by Craig Unger
At the store, Kislin and Sapir had brilliantly positioned themselves to win over Soviet bigwigs as clients, running into, as Sapir did, a boyhood friend from the old country who surfaced as bodyguard to Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, once the longtime KGB chief in the Soviet Republic of Georgia. Others who came by included Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko; future KGB counterintelligence chief and, subsequently, prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov; and Georgy Arbatov, the Kremlin’s American-based media spokesman.4
But one such client didn’t quite fit in with the rest—Donald J. Trump.
Many details about Trump’s transaction with Kislin are not known. In fact, Kislin himself seems to be the only source of it, having told Bloomberg Businessweek in 2017 that he “had sold Trump about 200 televisions on credit.”
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Trump, who later developed a reputation for stiffing his vendors, made sure he paid Kislin on time. “I gave [Trump] 30 days, and in exactly 30 days he paid me back,” Kislin said. “He never gave me any trouble.”5
But there was more to it than that.
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Semyon Kislin was born in 1935 in Odessa, the Ukrainian seaport on the shore of the Black Sea, which had been notorious as a haven for Jewish gangsters and thugs, as depicted by the great Russian writer Isaac Babel a generation earlier in The Odessa Tales. There, Kislin became well known for running what Ukrainians called “popular deli number one . . . the best in Odessa.”6
Situated on Odessa’s renowned Deribasovskaya Street near the Passage, an elegant and baroque market adjacent to the Gorodskoy Sad (City Garden), the store was so celebrated and the family did so well, according to Kislin’s wife, Ludmila, that they were able to afford a car with a full-time personal driver,7 an extraordinary luxury in the impoverished Soviet Union.*
Under Soviet communism, of course, there was no private ownership of businesses, but running a food store was a highly favored position nonetheless. Thanks to chronic food shortages throughout the Soviet Union, up to 40 percent of all foodstuff passed through the black market, providing plenty of opportunity for corruption.8
In that context, former KGB officer Yuri Shvets told me, it was impossible to successfully navigate such corrupt precincts without being wired in with the powers that be—and in the end, that meant working with the KGB. “For a Jewish guy to run a fresh produce store back then was like walking on a minefield,” said Shvets.9 “This was a time when the KGB was going after people to get information. It would be inevitable that the director of a large grocery story in Odessa would be recruited by the KGB.”
Shvets should know. When I first met him, in October 2019 at a steak house in Tysons Corner, Virginia, about ten miles outside Washington, DC, he was wearing a sport jacket and jeans, no tie, and looked younger than his sixty-seven years.
In the mid-eighties, Shvets identified himself as a Washington correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS. But that job was merely a cover. Shvets’s real career was working in counterintelligence for the KGB, a position that afforded him access to highly sensitive materials. He was there to recruit American spies.
Shvets’s tenure with the KGB in Washington in the mid-eighties happened to coincide with the period during which the KGB had begun to keep an increasingly close eye on Donald Trump through the New York rezidentura (station), the sister outpost to Shvets’s home office in Washington. As a result, Shvets had decades of hands-on experience with KGB tradecraft and the protocols it used to recruit new spies, personal acquaintance with the KGB’s top brass, and an understanding of disinformation, the use of compromising materials, and various other ruses employed by Russian intelligence to throw Western observers off the trail. Thanks to his experience there, he was able to state confidently that Donald Trump had been cultivated as an asset for the KGB.
According to Shvets, Kislin was recruited on the eve of his emigration from the Soviet Union in 1972 by the Odessa field office of the KGB, which had a special “Jewish department” to oversee the recruitment of Jews from Odessa who wanted to emigrate from the Soviet Union. “I spoke to a two-star general who had worked there at the time,” Shvets told me, “and he said many of the Jews who were immigrating signed papers saying they would cooperate with the KGB. It was almost an ultimatum. If you want to immigrate, you agree to cooperate. You sign the pledge to cooperate with the KGB. And Kislin was one of those recruited.”
