House of Trump, House of Putin2

by Craig Unger

  No one embodied the new zeitgeist more than Donald Trump, who, from his Fifth Avenue aerie, had transformed himself into an international tabloid celebrity who personified a spectacularly luxurious lifestyle and was pumping it for all it was worth. Trump Tower was his defining moment, the point at which Trump invented himself as a dream maker, as the epitome of luxury and success.

  And so, he set off in half a dozen directions simultaneously, after his success with the old Commodore—sports, publishing, gambling, real estate, airlines, and more—marketing himself nonstop, like a latter-day P. T. Barnum, as the creature most emblematic of this new age of celebrity, grandiosity, and conspicuous consumption.

  Trump always said his building had the “Tiffany location,” and, on that score at least, he was correct. The building was surrounded by the most exalted names in the luxury marketplace—Bergdorf Goodman, Henri Bendel, Bulgari, Van Cleef & Arpels, and Tiffany. Over the years, the building was also home to Steven Spielberg, Michael Jackson, Sophia Loren, Johnny Carson, Bruce Willis, Liberace, and, of course, the man whose fame ultimately exceeded theirs—Donald Trump himself.

  At the heart of his success was a no-holds-barred approach to PR that Trump once explained to casino executive John Allen. “Here’s how I work,” he said. “I call the society editor [of one of the New York tabloids] and tell them that Princess Di and Prince Charles are going to purchase an apartment in Trump Tower. And they, in turn, investigate the source, call Buckingham Palace. And the comment is ‘No comment.’ Which means that it appears to the public that Princess Di and Prince Charles are going to purchase an apartment in Trump Tower.”45

  Of course, Prince Charles never had the slightest intention of buying a condo in Trump Tower. Nevertheless, with the success of Trump Tower, Trump was suddenly able to make “Trump” the brand name for a class of products that had never before had brand names—luxury apartments. It was, Fortune magazine said, “a textbook marketing strategy. That name indisputably adds value . . . There is undeniably a Trump mystique. Some people love him, others despise him, but everybody talks about him. He has become a cult hero for many people around the world who seem to regard this flamboyant billionaire as the most heartening example of the American dream come true since [Texas computer king] Ross Perot.”46

  As if to prove the wisdom of this marketing strategy, in 1982, Trump began construction of the thirty-six-story Trump Plaza on Sixty-First Street and Third Avenue. Then he bought the iconic Plaza Hotel (not to be confused with the aforementioned Trump Plaza), which, he proclaimed, was not a building but “a masterpiece—the Mona Lisa.”47

  He announced never-realized plans to build “the world’s tallest and greatest building,”48 a 150-story tower on Manhattan’s West Side. In 1984, he bought the New Jersey Generals in the USFL football league. Later, he bought Eastern Airlines’ New York–Boston–Washington routes for $365 million and transformed it into the Trump Shuttle, making sure its flight attendants were accessorized with pearls.49

  When it came to flamboyance, Trump had no equal. In 1985 he bought Mar-a-Lago, the 128-room, 100,000-square-foot mansion that heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post hoped would one day serve as a winter White House. Trump bought a Boeing 727; a “Darth Vader” helicopter; a huge estate in Greenwich, Connecticut; and a massive yacht, the Trump Princess.50 And in 1987, he told the world all about it when Random House published his bestseller Trump: The Art of the Deal, which was written by Tony Schwartz and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly a year.

  Real estate developer, casino operator, football team owner, bestselling author: Trump had transformed himself into a marketing phenomenon in which his brash self-promotion, however distasteful, generated a self-perpetuating, larger-than-life aura of success, wealth, status, and opulence.

