American Kompromat

by Craig Unger

  Exactly where this fantasy originated is unclear. Trump’s uncle John Trump, who died in 1985, was in fact a physicist at MIT who pioneered medical and engineering applications of high-voltage machinery and, together with Robert J. Van de Graaff, developed one of the first million-volt X-ray generators. As reported in Science for the People, John Trump had been approached repeatedly to make weapons of all sorts. “What did he do with it?” asked Trump lab director James Melcher. “Cancer research, sterilizing sludge out in Deer Island—a waste disposal facility—all sorts of wondrous things. He didn’t touch the weapons stuff.”1

  Donald Trump often cited his illustrious uncle as evidence of the Trump family’s genetic predisposition to dazzling intelligence. But there is no evidence to suggest that Uncle John had mentored his nephew on the subject.

  As William E. Geist observed in the New York Times, with his newly crafted persona as a strategic nuclear arms virtuoso, Trump, briefly at least, left behind the showy attire he had worn earlier (burgundy suits with matching shoes, for example) in favor of dark suits, white shirts, and subdued ties. Suddenly, Trump, the brash, vulgar carney barker, who always projected the aesthetics of Vegas more than Manhattan, had a new side to him. He was thoughtful. He was deep. He thought we might be headed toward a nuclear holocaust. And he wanted to stop it.

  Nor was this a passing fancy. In April 1984, Trump told Geist that his concern about a nuclear holocaust had troubled him since he first discussed it with his uncle many years earlier. As a result, he said, he wanted to put his astonishing talents to work negotiating arms agreements.2

  Similarly, seven months later he surprised Washington Post reporter Lois Romano in November 1984 by saying that he should take over the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union.3

  “Some people have an ability to negotiate. It’s an art you’re basically born with. You either have it or you don’t.”

  Trump made it clear that he thought he had what it takes to handle the negotiations. And as for mastering the nuts and bolts of strategic arms limitations, missiles, nuclear proliferation, and the like—well, that would be child’s play. “It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” he told Romano. “I think I know most of it anyway.”

  Before the interview was over, Trump answered a question that had not been asked. When he did that, it meant he had a special item on his agenda he wanted to get across.

  “You know who really wants me to do this?” he asked. “Roy . . . I’d do it in a second.”

  Roy, of course, was Trump attorney Roy Cohn, who had won notoriety for being the hatchet man for Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI), the red-baiting demagogue of the fifties.

  So now Trump was telling the Washington Post that Cohn had been urging him to become involved in nuclear talks. What was that about?

  First, it’s hard to believe that Cohn, still an unreconstructed McCarthyite Cold Warrior, would get in bed with the Soviets in any way, shape, or form. Or that he would think it was a good idea to have Trump promote himself as an expert on nuclear arms. More likely, Trump, who even then had a creative relationship with the facts, was making it up. With his friend Ronald Reagan in the White House, Roy Cohn’s name carried considerable clout in Washington and was certain to get the attention of a Washington Post reporter. In Trump’s eyes, having Cohn’s name attached would have lent the charade gravity.

  Then, in 1985, Trump met with a reporter for a stylish, now-defunct monthly business magazine called Manhattan, Inc., which chronicled Wall Street and the “Masters of the Universe” who ran it. In short, the magazine dissected a culture that was all about money, greed, and conspicuous consumption.

  By this time, Trump had become a staple in the tabloids’ gossip columns. Trump Tower had been the talk of international real estate in the two years since it had opened, and with celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Johnny Carson, Bruce Willis, and Sophia Loren owning condos there, it had begun to define Trump as the ultimate luxury brand in the largely unbranded new sector of high-end condos. Even though one stupendous project after another never reached fruition or failed—a massive domed sports stadium, a 150-story building—Trump’s brand skyrocketed.

