by Luke Harding
The ambassador—“fluent in English and a brilliant master of negotiations”—charmed the busy Trump, telling him: “The first thing I saw in the city is your tower!”
Dubinina said: “Trump melted at once. He is an emotional person, somewhat impulsive. He needs recognition. And, of course, when he gets it he likes it. My father’s visit worked on him [Trump] like honey to a bee.”
This encounter happened six months before the Estée Lauder lunch. In Dubinina’s account she admits her father was trying to hook Trump. The man from Moscow wasn’t a wide-eyed rube but a veteran diplomat who served in France and Spain, and translated for Nikita Khrushchev when he met with Charles de Gaulle at the Elysée Palace in Paris. He had seen plenty of impressive buildings. Weeks after his first Trump meeting, Dubinin was named Soviet ambassador to Washington.
Dubinina’s own role is interesting. According to the Mitrokhin archive, the Soviet mission to the UN was a haven for the KGB and GRU. Many of the three hundred Soviet nationals employed at the UN secretariat were Soviet intelligence officers working undercover, including as personal assistants to secretary-generals. The Soviet UN delegation had greater success in finding agents and gaining political intelligence than the KGB’s New York residency.
Dubinin’s other daughter, Irina, said that her late father—he died in 2013—was on a mission as ambassador. This was, she said, to make contact with America’s business elite. For sure, Gorbachev’s Politburo was interested in understanding capitalism. But Dubinin’s invitation to Trump to visit Moscow looks like a classic cultivation exercise, which would have had the KGB’s full support and approval.
In The Art of the Deal, Trump writes: “In January 1987, I got a letter from Yuri Dubinin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, that began: ‘It is a pleasure for me to relay some good news from Moscow.’ It went on to say that the leading Soviet state agency for international tourism, Goscomintourist, had expressed interest in pursuing a joint venture to construct and manage a hotel in Moscow.”
Meanwhile, some colleagues disliked Dubinin. Andrei Kovalev—a Soviet diplomat who first met him in 1968—described Dubinin as “morally unscrupulous,” “self-promoting,” and vain about his (“admittedly handsome”) appearance—a “preening peacock,” keen to ingratiate himself with those in power at home. Dubinin would have been accompanied everywhere in the United States by a security guard who reported to the KGB, Kovalev told me.
There were many ambitious real estate developers in the United States—why had Moscow picked Trump?
According to Viktor Suvorov—the former GRU military spy—and others, the KGB ran Intourist. It functioned as a subsidiary KGB branch. Initiated in 1929 by Stalin, Intourist was the Soviet Union’s official state travel agency. Its job was to vet and monitor all foreigners coming into the Soviet Union. “In my time it was KGB,” Suvorov said. “They gave permission for people to visit.” The KGB’s first and second directorates routinely received lists of prospective visitors to the country based on their visa applications.
As a GRU operative, Suvorov was personally involved in recruitment, albeit for a rival service to the KGB. Soviet spy agencies were always interested in cultivating “young ambitious people,” he said—an upwardly mobile businessman, a scientist, a “guy with a future.”
Once in Moscow, they received lavish hospitality. “Everything is free. There are good parties with nice girls. It could be a sauna and girls and who knows what else.” The hotel rooms or villa were under “twenty-four-hour control,” with “security cameras and so on,” Suvorov said. “The interest is only one. To collect some information and keep that information about him for the future.”
These dirty-tricks operations were all about the long term, Suvorov said. The KGB would expend effort on visiting students from the developing world, not least Africa. After ten or twenty years, some of them would be “nobody.” But others would have risen to positions of influence in their own countries.
Suvorov explained: “It’s at this point you say: ‘Knock, knock! Do you remember the marvelous time in Moscow? It was a wonderful evening. You were so drunk. You don’t remember? We just show you something for your good memory.’”
Over in the communist German Democratic Republic, one of Kryuchkov’s thirty-four-year-old officers—one Vladimir Putin—was busy trying to recruit students from Latin America. Putin arrived in Dresden in August 1985, together with his pregnant wife, Lyudmila, and one-year-old daughter, Maria. They lived in a KGB apartment block.