  But less visibly, Trump was also going through a highly improbable transformation into becoming a new kind of political figure. It was a transformation that grew out of Trump’s 1977 marriage to Ivana Zelníčková, a Czech national who had worked as a model in Canada and whose father was under surveillance by the Czech secret service, which, in turn, as a Soviet satellite, was in league with the KGB; his political education at the feet of Roy Cohn, New York’s most notorious fixer; and his unbridled ambition to top his father not just by crossing the river into Manhattan, but by staking out his own place on the world stage. All of which made him a tempting target of operatives of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HONEY TRAP

  On a frigid December day in 2017, Oleg Kalugin opens the door of his house in Rockville, Maryland, an upper-middle-class suburb of Washington, DC, to meet me. Nothing in particular distinguishes his split-level suburban home from those of the other professionals in the neighborhood, but the man who lives there is very much out of the ordinary, a former KGB spymaster who is now an American citizen.

  Born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), Kalugin, at eighty-three, now lives just half an hour’s drive from the White House, which for decades was dead center in the crosshairs of the KGB, the dreaded secret security forces he served as head of counterintelligence. Some twenty-five years later, he still has “the razor-sharp features and icy glare of a movie spy,” as David Remnick described him in Lenin’s Tomb.1 A genial host, Kalugin gives a guided tour of his sprawling library spread over three rooms and reveals himself to be a man of history, a veritable Zelig of the Cold War.

  A fierce critic of Vladimir Putin, Kalugin, who was sentenced to fifteen years in jail for treason2 in Russia, moved to the United States in 1995 and accepted a teaching position at Catholic University in Washington. A professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, where he teaches FBI and CIA officers, he also serves on the board of the International Spy Museum in Washington.3

  Kalugin’s work as a spy began in 1959, when he was a twenty-four-year-old student at Columbia School of Journalism from Russia—who, unbeknownst to his classmates, was already undercover as a fair-haired golden boy of the KGB. But that was just the beginning. In 1960, when Nikita Khrushchev infamously startled the world by banging his shoe on the podium during the United Nations General Assembly, that was Kalugin nearby, then as Radio Moscow’s bureau chief in New York—or at least that was his KGB cover. “This country was always a paradise for spies,” he told me.4

  In 1970, Kalugin returned to KGB headquarters in Moscow, where he eventually headed the K branch of the First Chief Directorate, which was responsible for foreign operations and intelligence collection. If you’re familiar with the infamous Cambridge Spy Ring,* the group of posh, highly educated Brits who caused an international scandal in the 1950s when they went over to the Soviets, that too was Oleg Kalugin in Moscow, handling Kim Philby and Donald Maclean, in the seventies, long after they had defected. In 1974, Kalugin was promoted to general, the youngest in the history of the powerful Russian spy organization.5

  When it comes to Soviet leaders Yuri Andropov, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin, Kalugin knew them all and can regale you for hours with stories about them. He was even the boss of a promising young KGB officer named Vladimir Putin.

  Of medium height, immaculately groomed, clad in dark blue slacks, a striped shirt, and a light blue jacket, Kalugin was congenial and utterly disarming when I met him. As John le Carré wrote, when he interviewed Kalugin nearly twenty-five years ago, he is “one of those former enemies of western democracy who have made a seamless transition from their side to ours. To listen to him you could be forgiven for assuming that we had been on the same side all along.”6

  But we weren’t. Gracious and amiable as Kalugin is, one has only to remember the 1978 assassination of Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov—a brave and widely loved émigré who was murdered when a KGB operative wielded a specially designed umbrella that fired a tiny poison pellet filled with ricin into Markov’s thigh—to remind oneself of the KGB’s dark and murderous legacy.

  That was Kalugin’s work. “We’re not children,
” he told le Carré. “I was the head man for all that stuff, for Christ’s sake! Nothing operational could be done unless it went across my desk, O.K.? Markov had already been sentenced to death in his absence by a Bulgarian court, but the Bulgarians were terrible. They couldn’t do a damn thing. We had to do it all for them: train the guy, make the umbrella, fix the poison.”7

  Hoary tales of the Cold War aside, Kalugin is of special interest these days because his experience as head of counterintelligence for the KGB makes him a master of the tradecraft that was used to ensnare Trump. The operation began during a 1978 trip to Czechoslovakia not long after Trump’s marriage to Ivana, in which the newlyweds piqued the interest of the Czech Ministry of State Security (also known as the StB) enough that a secret police collaborator began observing Ivana and met several times with her in later years.8