  At the same time, to the media, his intense and unlikely preoccupation with “the Subject,” as Trump called the nuclear arms race, and his passion to save humanity from annihilation served up a deliciously ironic stew of new money, glitz, and strategic arms limitation talks—incongruous as a sure winner. With that in mind, the Manhattan, Inc. art director Nancy Butkus told Topic, she decided she wanted “a really nice, formal portrait—with one thing that’s weird.”4

  To that end, while Trump was combing his hair in the bathroom, she spoke to him through the closed door and asked him to pose with a bird.

  “Because you’re so interested in world peace, can you pose with a dove?”

  Trump was silent for a few seconds.

  “Sure,” he replied.

  So photographer William Coupon went to work with an eye toward capturing the image of the avian symbol of peace perched atop the impeccably sculpted tonsorial edifice that was otherwise known as Donald Trump’s hair.

  Which was all well and good until the dove decided to unburden itself on Donald Trump’s germophobic hands.5

  * * *

  —

  Peculiar as Trump’s nuclear fixation may have been, from the KGB point of view, it presented a new opening. “To have any expertise on these issues, Trump would have to be briefed by somebody,” Shvets told me. “But as a real estate developer, he wasn’t part of any think tank. He didn’t work for the State Department or the Pentagon.”

  Yet Trump was obsessed enough that, in his own peculiar way, he sought out expertise on the matter. In 1986, he met with Nobel laureate Dr. Bernard Lown, who, along with Soviet cardiologist Yevgeny Chazov, had just accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Knowing that Lown had recently returned from meeting Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, Trump pumped him for everything he knew about the Soviet leader, and then declared that within an hour of meeting Gorbachev, he would end the Cold War. “The arrogance of the man and his ignorance,” Lown told me. “The idea that he could solve it in one hour!”

  Trump also attended a November 1985 Palm Beach gala put together by Armand Hammer, the wealthy owner of Occidental Petroleum who had long and close ties to the Kremlin.

  By the eighties, Hammer was dispensing advice to both President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. And the Soviets loved him for it—enough that, the New York Times reported, Brezhnev gave Hammer a luxurious Moscow apartment and suggested that he be appointed US ambassador to Moscow. It was a suggestion that perplexed members of the Reagan administration, one of whom told the New York Times, “We simply don’t know which side of the fence Hammer is on.”6

  In other words, Armand Hammer might well be a Soviet asset.

  There was little doubt that Trump would have loved to be in a similar position to that of the eighty-seven-year-old Armand Hammer—and that presented the KGB with the perfect opening.

  When I asked Yuri Shvets and Glenn Carle about how a KGB agent might handle a new asset who was being cultivated, their answers were somewhat similar. “Be good to them,” said Shvets. “Give them what they want. Have a good relationship.”

  As Carle explained, “I think we [as handlers] are dream makers. We fulfill the dreams of our targets. Whatever you lack, we can provide. If you need psychological soothing because you are under stress, come cry on my shoulder. If you need someone to talk to, I’m a listener. If you want a bowling buddy, you know, I really like ten pin. And so forth.”

  Similarly, it would not have taken a genius to figure out what Trump wanted. “It was like he was created for this,” said Shvets. “This is what the KGB is looking for. With Trump, it was so obvious. It was just striking.”
/>
  One of the great paradoxes of intelligence work is that highly sensitive clandestine work is sometimes done best in plain sight—that openness provides the best cover. As Carle told me, “Good intelligence operations are designed to not be punishable in a court of law.”

  The KGB knew that, of course, and designed intelligence operations accordingly. As a result, KGB tradecraft and protocols slithered in, around, and through the myriad loopholes in America’s legal system, government bureaucracies, and regulatory agencies. So Donald Trump bought hundreds of TV sets from Semyon Kislin’s electronics store. There’s nothing wrong with that. How could he have known that Joy-Lud was under the thumb of the KGB? Or, more important, how could prosecutors prove that Trump knew?

  Having become a major figure in New York, thanks to Trump Tower, the future president desperately wanted a place on the world stage. For the next step, the strategy was so simple as to be self-evident: Donald Trump was a real estate developer. He developed buildings all over the world.

