A Former KGB Spy has revealed to the Guardian that Russia Groomed Trump to Be an Asset for 40 Years.
Yuri Shvets, a former KGB told The Guardian “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, 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. Guardian reports.
Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump then became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.
Three years later when Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel he bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue.
Shvets told the guardian that Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump as a potential asset. Kislin has denied that he had a relationship with the KGB.
“For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on Trump’s 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. Yuri Shvets recalled.
“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.”
Read more on the Guardian