  Keeping tabs on Czechs who had left the country was standard operating procedure for the StB. “The State Security was constantly watching (Czechoslovak citizens living abroad),” said Libor Svoboda, a historian from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague.9 “They were coming here, so they used agents to follow them. They wanted to know who they were meeting, what they talked about. It was a sort of paranoia. They were afraid that these people could work for foreign intelligence agencies. They used the same approach toward their relatives as well.”

  According to the German newspaper Bild, starting in 1979, encrypted StB files say, “the phone calls between Ivana and her father were to be wiretapped at least once per year. Their mail exchange was monitored.”10 The agent who reported on Ivana used the code names of “Langr” and “Chod.”11 The StB files are stamped “top secret,” bear the code names “Slusovice,”* “America,” and “Capital,” and indicate an ongoing attempt to gather as much information about Trump as possible.12

  “The StB thought there was a chance that the U.S. intelligence agencies could use (Ivana Trump). And also they wanted to use Trump to gather information on U.S. high society,” said Svoboda.13

  The StB archives also show that Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, was monitored by the secret services and that during his 1977 trip to the US for Ivana’s wedding, Zelníček was subject to an StB-ordered search of his possessions at the airport. “He provided information that the secret police found out anyway from other sources,” said Petr Blažek of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes,14 who suggested that the search was a warning shot telling Zelníček that cooperation was the only way such trips would be permitted in the future.

  Far from handing over compromising materials, Zelníček may have simply delivered the minimal amount of information necessary to keep the StB off his back. “Ivana’s father was registered as a confidant of the StB,” Czech historian Tomas Vilimek told the Guardian.15 “However, that does not mean he was an agent. The CSSR authorities forced him to talk to them because of his journeys to the US and his daughter. Otherwise, he would not have been allowed to fly.”

  In the end, we do not know exactly when the KGB first opened a file on Donald Trump. But it would have been common practice for the Czech secret police to share their intelligence on the Trumps with the KGB. More to the point, Trump was so highly valued as a target that the StB later sent a spy to the US to monitor his political prospects for more than a decade.16

  * * *

  —

  It’s unclear how much Trump himself knew about his in-laws’ encounters with Czech intelligence, but when Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, rose to power in 1985, and put forth the policies of perestroika (literally “restructuring” in Russian) and glasnost (“openness”), which eased the tensions of the Cold War, Trump became deeply infected with a severe case of Russophilia.

  In the past, his participation in politics had been confined to getting Roy Cohn to push through tax abatements, changes to zoning restrictions, and the like—or making political donations to accomplish such goals. Suddenly, Trump reinvented himself as a pseudo-authority on nuclear arms and asserted that he could play a key role in strategic arms limitations.17

  Trump took the issue up in an interview with journalist Ron Rosenbaum in the November 1985 issue of Manhattan, Inc. magazine, in which he asserted of nuclear proliferation, “Nothing matters as much to me now”—an extraordinarily unlikely passion for a man who personified conspicuous consumption.

  Trump started by telling Rosenbaum about his late uncle John Trump, an MIT professor, who explained that nuclear technology was becoming so simplified that “someday it’ll be like making a bomb in the basement of your house. And that’s a very frightening statement coming from a man who’s totally versed in it.”18

  What was taking place was decidedly un-Trumpian. Rosenbaum, who was anything but a Trump enthusiast, said the real estate developer “seemed genuinely aware of just how much danger nukes put the world in.” He even passed up a chance to tout the glories of Trump Tower. Instead, Rosenbaum told me, Donald Trump preferred to be seen as being in “on some serious stuff. The fact that his uncle was a nuclear scientist gave him the right to make these pronouncements.”19

  Trump made a similar pitch to the Washington Post. “Some people have an ability to negotiate,” he told the paper.20 “It’s an art you’re basically born with. You either have it or you don’t.”