According to the writer Masha Gessen, one of Putin’s tasks was to try to befriend foreigners studying at the Dresden University of Technology. The hope was that, if recruited, the Latin Americans might work in the United States as undercover agents, reporting back to the Center. Putin set about this together with two KGB colleagues and a retired Dresden policeman.
Precisely what Putin did while working for the KGB’s First Directorate in Dresden is unknown. It may have included trying to recruit Westerners visiting Dresden on business and East Germans with relatives in the West. Putin’s efforts, Gessen suggests, were mostly a failure. He did manage to recruit a Colombian student. Overall his operational results were modest.
By January 1987, Trump was closer to the “prominent person” status of Kryuchkov’s note. Dubinin deemed Trump interesting enough to arrange his trip to Moscow. Another thirtysomething U.S.-based Soviet diplomat, Vitaly Churkin—the future UN ambassador—helped put it together. On July 4, 1987, Trump flew to Moscow for the first time, together with Ivana and Lisa Calandra, Ivana’s Italian-American assistant.
Moscow was, Trump wrote, “an extraordinary experience.” The Trumps stayed in Lenin’s suite at the National Hotel, at the bottom of Tverskaya, near Red Square. Seventy years earlier, in October 1917, Lenin and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, had spent a week in room 107. The hotel was linked to the glass-and-concrete Intourist complex next door and was—in effect—under KGB control. The Lenin suite would have been bugged.
Meanwhile, the mausoleum containing the Bolshevik leader’s embalmed corpse was a short walk away. Other Soviet leaders were interred beneath the Kremlin’s wall in a communist pantheon: Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov—Kryuchkov’s old mentor—and Dzerzhinsky.
According to The Art of the Deal, Trump toured “a half dozen potential sites for a hotel, including several near Red Square.” “I was impressed with the ambition of Soviet officials to make a deal,” he writes. He also visited Leningrad, later St. Petersburg. A photo shows Donald and Ivana standing in Palace Square—he in a suit, she in a red polka dot blouse with a string of pearls. Behind them are the Winter Palace and the state Hermitage museum.
That July the Soviet press wrote enthusiastically about the visit of a foreign celebrity. This was Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist and journalist. Pravda featured a long conversation between the Colombian guest and Gorbachev. García Márquez spoke of how South Americans, himself included, sympathized with socialism and the USSR. Moscow brought García Márquez over for a film festival.
Trump’s visit appears to have attracted less attention. There is no mention of him in Moscow’s Russian State Library newspaper archive. (Either his visit went unreported or any articles featuring it have been quietly removed.) Press clippings do record a visit by a West German official and an Indian cultural festival.
The KGB’s private dossier on Trump, by contrast, would have gotten larger. The agency’s multipage profile would have been enriched with fresh material, including anything gleaned via eavesdropping.
Nothing came of the trip—at least nothing in terms of business opportunities inside Russia. This pattern of failure would be repeated in Trump’s subsequent trips to Moscow. But Trump flew back to New York with a new sense of strategic direction. For the first time he gave serious indications that he was considering a career in politics. Not as mayor or governor or senator.
Trump was thinking about running for president.
The New York Ti
mes story appeared on September 2, 1987—less than two months after Trump’s Intourist adventure. Its headline read: “Trump Gives a Vague Hint of Candidacy.”
The article began:
Donald J. Trump, one of New York’s biggest and certainly one of its most vocal developers, said yesterday that he was not interested in running for political office in New York, but indicated that the Presidency was another matter.
Mr. Trump, a Republican, bought full-page advertisements in three major newspapers around the country this morning to air his foreign-policy views. And an adviser disclosed that Mr. Trump is planning a trip in October to New Hampshire, site of the first Presidential primary.
The advertisement was eye-catching. It appeared in the Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. It was addressed “to the American people” from “Donald John Trump” and headlined: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”
It said:
For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.