In an email to me, Kislin denied that he had any such relationship. “My family and I emigrated as Jewish refugees,” he wrote. “There was no agreement with any entity tied to the USSR.”
But Shvets was not alone in asserting that the Soviets had introduced subterfuge into the way they sometimes allowed oppressed Soviet Jews to immigrate to Israel and the United States. The strategy was brilliantly designed to exploit legislation sponsored by Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA) and Representative Charles A. Vanik (D-OH), who were concerned about the plight of Soviet Jews who weren’t being allowed to leave the country.
In a nutshell, the Jackson–Vanik Amendment to the Trade Act of 1974 allowed the Soviet Union to enjoy normal trade relations with the United States, but only if Jewish refugees were allowed to emigrate. Which turned out to be exactly what the Soviets wanted. General Oleg Kalugin explained how then–KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who later led the USSR as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, reached out to him for advice about Jackson–Vanik. “I was summoned to Andropov’s office and asked if I had any ideas of what to do about this,” Kalugin recalled.10
While many saw the amendment as a move to force the Soviets to recognize human rights—and that was its intention—Kalugin saw it as a great opportunity for the KGB. “First, I said, we should choose a substantial number of the Jews who want to immigrate. That would relax the increasing tensions and help shut up the Voice of America and BBC programs that blame Russia for anti-Semitism.”
All well and good, but Kalugin also included a Trojan-horse-like component to what appeared to be the newly benevolent Soviet emigration policy. “We told [the émigrés], you can go, but you will provide us with information. And they pledged their services to us,” Kalugin said.11
For many émigrés, it was an offer that was hard to refuse, because the KGB had leverage on any family left behind. And in the United States, the operation had insulated itself from criticism because anyone who tried to discuss the dangers of letting in so many Soviet Jews risked being labeled anti-Semitic.
Later, perhaps several years later, the KGB would follow up by sending an officer to talk to the émigrés, according to Kalugin. “He would tell them, ‘Hi. Best regards from . . . ,’ and he would mention some name and then some key words, which would suggest that the émigré knows who is he dealing with.”
And what was their task after that? “To penetrate all Western institutions. Government, primarily, and business, particularly high technology,” said Kalugin. “That’s something Russia was always behind. But also the government organizations. And some did succeed in that sense.”
So in the aftermath of Jackson–Vanik, the Soviet Union magnanimously allowed hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews to immigrate to the United States. By any measure, it was an extraordinary achievement in human rights. Jewish dissident Alexander Lerner declared that fulfillment of these promises meant “a profound improvement of the emigration policy and that it should be responded to positively by the world.”
But the amendment also had the effect of creating a hole in America’s defenses so massive that huge numbers of Russian criminals and KGB spies could and did inundate the United States. In the last half of the seventies, Kalugin himself sometimes went to Soviet night spots like Rasputin in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach in hope of recruiting new talent—that is, Russian mobsters who would work in tandem with the KGB. “I’d look around, pick up some people, and check their backgrounds with Moscow to see if t
hey were good enough to promote a relationship with.”
In the United States, of course, the Italian Mafia would have been at war with the feds, but the Soviets and the Russians were different. They coopted the Russian Mafia. They weaponized organized crime. As Kalugin told me, “The Mafia is one of the branches of the Russian government today.”
So, under cover of this new, more humanitarian emigration policy, the Soviets opened the floodgates. Hence, legislation with the goal of allowing Jewish refugees to immigrate to America had the unintended consequence of fueling the growth of the Russian Mafia and a new generation of KGB assets in America—one of whom was Donald Trump.
