American Kompromat

by Craig Unger

  The Monster Plot was still a sore point with the agency even fifty years later, and as a result, Carle’s friend warned him that it had torn apart the agency. Nevertheless, when the call was over, Carle had persuaded him to poke around a bit. After all, it would be surprising if the Russians didn’t try to place an asset as high as possible in the American government. There was already plenty of evidence that Russian intelligence had focused enormous amounts of attention on Trump, his family members, and people who had access to him.

  Carle’s friend made a few calls and finally got back to him.10 “Times have changed,” the old hand said. “It is conceivable now.”

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  So is Donald Trump a Russian asset?

  Yes.

  But the way in which it happened is significantly different from the scenario in the Monster Plot postulated by Angleton. Even though Trump’s liaison with the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security) started more than forty years ago, what has happened since—namely, the installation of a Russian asset in the White House—is not simply the carefully calculated result of one extraordinarily cunning, long-term counterintelligence operation.

  It’s more complicated than that. “When people start talking about Trump’s ties to the KGB or Russian intelligence, some are looking for this super-sophisticated master plan, which was designed decades ago and finally climaxed with Trump’s election as president of the United States,” said Yuri Shvets, a former major in the KGB who came to the United States and now lives outside Washington, DC.

  But what happened with Trump can best be seen as a series of sequential and sometimes unrelated operations that played into one another over more than four decades. According to Shvets, with the Soviets and their Russian successors, standard tradecraft has been to develop assets and data that might not have an immediate payoff but that could offer far more value years or even decades in the future. “That’s a big difference between the KGB and some Western HUMINT [human intelligence] agencies,” Shvets told me during my first interview in what became an extended series of conversations that began in fall 2019. “The KGB is very patient. It can work a case for years. Americans want results yesterday or maximum today; as a result, they have none. They don’t get it—that if you round up nine pregnant women, the baby would not be born within a month. Each process must ripen.”

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  The ascent of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States in 2016 did not take place in a vacuum, nor did his grab for unprecedented executive power that far transcend democratic norms.

  Starting back in the Soviet era, the KGB and its successors methodically studied various components of the American body politic and the economic forces behind it—campaign finance, the US legal system, social media, the tech sector, K Street lobbyists, corporate lawyers, and the real estate industry—and exploited every loophole they could find. In the end, they began subverting one institution after another that was designed to provide checks and balances to safeguard our democracy, including our elections, our executive branch, the Department of Justice, and the intelligence sector.

  For the most part, the American media covered the Trump–Russia scandal as if it were a series of major criminal inquiries—following the investigations, prosecutions, and trials of Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, and other Trump associates; the Mueller Report; Trump’s impeachment and no-witness acquittal in the Senate; and all the rest.

  But the investigation began as a counterintelligence investigation, not a criminal probe, and therein lies the problem. Successful intelligence operations often have far higher stakes than ordinary crimes. After all, paying hush money to a porn star out of campaign finances is illegal and can result in jail time, as it did for former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. But it pales in significance to installing a Russian asset in the Oval Office. And, believe it or not, that may be perfectly legal.

  That’s because, as the KGB and its successor agencies know all too well, intelligence operations are designed to operate within the law, which, thanks to lax regulations, lax enforcement, and the very nature of counterintelligence, has given the Russians plenty of latitude. After all, this is a country in which laundering massive amounts of money through anonymously purchased real estate can be done with virtually no risk. It is a country in which it’s possible to take money from Russian intelligence, to establish communications with Russian intelligence, and, in effect, to be a Russian asset without breaking the law. It is a country in which the Russians can hire highly paid attorneys as lobbyists, who just happen to have access to loads of important secrets, and use them to get what they want.

  When one thinks about it like that—as an intelligence operation rather than as individual crimes—suddenly the interactions of Trump surrogates and Trump himself with dozens of Soviet émigrés, Russian mafiosi, businessmen, and the like over forty years can be seen in an entirely different light, not so much as crimes but as part of standardized intelligence operations that served to bring Trump into the KGB’s fold, that tested him to see if he was worth cultivating, that compromised him through lucrative money-laundering schemes, sycophantic flattery, pie-in-the-sky Trump Tower Moscow projects, extravagantly well-paid franchising projects, and more. Hundreds of articles have been written about Trump’s ties to oligarchs like Aras Agalarov and his son, Emin, who promoted the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013; about campaign manager Paul Manafort, who had received $75 million from pro-Putin oligarchs and whose chief assistant, Konstantin Kilimnik, was an operative for Russian military intelligence; about Trump’s highly lucrative deals with the Bayrock Group, a real estate development firm run by Soviet émigrés; and about so much more.

  And many, if not all of those transactions, must be viewed not just as dubious financial deals with formerly Soviet entities, but as part of a long, ongoing Russian intelligence operation.

