the new hotel from Semyon “Sam” Kislin, a Ukrainian Jew who co-owned a small electronics store in New York.
At the time, Manhattan was awash with cut-rate electronics stores selling every gadget imaginable. But Kislin’s store, Joy-Lud, on lower Fifth Avenue near the Flatiron Building, proclaimed its distinctiveness. “We speak Russian,” a sign read. As a result, it carved out a special niche among Soviet diplomats, KGB officers, and Politburo members living in or passing through New York City.
The reason for Joy-Lud’s popularity among the Soviets wasn’t only that they spoke Russian. Standard American TV didn’t work in the Soviet Union, which used different technical standards to broadcast. “You couldn't buy a TV set in a regular American store which would work in Moscow,” says Shvets, who was familiar with the Joy-Lud when he served as a major in the KGB in Washington in the mid-1980s. “The only place was Kislin's.” So Soviets living in New York who wanted to buy a TV that would work when they took it back home all patronized the store.
[…]
According to Shvets, the KGB got its foot in the door with Trump thanks to the forementioned owner of the Joy-Lud electronics store, Semyon Kislin, a wealthy Sovietémigré from Odessa, who left the Ukrainian seaport in 1972. At the time Kislin emigrated, Shvets said, the Odessa field office of the KGB had a special “Jewish department” to oversee the “recruitment” of Jews from Odessa who wanted to leave the Soviet Union.
“It was almost an ultimatum,” Shvets told me. “If you wanted to immigrate, you had to sign the pledge to cooperate with the KGB. And Kislin was one of those recruited.”
Many émigrés forgot about their promises to the KGB as soon as they got to the United States, but not Kislin. Before long, he and his partner, Soviet émigré Tamir Sapir (neé Temur Sepiashvili), had set up Joy-Lud to sell goods to fellow Soviets. That was Kislin’s way of cooperating: Joy-Lud Electronics was a KGB front.
The Russians had different categories for agents who could be tasked to perform specific operations as handlers, recruiters, and penetration agents. Kislin's job, according to Shvets, was simple. "He was a spotter agent. His task was to look for potential targets for KGB recruitment.”
And, according to Shvets, Kislin had spotted Donald Trump.
There were a number of anomalies in Trump’s deal to buy 200 TV sets for The Grand Hyatt from Kislin. Why would the blue-chip Hyatt Corporation get television sets from a small Soviet outfit instead of a reliable wholesaler? The answer, according to Shvets, is that Kislin probably offered the TV sets to Trump at spectacularly low prices.
By doing so, the KGB, via Kislin, got its foot in the door and could see if the flashy,connected real estate mogul was worth the effort to recruit. Once contact with Trump had been reported to the KGB, the process began. The KGB could not have foreseen Trump’s ascent in politics, of course, but simply making a sale to Trump got the ball rolling.
By the mid-eighties, Trump was bragging to the media that he was an expert on “nuclear,” and that he should be negotiating arms-control deals between the superpowers.
We had absolutely no warning of what his Presidency would be like.
Around this time, according to a KGB defector, the Agency was gloating about one of its greatest successes: getting a prominent real-estate mogul to parrot Soviet foreign-policy talking points in major American newspapers.
Shvets recalls receiving a cable celebrating the work of a new asset acquired bythe KGB. The point of the cable, Shvets said, was not to call attention to the identity of the new recruit, but to show off examples of successful craftsmanship in recruitment and in analytical work.
In this case, the new recruit had executed a successful Active Measure operation by voicing KGB talking points in full-page ads bought in three major American newspapers: The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. The ads called for the United States to stop spending money to defend Japan and the Persian Gulf.
The ads, which originally appeared on September 1, 1987, ran under the headline, “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure,” and, for all practical purposes, called for the dismantling of the postwar Western Alliance. The ads took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend Themselves.”
“The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help,” the ad said. “It’s time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan, and others who can afford it, pay.”
The positions put forth were and remain quite extraordinary. Oil in the Persian Gulf was of “marginal significance,” the ad said.
Does the excerpt prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Trump was working with the KGB and later the FSB? No. And it doesn’t even claim that he had any ideological reason for working with the Communists. This was all about Soviet and Russian agents masterfully playing on Trump’s vanity:
“It was an established procedure for the KGB stations in the US to use Ambassador Dubinin to pass on invitations to Americans to visit Moscow,” says Shvets. “Usually, those trips were used for ‘deep development,’ recruitment, or meeting with the KGB handlers.” The letter also expressed the Russian government’s interest in Trump constructing a Moscow replica of Trump Tower, the building Dubinin had so admired. After all, that was what had gotten Trump so excited.