  So it was easy to discuss such matters with Trump without attracting undue attention. There was no reason to suspect that occasional meetings with Russian diplomats were really a way for the KGB to develop Trump as an asset. Trump’s new interest in “nuclear” only made the KGB’s task easier.

  “Trump’s contact would have called him and invited him to lunch or dinner on some pretext to discuss having a Trump Tower in Moscow, or to learn Trump’s ‘valuable opinion’ on important war and peace issues,” said Shvets. Deeply insecure intellectually, highly suggestible, exceedingly susceptible to flattery, Trump was anxious to acquire some real intellectual validation. In that regard, the KGB would be more than happy to humor him.

  Discussions about Trump Tower Moscow could provide a highly credible cover for contacts with Trump that could last for decades. And besides, Trump had long since befriended various people at the FBI such as James Kallstrom, the stalwart Trump supporter who later attacked Bill and Hillary Clinton as being “a crime family.” So the FBI was unlikely to do a deep dive into his relationship with the Soviets.

  In the end, Trump’s dreams of building a Trump Tower in Red Square were as ludicrous as his putative expertise on nuclear arms. To be sure, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to be known as a genial peacemaker who thawed Cold War tensions, but as he reminded a reporter in early 1986, he was still very much a communist, and the communism of Lenin remained “a fine and unsullied ideal.”7

  At the time, the Soviets still zealously guarded the Berlin Wall to safeguard East Germans from the allure of capitalist luxuries in the West. Soviet media were rigorously state-controlled and monitored for the same reason. In that context, how could anyone really think that Soviet communists wanted a garish monument to conspicuous consumption—Trump Tower Moscow—near Red Square? A shrine to American capitalism near the Kremlin?

  “The Soviet government was running out of money,” Shvets told me. “It was looking to the West for loans because they didn’t have enough to feed their own people. To suggest that they were seriously considering building Trump Tower in Moscow was just insane.”

  Nevertheless, Trump was incapable of resisting sycophantic flattery, so the Soviets humored him and played on his vanity. “No one needed him in Moscow at that time, except the KGB, because they went after everybody who was willing to cooperate,” said Shvets.

  Trump Tower Moscow would be one of the crown jewels in his empire. Trump Tower in New York had made him a player on the national stage. Building in Moscow would mean he had gone international.

  * * *

  —

  For all the unanswered questions, the most “authoritative” official Russian account of how the Trump Tower Moscow project began appeared on the website of the Moscow-based daily newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets (MK) at exactly 6:54 p.m. Moscow time on November 9, 2019—nine hours and twenty minutes after Hillary Clinton conceded defeat and Donald Trump was declared the forty-fifth president of the United States.8

  At that precise moment, MK, with a circulation of nearly one million, posted an interview with Natalia Dubinina, the daughter of Soviet ambassador to the United Nations Yuri Dubinin, who, with her father, was among the first Soviet officials to meet Trump in March 1986.

  It’s worth noting, too, that even though she spoke out so quickly, Natalia was still not the first person to put forth a new version of how Trump’s relationship to the Soviet Union began. The day before—November 8, 2016, Election Day in America—Ekaterina Dobrynina was quoted on the Rain, a Russian website, asserting that in 1987 her father, Yuri Dobrynin, then ambassador to the United States (not to be confused with his successor, Yuri Dubinin, who also served as ambassador to the UN), had the idea of building two Trump Towers, one in Moscow and one in Leningrad. “My dad tried to promote it here, to Russia, in order to build here—he wanted everything, dreamed of—both here and in Leningrad Trump Towers,” she said.9

  But her account was not nearly as fleshed out as Natalia Dubinina’s account in MK. “Why did an American businessman come to Russia several times?” the article asks. “MK dug up exclusive details of Donald Trump’s very first visit to Moscow and learned that it was not politics or the alluring smell of money from new business projects that played a decisive role here, but a combination of circumstances and the wide smile of a Soviet diplomat.”10

  The MK version begins in March 1986, when Soviet diplomat Dubinin was appointed the Soviet Union’s permanent representative to the United Nations and flew to New York, where his twenty-nine-year-old daughter Natalia was working for the UN. At the time, rigidly enforced Soviet rules did not allow members of the same family to work in the same foreign country at the same time, so Natalia had planned to fly back to the Soviet Union just as her father arrived.