  Indeed, during the 2016 election cycle, the Russian Federation’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, the Russian successor to the Soviet KGB, found plenty of ways to subvert America’s elections without breaking the law. There was nothing illegal, for example, about naturalized American citizens like the Odessa-born billionaire oligarch Len Blavatnik and his businesses contributing millions to Mitch McConnell’s GOP Senate Leadership Fund and to the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, as he did in 2016.

  In addition, vitally important contacts between Russian intelligence and the Trump campaign took place in plain sight without attracting undue attention—as happened in April 2016 at a major foreign policy event for the Trump campaign at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, hosted by the Center for the National Interest (CNI), a conservative foreign policy think tank led by Dimitri Simes, who served as an informal foreign policy adviser to the Trump operation.

  The Russian-born Simes himself is curious figure who served as a foreign policy adviser to Richard Nixon and whose career includes prestigious posts at various universities and think tanks—Columbia University, the Paul S. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace—as well as being head of CNI and publisher of its foreign policy bimonthly magazine, the National Interest.

  The Mueller Report concluded that Simes was not working for the Kremlin, but it noted that Simes and CNI had “many contacts with current and former Russian government officials.” Michael Carpenter, the managing director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement and a foreign policy adviser on Russia to Vice President Joe Biden, told me, “It’s very transparent what [Simes’s] agenda is. He is completely pro-Kremlin and always has been.”11

  Others went further and described Simes as “an agent of the Kremlin embedded into the American political elite,” as Yuri Felshtinsky did in a 2018 article on Gordon, a Russian-language site in Ukraine.12
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  To make his case, Felshtinsky reported that Simes, through CNI, organized meetings between high-level officials at the Federal Reserve and the US Department of the Treasury with Maria Butina, who was later arrested on espionage charges and pleaded guilty to a felony charge of conspiring to influence US politics. Felshtinsky is the coauthor—with Alexander Litvinenko, the FSB lieutenant colonel who died of polonium poisoning—of Blowing Up Russia, about how the state security apparatus seized power in Russia.

  Simes’s ties to his motherland go back to Soviet days, and when Putin won power, he took the bit and became a wholehearted supporter. But in Politico, Ben Smith wrote that by 2011, Simes had embarrassed the Richard Nixon Family Foundation–funded CNI because he had become an apologist for Putin and attacked Senator John McCain for denouncing Russia’s invasion of Georgia.13

  Along similar lines, Yuri Shvets told me that when he was still in the KGB, he crossed paths with Simes at the press center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) in Moscow and wanted to recruit him on the spot. “I saw Simes, and he was always lonely,” said Shvets. “Americans didn’t talk to him. Soviets didn’t talk to him.”

  Shvets discussed the matter with his superior, who wanted to check it out with headquarters. “And the next day, he calls me saying, ‘Stand down. He’s being taken care of,’” Shvets told me. Translation: There was no need to recruit Simes because he was already a contact of the KGB.Similarly, in an interview for this book with researcher Olga Lautman, General Oleg Kalugin, the former head of counterintelligence for the KGB, recalled running into Simes at an event in Washington after Kalugin had defected to the United States in 1995.

  As Kalugin saw it, Simes had been avoiding him most of the evening, so he finally went up to Simes and was shocked by what he heard.

  “You’re a traitor,” Simes told Kalugin.

  “I was no longer connected with the KGB,” Kalugin said. “That’s why he called me ‘traitor.’”

  When Donald Trump appeared at the Mayflower Hotel under Simes’s auspices to put forth his first formal presentation of his foreign policy, the media portrayed the event as precisely that: a Republican Party presidential candidate putting forth his foreign policy objectives. But in fact the event had been orchestrated by Simes, who, according to Shvets, Kalugin, and Felshtinsky’s report, was working for Russian intelligence. According to documents released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in August 2020, Simes testified before the Senate that this was where he introduced Donald Trump to Russian ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak for the first time.

  Trump may not have been doing anything illegal at the Mayflower, but the Russians were there and in a position to expose him.

  That was kompromat.

  That was how it worked. The press covered the event as something that was completely normal. In fact, nothing illegal was taking place. Nevertheless, Russian intelligence had essentially hijacked Trump’s foreign policy in plain sight and nobody noticed.

  Neither Simes, who has subsequently relocated to Moscow, nor the Center for the National Interest returned my phone calls.

  In a similar vein, there was nothing unlawful about the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. accepting an honorarium of $50,000 plus, as the Wall Street Journal reported, to give a speech at the Ritz Hotel in Paris on October 11, 2016, just one month before the election, sponsored by the Center of Political and Foreign Affairs (CPFA), a French think tank.14

  But Don Jr.’s appearance takes on a different hue when one considers that the CPFA “was assessed by French intelligence to be a front organization and influence operation for Russian intelligence services to promote Russian policies in the Middle East,” as former CIA officer Glenn Carle told me.

