Former KGB Maj. Yuri Shvets, in a story published today in The Guardian, fills in some of the details on Moscow's cultivation of incompetent insurrectionist Donald "Mango Mussolini" Trump over a 40 year period. It's an interesting perspective coming from a former KGB official that confirms, once again, how Mango Mussolini was viewed and used by Russia over much of his adult life:
Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset
over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda
that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the
Guardian.
Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.
Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat,
a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include
House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former
president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. [snip]
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.
Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg
for the first time. Shvets said he was fed by KGB talking points and
flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into
the politics.
The ex-major recalled: “For the
KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information
on his 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.
“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.”
The flattery worked on the clueless narcissist, who was soon parroting Russian propaganda about sharing the defense costs of NATO and other allies (sound familiar?). Of course, the Russians loved it and couldn't believe their luck.
Fast forward to the 2016 election and Mango Mussolini's election, with help from Russia, and the Mueller investigation:
Shvets, who has carried out his own investigation,
said: “For me, the Mueller report was a big disappointment because
people expected that it will be a thorough investigation of all ties
between Trump and Moscow, when in fact what we got was an investigation
of just crime-related issues. There were no counterintelligence aspects
of the relationship between Trump and Moscow.”
He
added: “This is what basically we decided to correct. So I did my
investigation and then got together with Craig. So we believe that his
book will pick up where Mueller left off.”
Unger,
the author of seven books and a former contributing editor for Vanity
Fair magazine, said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not this grand,
ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later
he’ll be president. At the time it started, which was around 1980, the
Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and
dozens of people.”
“Trump was the perfect
target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural
target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up
through his election.”
If there's more evidence needed to keep this treasonous, ignorant, desperate, wannabe despot from receiving intelligence briefings, we don't know what that would involve. As Shvets mentions, it also begs a thorough, transparent intelligence community investigation into his actions regarding Russia while president, including his private discussions with Russian thug Vladimir Putin and the influence of various actors in Mango Mussolini's orbit.