  But, according to MK, Natalia’s flight home was postponed, which meant that she had a rare opportunity to put together a quick tour around New York for him. “I met Dad and offered to show him New York,” Natalia recalled. “Still, I had lived there for a long time at that time, and he came for the first time in his life.”

  According to Natalia, the first stop was Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, which so impressed her father that he decided he had to meet the creator of this “unprecedented architectural masterpiece.”

  “This building was the first thing my father saw in New York,” Dubinina told MK. “He had never seen anything like it, it was a revolution in architecture and approach.”

  In fact, he was so amazed, Dubinina said, that he decided he had to meet the building’s creator immediately, at which point he and Natalia took the elevator up to Donald Trump’s office, in what was an extraordinary departure from the Soviet Union’s Cold War protocol.

  After all, in the context of the ongoing spy wars, the career foreign service officers and “clean” diplomats from the Soviet Union knew all too well that the FBI was scoping them out and making recruitment pitches. According to Shvets, simply being targeted by the FBI pretty much meant the end of a career and an abrupt return to Moscow.

  In that context, going upstairs on a whim to meet Donald Trump would have posed a foolish risk to both Dubinina and her father. “The top officials, such as the rezident in New York, Washington, or the Soviet ambassador, these are guys who knew a lot of secret information,” said Shvets. “The ambassador, for instance, was aware of many other confidential things, and I remember the then KGB rezident saying he wasn’t authorized to work in the streets of America without a bodyguard. This was an ironclad rule.”

  In 1984 and 1985, there were two incidents in the Soviet embassy in DC when the FBI tried to recruit officers of the KGB rezidentura from the embassy. Shortly thereafter, all Soviet diplomats in the United States, unless they were intelligence officers, were forbidden to make unauthorized unofficial contact with any Americans whatsoever. Merely being approached by the FBI could get them sent home, as the KGB was deeply afraid that the FBI would resort to
dire measures to get any information it was looking for.

  Nevertheless, Dubinina’s account has it that as soon as her silver-tongued father met Trump, he brushed all such protocols aside and took charge. “My father was fluent in English,” Natalia told MK, “and when he told Trump that the first thing he saw in New York was Trump Tower, Trump immediately melted. He is an emotional person, somewhat impulsive. He needs recognition and, of course, he likes when he gets it. My father’s visit had an effect on him like honey on a bee.”

  About six months later,11 in autumn, at a luncheon given by cosmetics czar Leonard Lauder, Trump found himself seated next to Dubinin, who had been newly appointed as ambassador to the United States, and Vitaly Churkin, both of whom promoted the Trump Tower Moscow project. As Trump (via ghostwriter Tony Schwartz) claims in The Art of the Deal, “One thing led to another, and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.”12

  * * *

  —

  To most readers, Dubinina’s account may seem relatively anodyne, but in fact it’s full of inaccuracies, some of which appear to be intentional—and all of which raise the question of whether there was another agenda behind its publication. The errors are important, Shvets says, because they lead one who understands the KGB modus operandi to believe that “Natalia was a KGB officer and her story in MK was an attempt to cover the true nature of the KGB’s contact with Trump.”

  According to Shvets, the real significance of the “gross lies” in the MK story is that it is an active measure fabricated by Russian intelligence with two goals. “It was a ‘hello’ from the Russian human intelligence (HUMINT) to DT, their man at the White House,” Shvets texted me. “And it was an urgent attempt to conceal the details of his initial contacts with the KGB foreign intelligence.”