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It was under these circumstances that Kislin left Odessa for good in 1972, departing first for Israel and later the United States. His first stop in the United States was Boston, where he worked as a grocery clerk and cabdriver, among other jobs, before moving to New York just as the first wave of Soviet émigrés had begun to flood into Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach. Among his first jobs, according to a post on WikiReading in Russian and translated by Google Translate, Kislin “unloaded fish at night, and during the day he sold vegetables at the market to feed his . . . wife and two children. . . . How much sweat, and even blood, he shed on Brighton pavements, running around the entire Russian quarter in search of work.”12
Of course, many émigrés who agreed to work with the KGB forgot about their promises as soon as they got to the United States. But Kislin was different. Before long, he and his partner, Tamir Sapir (né Temur Sepiashvili), had set up the small electronics store on lower Fifth Avenue that sold goods to fellow Soviets. According to Shvets, Kislin stayed loyal to the KGB and turned Joy-Lud Electronics into an outpost that played a unique role for Soviet intelligence.
That was Kislin’s way of cooperating: Joy-Lud Electronics was ultimately controlled by the KGB.
Shvets believes that Kislin’s motive in starting the store was part of “a deliberate decision” to cooperate with the KGB.13 “Because he is recruited by the KGB and establishes himself in New York, this is already a big operation,” Shvets told me.
As soon as Joy-Lud opened, Shvets said, standard KGB modus operandi had it that the case was moved to the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (FCD), which was in charge of all foreign intelligence operations for the Soviet Union, and was handled by the FCD New York rezidentura.* As for Kislin, after his immigration to the United States, Shvets said, his case file was forwarded to the Moscow KGB headquarters.
Joy-Lud became an important outpost for the KGB. It was Crazy Eddie with a Russian accent, always filled with KGB agents and high-level Soviet dignitaries. A key to its existence had to do with the KGB’s sensitivity about electronic eavesdropping. “The KGB was always paranoid about the CIA or FBI planting some kind of sophisticated bugging device into electronic equipment, because that was exactly what they were doing with respect to American diplomats, CIA officers, buildings in Moscow,” said Shvets.
As a result, the KGB wanted to guarantee that various diplomats, consular officials, and intelligence operatives who returned to their homeland with the latest Sony Walkman weren’t unwittingly broadcasting their secrets into the listening posts at Langley or Quantico, Virginia, the respective homes to the CIA and FBI facilities. But since Kislin was co-owner and he was with the KGB, Soviet dignitaries had no such concerns. “They were absolutely confident that the FBI or CIA couldn’t use Kislin’s store for their purposes,” said Shvets. “The KGB must have had profound trust in Kislin to allow him selling equipment to his unique Russian clients, many of whom were bearers of the country’s top secrets. There was no other store in the world that had access to so many secrets.”
Kislin wasn’t the only one in the store who was connected to the KGB. His partner and co-owner, Tamir Sapir, had also fled the Soviet Union to go to Israel and then the United States in the early seventies, and was on a similar path. Starting out in Kentucky, he took a succession of jobs—caring for the elderly, selling tools, working as a janitor—before moving to New York, where he, too, drove a cab. “I worked day and night, because I wanted to buy out the car. I slept at the airport, waiting for the first flight to arrive,” said Sapir, according to the Georgian Journal.14 “In six months, the taxi became mine.”
In the former Soviet Union, both Sapir and Kislin were veritable poster boys for up-by-their-bootstraps Soviet émigrés, who, having arrived in the United States with the proverbial three dollars in their pockets, held menial jobs for a few years, and then somehow or other became incredibly wealthy.
Of course, that was the giveaway. That was the tell. They were not oligarchs, but they were just one rung lower on the ladder—wealthy Soviet émigrés who got rich through their ties to the new powers that came to be when Russia began developing into a real Mafia state after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In Sapir’s case, clues revealing his ties to the intelligence services surfaced in his home country. According to the Georgian Journal, he returned to the Soviet Union in 1984 to attend the Academy of the Ministry of the Interior, which was closely tied to Soviet intelligence.