  The couple in charge consisted of the CPFA cofounder Fabien Baussart, who had nominated Vladimir Putin for the Nobel Peace Prize, and his wife, Randa Kassis, a former model from Syria who has supported Russian intervention in Syria and cooperation with Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

  Both Baussart and Kassis “are openly linked with the Russians,” Renaud Girard, a French journalist who served as the moderator, told ABC News. “They don’t hide it at all.”15 ABC cited French news reports describing Kassis as a Syrian-born activist who had met regularly with senior Kremlin officials seeking Russian support for her position.

  According to the Wall Street Journal, Kassis said she told Donald Trump Jr. that it was essential to cooperate with Russia in the Middle East. “We have to be realistic. Who’s on the ground in Syria? Not the U.S., not France,” she explained. “Without Russia, we can’t have any solution in Syria.”16

  Immediately after talking with him, she flew to Moscow, where she met with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, with whom, The Guardian reported, she is good friends.17 Shortly afterward, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued statements about Don Jr.’s speech. As Kassis explained in a Facebook post, “I succeeded to pass [to] Trump, through the talks with his son, the idea of how we can cooperate together to reach the agreement between Russia and the United States on Syria.”

  “The Russian MFA echoing a political line that the Russian intelligence service is planting in ostensibly aboveboard events like the Paris dinner fits the classic pattern of Russian disinformation and intelligence-driven propaganda,” Glenn Carle told me. “The participants are tools or dupes of Russian intelligence.”

  He added that in terms of national security, the Paris meeting alone “would suffice to make Don Jr. someone you could never trust or touch for an intelligence service.

  “That does not make Donald Trump Jr. a spy,” he said. “But to an intelligence officer, if such exploitation is repeated over and over, it does make them a de facto asset of Russian intelligence, whatever the individual may believe.”

  After all, Don Jr. was being paid by operatives close to Russian intelligence who wanted his father, as president, to implement policies favorable to Russia.

  In terms of criminal prosecution, it is highly probable that there would be no criminal case to make against Don Jr. “It’s not illegal,” said Carle. “You can’t get a conviction in a court, so that is taken by the journalists and the public as proof of their innocence. You’re innocent unless you’re guilty. But that’s not true in intelligence.”

  Understanding that, as well as exploiting those loopholes, was a key tenet of KGB tradecraft and, later, of its successors in Russian intelligence. So when it came to laundering billions of dollars through real estate, lax regulations allowed buyers to keep their anonymity. That, in turn, gave developers like Donald Trump license to say that he had no clue who the buyers really were or how they’d made their money. And if he had no knowledge that the money in question was illicit, he was not culpable. It was as simple as that.

  Discovering how and why all that happened means investigating a cut-rate electronics store in Manhattan that was really controlled by the KGB in the 1980s, and reporting, for the first time, that the owner, Semyon Kislin, was allegedly a “spotter agent” for the legendary Soviet spy agency who had opened the door to cultivating Donald Trump as a Soviet asset. It means examining a huge Soviet spy nest at the United Nations during the so-called spy wars of that period, and revealing that another one of the Soviets who first reached out to Trump was also an alleged KGB operative who, more than twenty years later, went to extraordinary lengths to camouflage the real “origin story” of how the KGB developed Donald Trump as a Soviet asset.

  It means exploring what happened at KGB counterintelligence headquarters in Yasenevo, outside Moscow, in 1987, where the Active Measures directorate distributed a memo celebrating the first successful active measure—a disinformation operation in which a freshly groomed asset broadcast KGB talking points in major American newspapers—seeing that the asset in question was none other than Donald Trump.

  My book will show how kompromat works by examining Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile sex-trafficking operatio
n, where he got his money from, his links to Israeli intelligence and to Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, who worked so closely with the KGB. Similarly, it will look into how Russian intelligence penetrated Epstein’s operation and placed within it Russian nationals who infiltrated the highest level of Silicon Valley and America’s tech sector as part of Vladimir Putin’s assault on America.

  It will delve into Epstein’s fifteen-year friendship with Donald Trump, the women with whom they consorted, and how their friendship ended, Epstein’s ties to the super pimps whose modeling agencies supplied girls for Russian oligarchs—and kompromat for Russian intelligence.

  It will show how William Barr, during his first term as attorney general, under George H. W. Bush, opened the door, inadvertently perhaps, to Russian espionage activities in 1991. And it will show how nearly thirty years later, Barr and his associates in the new Catholic right, some of whom have ties to Opus Dei, came to play such a huge role in both the Department of Justice and the Supreme Court, and how Barr, as Trump’s attorney general, helped undermine the rule of law.

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  One might think questions of Trump’s ties to Russia would have been fully addressed by now. After all, the Trump–Russia scandal began to unravel almost immediately after his inauguration. Indeed, less than a month after Trump became president, on February 13, 2017, he got rid of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn for lying about his ties to the Russians. The very next day, Trump urged FBI director James Comey not to investigate Flynn. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go,” said Trump.18

  According to the Mueller Report, “The circumstances of the conversation show that the President was asking Comey to close the FBI’s investigation into Flynn.”