The saga continues unabated as we defend the Persian Gulf, an area of only marginal significance to the United States for its oil supplies, but one upon which Japan and others are almost totally dependent. Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?
Trump took aim at Saudi Arabia—which had refused to lend the Pentagon a mine sweeper. He wrote that Japan, and “others,” had gotten rich by taking advantage of American generosity. It was time, he wrote, to help “our farmers, our sick, our homeless.” “Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore,” he concluded.
There’s no doubt that Trump’s message was authentic. He would return to these themes—of America first and freeloading partner nations—in his later actual campaign for the White House. At the same time, Trump’s public proclamation would have pleased Moscow.
General Kryuchkov was always keen to foster disagreement between the United States and its allies, as his secret 1984 work plan showed. The KGB’s “global priorities” included a long list of active measures. These were to be done covertly. According to Andrew and Gordievsky, the second-most-important priority was to “deepen disagreements inside NATO over its approach to implementing specific aspects of the bloc’s military policy.” And: “exacerbating contradictions between the USA, Western Europe and Japan on other matters of principle.”
The Times reported that Trump had recently returned from Russia. It said that he had met with Gorbachev. (If he did, the Soviet press failed to report this.) The paper wrote: “The ostensible subject of their meeting was the possible development of luxury hotels in the Soviet Union by Mr. Trump. But Mr. Trump’s calls for nuclear disarmament were also well-known to the Russians.”
Trump’s announcement remains puzzling. After all, he knew little of foreign policy. “The idea of doing it was his,” ad executive Tom Messner told The Washington Post. Messner had worked on Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign and said that his team had little input in Trump’s letter. The advertisements cost Trump $94,801, paid for—the Times said—with his own money. They appeared in papers with a big New Hampshire readership.
As ever with Trump, it was hard at the time to tell whether his flirtation with a presidential run was another self-branding moment—or something more serious. Mike Dunbar, a prominent and eccentric Republican, invited Trump to visit New Hampshire and launched a “draft Trump movement.” There was talk that Trump might secure the vice president slot, on a ticket with George H. W. Bush. In the end Bush picked Dan Quayle, the senator from Indiana.
Trump’s subsequent attempts to build property in Moscow followed the same unsuccessful model: a bright fizz of publicity followed by nothing much. Were the Soviets stringing him along for their own reasons? Or were the visits to Russia simply Trumpian hyperbole, designed to project him as a global player, at ease in the capitalist West and communist East?
In December 1987 Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev made their first trip to the United States. The visit was historic: the American and Soviet superpowers had agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals for the first time, with a landmark arms control treaty. Kryuchkov came with Gorbachev. It was the first time a First Chief Directorate boss had accompanied a general secretary on a trip to the West.
Trump told reporters that the Russians had called him and wanted him to show the Gorbachevs Fifth Avenue and Trump Tower. The Soviet first couple never showed. Instead Trump was pranked into meeting with a Gorbachev impersonator, hired by a U.S. TV channel.
In Washington, Kryuchkov had dinner with Robert Gates, the CIA deputy director. Unbeknownst to Gates, Kryuchkov’s instructions to recruit Americans had gotten stunning results. The KGB had two moles inside U.S. intelligence—the CIA’s Aldrich Ames and the FBI’s Robert Hanssen. Both gave secrets to Moscow and betrayed U.S. agents.
In summer 1991—while Chris Steele was working undercover in Moscow—Kryuchkov led a KGB coup against Gorbachev. The general believed this was the only way to preserve the Soviet Union. He was one of those arrested.
It would be another five years before Trump returned to post-communist Moscow. By this point his marriage to Ivana had ended. He had also survived the worst moment of his career, in 1990, when his credit-fueled business empire fell apart, leaving him virtually bankrupt.
Trump’s 1996 reappearance made the business daily Kommersant. It reported that the “famous businessman” who had been “wealthy, broke and made a fortune again” was interested in Moscow construction projects. Trump wanted to redevelop the Moskva and Rossiya hotels. The latter was a Soviet-era monstrosity occupying a prime spot next to the Kremlin.