Trump’s trip began on July 4, 1987. The Guardian’s Luke Harding wrote about it in some detail in his 2017 book, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win. He said it resembled “a classic cultivation exercise which would have had the KGB’s full support.”
Since then, new details have come to light that make it even harder to believe that Trump’s visit was anything other than a means of activating his relationship with the KGB.
[…]
Before Trump was brought to Moscow, Shvets says, the KGB in New York City would have conducted a “preliminary evaluation” of his personality based on intelligence from their human assets who had penetrated his circle. That information could have come from a yet-to-be identified handler, or, perhaps, a number of wealthy Soviets who owned and lived in Trump Tower and other Trump properties, and had links to the KGB. After that would have come the professional evaluation, for which Trump would have had to meet with an experienced operative at least three or more times.
“In terms of his personality,” Shvets added, “the guy is not a complicated cookie, his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyper inflated vanity. This combination makes a dream for an experienced recruiter.”
Traveling to Moscow with his then-wife Ivana, Trump stayed at the National Hotel, where he was almost certainly under constant observation. During the trip, Trump saw half a dozen potential building sites for Moscow’s Trump Tower, none of which were as close to the Kremlin as he had hoped.
Shvets, who had been recalled to Yasenovo, the First Directorate’s highly guarded headquarters in a forest southwest of Moscow, had no contact with the Trump party when it arrived. But he was close enough to the operations underway at New York Station to understand their shared protocols. “The New York desk where Natalia Dubinina worked was located just two doors away from the room where I worked. On a regular basis, we had business meetings where we were discussing professional matters. We didn't discuss specific cases in this giant meeting, but you could have an understanding on generally what's going on.”
And that was to flatter Trump into believing that not only was he a budding statesman, but that he had a lucrative real estate future in Russia.
Contrary to popular belief, Trump’s first run for the Presidency wasn’t with the Reform Party (Ross Perot’s, not Preston Manning’s) in 2000. After returning from Moscow he launched a very brief challenge for the Republican nomination in 1988. The newspaper ads appeared around this same time.
Trump insists that the Mueller report was a “total exoneration” - Mueller himself disagrees - but it feels like we’ve barely scratched the surface of his relationship with the Russians. I’ll definitely check out this book once it’s released.
A thought experiment.
On Tuesday, five Republican Senators - Romney, Collins, Murkowski, Toomey and Sasse, voted against Rand Paul’s motion to discuss Trump’s impeachment trial.
That same day, news broke that Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia’s QAnon Queen, endorsed killing Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats on social media. And then, a video of her harassing a Parkland school shooting survivor surfaced.
My question is: which of these Republican politicians has the better chance at being on the party’s Presidential ticket in 2024?
And, a bonus question: how confident are you that all five of these Republican Senators will vote for conviction? Romney has already done it once, so he’s good. Collins just proved she’s indestructible in Maine, and Murkowski is Alaska political royalty - she literally got elected as a write-in candidate after losing the GOP nomination - so they’ll probably join him.
Sasse and Toomey? I’ll believe it when I see it.
Not even revered former presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson are safe from "cancel culture," it appears.
The American icons were among a list of historical figures whose names will be removed from San Francisco’s public schools following a 6-1 vote by the school board Tuesday, according to multiple reports.
Washington and Jefferson were both slave owners and Lincoln, who ended slavery, became controversial because critics claim he oppressed indigenous people.
To be fair, Native Americans may have good reason to think Lincoln is something less than a hero. But if that so overwhelms everything else Lincoln did that he must be unpersoned, I guess we’d better cancel every American - and Canadian, for that matter - born before 1980.
Maybe that is the point.
The presidents were among a long list of men and women whose namesake schools will soon be renamed. Others on the list include Francis Scott Key, who wrote the words to the national anthem, former presidents William McKinley, James Garfield, James Monroe, and Herbert Hoover, Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere and author Robert Louis Stevenson, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Even an elementary school named for current U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., will be changed over allegations that she replaced a damaged Confederate flag outside of City Hall when she was the city’s mayor in 1986, according to Courthouse News. She didn’t replace the flag after it was pulled down a second time.
Anyway, that’s all set-up. Here is the punchline:
While the board focused on renaming the schools in the Tuesday meeting, it did not discuss reopening schools from coronavirus shutdowns.
Well, he obviously didn’t come up with that letter himself. After all, it uses complete sentences and follows a coherent train of thought from beginning to end. ;p
How typical that naming, of all things, would be given priority over the actual provision of schooling and all the associated benefits beyond an education, such as school meals, a social fabric, and a safe place to be during the day. Whoever is in charge is very far removed indeed from the lives and needs of the people those schools should be serving.