But at the time, Shvets notes, that would have been an extremely odd choice for a Jewish émigré who had already fled the Soviet Union. It was hard enough for Jews to emigrate from the Soviet Union in the seventies, as Sapir did, but to return to the USSR later and study at a university so closely tied to the KGB made no sense. “So it is either a mistake, a hoax, or an awkward ‘legend’ to cover Sapir’s training as an intelligence officer,” Shvets said. He added that the article in the Georgian Journal was “a typical story of infiltrating a KGB intel agent into the US.”15
According to Shvets, the awkward legend was often a tell that revealed how the KGB disguised and falsified the personal histories of its operatives. As a result, he looked for how Jews and other beleaguered ethnic minorities were given perks by the KGB if they played along; how some jobs at the United Nations and in the USSR were reserved for those in the KGB; which institutions were really KGB fronts; and how disinformation was disseminated to hide the truth. When tradecraft was poorly done, he said, it was a dead giveaway.
Meanwhile, for Soviet diplomats and spies, Joy-Lud was the place to see and be seen. A story titled “Breakfast in Winter at Five in the Morning,” by Shtemler Ilya Petrovich, published on WikiReading, tells how the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations ran into his Israeli counterpart at the Joy-Lud checkout counter and had a fortuitous unplanned discourse—at a time when the two nations did not even have diplomatic relations.16 And, of course, KGB operatives were always dropping by to sample the latest hardware.
The KGB had bugged tourist hotels in Moscow to listen in on Americans and other Westerners for years, so, through Joy-Lud, they could make sure they were not being victimized by similar American practices. Considering how risk-averse the KGB was, its giving Kislin this responsibility was a measure of how deeply it trusted him. “Every big Soviet official coming to the United States went there,” said Shvets, “because the local KGB station had taken full responsibility to make sure that this place is safe and the electronic equipment was safe.”
And those customers happened to be the very same Soviet diplomats and high-level officials who were overseeing spectacularly lucrative black markets in Western goods in the Soviet Union. That made it easy for Joy-Lud to sell thousands of VCRs, microwaves, TVs, and other electronic equipment to Soviet customers. In return, Sapir told Forbes magazine, his customers included the former Soviet minister of petrochemicals, who granted Sapir rights to distribute tens of thousands of tons of fertilizer and tens of millions of barrels of oil, while pocketing fees that made him rich.17
Given that all commodities—oil, gas, and the like—were under the control of the KGB, and it was up to the KGB to give out licenses to sell commodities, the mere fact that Sapir sold commodities, in effect, confirmed his ties to the KGB, because
selling oil was impossible without KGB approval.
Meanwhile, the FBI had become suspicious and had put Joy-Lud under surveillance.18 But few people really knew that Kislin’s store had the KGB seal of approval, and in addition to selling “clean,” bug-free electronics to Soviet operatives, it could also be used by the KGB to initiate overtures to prospective assets.
More specifically, it appeared to Shvets that Kislin himself had finally become operational and that all signs pointed to Kislin being “a spotter agent,” which meant that “his task was to look around for potential targets for KGB recruitment and report on a regular basis.” Once he had spotted someone and reported, it was then up to his handler to initiate cultivation and recruitment.
For the most part, the KGB’s approach to categorizing agents was very different from the CIA’s. “The CIA approach was either what we call developmental—that is, someone we are working on—or it was a recruited agent,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a former CIA station chief in Moscow.19 “There was really no other category. But the Russians had many different categories.”
For the KGB and its successors, under the broad category of assets, there were both agents and contacts. According to Shvets, the agent is someone who clearly understands that he works for Russian intelligence and is knowingly tasked to complete specific assignments.
Within that context, there were agents who could be tasked to perform specific operations, and they could be categorized as handlers, recruiters, penetration agents, keepers, “useful idiots,” and the like. “One agent may provide information, bringing documents from the CIA,” Shvets said. “But Kislin was not an agent informant. I believe he was a spotter agent.”