How serious was Trump’s latest foray into Yeltsin’s Russia? Not very, it appeared—though in 1996 Trump did begin registering trademark applications in Moscow for eight of his companies. In November that year he flew to Moscow with Howard Lorber, a businessman whose Vector Group had interests in Russia.
Trump met with Zurab Tsereteli, a Georgian-Russian sculptor. Tsereteli’s overblown public works enjoyed official favor. According to The New Yorker’s Mark Singer, Trump discussed erecting a giant statue of Christopher Columbus on the Hudson River. It would be bigger than the Statue of Liberty. The mayor of Moscow would donate the statue to his New York counterpart, Rudy Giuliani, Trump told Singer.
The statue never arrived. Nor did Trump manage to close a hotel deal. And a year later the Russian economy crashed.
As an American and an outsider Trump was never likely to make money inside Russia or obtain favored chunks of real estate. What counted in the lawless Moscow of the 1990s was connections—and buying off people at the top of state structures.
What Trump needed was a Russian friend, a primary partner. Preferably one known to the Kremlin.
—
In October 2007 I was leafing through the morning papers. I was the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent. The newspaper’s office wasn’t much to boast about: two tiny low-ceilinged Soviet-era apartments knocked together to form a pair of dingy rooms. Mine had a bookshelf and a map of Russia. A mini-kitchen looked onto a strip of green. A short walk along Gruzinsky Pereulok took you to Belorussky train and metro station.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, Steele had lived during his Moscow posting in the same building, used by journalists and diplomats. We were on the ground floor, apartments 75 and 76, entrance number three; Steele had lived two floors above us. We had shared a stairwell and a communal mailbox. Not that letters ever arrived.
We assumed our office was bugged. Not from paranoia but because it was made obvious. Sometimes the FSB broke in and left the usual clues: an opened window (unlatched from the inside), a phone taken out of its cradle and left demonstratively on the desk in the early hours. There was electronic surveillance, too. Each time I made a joke about Putin, the landline was cut, replaced by an ominous crackle.
A branch of the Russ
ian foreign ministry, UPDK, managed our apartment. Like Intourist, UPDK used to be KGB. Presumably the FSB had its own set of keys.
I found an article in The Moscow Times with a familiar subject: the antics of the capital’s superrich. It mentioned a new exclusive club at the National Hotel, where Trump had stayed. At this time, according to Forbes magazine, Russia had fifty-three billionaires, a lot of “minigarchs,” and tens of thousands of millionaires. I read on.
The story reported that one wealthy individual—the property developer Aras Agalarov—was planning to create something extraordinary.
Agalarov was building a luxury housing estate on the outskirts of Moscow. It would be a sort of oligarch utopia, with houses costing around $25 to $30 million each, and a gilded retreat from which the poor were invisible. There would be 250 high-end properties, a golf course and clubhouse, a lake, and an artificial beach decked out with white sand imported from Thailand.
I picked up the phone.
Arranging an interview with Agalarov was easy. A few days later I got a lift up to the Istra region, west of Moscow, to a rustic spot dotted with fir trees and white chamomile flowers. Several villas had been completed. Others were being built. Each was different. A Scottish baronial mansion rose above a line of newly planted birch trees. Nearby was a neoclassical palace, a froth of concrete pillars, acanthus capitals, and Greek fluting.
In person, Agalarov was jovial and welcoming. He spoke fluent English. The tycoon was a figure of medium height, at this point in his early fifties, wearing a sports jacket. Forbes had dubbed him the “vainest of the Golden Hundred,” its list of the top one hundred richest Russians. Actually, he was quite charming.
Agalarov gave me a tour. We climbed into a dark blue Land Rover jeep. On the vehicle’s door, I noticed, were the initials AE, approximately a foot and a half in height, standing for Agalarov Estate. A dainty crown floated above the monogram. Agalarov drove; I sat in the front passenger seat.