  Lack of confidence was not his problem. “It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” he said. “. . . I think I know most of it anyway.”

  Which did not mean Trump was above seeking out expertise. A few months later, according to the Hollywood Reporter, in 1986, he insisted on meeting Bernard Lown, a Boston cardiologist best known for inventing the defibrillator and sharing the Nobel Peace Prize with Yevgeny Chazov, the personal physician for Mikhail Gorbachev.21

  After accepting their Nobel medals in Oslo, Drs. Lown and Chazov went to Moscow and spent time with Gorbachev, the new Soviet leader. Not long after he returned to the United States, Lown got a message from Trump. At the time, Lown had never even heard of him but secretly hoped Trump might contribute to the Lown Cardiovascular Research Foundation, which was low on funds at the time.

  They met in Trump’s offices on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower. “I arrived totally ignorant about his motives,” Lown told me.22 “We sat down for lunch and Trump was very grim looking, very serious.”

  “Tell me everything you know about Gorbachev,” Trump said.

  After twenty minutes or so recounting his experience with the Soviet leader, however, Lown became painfully aware that Trump wasn’t listening. “I realized he had a short attention span,” Lown said. “I thought there was another agenda, perhaps, but I didn’t know what that was.”

  Lown cut to the chase. “Why do you want to know?” he asked Trump.

  At that, Trump revealed his grand plan. “If I know about Gorbachev, I can ask my good friend Ronnie to make me a plenipotentiary ambassador for the United States with Gorbachev.”

  “Ronnie?” Lown asked.

  Lown was unaware that Trump had retained the powerful lobbying firm of Black, Manafort & Stone shortly after it opened shop in 1980,23 and its three name partners—Charles Black, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone—had just played vital roles in Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide victory.

  “Ronald Reagan,” Trump explained.

  Then he clapped his hands together, Lown says, and went on to say how within one hour of meeting Gorbachev, he would end the Cold War.

  “The arrogance of the man, and his ignorance about the complexities of one of the complicating issues confronting mankind! The idea that he could solve it in one hour!”24

  * * *

  —

  Thanks to Gorbachev, the Russian bear had finally put on a friendly face, but the KGB had not. It remained the most effective and most feared intelligence-gathering organization in the world with more than four hundred thousand officers inside the Soviet Union and another two hundred thousand border guards, not to m
ention an enormous network of informers.25 And that didn’t even include the First Chief Directorate (FCD), the relatively small but prestigious division in charge of gathering foreign intelligence. It had about twelve thousand officers and was headed by General Vladimir Kryuchkov, a hard-liner who seemed to be swimming against the tides of history.

  Gorbachev’s dovish overtures to the West notwithstanding, Kryuchkov, according to ex-KGB general Oleg Kalugin, was still very much “a true believer until the end, eternally suspicious of the West and capitalism.”26

  Kryuchkov is of special interest not simply because of his unreconstructed hard-line views.* Thanks to a compendium of his memos during this period entitled Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations, 1975–1985, we know that by 1984 he was deeply concerned that the KGB had failed to recruit enough American agents.27 To Kryuchkov, absolutely nothing was more important, and he ordered his officers to cultivate as assets not just the usual leftist suspects, who might have ideological sympathies with the Soviets, but also various influential people such as prominent businessmen.28

  And so, as if orchestrated by Kryuchkov, the political education of Donald Trump began in March 1986, when he met the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Yuri Dubinin and his daughter Natalia Dubinina. Dubinina, who was part of the Soviet delegation to the UN, was an interesting figure herself in that the Soviet mission was widely known to harbor KGB agents.29 As she told the Russian daily Moskovsky Komsomolets, when her father arrived in New York City for his very first visit, she took him on a tour, and one of the first buildings they saw was Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. “I met my father and invited him to show New York,” she said, according to a Google Translate version of the article. “After all, I lived there for a long time, and he came for the first time in my life.”30